A pang of guilt, clean and acute, lanced through her. Lying to Arvid a second time, who had disarmed himself with stories of his family, felt uniquely reprehensible. It was a stupid, emotional impulse—not a strategic one, that made her answer.
[... I didn't lie about being lost, or about not having harmful intent] she sent, the mental tone soft with apology. [I do have my memories, but I... came here from another world.]
Arvid's eyes widened, his jaw going slack. A murmur rippled through the ring of hunters.
Salih's stern expression didn't change, but his gaze sharpened, lenses glinting. "A transmigrator?" he stated, his voice cutting through the buzz.
The way he said the words hit Serena like a physical blow after a few seconds of mental buffering.
'Transmigrator.' A term. An established category? Was that a thing here?
Maybe he's simply not as smart as he looks—maybe he's just gullible. Maybe she's just jumping to conclusions.
Her mind, that vast archive holding two complete lives, scrambled. In Virgil's memories, spanning millenia of esoteric lore and world-conquering, there was no record of such a phenomenon. Souls were bound, recycled, stolen, or destroyed. They travelled, but they did not hop worlds. She only managed to do it because of a God-Emperor's power.
This was perhaps new data, terrifying and exhilarating.
'How?'
"..."
'How did they get here? How much time has passed? Have there been multiple Virgils? Maybe different methods. Were they like her? Were they from Earth? Were they here now?'
Her silence stretched a beat too long.
Salih filled it, his question clinical, probing. "How did you get here?"
The instinct to say the truth was immediate. But a deep, unexplainable, more primal instinct screamed a warning: Do not mention him. Do not speak of Virgil.
She saw it then—the fear, the horror, the pyre. Even if he was dead, the mere possibility of there being the echo of such power in a woman's body would be met with fire. She couldn't even blame them. Knowing what she did, she would do the exact same thing.
However, she couldn't rest without putting an end to his legacy herself.
"I died," she said aloud, then, remembering, pushed the thought to all of them, translating the English into clear concepts. [I died in my world. A place called Earth. I woke up... elsewhere. On a land that floated in the sky. It was lined with corpses, structures made of the dead. I fled. Under was a sea of blood. I travelled across it using magic until there was water, then land—and I fell here, on your tundra.]
"What? An island of blood?"
The telepathic broadcast sent a collective shiver through the crowd. Disbelief was the dominant emotion, painted on their faces. A tall woman spat into the snow. But Salih merely listened, his skepticism now tempered with a scholar's curiosity.
"... A test," he announced to the square. He looked directly at Serena. "Who was King Leopold the II?" The name, so utterly, bizarrely specific to Earth, almost made her laugh.
'Leopold. The Congo.' The horror of her own world's history, surfacing here, on an alien tundra.
'How?' The question burned, but the answer to his was readily available, pulled from the neat, academic files of her first life's education. One of her degrees had required a paper on colonial extractive economies. The data was pristine, easy to directly copy and paste.
Telepathically, she delivered it in a dry, essayist tone. [Leopold the II, King of the Belgians. A monarch of 19th-century Earth. Noted for his private colonization and brutal administration of the Congo Free State, characterized by systemic forced labor, mutilation, and mass death in pursuit of rubber and ivory. Estimated population decline of ten to fifteen million.]
The square was dead silent. The hunters glanced at each other, unnerved less by the content—which was half-gibberish to them—and more by the flat, relentless torrent of information delivered directly into their minds.
Salih, however, after a few seconds, let out a long, slow breath. The rigid set of his shoulders relaxed a fraction. He gave a single, sharp nod. "Accurate enough," he said aloud, for the benefit of his peers. "The account matches. She speaks of the same Hell."
"..."
The effect was immediate. The rifle barrels, while not lowered, subtly drifted from center-mass to a less immediately threatening posture. The trust was not in her, but in Salih's judgment. He had vouched for her indirectly, however reluctantly.
Serena seized the opening to ask questions. [How do you know that name?] she asked, focusing on Salih. [And how did you know how I arrived? You said I appeared in a storm of power. You couldn't have seen that.]
"... Two answers. First, I am not from this ice-bound backwater," the hunters lightly sneered and chuckled in response. "I am a mage from the Sun Continent—to the far, far western south. A researcher of sorts." Salih pushed his glasses up his nose, a gesture that seemed more weary than stern. "Historically, some countries there have produced transmigrators. They're quite rare. One of the prominent ones was a historian, obsessed with... the injustices of your world. She's written about this Leopold."
The words echoed. She wasn't alone. At least not completely. The concept was so vast she had to shelf it for later examination, lest her mind spiral again.
"Second," Salih continued, a faint blush of embarrassment colouring his cheeks. He looked genuinely annoyed, but with himself. "This country maintains a perimeter. A magical array along the coast—it detects major disturbances and foreign magic. When you crashed, the array flagged it." He scowled, now visibly mentally self-flagellating. "I am the one tasked with monitoring it for this particular region. I have been... preoccupied with other matters. I neglected the daily scry. I did not see the alert until a few minutes ago."
'... I arrived here months ago,' Serena almost commented.
"By the time the hunters reported a 'naked spirit', you were already upon us." He shot a look of pure exasperation at Arvid. "I was preparing a proper containment expedition. I did not anticipate a... guided tour."
Arvid had the decency to look abashed.
Serena absorbed it all. A monitoring network. A scholarly community aware of transmigration. A world where her origin was not unique myth, but a documented rarity. The ground of her reality shifted once more.
She looked at Salih, then at the still-wary but less hostile faces of the townsfolk, and finally at Arvid, who offered a tentative, worried smile.
[... What now?] she announced.