Circle of Inevitability: A Changed Fate

Volume 1: Fate Appropriator

"I would have lived in peace, but my enemies brought me war." – Red Rising

April 4th, 1357

Cordu Village, Riston Province, Intis Republic

 "Hmm, what about 'I'm just an ordinary lad, wasting my youth away?' No, that sounds too melancholic." In a busy countryside tavern, a youth of sixteen winters mumbled to himself at the bar table, a glass of half-finished absinthe in front of him. Despite the obvious underaged drinking occurring in the establishment, most patrons of Ol'Tavern did nothing to dissuade the boy.

 "I'm a nobody, with no time to notice the brightness of the sun." Suddenly, the youth stood up as if he just had a moment of what Emperor Roselle dubbed 'Eureka'. This sudden action startled a slumbering drunken villager sitting next to him, causing the villager to jerk out of his sleep. The villager opened his eyes a smidgeon and saw a handsome face with coal-black hair, blue eyes shimmering like lake water and the demeanour of a prankster smiling to himself in satisfaction.

 The young lad then downed the rest of his absinthe all in one go, scowling in regret at his hasty decision due to the bitterness that he was still trying to condition himself towards liking. He eagerly left his seat at the bar table and rushed out of the tavern, but not before leaving a few coins for the barkeep. Some tavern patrons glanced at the commotion in curiosity and began whispering to themselves.

 "What prank do you think Lumian is up to this time?" A middle-aged farmer with a balding head and beer belly asked his drinking companion, another farmer with an even worse hairline.

 "Probably putting holes in the milkmaids' buckets or maybe throwing eggs at the administrative building. Maybe even steal Madam Pualis' knickers for all I know." The other replied before drinking a gulp of rye beer, having grown familiar with the antics of the Prankster King of Cordu.

 Lumian ran back to his home in a haste, straying off the road entirely to take a short cut. He athletically hop over fences, rocks and even leapt over a dry gulley.

 In a couple minutes, he arrived outside his semi-subterranean two-story abode. The ground floor of the house served as both a kitchen and a lounge.

 "Aurore!" Lumian shouted with enthusiasm, excited to share the culmination of his efforts in inventing a fake story to lure in the victims of his prank that even an accomplished author like his older sister would be proud of. "I just made up this story that I want to you to critique!" Lumian often went to his sister to let her judge his stories, pointing out plot holes and inconsistencies, all to refine his pranking skills.

 No reply came from anywhere in the house.

 Thinking that his adoptive sister probably went to the roof to gaze at the cosmos again, Lumian made his way upstairs. However, as he passed Aurore's room, he noticed that the door was slightly ajar, allowing him to catch a glimpse of golden blonde hair.

 Momentarily forgetting basic manners like knocking on a girl's room before entering due to his excitement, Lumian discourteously barged into Aurore's room. "Aurore, you need to check…" Lumian halted mid-speech, as he laid eyes on his exquisitely enchanting sister's form in a genuflecting position in front of a makeshift altar, her eyes closed, her mouth moving in quick movements, but no sound came out, as if an invisible barrier laid between the two siblings.

 The simple altar had only a single candle on it, burning bright blue. Aurore continued chanting, oblivious to the sound of Lumian entering the room. Hesitating, Lumian asked. "Aurore, what are you doing?" Aurore continued chanting.

 Suddenly, an illusory apparition slowly started to form on top of the altar. Its form was faint at first, barely distinguishable as a human outline, but then definition started to creep onto the figure. Lake blue eyes, golden locks of hair, fair skin and a beautiful face, it was no other than another Aurore!

However, one distinct feature separated her from the sister that Lumian adored, it was the look on her face – one of contempt. Slowly, the person on the altar went from almost being transparent to gaining more and more corporeality by the second, becoming translucent. The Aurore on the altar started grinning mischievously as Aurore kept chanting fervently, her eyes tinged with an evil glare.

Unnerved by the malevolence in the other Aurore's eyes, Lumian stepped towards his kneeling sister. As he took his third step, he found that he could suddenly hear Aurore again. She was rapidly speaking in a language he didn't understand, with the speed of her words accelerating by the second, making the translucent Aurore on the altar grin almost impossibly wide.

"Aurore!" Lumian shouted, panic creeping into his voice. The sudden noise caused Aurore to flinch and turned around to assume a combat stance, interrupting her chanting. The Aurore on the altar started to lose her corporeality, with her body evaporating away like wisps of fog.

