To Lord Cassian Vane,
I'll be direct. The preparations for the wedding need to stop.
I know this is probably not what you were expecting to read after your men rode three days to deliver your last letter. I appreciate the effort, truly. But I cannot in good conscience allow the wedding to proceed this year. Lyra turns fifteen in the spring. Fifteen. I have no intention of marrying a fifteen year old girl, my lord, regardless of what custom says.
I have spoken with my father on the matter. He is not pleased, but he is not against it either. The betrothal stands. I have no desire to break it. Lyra is a fine girl and I am sure she will grow into a capable woman, which is precisely my point. Let her grow. Let her have a few more years of being young before she is handed off to be somebody's wife.
When she turns eighteen, send word. The preparations can begin then. I will not object to anything reasonable you have planned, and I will personally ensure the Valerius household holds up our end with equal effort.
Until then, please give my regards to Lady Morwenna Vane.
Noctis Valerius Azor
Noctis set the quill down and read it over once. It was blunt. Maybe a bit too blunt. He picked the quill back up, looked at the letter, then put it down again. No, it was fine. Lord Vane was a practical man from what his father had told him. He would understand.
He folded the letter, pressed the Valerius seal into the wax, and handed it off to the courier waiting outside his study door. The man gave a short bow and disappeared down the corridor.
Noctis leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. The courtyard below was the usual mid-morning mess. Stable hands, guards doing their rotations, a couple of the kitchen staff crossing toward the herb garden. Ordinary. Normal. His.
He had spent a long time getting used to that word.
* * *
The Valerius Empire sat roughly in the center of the known continent, wedged between mountain ranges to the north and a stretch of coastline to the south that the empire had been slowly expanding toward for the better part of two centuries. It was a functioning, moderately prosperous medieval kingdom with all the usual complications. Nobles who thought too highly of themselves. Peasants who had too little. A church with opinions on everything. Ongoing border disputes with at least two neighboring states. Normal stuff, by the standards of the world.
Into this world, eighteen years ago, Noctis Valerius Azor was born.
Or rather, someone was born into Noctis Valerius Azor.
He did not remember dying. That part, if there even was a part, was just gone. What he did remember was waking up screaming in a way that was completely out of his control, in a room that smelled like candle smoke and something herbal, with a woman's exhausted face looking down at him. That was Elara. His mother, in this life. She had cried. He had also cried, though for entirely different reasons.
He had been a grown man once. He was fairly certain of that. The memories were intact, even if the context around them had started to feel distant the older he got. He remembered cities with electric lights. Phones. Plastic. The smell of petrol and rain on concrete. A world that was loud and fast and constantly connected, where information traveled in seconds and everyone carried a small glowing rectangle in their pocket.
He had no idea how he had ended up here. There was no explanation, no divine voice, no dramatic moment of being told he was chosen for something. He had simply been somewhere else, and then he was a newborn in a medieval empire, which was, objectively, a terrible situation to be in.
The first few years were rough in ways he had not anticipated. Being an infant with a full adult consciousness was not as useful as it sounded. He could not talk. He could not walk. He was completely dependent on people who had no idea there was a functional person looking back at them. He spent a lot of time thinking. He catalogued everything he remembered. He watched how the household worked. He listened to conversations he was not supposed to be aware of and filed them away.
By the time he could actually speak, he had a decent understanding of the language, the basic hierarchy of the empire, and the fact that his father, Sigurd Valerius Azor II, was a man who commanded a great deal of respect and used very few words.
His older brother, Sigurd the Third as everyone would eventually call him, was seven years his senior and had been watching the new baby with the particular suspicion that older siblings reserved for things that threatened their position. That had softened over time. They were not close in the way that stories liked to make brothers, but they got along well enough. Sigurd III was already being groomed for rule. Noctis was the second son, which meant expectations were lower and the leash was longer, and he had decided early on to be grateful for that.
He had not arrived with any grand plan. He was not trying to change the world. In his first years of actually being functional enough to act, he had mostly focused on the basics. Teaching himself to write in this world's script. Learning which foods existed here and quietly mourning the ones that did not. Getting used to the fact that everything was slower, harder, and smelled worse or better than what he had grown up with in his previous life.
The teaching had come naturally. He knew how to read and write, and he knew that most of the people around him did not. The servant children especially had little access to any kind of education, so he had started there, casually, the way a bored kid with too much time might. He taught the stable master's son first. Then a few others. It had spread the way things did when they were useful. He had not made a project of it. It had just happened.
Football had gone over better than he expected. He had drawn the basic idea in the dirt one afternoon, marked out a rough pitch, and within an hour had nine kids completely absorbed in kicking a stuffed leather ball back and forth. It had become a regular thing. There were rules now, loosely enforced. There were arguments about the rules, which he supposed meant it was working.
The mechanical projects were quieter. He had sketched out a rough bicycle design in a notebook he kept in his room, worked through the problems with the materials he had access to, and shelved most of it when he realized the metalwork was beyond what he could manage alone. The crossbow he had actually built, mostly out of curiosity, and then left in the corner of his workshop because he was not sure he wanted to hand anyone a faster way to kill people. The ballista designs stayed on paper for the same reason. He thought about it sometimes. He was not a pacifist, exactly. He just knew how these things tended to go.
Eighteen years. Half his life in one world, the rest in this one. The math felt strange when he thought about it, so mostly he did not. This was his life now. The stone corridors and candlelight and the smell of horses and woodsmoke. His mother calling him down for meals. His brother's occasional letters from the capital. The friends he had made among people who would have been invisible to him in his previous existence.
It was fine. Better than fine, most days. He had stopped waiting to wake up a long time ago.
Outside, the courtyard had gotten noisier. He could hear the familiar sound of an argument starting up near the stables, and underneath that, the distant thud of a ball hitting something it probably should not have. He stood up, stretched, and went to see what was happening.
Same as any other morning.