Sylas watched the boy from the end of the corridor like he was seeing a ghost.
Because he was.
That freckled face, the shaggy chestnut hair, the jittery posture like a squirrel on caffeine—that was Willem Trask.
Willem Trask, the scholarship kid with an affinity for wind magic and a tendency to overshare everything he knew. In the original novel, he died. Early. As in chapter seven early.
Sylas rubbed his eyes and looked again.
Still there. Still alive.
"Well, crap," he muttered.
The worst part? Willem looked exactly like the fan art he'd seen in the spoiler thread. Down to the dumb lopsided grin.
This wasn't just deja vu. This was the timeline punching him in the face.
"What is he doing here?" Sylas whispered, half to himself. "You're supposed to be dead, dude. There was a fire. You tripped. A chandelier crushed your—"
"I don't believe we've met," said a voice next to him.
Sylas nearly leapt a foot in the air.
Vivienne stood beside him, her arms crossed, golden eyes narrowed. Today, she wore the academy's navy coat draped over one shoulder like she owned the place. She probably did, in spirit.
Sylas cleared his throat. "Uh. No, we haven't. Not formally."
"You were muttering to yourself. About a chandelier.
"Oh. I do that," he said quickly. "Sleep-talking. While awake. Very rare condition. Super tragic."
She didn't laugh. She didn't even blink.
She turned her gaze back to the boy at the other end of the hall. "You know him?"
Sylas hesitated. Every instinct told him not to say yes. But then again—if Willem was alive, that meant something had already shifted. And Sylas needed every ounce of information he could gather.
"I've seen him before," he said carefully. "He's… hard to forget."
"His name's Willem," Vivienne said. "Top of his theory class. Terrible at combat spells."
"Yeah," Sylas muttered. "That tracks."
Vivienne gave him a sideways glance. "You're acting like you saw a ghost."
"I thought I did."
There was a pause. Then:
"You're weird, Vermund," she said, and walked away.
Sylas let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. He turned back to Willem—who was now laughing with two other students.
Alive. Willem Trask was alive.
And that meant—
The future was no longer safe.
Sylas sat in his dorm room, staring at a mana crystal like it had personally betrayed him.
"Okay," he said aloud, pacing. "Either this world has more save points than I thought, or I just stepped into a completely different storyline."
Willem's death had been one of the early catalysts for the novel's real plot kicking off. His death had pushed the protagonist into a protective spiral, awakened his darker instincts, and catalyzed a major Academy shift.
But if Willem was alive… then what was the catalyst now?
What was going to replace it?
What's going to break the world this time
And more importantly—
Would Sylas be anywhere near it?
The system pinged.
[MINOR WARNING: Discrepancy in narrative timeline detected.]
"Oh, you don't say," Sylas muttered. "Give me something useful."
[Suggestion: Do not interact further with Willem Trask.]
Sylas blinked. "What, seriously?"
[Probability of chaos: 67.2%. Probability of you dying as a direct result: 48.9%.]
"Cool, cool, cool," he whispered, heart pounding. "So… stay away from the nice, chatty boy with the murder chandelier fate. Noted."
He slumped onto his cot.
If Willem's alive… who else is supposed to be dead?
That night, Sylas dreamed of fire. Not the warm kind. The consuming kind. Smoke curled through the corridors of Aetherhold. Shadows screamed names he didn't recognize. And in the center of it all, Willem stood in the flames, staring right at him.
"You were supposed to stop it," the boy said
Sylas woke up with a gasp.
The sky outside his window was burning red.