Chapter 2: Comparison

Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Comparison

Funny how much I hated the phrase,’ he thought, pushing the chair a little further up the uneven stone, careful, unhurried, ’and how much I still remember every word of it.’

His rise had lasted about a month. His fall had taken considerably less time than that.

By the time Novaria was old enough for anyone outside her own clan to start paying real attention to her, Jason had already been old news for years, a cautionary tale parents used when they wanted to remind their own gifted children not to get ahead of themselves.

He was two years older than she was, twenty-four now to her twenty-two, and that gap had turned out to matter more than he’d expected.

She’d grown up hearing about the once-in-a-generation Veryon talent. She very likely hadn’t heard much about him at all, a half-remembered footnote from before her own story had even started.

’Which is fitting,’ he thought, dry even in his own head. ’Ten thousand years, and I still only got about a month of relevance before people forgot the math.’

Jason had turned this comparison over so many times in the years since that it had worn smooth in his head, like a stone rubbed soft by a river, but pushing this particular wheelchair up this particular path made the shape of it feel new again.

’We’re not the same’, he thought, watching the back of Novaria’s head, the careful way she held herself upright even now, even exhausted, even sitting in a chair she clearly resented needing.

’Not really’.

Her fall had come from a Gate that lied to her. A miscalculated threat rating, a mission gone catastrophically sideways through no fault of her own judgment, her own preparation, her own decisions. She’d done everything right and the world had broken her anyway.

His fall was entirely of his own doing.

That distinction mattered to him more than he would bother to admit, because it was the one detail that made him genuinely uncomfortable comparing his story to hers, the one place where his sympathy came with a slight comma attached.

He hadn’t been unlucky. He’d been eight, convinced that a childhood of spectacular results meant he’d already learned everything worth learning about danger, and he’d walked into a Gate everyone with actual sense had told him to wait on, and the Gate had obliged him by very nearly killing him and taking away the one thing everyone had told him made him special.

’She lost something that wasn’t her fault,’ he thought, the humor gone from his chest entirely now, replaced by something quieter and more familiar. ’I lost something that was completely mine to lose.’

And yet.

And yet he understood the shape of what she was carrying better than almost anyone else in Mordania possibly could, and that understanding wasn’t something he’d asked for or particularly wanted, but it was his all the same.

He knew what it felt like to walk into a room and watch people recalculate your worth in real time behind carefully polite expressions.

He knew what it felt like to have people who used to fight for a place near you start finding urgent reasons to be somewhere else.

He knew, more specifically than he liked admitting even to himself, what it felt like to have every single person who’d once called you a genius quietly, gradually, without ever officially announcing it, stop believing that word applied to you anymore.

’Not as intensely as her, probably,’ he thought, honest with himself in the specific way he tried to always be, even when the honesty was inconvenient.

’I only got about a month of relevance before I got in my own head about it.

She had way longer. Whole clan strategies built around her. A future everyone had already started planning before she turned ten.’

Maybe a month of fame followed by more than a decade of irrelevance was one kind of loss. A childhood of being called the family’s whole future, followed by a wheelchair and a marriage arranged specifically to make her someone else’s problem, was another kind entirely. He wasn’t going to insult her by pretending the two were equivalent.

But they weren’t nothing alike either. And as far as Jason could tell, looking at the very short, very exclusive list of people in Mordania who actually knew what this particular flavor of loss tasted like, that list currently had exactly two names on it.

His.

And, as of six months ago, hers.

’Small club,’ he thought, and this time the corner of his mouth did tug up, just slightly, just for himself, the kind of expression that would’ve looked like nothing at all to anyone watching.

’Terrible initiation process, though. Would not recommend.’

He glanced down at the certificate one last time before he reached the door, the paper soft now from all the folding and refolding he’d apparently been doing without fully noticing.

His name printed there in the kind of formal script clan documents always used, right next to hers. Jason Veryon. Novaria Veryon, née Agnello.

He looked at the two names sitting together on the page in the same way you’d look at an equation you weren’t entirely sure you’d solved correctly, and then he folded it one final time and tucked it away into his jacket, out of sight, though not, he suspected, out of mind.

’A week ago I thought this was some kind of sick joke,’ he thought, easing the wheelchair carefully over the threshold and into the house that was, apparently, both of theirs now. ’Turns out the joke’s on me.

I might actually understand exactly what’s sitting in this chair better than anyone else alive.’

He looked around at the plain, unfamiliar front hall, at the boxes still stacked against one wall, at the whole quiet, waiting shape of the life he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t refuse, and allowed himself one more small, private thought before he had to be a functioning adult about all of this.