Orphan [LitRPG Adventure] - Book One Complete!

Alarion knew something was amiss long before he heard Nessa's screams.

The first sign had been an offhand comment from Kali.

"You're grumpier than usual," the Godborn had said during a break in their mastery training. "You are making progress, if that is what you are worried about."

It hadn't been. He'd just felt… off.

Alarion had brushed it off at the time—fatigue, hunger, or ever-looming deadlines; there was always something to be stressed about. But the unease grew as the hours passed. He was upset, but he couldn't pin down why.

That was the insidious nature of the bond he shared with Nessa. Their emotions fed into one another, but in a way so utterly natural that it was almost unrecognizable. When he was happy, she had a spring in her step. When she was bored or frustrated, he felt a twinge of the same. It was only when their emotions clashed or were heightened to an extreme that the influence became obvious.

Today had both in spades.

By mid-afternoon, he could no longer ignore the sensation. Nessa was often lonely or sad, emotions he longed to remedy, but she had never been so viscerally angry that it made him itch for violence. All at once, he'd seen red, tasted blood, and very nearly taken a swing at Kali.

The feeling passed quickly, but was so foreign—so at odds with his circumstances—that Alarion had excused himself and gone in search of Nessa.

She wasn't hard to find. He could follow her screams, after all.

As a Warrant Officer, Alarion was entitled to a small suite of rooms in the fortress core, a perk he would have refused if not for Nessa. Though he adored the comfort of a real bed, he had little need or interest in so much space. But she did. It was her home and refuge, the place she had spent most of her time since their arrival weeks earlier.

And she'd made it very… her.

Alarion had no taste for aesthetics. There were things he liked, and things he didn't, but he could never explain the appeal of one over the other. As an amalgam of his nature and his memories of Sierra, Nessa desired class, but struggled to act on that urge. With his help, she draped the beige walls in art and colored silks, all of it procured from empty rooms throughout the fortress. Alarion liked it, but Lily had called it gauche and pedestrian.

Nessa had called her things that he had chosen not to repeat.

Books were scattered throughout the room in small piles. He'd been told that it was some kind of sorting method, that there was order in the chaos, but if there was a connection between A Feast Fit for the Mothers, The Thrice Told Fall of the Celesian Empire, and Velvet, Gunpowder and Grace: A Tale of Forbidden Romance on the High Seas, Alarion could not discern it.

He usually found her there when he returned home, sitting amidst the day's reading with Kotone floating nearby. But not today.

The shouting died down when she felt him approach the suite, the anger now tinged with a deep sense of embarrassment and self-loathing. Now there were only sobs, tears she could not hope to suppress, despite her best efforts. She was in the master bedroom, the one he'd set aside for her despite her protestations, and the door was closed, but not locked.

"Nessa?" he asked, rapping two knuckles on the wood.

"Go away."

"Do you actually want me to leave?"

"Yes." A harsh sniffle followed the barely audible word through the oak door. "No, I do not know. I just do not want you to see me like this."

"I can already feel it. I am coming in."

Broken ceramic scraped along the floor as Alarion pushed the door open, to find precisely what he'd expected. The room was in a mockery of shambles, the bed sheets strewn about, a chair tipped over, and a single mug shattered on the floor. Kotone had been instructed to follow Nessa's orders, but a temper tantrum by proxy was never as tumultuous as the real thing.

Nessa herself was hard to find, curled in on herself in the rear of a closet, as far from visible as she could manage. Her knees were tight to her chest, her arms wrapped snugly around them for comfort that wouldn't come. She uttered a single desperate sob as Alarion loomed over her, then turned away.

"What happened?" he asked, kneeling next to her.

"I do not want to talk about it," she told him.

"Nessa-"

"It will not happen again!" she snapped, glaring at him for half a second before her eyes glistened and she buried her face back against her knees. "It will not. I am sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry for," Alarion reassured her. "And I am not concerned about what it did to me. I am worried about you."

For a long while, she said nothing. When at last she found words to voice, they were the last thing Alarion expected. "Why did you do this to me?"

