TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 43 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 43 Unknown Futures

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

- Peter Drucker

Her mother’s proposal hit Seraphina like a punch to the gut, so sudden and so brutally matter-of-fact, that for a heartbeat she forgot how to breathe.It was the path of wholesale slaughter.

It ran counter to everything she was striving for. And the worst of it was not even the horror of the act; it was the casualness with which her mother offered it. Seraphina had always known that older woman could be ruthless and vengeful. But this was colder than strategy. This was emptiness that mirrored the power that slept around her neck.

What good was it to rule over ashes? Over silence? Over nothing.

And then there was her solemn word—given in a moment that had felt, to Seraphina, like the first time she had stood as something more than a daughter. A promise made to the representatives of the Church, spoken with careful authority to buy time, to prevent bloodshed, to keep the situation from tipping into raw chaos.

Her throat tightened.

“You cannot be serious, Mother…” she half-whispered, aghast.

Even as the words left her mouth she felt the flush of embarrassment from idiotic, childish slip. An admission. She might as well have announced to her parents that she was unsteady. Unready and unfit.

Her mind scrambled for an explanation, for some stray detail she had missed… How did Anaselena know? And then it resolved, with that sickening simplicity that made her stomach turn. Of course Anaselena knew.

She would always know. She always did. Even a glance held too long, even a breath taken at the wrong moment—her mother could draw a map from the smallest inference from the ocean of fate. No doubt the entire exchange was bait, a test laid down like a knife on a table: show me what you’re made of.

“I promised the representatives of the Church that I could find a way to resolve this,” Seraphina said, forcing steadiness back into her voice, “that we could…”

A beat.

“You promised on our behalf?” Anaselena cut in, voice sharp like a saber as she flicked a glance toward her husband.

Her husband Anatoli answered before Seraphina could. “Yes, Sera, dear,” he said with a faint, wry curve to his mouth. “I mean, I am the Duke, after all.”

The air seemed to sharpen. Seemed to thicken.

Seraphina’s hands balled into fists at her sides.

“That’s not what it was like,” she snapped, then immediately tried to rein herself in. “I had to give them something to come here. They would not let me walk through their lines otherwise.” Her eyes darted from her father to her mother, searching for any sign of sympathy, any crack in the wall.

Anaselena merely watched her, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth as if Seraphina were proving a point she’d made long ago. Her smile, soft and intimately certain, put fresh heat under the young girl’s skin.

Seraphina’s anger, her frustration, did not spill or scream or claw for release. It turned inward, compressed, and hardened. Cold focus. Calculating. She was more than just her mother’s daughter. 

“Perhaps,” Seraphina said slowly, choosing her words with care now, “against the King… you might have common cause.” The wheels turned. “If we align, briefly, of course, and use them to to contain him, and then—”

“No.” Anaselena’s answer landed like a stone dropped into churning water. Heavy and very final.

Seraphina flinched despite herself.

“Ana’s right,” Anatoli added, as if the matter were a simple lesson in good governance. “You don’t leave enemies behind you, Sera. Not even ones who share a common cause with you. It isn’t prudent.”

Seraphina’s jaw clenched, marring her youthful perfection. 

Before she could respond, the command tent’s flap rustled and a young soldier stepped in, deferential but hurried. He held his helm tucked under his arm, eyes angled respectfully to the ground.

“Milord, Duke. Your Grace,” he said, voice tight with urgency. “The quartermaster wishes to speak to you. Says it’s most urgent.”

Anatoli exhaled, the moment shifting with him as if the tent obeyed his authority. He leaned to kiss Anaselena’s cheek, an easy gesture filled with deep love, then gave Seraphina a look that was anything but casual.

A look that said ‘Do not push too hard. Not here. Not now.’

“I must go a while, my dear,” he told Anaselena. “I will not be long.”

Then he was gone, the flap falling back into place behind him, shutting out the bustle of the camp. Then silence filled the space he left.

Anaselena’s gaze snapped back to Seraphina, sharper now, the amusement fading into something cleaner and more dangerous.

“You will do what must be done,” Anaselena said quietly, “with the tools that I know you have.” The emphasis was delicate, almost affectionate. “I will have it no other way.”

She stepped closer. Close enough that Seraphina could catch the faint scent of her perfume and the scent that was uniquely her mother’s.

Anaselena lifted a hand and, with a slow, proprietary tenderness, traced a finger across Seraphina’s necklace. A perverse imitation of motherly love that was truer than the real thing. It was not comfort, nor a reminder, but a vicarious claim.

Seraphina held herself perfectly still, because she knew the true purpose of the gesture was not affection at all.

It was to make sure Seraphina understood—without a single raised voice—exactly who was in control.

***

Begging, distressed, Seraphina finally managed to disengage from her mother under the added pretense of “seeing to my entourage.” It was a flimsy excuse at best, thin as transparent gauze, but Anaselena allowed it. Whether that permission was a rare kindness or merely another, subtler twist of the knife, Seraphina could not tell. Either way, it left her feeling small.

After dismissing Miriam, she found herself alone in a spacious field tent. Only then did she let go. She let go of her schemes, of duty, of ambition and collapsed into the crude mercy of sleep.

But fate was cruel, and it offered no respite to those it deemed important. Even in slumber, there would be no refuge. For those with the blood of an Oracle, sleep was not rest at all. It was a place of messages and revelation, where the world spoke in symbols it could deny in daylight.

She found herself beneath the boughs of a flowering tree. White petals drifted lazily through the air and across a vista of endless plains—no, not plains: a sea of viridian grass rolling to the horizon. It was peaceful in the way the air was peaceful before a storm, before horns called and banners rose.

