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The last thing that Lacie had ever expected to happen after her death was getting reincarnated in the Hundred Cycles, but as she slowly pushed herself up in her grandly decorated, massive plush bed she realized that this was, in fact, what had happened. Here she was, stuck in another life; if she had remembered her previous life as a child, Lacie thought that she would probably have run amok trying to find the Baskervilles and force Levi to answer for his mistake, but she was old enough now to know that that was a fool’s errand, and that there were much better ways of getting what she desired. In this life, she was sixteen—marriageable age, and just about the age she’d been when she found Jack in her last life, she thought—sixteen, and about to enter the royal academy of magic, and the only daughter of a duke who gave her whatever she wished for. She was engaged to the Crown Prince and set to become his queen someday, a horrid fate and one that Lacie had not truly considered up until this point. The girl she had been—Leticia Marionna Maria d’Présage Mauvais—had thought of her upcoming wedding mainly in terms of the power she would wield and the love she would receive as the luckiest, most beautiful girl in the world.
As if, Lacie thought. I am not cut out to run a country. That’s more Nii-sama’s role, if anyone’s! How could I never have realized it before…
But of course she hadn’t, she reflected. She hadn’t thought of her position as ‘being a leader’. She had simply taken it for granted, as though somewhere deep down inside she had known that she would never really have to shoulder the responsibilities of a queen, that she could live as she always had, for herself and her pleasure only, and be happily ever after until death. But that was only the privilege of the Ill Omened—that was only the privilege of those who were already dying. Fuck.
Somehow I’ll have to get this engagement called off, at the very least, Lacie thought. Someone else can shoulder the burden of being queen. Then I can find some dupe to pass the duchy off onto and do as I please after that. But what was it that she pleased? —Lacie didn’t know. It had been easy when she was Lacie Baskerville—the Core of the Abyss and beautiful dresses and jewels and sneaking out and seeing the town and Nii-sama and Jack and even occasionally Levi had been wonderfully pleasant ways to kill time until her death. But a pleasant way to live?
—She could figure that out later. Her first priority was breaking her engagement so that she wouldn’t become queen. It was honestly shocking that she’d been selected in the first place—before gaining her memories of her first life Leticia had lived exactly as Lacie had, even though in this life she wasn’t destined to die. Such a person shouldn’t have been chosen to be a future queen—how ridiculous! What were the royals thinking?
Well, that wasn’t Lacie’s problem. Her problem was ending the engagement. Obviously, unsuitable behavior from her wouldn’t cut it, if it hadn’t so far—Levi had written some ridiculous little story like this, and its villainess had been in almost the exact same situation Lacie was now in, except that Leticia hadn’t any intentions of ending her engagement. She had just behaved awfully to the main character until her fiancé, Prince Jackson, had had enough of her and dumped her in front of every noble heir and spare there was at the academy’s graduation party, before proposing marriage to the main character. Lacie had called it gauche at the time, and now she knew that there was no possible way things actually worked like that. If her behavior so far hadn’t chased off the royals—
Wait.
The crown prince that she was engaged to as Leticia d’Présage Mauvais was also named Jackson. In Levi’s little story, they both met the main character Osanna Liliana Wald, a peasant orphan who had recently been adopted by a count, at the opening ceremony for the royal academy of magic—the same school that Lacie was about to enter.
Fuck.
“Master Glen, you bastard,” Lacie whispered, curling her hands into fists on her luscious bedspread and casting her gaze around the darkened room. “You told me that all we were doing was granting the Core some company—if we succeeded at all. Levi Baskerville, you absolute bastard…I will find your self-insert in this ridiculous story and then I will throttle it right in front of your precious main characters.”
Her nails dug further into the fabric and split it, letting the down feathers inside spilled out. They were impossibly soft, and felt impossibly real, and Lacie wondered how long the story would go on after it ended. Leticia’s role was complete when she was dragged away from the graduation party in disgrace and banished from the kingdom. If she recalled correctly what Levi had said about his ending, the story itself ended when Osanna and Jackson got married in front of the entire country and everyone cheered for them. Stupid. Cliché. Gauche.
But it provided a blueprint for how Lacie could end her engagement and get the heck out of dodge in order to figure out what it meant to live. And Lacie knew well how Levi wrote his silly little stories. He was addicted to self-inserts and he was addicted to basing characters off of people he knew. Osanna and Jackson were probably based off of Nii-sama and Jack—hopefully respectively, but you never knew with Levi. Hopefully Osanna, at least, was based off of Nii-sama—that would make her delightfully fun to bully.
I’ll play along with your gauche and cliché little story, Levi, and when it ends and I’m banished, I will find the Core of the Abyss, work with her on how to get home, and then throttle you personally, no matter who Glen is now. I promise.
Thus decided, Lacie lay back down in her new bed, in her new life, and let herself fall back asleep, ready to raise hell in the morning to keep Levi’s ridiculous fairytale on the rails.
When Oswald woke up, he was a girl. He was also in an unfamiliar room, with memories of an unfamiliar life. Most importantly, he had woken up at all, which was a shock to his system, and he had woken up in a body that did not contain any soul other than his own. Somehow, after choosing to spare the child Lacie, instead of dying he had been transported into one of his master’s novels.
