The lights were obscene.
They flattened every flaw, gilded every smile, and turned the smallest triumph into an announcement. A thousand lenses hunted for the perfect frame; a thousand hands clapped as if applause could stitch a life back together.
"—And the Best Actor Award goes to—"
The envelope tore with the practiced reverence of a ritual. "Arden Alvin."
Thunder rose, flawless and well-rehearsed. Cameras chimed like distant bells.
I sat in the last row and clapped for a man who had what I'd never had. I clapped because not clapping would have felt like holding a mirror up to the ruin of my own choices.
That was the honest part. The rest was costumes and habit.
I left before the speeches—no grand exit, no sobbing confession. The final act of a washed-up performer is always a quiet shuffle into the night. Outside, the city smelled of rain and cheap perfume. Neon smeared across puddles. A taxi hissed down the avenue, headlights cutting through steam like knives.
"Maybe I was never meant for this," I told my reflection. "Maybe I was only ever good at pretending."
A horn answered me—louder than I expected.
White light. Screeching brakes. A silence so absolute it rang in my ears.
Warmth, then a woman's voice, soft and certain.
"From this moment, you are our son. Kale von Greystone."
I blinked at silk and chandeliers and the carved crest above a fireplace I'd never learned to name. My hands—small, delicate, impossibly new—fanned the air in helpless disbelief.
A nursery, not a hospital corridor. Mana lamps hung like captured stars. Velvet curtains breathed slow with the wind. The world smelled faintly of beeswax and something colder, like iron left in magic-warmed water. A man in a dark coat leaned by the doorway, silver hair braided at the nape, eyes the color of rain against pewter.
"Son?" I mouthed, tasting the word like a line from someone else's script.
Five minutes ago I'd been a different person. A failed actor with nothing but the habit of sarcasm and a life hollow enough to echo. Now I was wrapped in linen and gold and a pronouncement that felt like destiny handed to me by an indulgent author.
I might have laughed then, if not for the faint pulse of something unfamiliar at the back of my mind. I said the only word that had ever fixed impossible things in the stories I loved.
"System."
A cold chime answered, clean and mechanical.
[Initializing…]
[Top Actor System online.]
[Designation: Host = Greatest Pretend Actor.]
[Current Status: Born into House Greystone. Magic Affinity: Lowest Recorded.]
[Objective: Survive by acting.]
[Locked until Magic Affinity Ceremony. Time Remaining: 5 years.]
I stared. The text was efficient and unsentimental, as if the world itself were a ledger with no time for pity.
"Top Actor?" I said aloud, the idea landing like a joke told after the laughter had died. "Greatest Pretend Actor? Wonderful. So even here I play roles. Lovely."
The system did not giggle. It did not offer comfort. It simply existed—an arctic stage manager whose first instruction was cold and simple: act, or burn.
Fine. I had been pretending my whole life. I could do another role.
Five years rearranged themselves like scenes cut and spliced.
Greystone Manor was a volume of a book I could open at will: an endless hallway that smelled of cedar and ink, portraits that watched and remembered, servants who moved like well-oiled sentences. Mana-lanterns drifted above the staircases, blowing faint perfumes of lavender into the corridors. In the courtyard, fountains thrummed with soft blue light and bronze statuettes circled like patient gods.
My father—Duke Reinhart von Greystone—carried the kind of silences people waited to fill. He spoke rarely and precisely, as if every word had to be a spell. My mother laughed in notes that fixed small mistakes; she pressed light kisses to my forehead and taught me to read before I could tie my shoes.
The tutors arrived like a procession: a man who whispered the histories of the Empire as though reciting liturgies, a woman who taught posture and how to hold a chalice without spilling mana (an art, apparently), and a rotund fellow who tried to spark mana in my palms and failed so often his jaw ached.
I was small in a big house, and they adored me because I was obedient and serene. There are roles that do not require talent—only the willingness to be picturesque. I learned how to be that painting.
At night, behind the curtains, I practiced. Not spells—those were mute under my skin—but faces. The calm face. The inspired glance. The look of someone who understood secrets the world did not. I practiced the pause that suggested depth. I practiced the silence that read as meaning. I hoarded gestures like jewels.
The system watched. It offered no praise; it only counted.
[System Log: Acting Efficiency +0.5%]—no, wait. The system did not speak of praise. I imagined a ledger with ticks increasing when I sold my manner convincingly. Points were intangible and worse; they were the breath that might keep me safe.