"Lumian Lee! I curse you! How dare you help that thief!" The ghostly Aurore screamed in agony with such resentment in her voice that it made Lumian take a step back in shock, having never heard his sister's voice take on such a nefarious edge. The rest of the ghostly Aurore dissipated, leaving a bewildered Aurore and Lumian in the bedroom.

"Aurore, what was that? Who was that? What were you doing?" Having forgotten his initial excitement, Lumian launched questions at Aurore in rapid succession.

"I - I was just experimenting with some rituals." Despite her answer, Aurore herself sounded unsure, glancing back in fear at the altar, seemingly not having noticed the ghostly Aurore until she shouted out her death throes.

"What was that ghost? Why did she look exactly like you?"

"That… wasn't something that was supposed to happen. The person that sold me this spell told me something else would occur." Aurore's voice suddenly took on a careful tone, as if she had fallen into a pit trap and barely caught herself on the edge.

"Was that part of your powers? Summoning a copy of yourself?" Lumian asked, having always been curious of the details of Aurore's supernatural abilities, having often pestered Aurore for how to obtain them for himself.

 Aurore glanced back at the altar, then to Lumian, then back at the altar again, as if she was contemplating a monumental decision. Then, letting out a tired sigh that held a hint of resignation, Aurore went to her bed and pulled out a travelling trunk from underneath it. She opened the combination lock and opened the trunk, revealing 2 stacks of bound leather books. Grabbing the green book on the top, the held in behind her back as she spun around to face Lumian, her face filled with trepidation.

 "Lumian, I want to tell you the truth about me. About my past, about who I really am. But first, you have to promise me something in return." Aurore spoke, a hint of fear in her voice. "Can you promise me that your opinions of me will not change for the worse?"

 Instead of just instantly giving her an answer, Lumian took a moment to think about the Aurore he has always known, the Aurore that saved him from the life of a street beggar, the same Aurore that fed him, clothed him, gave him a new name and taught him proper moralities and gave him an education. No matter what her past was, it didn't erase anything that Aurore has done for him. He suddenly thought about an old man with a blue-black mark on his chest he had met when he was twelve, this old man had died on the streets because Lumian could not spare any effort to help him due to having gone hungry for three days in a row. 'If not for Aurore, I'd probably be as dead as him already.' Lumian thought.

 "I could never think less of you." Lumian answered.

 Aurore let out a breath of relief that she hadn't realised she had been holding. She held the green book in front of her and explained that it was her journal, insisting that it was definitely NOT a diary. She handed the journal over to Lumian, who took it gingerly with both hands. Flipping to the first page, he read the handwritten words 'This journal belongs to-,' expecting to see Aurore Lee's name written, he was surprised when the name that followed was 'Roche Louise Sanson'. Being aware that Aurore Lee was likely a pseudonym she made up, Lumian surmised that Roche Louise Sanson must be Aurore's real name that she had before their fateful encounter.

 Flipping to the next page, he saw the first words being the date of the first entry. '11th September 1351.' A whole two years before Lumian met Aurore. 'Dear diary,' it says, prompting Lumian to snidely glance at Aurore, who has always insisted that keeping a diary was something childish no serious adult would attempt.

 "Stop reading further before you confuse yourself, I'll explain my background first. Please listen carefully before you make your judgement." Aurore said, causing Lumian to halt in his reading.

 "I come from another world. A world much more technologically advanced than this one. Back home, I was brainstorming ideas for a novel I was working on and decided to do some research. I stumbled upon an ancient book that had descriptions of what I was looking for. But in that book, there was also a paragraph that contained a peculiar name. When I read that name out loud, I suddenly found myself in this body." Aurore explained.

 "My real name, or at least the real name of this body is Roche Louise Sanson." This caused Lumian to raise an eyebrow at the mention of 'this body'. "The real Roche Louise Sanson died in September 1952, which prompted me to wake up in her recently deceased body. I know this sounds unbelievable, but please let me explain. I inherited all of Roche's memories, up to the moment of her passing. Roche's family was a struggling merchant family that fell onto hard times. But for some inexplicable reason, her father, Voisin, managed to stumble into financial success after success, accumulating a vast fortune. He later revealed to his whole family that he had obtained the blessings of a being known as the great Circle of Inevitability, who granted Voisin boons that allowed him to manipulate fate to accrue riches. The whole family joined Voisin in converting their faith to the Circle of Inevitability, and all of them obtained boons that granted them superpowers."