It was a romance story, set in a fictionalized version of their world; it looked simple at first glance, but as was common for Master Levi the backstory was intensely muddled and interwoven. Everyone was connected to everyone else; everyone had a hidden agenda; the plot twists were sharp enough to give anyone whiplash. Master Levi’s publishers had hated it. Luckily for Oswald, though, the most relevant twists regarding the character Oswald had woken up as, Osanna Liliana Wald, were the kind of twists that enticed him to actually follow the novel’s plot. Osanna Liliana Wald was in actuality Liliana Wald Osanna d’Présage Mauvais, the long-lost twin sister of the novel’s villainess Leticia d’Présage Mauvais, and her love interest, the crown prince, was actually the secret leader of the country’s rebels. He had only chosen his fiancée for her ability to thoroughly devastate the country’s social order; as soon as he was done with her, he would throw her away and move on to the next girl. This happened twice in the novel itself, once to the minor antagonist Leticia and then once to the main character Osanna Liliana. The real ending of the novel included his rebellion getting caught by the king and queen, which caused him to be guillotined, and then as an apology to the girls whose lives his plotting had upended, Leticia and Osanna Liliana had been made dual heirs to the throne. Master Levi’s publishers had cut that entire ending out and he’d sulked for a week, but all the foreshadowing was still there and that likely meant that Prince Jackson was a rebel here, too.
I suppose I won’t be able to let anyone know I’m a man until I’ve played out the plot of Master Levi’s novel, Oswald thought. It was unfortunate, but Lacie had dressed him up in her dresses enough that he knew better than to complain. As with his real life, it seemed that there was a role to play before he could be simply Oswald; if Leticia and Osanna Liliana weren’t siblings, maybe that would have been different, but it seemed that no matter what life he lived, Oswald had a sister. And in his real life, his duty had been to kill her, but in this storybook life with a storybook sister who hated him he could actually protect his sister. —Not Lacie, Lacie was long dead, but at least there was a sister. A sister who could be helped by playing his role to perfection, too. He would just have to follow along the path that Levi had laid out, and everything would be fine. He didn’t have to deviate from any part of the story. At least here, playing his role would make everything turn out right.
Maybe this was why Master Levi had liked writing novels so much. When you were in a novel, you always made the right choice and you always got a happy ending—except that wasn’t true, since to the Jury, the world Oswald had come from was just a novel as well, and the path laid out for him had only led to tragedy. But Oswald knew the ending of this one. This was not a tale written by the Jury, it was a novel written by Levi. It was sensational and suspenseful and a little bit sloppy, but it still had a happy ending. And since it was written by Levi, there was no Jury, no Abyss, no Children of Ill Omen and no Baskervilles. No Jack Vessalius. A safe world, Oswald thought. But a safe world where he was entirely alone.
If only Lacie had this life instead of me—
But Lacie was dead, long gone, lost forever. Oswald had ensured it himself. Perhaps it was only his just desserts that he had been denied the mercy of nonexistence. A story like this was the best torment—a gilded birdcage with a wonderfully simple path laid out in front of him, a duty easy to fulfill, with absolutely nothing to distract him from the eternal knowledge of how deeply he’d failed in his first life.
Well, there was nothing for it other than to continue down the path that was assigned to him. At least it was a merciful one, in this life.
Still, though, in the quiet dark hours before dawn, Oswald slipped out of the bed he’d awoken in and passed his time moving stiffly through the drills and exercises that had come so easily to him in his first life. There was nothing laid out in Osanna Liliana’s future that necessitated skills with the sword, but somehow still Oswald did not want to leave it behind. At any rate Osanna’s body was better with a sword than Leo’s. That was good; that was a relief. If Oswald was wrong about the world and the life he was in, then he would have something sure and steady and safe to fall back on. So he continued his drills, and reviewed his memories new and old, preparing to once more walk the path that life had laid out for him until he reached some sort of ending.
Jack Vessalius awoke in a castle in the middle of the night with the memories of an unfamiliar life rolling around in his head. The life here that he remembered—a world with no Lacie, a world in which there was no point in any kind of existence. This was not a world that Lacie had known. This was not a world that Lacie had loved. There was nothing here to hate or to covet, nothing here to protect or to destroy. This world had no reason to exist—
Well, better to do his research first. The Abyss connected every world, and Glen had told him once that sometimes you could catch glimpses of other worlds when you were near the Core—so Lacie had told Glen when she was young and Glen was still Oswald. That would pose a problem, if this were a world that Lacie had seen. What to do with a world that Lacie had loved—
If Lacie were alive, the answer was obvious. You did what it took to find her, wherever she was, and then you kept her in your sights so that you could be alive, too. The problem came with Lacie being dead. Not even dead—dead people reincarnated. Destroyed. Utterly and completely gone, dissolved, with only a few corrosive memories left behind to turn a rabbit named Oz to dust. You could break the world then—it felt nice to break the world, and nicer when you thought that this would make the corrosive thing that had once been Lacie happy. If you couldn’t break the world then what? Oz couldn’t be used anymore, and the Core wasn’t dumb enough to fall for the same tricks twice.
But a castle—Jack had awoken in a castle, Jack could remember living life as a prince. A crown prince, even—the heir to an entire kingdom. That was real power—not as real as a Chain, of course, but real nonetheless. It could be useful, if he played his cards right—if he had a game to play at all.
But what was that game? What to do? He had a kingdom and a fiancée and wealth and revolutionary contacts. There was no need to build anything up from here. —But that was fine, wasn’t it? After all, Crown Prince Jackson had revolutionary contacts for a reason. He had never met Lacie; he had never been alive. He wanted to burn it all down, a goal that Jack could get behind, if only for now. It would be an excellent way to kill time until he decided what to do with this new life—and exactly how to throw it all away.
The night continued. The dawn broke. The morning began, and with it came the first move-in day of the new semester at the royal academy of magic—carrying Leticia and Osanna and Jackson ever closer on their collision course within another world of another story of another life.