Once, when I failed spectacularly in front of a visiting dignitary—my jaw unclenched and I sneezed confetti of my own pretence—the tutors blinked and called it "charm." The visiting lady pinched her handkerchief and declared, "Such human warmth, so rare in a noble child." I took a bow in private.
Sometimes I hated the sound of applause. Sometimes I lived for it. They were both the same thing in different rooms.
The morning of the Magic Affinity Ceremony dawned like a close-up. Clouds moved like slow film credits across a wide sky. The manor hummed; the air tasted metallic and anticipatory.
The hall for the ceremony was carved from white stone, ribs of runic script climbing its pillars. At the center floated the Affinity Crystal—an orb no larger than a man's head but thrumming as if containing a small sun. Its surface was a living map; light rippled beneath its skin, colors folding like breath.
Servants ushered us into place. Relatives arranged themselves in predictable bays, some smiling with the hem of calculation, others with the raw glee of the unaccustomed.
My heart tapped like a nervous drummer. My hands shook. Small, ridiculous tremors—like a gag I could not quite swallow.
[System Unlocked.]
[Top Actor System Active.]
[Instruction: Perform convincingly. Reward: Beginner's Package.]
Begin convincingly. I had an entire childhood of convincing behind me. I stepped forward.
My father's gaze was a ledger: measured, then proud. "Kale," he said, voice low and not unkind, "this is only ritual. Remember your posture, son."
"Of course, Father," I replied, then thought: Of course. Don't die. Smile. Breathe. Act like you belong.
I took the small vial from the folds of my sleeve—an enhancer I had acquired with all the paranoia of a man who had learned to purchase security. A petty theft, perhaps, but in my life predicaments were often bartered for coin.
No light answered at first. The crystal swallowed my palm's warmth like an old appetite and hummed. Senses tightened like the string of a bow.
Then the world yawned.
Color burst from the crystal. Not a single color—an entire orchestra. Scarlet bent into blue, blue folded into green, gold threaded through silver. Each strand of light hammered into the air with a chord that made the ancients' hairs stand up.
Gasps fragmented into whispers. The elderly scholar in the front row heaved out a sound that might have been a curse or a poem. Servants pressed palms to their chests. My mother's hand trembled against her robes.
A voice somewhere near the back—thin, incredulous—said, "All affinities? Maximum? That's impossible."
I stared at my hand where the light still clung. My pulse was not a proper drum; it was a narrative: He was a pretender. He is still a pretender. Now everyone thinks he is something else entirely.
[Result: Multi-Affinity—All Elements Detected. Maximum Resonance.]
[Performance Evaluation: S+—Audience Belief: 100%. Reward: Title Temporary Perception: 'The Undefeated Archmage'.]
I read it as if the system had scratched it into my skin. S+? Audience belief? Temporary—perception? The lines came together with cruel efficiency.
My mind furnished jokes by reflex. Of course. The system pays out for convincing acting, and then feeds my life to rumor mills. Perfect. I could hear the chorus of future headlines forming like vultures sharpening their beaks.
"We have never seen this reading," said the elder mage—his voice a brittle instrument. "Such resonance across all elements is unheard of."
My father's balance tilted from curious to stern to a rare softness. "Kale," he said in a voice that unseated me, "you… are the Greystone heir."
People gathered words like offerings. "Prodigy." "Archmage." "Miracle." My chest swelled with a feeling awkwardly similar to pride, but poisoned with the knowledge of how it had arrived—glue and stagecraft, not blood and destiny.
Inside, I was a panic strung into prose. Act. Don't twitch. Smile like you mean it. I smiled—a practiced crescent—and the room inhaled.
Later, when servants draped me in incense and praised and the house thrummed with gossip, the system whispered nothing. It did not need to. Its ledger had been balanced: belief had been purchased; the world had paid attention.
I lay in bed that night beneath a canopy that smelled of orange wood and old books, and the house seemed to bloat with its own importance. My mother tucked a ribbon at the corner of my pillow. My father left a palm on my shoulder—their touch a punctuation mark that said: we believe.
I stared at the ceiling where painted stars had been frozen in a tableau. The system's last line of the evening glowed above my pillow like an indifferent coin.
[Acting continues.]
I let the sound roll around my head. It was not a comfort. It was not a threat. It was a schedule.
I laughed once, quietly, because that was what I always did when the joke was on me. "Even in another world," I whispered to the dark, "I am still an actor."
The house breathed. Outside, the estate's lights blinked like distant applause.
The curtain had risen. The audience had already begun to cheer.