"Do what?"

"This!" Nessa exclaimed, as though it made more sense the second time. When Alarion remained befuddled, she added, "Why did you make me like her?"

"Nessa, I did not mean to-"

"But you did!" she said sharply. Her eyes were angry when they finally met his, ice-blue that he'd once thought lost forever. "You did this to me, you made me look like her! Feel like I should be her!"

"You-"

"I can't even cut my own fucking hair!" Nessa screamed in his face this time, her eyes wild with fury and something worse beyond it. "I cut and I cut and I cut, but when I look back, it is still there! So, I cut and I cut. And then… and then I just cut."

There were scissors beside her, the stainless steel glinting up at Alarion. She must have been at it for hours, he realized, her frustration and self-loathing building until it boiled over in utter rage. He should have known. Should have paid more attention to his emotions.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Her mood sank along with his; the rage in her eyes replaced with a deep vacancy as tears sprang anew.

"I think I want to go."

Alarion's heart skipped a beat at the words, and he instantly shook his head in refusal. Without a physical body, a Thoughtborn like Nessa was extremely difficult to conventionally kill, but they could be unwound by their creator, even one as novice as Alarion. It had always been an option, but never one Nessa had seriously suggested. Until now.

"Do not say that," he said quietly, as though concerned his volume might shatter her.

"I tried. But it does not work. It just hurts," Nessa whispered. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, then looked at him. "I just… I cannot keep looking at her face."

"I know," Alarion told her, though the words failed to convey his meaning. He was no good at this; it had been years since someone had leaned on him for support, and he'd never been good at it. He didn't think offering her his favorite toy to stop her from crying would go over any better than it had with his sister all those years ago.

But he had to do something.

He reached over her, plucking the scissors from the ground, then stood and offered her his hand. She eyed it, and him, skeptically, but relented when his fingers crooked to beckon her. Once she stood, he led her to the nearby dressing table and sat her down in front of a mirror, his hands on her shoulders.

"Just… give me a minute, alright?" he asked her, before closing his eyes.

She wasn't the only one who had been reading. Books on Thoughtborn manifestation were rare, but not unheard of or unavailable, especially in a large city. There, they were merely expensive. With Lily's help, he'd walked away with two: a copy of The Designed Lives of the Kel-Taran and the much less informative Signs of Manifestation. The two books, primarily the former, had filled in most of the fundamental gaps in his knowledge of the Thoughtborn, and, when combined with his copy of Selica Gareris' Meditations on Meditation, they provided a solid foundation for sculpting the appearance or demeanor of a nascent Thoughtborn.

As a fully manifested Thoughtborn, Nessa was not so easy to change. Her personality could be guided, but like her appearance, it could no longer be forcibly altered without risking drastic damage to the underlying Thoughtform. Her hair, though? The sympathetic ties there were less rigid and defined. So long as he was careful, that was something he could change.

He started by pulling loose the ever-present cord that kept Nessa's raven locks in a severe ponytail. Changes like that were possible even for her, but they wouldn't stick for long. Strange as it seemed, the hairband was as much a part of Nessa as Alarion's skin was a part of his hand. If he wanted it gone, he needed to alter her very existence.

That much, blessedly, proved easy. [Lifegiving Meditation] was a skill designed for the creation and adjustment of Thoughtborn, and it felt almost eager to be used for that purpose.

He could see the hairband through [Unraveller's Sense], the twisting lines of magic and sympathy that made up the concept, and the similar bonds that connected it to Nessa as a whole. With careful use of [Unraveller's Sense], [Lifegiving Meditation], and [Sympathetic Manipulation], he found the 'end' of the hairband and began to untangle it. First, he severed its connections to Nessa to eliminate, or at least mitigate, any backlash she might face. When that was finished, he set upon the thing itself, unweaving it until nothing but loose fragments of sympathy remained, already dwindling into the background connections of the world.

When he finished, Nessa drew in a sharp breath.

"Are you alright?" he asked, alarmed.

"I am… I'm fine," she answered, putting an emphasis on the contraction, as though to spite the girl staring back at her in the mirror. "That just felt strange. Can we cut it short?"

