The chamber's warm candlelight returned all at once, the battlefield and the harbor and the wedding hall all dissolving back into stillness, and Ragna found himself once more seated in the modest corner chair, the cold, forgotten remains of his first cup of tea sitting exactly where he'd left it.
Master Tarus watched him with the same unhurried patience he'd carried through every scene of the vision, waiting for Ragna's mind to finish settling back into the present before either of them spoke.
"Does Mist know," Ragna asked finally, his voice still faintly unsteady from the weight of everything he'd just witnessed, "that Colvo is his brother? That Laiman — the man who arranged all of this, who hid him away in his own household — is his father?"
"He does not," Tarus said. "Mist bears too little resemblance to Laiman for the truth to suggest itself on its own, and no one within that household has ever offered him reason to suspect it. If left to draw his own conclusions, he assumes, quite reasonably, that the Duke simply took pity on an orphaned foreign boy found alone at a harbor, and gave him a place in service out of whatever charity a powerful man occasionally extends to those beneath him. Gratitude, in his mind, is the entire shape of the arrangement. Nothing more."
Ragna sat with that a moment, an old, uncomfortable ache settling into his chest on Mist's behalf — a boy serving his own brother, grateful for scraps of a household that owed him considerably more than servitude, entirely unaware of exactly how much had been withheld from him.
"And me," he said finally, the question he'd been circling since the very first library shelf finally arriving whole. "Why was I sent two hundred miles away? Who was my mother running from, that she'd carry me that far rather than simply hand me to Laiman's household the way he apparently found Mist?"
Tarus's expression didn't shift, the same calm, ancient patience holding steady across his face. "You have not yet met the condition required for that answer," he said. "What you've witnessed today is all you've earned. The rest will come, Ragna — but not before you're ready to carry it."
Frustration rose in Ragna's chest, sharp and immediate, and he opened his mouth to press further — only for his body to answer the question for him, a sudden, dizzying weakness sweeping through his limbs, his stomach growling loud enough in the quiet chamber that even Tarus's steady composure flickered, briefly, into something almost like amusement.
"How much time," Ragna managed, steadying himself against the arm of the chair, "actually passed? In the memory. Compared to here."
"A month," Tarus said simply. "You've been sitting in that chair, Ragna, for a full month of the outside world's time, sustained only by the temple's own ambient magic while your mind walked eighteen years of another man's history. That sustenance ends the moment you wake fully. I'd suggest finding something to eat, and soon — the body remembers hunger considerably faster than the mind remembers everything else it's just learned."
Ragna rose on legs that felt distinctly unfamiliar, the month-long absence settling into his muscles as genuine, physical weakness despite the vision's insistence that no real time had passed for him at all. He bowed, unsteadily, toward Tarus — a gesture the old man returned with a slight, approving incline of his own head — and made his way back through the incense-heavy corridor toward the temple's main doors.
He was nearly through them when a young temple aide intercepted him, pressing a small loaf of bread into his hands with the quiet, practiced efficiency of someone clearly used to catching disoriented visitors on their way out of exactly this kind of appointment.
"The Master usually sends word ahead," the aide said, by way of explanation, "when someone's about to come out hungry."
Ragna managed a grateful, if slightly dazed, thank-you, and ate the entire loaf before he'd even cleared the temple's outer gate, the simple, plain bread tasting, in that moment, considerably better than anything he could remember eating in his entire life.
He found his way back to the inn on legs still not entirely trustworthy, and by the time he reached their shared room, he had already devoured everything the innkeeper had set in front of him without much regard for pace or dignity — bread, cheese, a bowl of stew gone cold from sitting untouched, all of it disappearing with a single-minded focus that would have embarrassed him thoroughly under any other circumstances.
He was midway through scraping the last of the stew from the bowl when Levi came thundering down the inn's narrow staircase, freezing at the sight of him with an expression caught somewhere between concern and open delight.
"You've been gone a day," Levi said, "and you're eating like the world's about to end before dessert."
"It's been a month," Ragna said, not looking up from the bowl.
Levi blinked. "It's been a what?"
"A month. For me, anyway. The Master pulled me into some kind of memory vision — I lived through eighteen years of someone else's history in what felt like an afternoon, and apparently the whole time, my actual body just sat there in his chamber not eating anything at all." Ragna finally set the empty bowl down, exhaling slowly, the sheer strangeness of the last several hours — or weeks, depending entirely on which version of time he was measuring by — finally catching up with him properly. "I'm considerably hungrier than a single missed meal would explain."
"That's either the most fascinating thing I've ever heard," Levi said, settling into the chair across from him, "or the strangest excuse for gluttony anyone's ever given me. I genuinely can't decide which."
"Both," Ragna admitted, managing a tired, faint smile despite everything still churning behind it.
Levi studied him a moment longer, some of the teasing easing out of his expression as he seemed to register, properly, just how drained Ragna actually looked beneath the joking. "Whatever you saw," he said, more gently now, "you don't have to tell me about it tonight, if you're not ready. I'll just sit here and let you finish eating my share of the bread too, apparently, given the pace you're setting."
Ragna huffed a quiet laugh, grateful for the shift, and let the heavier weight of the memory settle, for now, somewhere he could revisit it later, once his body had finished reminding him it still had needs a vision couldn't satisfy.
"So," Ragna said, once the worst of the hunger had finally eased, "what did you manage while I was off touring someone else's entire life?"
"Quite a bit, actually." Levi's grin returned in full force, some genuine pride slipping into it now. "The weapons master here had me on the axe within the first hour — foundation work, mostly, grip and balance and the basic swing patterns, but I picked it up faster than I expected to. Faster than the old man expected too, if his face was anything to judge by." He flexed one hand, still faintly calloused in new places that hadn't existed a day ago. "I've got the basics down solid now. Enough that they think I'm ready for the next step."
"Which is?"
"Joining the recruits." Levi said it plainly, without hesitation, the same easy confidence he'd carried since the moment he'd first claimed a seat at Ragna and Matan's table back in Ruddafoth.
"Hizosshu's capital — Gerron. That's where the formal recruitment happens, apparently. The temple can teach the foundations, but actual enlistment into the army requires showing up there directly."
"What are the requirements?"
"Basic weapon technique, mostly — enough to prove you're not walking in completely useless. Everything else, the real refinement, happens after you're accepted, under proper military instructors." Levi shrugged, easy and unbothered. "I've got the basics now. I intend to go."
Ragna considered that for a long moment, turning the decision over with the same careful thoroughness he'd once applied to choosing between knight and defender on a manor training yard years ago — except this time, the choice arrived considerably faster, propelled by everything he'd just spent a memory-month witnessing.
If he wanted to see Laiman properly, not through some borrowed vision but face to face, as his actual son rather than a stranger reading his history secondhand.
If he wanted any real chance of standing before Colvo and Mist as more than a passing stranger on a forest road, of understanding what bound the three of them together beyond blood neither of his brothers even knew they shared with him.
If he wanted to be close enough, eventually, to whatever prophecy Tarus kept dangling just out of reach —
There was only one road that led anywhere close to any of it.
"I'll join too," Ragna said.
Levi's grin widened considerably. "Now that's the best news I've heard all day. Gerron, then. Together."
"Together," Ragna agreed, and found, despite the exhaustion still sitting heavy in his bones, that some quiet, resolute part of him had already settled fully into the decision, the way it always seemed to once he'd finally stopped circling a question and simply answered it.