 Having listened intently until now, Lumian asked. "Is that the source of the powers that you've displayed to me?"

 "No, I've never displayed the powers granted by the Circle of Inevitability in front of you. The powers that I've showed you are of a safer nature. To continue, Roche's family would complete missions handed down by the Circle of Inevitability such as spreading His faith, sacrificing certain items and even assassinating troublesome figures. They've probably killed dozens of people, and Roche's hands were not innocent ones. These contributions allowed the Sanson family to obtain even more powerful boons, at the cost of their sanity and self-control. Eventually, as Roche was granted her latest boon, her frail mind could no longer handle the strain the boons exerted on her. As a result, she died. Her dead body was then given new life when I occupied it, with the power of her latest boon in her."

 "So, you're telling me that you're a ghost or spirit that is currently possessing a corpse?" Lumian said. This causes Aurore's expression to fall, thinking what she had been dreading was about to manifest.

 "Yes, but not intentionally, I had no idea that something of that nature was about to occur. I'm not a body snatcher, neither me nor Roche consented to something like this." Aurore defended herself, with a sliver of desperation in her voice. "D-Do you think of me as body thief? A stranger, no, a parasite that stole your sister's body? Y-You don't hate me now, do you?"

 Lumian then surprised Aurore by saying, "Why would I care about that? Roche died a year before you even met me. Every moment you've spent with me, every experience we've made together, that was all you, not her. It was you who saved me. It was you who protected me. It was you who loved me. How could I ever hate you?"

 To her surprise, Aurore felt wetness on her cheeks. Bring her hand up her face, she realised that she had been crying. She attempted to wipe them off, only for even more tears to come out, as if every tear held her deep-rooted fears of rejection by the only person in the world whom she considered family. Lumian walked over and enveloped Aurore in tight hug, as if afraid that her soul was about to depart, and he was there to anchor her down. Aurore continued to weep onto his shoulders, covering his right shoulder with her tears.

 After a while, Aurore had emotionally recovered, her tears had stopped, and her breathing stabilised. Lumian stopped hugging her and she sat down on the bed, her shoulders squared as if a weight had been lifted off them. Lumian went to sit next to her. Aurore continued her story.

 She then explained how she had fled from the dangerous and heretical Sanson family after her resurrection. As the family wasn't there to witness Roche's boon granting ritual, none of them had known that she had died and was resurrected. This allowed Aurore to gather as much money and clothes as possible before absconding away from the Sanson estate. She eventually settled in Cordu to hide from the Sanson family, which she was certain had most likely discovered her resurrection at some point with the array of powers they had at their disposal. Occasionally, she would return to Trier, where the Sanson family resided, to gather information about them and to meet her associates. That was how she met Lumian on one of her forays to Trier, and the rest was history.

 "Are they still looking for you?" Lumian asked, foremost concerned with his sister's safety.

 "Likely yes. I haven't been back to Trier in some time, but the situation should still be the same. They still haven't given up looking for me, even though it's been 6 years."

 "What will we do if they ever find us? Can we fight them?" Lumian's voice was tinged with worry. 'What if they capture Aurore? What if they kill her?'

 "Roche's mother died some time ago; she went mad and was purged by the family. If we were to be discovered by any of Roche's siblings – Bliss, Annette and Atur – I could win if it's an individual fight and flee with you if it's all three of them at once. It's Roche's father that is the powerhouse of the family. He is extremely formidable and terrifying. Even if there was thirty of me, he would still easily kill me. Every time I go near the Sanson estate in Trier, my knees would buckle, and I would start to hyperventilate at the thought of him catching me. Luckily, he's too busy running his organisation to come directly look for me." At this admittance, Lumian face creased in worry and contemplation.

 'Someone so powerful that even someone with two sets of special abilities like Aurore would find impossible to face? If he was directly searching for Aurore, I'd suggest that we move locations to the Southern Continent immediately, and even then, we should still move different regions every couple of months.' Lumian immediately knew that there was no chance in hell that both of them could face an enemy like this. As such, if both fighting or running away were not available options, the only option left was to hide.

 "It's okay." Aurore assured him. "Riston is far away from Trier, and Cordu is remote even for a Riston village. We've been here for years, and my intels told me that the Sanson has never even been to Riston province. Their search range isn't very far." Lumian let out a breath of relief.

