Chapter 18: Rowan Ashford

Lucien slowly laid his head back against the sofa, pulled a silk throw pillow over his face, and let out a long, muffled scream that was supposed to last until dinner.

***

The concept of the "salted fish", a glorious cultural philosophy imported from the deep trenches of modern webnovels, was misunderstood by the masses.

People assumed being a salted fish was easy.

They believed it merely required an absence of ambition, a horizontal posture, and a disinterest in personal development.

They were wrong.

Being a salted fish in a world governed by high-fantasy narrative logic was, in fact, an exhausting, full-time administrative marathon.

It required constant vigilance, evasion, rapid threat assessment, and the supernatural ability to smell an impending plot flag from three imperial leagues away.

For forty-eight hours following the arrival plaza fiasco, Lucien Alaric Everhart had successfully executed the art of the salted fish with perfection.

He locked the heavy brass bolts of his bedchamber, drawn the velvet blackout curtains until not a single photon of sunlight could contaminate his personal space, and subsisted upon plates of buttered almond croissants, cold roasted chicken, and chilled melon wedges smuggled in by sympathetic junior maids who still believed he was dying of spiritual melancholy.

Outside his door, his family continued to operate as a natural hazard zone.

Caelan spent his afternoons in the villa’s courtyard, slashing training dummies with mana infused broadswords while shouting obscenities about Cassian Valemont’s lineage.

Elara spent her mornings sitting in the solarium, turning the decorative water fountains into jagged sculptures of blue ice while composing a formal twenty-page academic grievance to the Student Council regarding the "unwarranted pollution caused by commoners existing in the arrival plaza."

And then, at ten minutes past nine on a crisp Tuesday morning, the front door of the Everhart villa was subjected to what sounded like a high-speed collision with an unhinged battering ram.

THUD. THUD. THUD-THUD-THUD.

"LUCIEEEEEN!"

The sound that pierced the thick oak doors was not a noble greeting.

It was not even the sound of a rational human vocal tract.

It was a high-frequency, snot-drenched, glass-shattering wail that hit the upper register of a terrified tea kettle exploding under extreme steam pressure.

"LUCIEN! OPEN THE DOOR! I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! THE GUILD BROADSHEET SAID YOU BLED TO DEATH IN THREE DIFFERENT CAVERNS! THEY SAID YOUR RIBS WERE TURNED INTO CHALK! LUCIEEEEN! DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE IN THIS HELL-HOLE OF AN ACADEMYYYYY! I CAN’T SURVIVE THE TACTICAL ARITHMETIC MIDTERM WITHOUT YOUUUU!"

Lucien, who was currently sitting in bed delicately buttering his fourth croissant while wearing a nightshirt embroidered with small silver clouds, froze. The silver butter knife hovered an inch above the flaky pastry.

His eye gave that familiar, ominous, involuntary twitch.

’That voice,’ Lucien thought, a sudden wave of dread washing over his cerebral cortex. ’No. It can’t be. Not him.’

The heavy mahogany doors of the villa swung open with a tragic creak, followed immediately by the sound of scuffling boots, a frantic maid screaming about carpet cleanliness, and a human body rocketing down the parquet hallway with the speed of a panicked grease-fire.

BAM!

Lucien’s bedroom door didn’t just swing open; it was kicked off its secondary latch.

A figure stumbled across the threshold, caught his foot on the thick Persian rug, and went sprawling full-length across the hardwood floor, sliding five feet on his stomach before coming to an undignified halt against the mahogany footboard of Lucien’s bed.

The boy lay there for a second, twitching like a freshly landed trout, before snapping his head upward with terrifying speed.

He was roughly twenty years old, dressed in the green-and-bronze uniform of the academy’s auxiliary wind division, though the uniform was currently in a state of catastrophic disarray.

The brass buttons were fastened into the wrong holes; his tie looked as though it had been chewed on by an anxious goat; and his messy, sandy-brown hair stuck out in seventeen different directions like an agitated bird’s nest.

His face was an absolute disaster of raw bodily fluids.

Tears that were thick, streaming, river-like torrents of pure hydraulic despair poured down his flushed cheeks, mixing freely with an alarming amount of clear nasal discharge that bubbled whenever he inhaled.

His golden-brown eyes were bulging out of his skull, wide with frantic, manic terror.

This was Rowan Ashford.

Lucien stared down from the mattress, the butter knife still in hand.

His brain frantically spun through the catalog of The Astral Sovereign’s Dawn.

In the original novel, Rowan Ashford was a deeply tragic, deeply unsettling figure.

Following the fatal collapse in the Sunken Catacombs, where Lucien Everhart had died taking the claw of an Abyssal Crawler to save him, Rowan had completely broken.

Overwhelmed by suffocating guilt of losing his only friend, ostracized by the noble circles for causing the death of a Ducal heir, and consumed by a bitter, rotting hatred toward Cassian Valemont’s negligence, Rowan had transformed.

The novel had described him as:

"A shadow lurking in the academy’s peripheral corridors, his eyes hollowed by grief, his tongue poisoned by silent malice. Rowan Ashford spoke to no one, smiled at nothing, and let his wind magic curdle into jagged gale-blades. He became a third-rate villain, a spiteful saboteur who allied with underground syndicates, leaked expedition routes to the Eclipsed Hand, and orchestrated three separate ambushes against the Astra Party purely to watch Cassian Valemont bleed, before finally meeting his end at the Hero’s starlight blade in Chapter 214."

Lucien looked at the text memory.

Then he looked at the reality currently vibrating on his floorboards.

"LUCIEEEEEN!" Rowan shrieked, scrambling onto his knees, crawling forward on all fours, and violently latching both arms around Lucien’s left shin with the grip of a drowning man wrestling a life raft. "YOU’RE ALIVE! YOU’RE WARM! YOU DON’T SMELL LIKE A GRAVE! YOUR LEG STILL HAS MEAT ON IT!"

"Rowan— wait, let go of—"

"I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO GHOST ME!" Rowan wailed, burying his wet, snot-covered face directly into the pristine, Egyptian-cotton hem of Lucien’s duvet.