Her hand moved as if pulled by invisible strings. Fingers found her necklace and closed around it, completing a circuit she had never known existed. Her mouth formed words she could not have spoken awake. They were words that tasted of iron and old stone and inevitability.

A slash of darkness split the dream.

Not true darkness, but absence—an unmaking of everything, as if the world had been cut and the cut revealed what lay behind it. The wound opened across both ground and sky: a seam of madness in the deeper madness of the vision.

At first there was only the void.

Then, slowly and reluctantly, something within it began to take shape. A pressure and a presence. The shadow cast by spread wings. 

A man emerged, striding out of the gaping nothingness atop a nightmare. He was clad in armor of black midnight trimmed with gold that did not brighten the dark, only sharpened it—accentuating the cruel edges. In one gauntleted fist he gripped a halberd that seemed for lack of a better word, simply solid. He rode a thing dragged from legend: a manticore, lion-headed and bat-winged, its tail a living serpent. It was a monstrous vision, yet it held the terrible beauty of ruin made manifest.

Then his gaze turned to her, and the dreamscape simply stopped.

Petals froze in midair. Grass stilled in the wind. The entire world held its breath around the weight of that attention.

The avatar of the end dismounted and walked toward her. Each step was a verdict. Where he strode, the grass wilted, then blackened, and the air grew heavy as if the dream itself was struggling to bear him. He drove the butt of his halberd into the ground with a dull, final sound…

…and time resumed, shuddering back into motion.

When he spoke, his voice was full of existential dread and of a primordial truth that did not care whether she could endure it.

“I should not be here.”

Seraphina understood at once—and in that instant the dream broke and she was cast out of Eden.

It shattered and reformed around her like glass turning to water, then water to smoke. Disorientation flooded her, sharper than even the void that lingered in the armored darkness’s wake. Spinning and spinning, then darkness and light and color and cold, stretched into a long moment measured in the strange arithmetic of dreams.

Then she found herself again.

A new place that was strange in the way dreams were strange, and yet deeply familiar in their lies, the kind of lie that made even the absurd feel normal. She stood in a vast expanse of purples and pinks so luminous it bordered on the unreal, so soft it felt like an insult after the cosmic horror she had just faced.

In every direction, statues rose: marble figures veined with black, beautiful and unnervingly precise. They were all her—Seraphina de Sariens in endless variations, in all of her glory, posed like icons in a temple dedicated to possibility. Some held weapons, others tools; some wore armor, some robes, some rags; every face was a perfected echo of herself, refined into an ideal.

It was the class-change screen. The Calling. The Vocation—whatever name the system chose to cloak it in, it was the same thing: an infinite lattice of futures, stretching farther than sight could reach, each one a temptation promising her a higher height of power.

Paladin. Monster Tamer. Commander. Knight. Regal Coronant. Wizard. Witch. Grand Priestess. Beggar. Enchantress. Nex-Adept. Songstress…

The list went on and on, and understanding touched her with each step as her hand drifted across one statue, then another. Even among the same class, there were variations—branching like veins, subtle differences in posture and expression suggesting different emphases, different costs.

She could feel what they offered.

The Grand Priestess promised deeper control of the Holy Covenant—authority refined into ritual precision. The Beggar offered the stoicism of forsaking all material things, an ascetic path that transmuted deprivation into power. The Enchantress sharpened her voice into something dangerously sublime, a beauty that could bind as surely as chains.

And there—Nex-Adept: the instinctive command of piloting, the trick of coaxing more force out of a Nex Frame like the Ballista. A useless gift now, because she no longer had access to a Frame… yet even that dead branch of possibility hummed with the memory of what she had once been able to do.

Most of these choices were power. But only one choice—one path—felt like it could give her something rarer. A real choice and a way to be truly free.

So she wandered among the statues, rejecting possibilities one by one. With each refusal, something seemed to thin, as if the realm resented being denied. The air thickened. Her steps grew heavy, like walking through molasses. Time slid strangely—accelerating, then dragging—until doubt began to sprout in her mind like weeds.

Just choose something. Anything. A choice is better than nothing.

The whisper was not a voice, not exactly. It was the pressure of the dream itself, a siren-song nearly as potent as her own. It promised urgency. It promised consequences. It warned that she had to choose before the dream ended, or lose the opportunity forever.

Seraphina’s jaw set.

She did not need these lesser paths. Not truly. She could gain much of what they offered through raw practice if she chose—through stubborn work, through pain, through time. No. What she needed was a unique edge, something that belonged solely to her. Something broken in the most beautiful way possible.

A blade that should, and should not exist. An expression of her true potential.

Even the longest journeys end, and this was a realm where will mattered more than sense, wisdom, or logic. Where will was the compass and the motive force. And so it was at last that she stood before a crumbling statue—a heap of unappealing stone that seemed to shout: there is no power here. It was a fool’s choice. The system might as well have painted it in bright yellow, a warning for the timid.

Inwardly she laughed, the irony of it so thick and plain. A Broken class.

She reached out and her fingers touched the cold stone of the statue and the greatest, ever-changing secret flooded into her soul.

***

The blonde girl woke with a silent cry and a sharp gasp, as if she’d surfaced from deep water. It was still dark; the crystal lamp in the tent had been shuttered, leaving only the faintest suggestion of night beyond the canvas. And she was cold—cold despite the brazier that Miriam must have tended sometime during the night.

Her hand went instinctively to her throat.

She needed to confirm. To reach inward, to cast her inner gaze along the places where the world touched the soul, and see what the dream had done and what it had changed.

She closed her eyes. And she saw, truly saw, with her mind’s eye.

She was an Oracle now.