Chapter 264: Margaret
I’m going to have to learn all of this properly now. Not as a curious eighteen-year-old wondering what Awakening even meant. As someone who apparently already has capability that exceeds whatever standard assessment usually expects from someone who just finished their ceremony.
Whatever that process actually involves, I’ll face it the same way I faced everything else across the past seven months — carefully, honestly, and without pretending the challenge isn’t real simply because I’ve already survived considerably worse.
The woman returned with a glass of water and, after a moment’s consideration, a plate of simple food that Rohan accepted with genuine, overwhelmed gratitude.
"You said you’d been away a long time," she said, settling into a chair across from him with careful, unhurried curiosity. "Family looking for you somewhere?"
"I hope so," Rohan said. "I don’t actually know yet. I’ve been gone seven months, but I don’t know how much time actually passed here, in this particular corner of things. I’m not even entirely sure this is the same town I started in."
The woman’s expression shifted into something more serious, more concerned. "You don’t know where your own family lives?"
"I know where they live," Rohan clarified. "I just don’t know how to get there from exactly here, or whether seven months meant the same thing on this side of — " He stopped himself, uncertain how much of the truth this stranger’s ordinary, unprepared life could reasonably absorb. "It’s a long story. Longer than I think either of us has time for right now."
"Well," the woman said, studying him with a mixture of concern and gentle, practical kindness, "there’s a public transit line runs through Millbrook proper, connects to most of the regional network. If you can tell me where your family actually lives, I might be able to help you figure out the route from here."
Rohan gave her the details, and watched her expression shift into something between surprise and relief.
"That’s not far at all," she said. "Two hours by transit, maybe less if the connections line up well. You could be home by this evening, if you’re up to the journey."
Home by this evening. After seven months, after everything, home by this evening.
Rohan felt something in his chest loosen that had been wound tight since the moment he’d first opened his eyes in Hestia’s temple, seven months and an entire universe away from this exact, ordinary porch.
"Thank you," he said, voice thick with an emotion too large to fully contain. "You have no idea what that means to me right now."
"You’re welcome," the woman said, studying him with the particular gentle curiosity of someone who suspected there was far more to his story than he’d offered, but who understood, with evident kindness, not to press for the rest of it. "I’m Margaret, by the way. In case you ever find yourself passing through Millbrook again and want to say a proper hello, rather than just stumbling out of a field looking like you’ve survived something extraordinary."
"Rohan," he said. "And I probably have. Survived something extraordinary, I mean. Thank you, Margaret. For the water, the food, the directions. For simply being kind to a stranger who must have looked like considerable trouble walking down your road."
"Kindness doesn’t cost much," Margaret said, rising to gather the empty glass and plate. "Go on, now. Whatever’s waiting for you at the end of that transit line, I imagine it’s waited long enough already."
Rohan thanked her one final time, and set off toward the station with a lightness in his step that had nothing to do with his physical exhaustion and everything to do with the simple, accumulating certainty that every remaining obstacle between himself and home was, at last, a genuinely ordinary one.
The transit ride passed in a blur Rohan barely registered, his mind cycling endlessly through everything waiting for him at the end of it — his parents’ faces, the exact shape of his childhood bedroom, the particular, mundane comfort of a life he’d once taken entirely for granted and now understood, with painful clarity, he would never take for granted again.
He studied his fellow passengers with a fascination he suspected looked considerably stranger than he intended — an elderly man reading a physical newspaper, two teenagers arguing good-naturedly over a shared set of headphones, a mother juggling a toddler and several bags of shopping with the harried, unremarkable competence of someone whose biggest daily challenge had nothing to do with survival at all. None of them carried weapons. None of them scanned the carriage for threats the way seven months of instinct had trained him to do automatically, uselessly, in a world that no longer demanded it.
I’m going to have to unlearn some of this. Not all of it — some of what Cael Athis taught me, I think I want to keep. But this constant vigilance, this readiness for violence around every corner — this world doesn’t need that from me. Not the way that one did.
He wondered how long it would actually take, unlearning seven months of hard-won caution, and suspected, with the same clear-eyed honesty he’d learned to apply to every difficult question this search had posed him, that some part of that vigilance might never fully leave him — not as a burden, but simply as one more permanent piece of who this entire journey had made him.
He caught his own reflection in the carriage window at one point, and startled slightly at the sight of himself — travel-worn, weathered in ways that had nothing to do with his actual age, eyes carrying a weight and steadiness that the eighteen-year-old who’d once stood disappointed in a sports hall would barely have recognised as his own.
I look like someone who’s been through something. Because I have. There’s no hiding that, whatever story I eventually tell people about where I’ve actually been.
He checked his status panel periodically throughout the journey, still working through the full implications of everything the recalculation had revealed, the Origin Realm’s own system gradually revealing more detail the longer he examined it.