The Epic of the Discarded Son-Chapter 57: Diary 6

Even she didn’t liked the last entry. Or fully understood what Rei meant by it. He didn’t done much explaining—just let the frustration pour out of him like he needed the page more than the page needed him.

But the next entry was different.

The handwriting was back to its old self—loose, confident, alive. Rushed, but in a good way. Like Rei hadn’t wanted to waste time keeping a record of this one, but had forced himself to sit down and write it anyway because it was too important to skip.

Both of them leaned in.

"12/09/3024"

"This whole place is a nightmare. It’s a tiny country crammed into the corner of the continent, surrounded by three bigger ones, and all four of them are at each other’s throats over the same thing: resources. Oil. Minerals. The stuff we had mountains of back home without even thinking about it."

"Yeah—writing that out, it occurs to me I probably shouldn’t mention it out loud. The last thing I need is for one of these countries to go hunting for my ’nonexistent’ island. But out here? This stuff is the whole game. They build everything with it. They fight everything over it. They starve children for it."

"But the one thing every country actually wants—the thing they’re all scrambling for—is something called a gate. And I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it in my life."

"From what I’ve been told, the story goes like this: once, the people here hunted every corrupted beast in the region. Killed every last one of them. They thought they were done. Safe. Problem solved."

"Except killing them all messed with the balance of the world. So now, every so often, in specific places around the globe, a gate opens up on its own. And when it opens, it spits out corrupted beasts—not a few. Not a dozen. Whole armies. Enough to turn entire cities into ash if nobody stops them."

"Apparently, and I swear this is a real thing people told me with a straight face, they could close the gates. Permanently. It’s possible. But nobody does it. Nobody even tries. Because the gates are where the power comes from. Soul shard. artifacts. The stuff that makes kingdoms rich and warriors strong, exactly like the shards and artifacts back home. Except instead of getting them from hunts, you get them from the gates."

"And no one wants to give up that kind of power. So the gates stay open. Forever."

"And the countries that try to close them? The ones that actually care about the world? They fall behind. They lose. They get swallowed up by the ones that don’t care. The ’superpowers,’ as they call them here."

Nora snatched the diary right out of his hands and started flipping through the pages like she was looking for something specific.

"What are you doing?" Shiro asked, confused.

"This is all good and everything, but—do they get married? Do they have kids?"

Apparently Nora had been expecting a romantic diary. Not a whole lot of political nothing.

"Rei never told me he had kids," Shiro said. "Then again." He shrugged "I never asked."

She sighed and rolled her eyes, then skimmed the pages, fast and focused.

"Here. Found it."

"06/07/3025"

"I got caught sneaking into her room today. I should’ve died today. Statistically, historically, cosmically—I had absolutely no business walking out of that building alive."

"They dragged me in front of the king and queen. Full court. Guards everywhere. And standing behind each of them? Her."

"Of course," Nora muttered, shooting Shiro a look like this was somehow his fault.

"Her name is Nilha. And she’s so much more than what I saw in my dreams. Way more. Ten times more. A hundred times more. I don’t even have words for it—but I’m going to try anyway because if I don’t write it down now, my brain is going to rewrite the memory into something smaller, and I refuse to let that happen."

"She’s tall. Long black hair that goes past her waist—and it’s wild. Not messy. Wild. Like nobody has ever told her how to tame it, and even if they had, she wouldn’t have listened."

"Her skin is light tan. Her eyes are green. And not the pretty, soft kind of green you see in gardens. The cold, sharp kind. The kind that the first time she looked in my direction, I felt like I was being weighed on a scale and coming up short."

"She’s beautiful, but not the soft kind of beautiful. She’s beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. Not welcoming. Not safe. Made for something specific, and really good at it."

"So naturally, being me, I did the smart thing: I ran straight at her, grabbed her, and asked her to marry me."

"In my defense, there were approximately a dozen very sharp things pointing at me from every direction at that exact moment. In my further defense, I disarmed the guards. All of them. In record time, actually. I was kind of impressed with myself, but that’s not the point."

"The point is, once I’d made my... let’s call it an entrance... I turned to her father and told him everything. The dreams. My people. Where he came from. How I’d crossed the sea to find her. How I’d been looking for her for months."

"And—and this part genuinely surprised me—he listened. The whole time. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t yell. Didn’t have me thrown out. When I was done, he said I could marry her, but only if she agreed. Only if she chose it."

"Which was more than I had any right to expect."

"But then he said something else. Something that boiled my blood so fast I almost forgot where I was standing."

"And that’s when I made my decision."

"I’m going to conquer every country around hers before I marry her. All three of them. Every power that’s been pushing this little kingdom around for decades. Every nation that’s been bleeding them dry. I’m going to take them down. One by one."

"They took her voice."

"They took her smile."

"I’m going to make every last one of them pay for it."

The next page was a drawing of her.

Nora’s eyes went wide. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

She looked at the drawing. Then at Shiro. Then back at the drawing. Then back at Shiro.

He looked at her, confused.

"Shiro," she said slowly. "Can you turn your hair black and your eyes green? Just for a second."

He blinked.

But she wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t teasing. Her face was dead serious—the kind of serious that made you do what she asked before you even thought to ask why.

So he did.

Her eyes widened again. Wider this time. She held the drawing up beside his face, and for a long moment, she didn’t say anything at all.

"...Yeah," she said finally, her voice still blunt, still quiet. "You two have the same hair now. The same eyes. The same—"

She stopped.

"Shiro. You look exactly like her."

He chuckled. Nervous. Trying to brush it off.

"Coincidence, probably."

"Shiro." Her voice dropped. "From the timeline you’ve been telling me—the dates, the things don’t add up. They don’t add up."

She paused. Her gaze softened, and when she spoke again, there was something careful in her voice. Something gentle. Something that told him she already knew what she was about to say was going to hurt him.

"Shiro—"

He didn’t let her finish.

He grabbed the diary out of her hands.

And flipped straight to the back—fast, rough, not careful at all. Pages blurred past him. He wasn’t reading anymore. He was searching for something, and he didn’t know what until he found something.

The drawing took up the entire page.

Two small children—one sleeping, one barely awake—curled up in the arms of a woman. It was Nilha.

Except here, in this drawing, she was smiling.

Wide. happy.

She was leaning back against the tree they had met under in rei’s dreams, holding the two children close to her chest like they were the most precious things in the world. Her face was peaceful. Her eyes were warm. Her hair spilled over her shoulder and across the oldest boy’s cheek.

He flipped slower now. Page by page. Each one turning with more weight than the last.

Then he stopped.

A dark stain across the top of the page. Blood.

"01/05/3030"

"I’m sorry. I couldn’t protect her."

"I won’t lose my sons too."

His eyes drifted down the page. His hands had started shaking—he could feel the tremor in his fingers, see it in the way the paper moved. Something was wrong. Something was deeply wrong, and his body was figuring it out before his brain could catch up.

Slowly, he lifted his hand. Forced himself to keep reading.

"Please look after each other."

"Shiro and Kuro."

"Our precious boys."