 "Anyways, what was that ritual that you were doing earlier?" Lumian asked, returning to the source of this.

 "It has to do with my travelling to this world, a process that I call transmigration. I thought that if I could travel here, then I could go back." Aurore explained. Lumian then suddenly grew alarmed, standing up from the bed.

 "You want to leave me?" It was now Lumian's turn to express fear in his voice.

 "No, no, no, I simply want to find a way back to my world. If possible, I'd take you with me as well. There's no way that I could abandon my little brother. I'll find my old parents and even introduce them to you. Then I'll show you all the sights and wonders of my world." Aurore explained in haste, knowing how attached Lumian was to her.

 Seeing that Lumian has calmed down, Aurore continued. "So, as I was seeking out a method to return home, an… associate of mine belonging to the same organisation approached me to sell me a spell that deals with summoning souls. I theorised that my transmigration had to do with the transportation of souls into another body, so I was going to perform the spell to see if I could research how, it works and perhaps reverse engineer it. The ritual earlier was me performing the spell. What I didn't expect was that it would summon another apparition of me. Judging by her tone and way of speaking, that was most likely Roche's soul, which I summoned with the spell." Aurore instinctively shivered, recognising just how much danger she had placed herself in.

 "Are you saying that you got tricked by the seller?"

 "Unfortunately, yes. Roche's memories didn't exactly integrate with mine perfectly, or rather I didn't quite accept her memories as mine. This led to me developing a split personality, which led me to be quite strange on occasions, something that you've no doubt observed over the period we lived together." Lumian nodded, remembering times when Aurore would go riding horses into the wilderness or having distant looks in her eyes.

 "What I don't understand is why my associate would try to trick me like this. The members of our organisation are actually quite close and share a sense of comradery despite all being anonymous. This would be the first case of a member trying to harm another that I'm aware of. If I had completed that ritual, my guess is that Roche's soul would either cause my split personality issue to worsen or even take over my body completely." Aurore paused for a brief moment, then a sense of realisation dawned on her.

Some members in her organisation has met unfortunate ends over the years, which most people has passed off as them getting into accidents or simply not having been cautious enough. But now, she suspected that some, if not all of these deaths had been caused by the group that sold her the Soul Summoning spell!

Not wanting to worry Lumian about something he couldn't do much about, she chose to tell him this information. Afterall, he was neither a powerful Beyonder like those who sold her the Soul Summoning spell nor a member of her organisation. Steeling her will, Aurore decided to employ the help of other members in her organisation secretly to confront the group that meant her ill will in the future.

 "Can you do something about him? Maybe report him to your own organisation or to the officials?" Lumian asked.

 "Grande Seour will take care of it. Don't worry." Aurore tried to assuage her brother's worries. She extended her arm and hugged his shoulder.

 After sitting in comfortable silence for a while. Lumian blurted out. "I want to help you."

 "With what?"

 "Isn't it obvious? Your, well, Roche's family is pursing you, a member in your own organisation plotted against you, not to mention pests in Cordu like the padre who covets you. I can't just let you deal with that all alone."

 "You lack the power to help." Aurore sighed depressingly. "No matter how hard you train or study, you can't do much against them."

 "Then give me the ability to." Lumian turned to face Aurore, his eyes awash with determination.

 "Are you saying you want to obtain powers to help me?" Aurore asked. Shaking her head, she continued. "There is always a price for power, you know?"

 "Then I'm willing to pay it." Lumian's determination did not falter but instead redoubled in intensity. "We don't know if that guy in your organisation has friends that are willing to help him harm you or not. And your family could find you any day. When they come, I don't want to just sit on the sideline and watch you endanger yourself for us. What kind of brother would I be if I just allow that to happen?"

 Sighing in defeat, Aurore eventually acquiesced, nodding her head. "Fine, I'll try to teach you everything I know about mysticism." Lumian's face beamed in joy, "Once you mastered everything, I need to teach you, I'll buy the resources necessary to make you into a Beyonder – that's what you call a person with powers, by the way."

 "But" Aurore continued. "There is a condition. You must not go out drinking or dodge your lessons and tests until you have become a Beyonder. No pranks on fellow villagers either." At this point, Lumian's smile froze on his face, as if it was Emperor Roselle being told he must become celibate. But holding onto an optimistic outlook that perhaps he could absorb all of the necessary knowledge in a couple of months or so, he readily agreed.

 Oh how wrong he was.