"How short?"

Nessa bit her lip and reached up, sweeping her hair from left to right. She turned her head this way and that, carefully considering his question before she answered it. "Short on the left, almost to the scalp, like this. Longer on the right, but still shorter than I have now."

"Okay, we can do that," Alarion agreed.

The task proved both easier and more difficult than he'd expected. The very act of cutting her hair carried a sympathy all its own, one that frayed the link of the discarded clippings almost to nothing. What was more troublesome was making sure he cut it right from the start.

"No, not there. Left. No, left," she chided him, nearly a half-hour into the undertaking.

"This is left," Alarion complained.

"No, that is right. Mother above, how do you not know the difference by now?"

"I do," he protested. "I was looking in the mirror."

"The mirror doesn't flip left to right. It flips front-to-back."

"You know what…" Alarion trailed off, as if leaving the threat to her imagination, when it was really his lack thereof.

Nessa's mood had improved with each snip, as though he were cutting away the very woes themselves. She preened in her chair each time he paused to obliterate the discarded hair, but he still saw the hint of a frown every time he opened his eyes. It would take more than a haircut to right the wrongs he'd done.

"Do you know what my first memory is?"

The question caught the Thoughtborn girl off guard, her face scrunching up in a way that was so Sierra it hurt. "No, I don't have that one."

"I wish you did not have any," Alarion scoffed. It happened less and less as the weeks went by, but Nessa had an odd habit of asking him about old memories or thoughts, things she had absorbed in her creation, or pulled free through their shared bond. "I was four, if it jogs your memory."

She shook her head.

"That is good. It isn't a great one," he chuckled a little at the recollection. "My mother cooked some noodles with a tangy sauce. It didn't sit well, and I threw up."

Nessa met his eyes in the mirror, her expression a mixture of befuddlement and disgust as she said, "Alright? If you are trying to make a point-"

"I am getting there," he insisted. "The thing is, I did not just throw up. I must not have chewed well when I was eating, because I threw up against the wall, and there were these long, individual noodles that-"

"Alarion!" she protested.

He laughed a little and raised a flat palm in apology, "Sorry, it is very vivid in my memory. But the point is, that is my very first memory. I was four years old, but I do not remember anything before that. As far as my memory is concerned, I became self-aware when I threw up that night."

"Okay?"

"The odd thing is, I am not sure if it happened."

Nessa half turned in her seat to look at him directly. "You just said that this was your first memory."

"And it might be. But I do not actually know that," he said, much to her growing consternation. "When I traveled to Ashad Vitri, back when I was little, there was a family that took care of me. One of their daughters, Erda, was very close to me. An older sister trying to replace a little brother."

"I remember her," Nessa murmured, though he should have known that she would. His strongest memories were the most vivid for her, and Erda's death loomed large in his history. "She was kind."

"Mm," he agreed. "She asked me what my oldest memory was, and I told her what I told you, so some part of it must have happened. But the thing is, I do not remember the memory anymore, only the memory of the memory."

Nessa gave a sharp, half-hearted laugh before she said, "Like me?"

"That is not what I was getting at," Alarion shook his head. "My point is that there were years before I had even a single memory to call my own. Years where I was alive, but where nothing ultimately mattered. They are gone, lost, but they are the foundation for who I became."

He touched the back of her head, tilting it to the side to access a particularly troublesome spot, continuing on with his point even as the snip-snip of the scissors accompanied his words.

"You do not feel like it, because you have so much of me and my memory of Sierra inside you. But you are a newborn finding your first steps, and you have a lifetime ahead of you." He met her gaze until she looked away, a wan smile pulling at his lips. "In a few years, I will ask you what your earliest memories are, and you will struggle to recall anything that is not yours and yours alone. This will not be her face; it will be yours."

Nessa raised a hand, touching her fingers to her face, as though somehow worried it had changed. She studied herself in the reflection, turning her head; first left, then right. "This is me."

"It is."

"Well, she had a much better haircut. What was I thinking?"