CHAPTER TWO

On the Ropes (and Learning Them)

Trying to remember his real name may have left him with a splitting headache, but Cyrus had no trouble remembering other facts about his life in the real world. His apartment, his roommate, his daily routine, the repetitive, mundane slog of working as a transcriber. How he'd relinquished his scholarship due to medical complications. His ten years of moderator status on an obscure video game forum. And how yesterday, and all the days he lived before that, he'd been an only child.

Apparently that was no longer the case.

Darius Calvide sat across from him, watching intently as Cyrus sipped his tea, raising his eyebrows when Cyrus chose to add milk, nodding when he selected a dainty slice of cucumber sandwich instead of one heavy with meat. When Darius let out yet another hum of appraisal at Cyrus's pinched lips and barely-suppressed annoyance, enough was enough. He returned his teacup to its saucer with a clink.

"Is there something you wanted to say, or are you just going to watch me eat?" Cyrus asked, polite smile affixed firmly to his face.

Darius blinked innocently and moved back, finally settling into the couch on the other side of the coffee table instead of leaning forward like he was watching a particularly involving television show.

"Only figuring out if you've still got your head screwed on straight," he replied. "I didn't know you liked milk in your tea."

Cyrus pursed his lips as he glanced down at his cup, its light ochre awfully damning all of a sudden.

"... I suppose I wouldn't know."

The force of the sigh Darius heaved was almost enough to shake the tea set. He plucked a finger sandwich from the table; the dainty triangle looked tiny in his broad hands as he picked out the shaved meat filling and popped it in his mouth, discarding the bread onto the tray.

"I guess I should be thankful you aren't a drooling vegetable or gibbering mad," he sighed, lips smacking together as he chewed. "Imagine me being stuck as the brains of this household. We wouldn't last a week."

Looking at Darius's conflicted expression, Cyrus almost wanted to feel sorry for the man; it couldn’t be easy to wake up one day and be told your last living relative had accidentally given himself a magical lobotomy. "Almost" was the key word in this case. No matter how confusing Darius's day was, Cyrus guaranteed his own had been much worse – and he still wasn’t so impolite as to chew with his mouth open.

"I just don't get it. How can you remember the names of all the other ruling families but not our parents?"

"Something to do with the distinction between autobiographical and semantic memory, I would guess," Cyrus muttered into his tea. "Swallow your food before you speak; it sounds disgusting."

Darius scratched at the back of his head, amusement written plainly on his face. "You know, I was kind of hoping you'd be less testy if you couldn't remember anything, but it's actually reassuring to see you're still an ass."

The acknowledgment of his new "brother" was a double edged sword; one one hand it was a relief that an aura of disdain seemed to be all he needed to pass off as Cyrus, Video Game Villain, but the fact that it was apparently quite easy to wear the face of a murderer made something twist uncomfortably in his chest. It wasn't even a deliberate effort this time – as much as Darius appeared to have the straightforward and jovial attitude of a dog, he wasn't one, so there was really no excuse for him to eat with such loud, wet smacking noises.

Usually that wouldn't bother him so much, but the sting of betrayed expectations had been colouring his mood from the moment the man started talking. Sure, Darius Calvide was a character players only learned about posthumously, but he was supposed to be so much cooler than this. An image of the kind, noble first son of the Calvide household, dignified and proud in bearing appeared in his mind's eye and was ruthlessly shattered as the real Darius used a pinky nail to pick at a mustard seed stuck in his teeth.

"The healer said you might get some memories back after a while since you didn't totally liquefy your brain, emphasis on the might," Darius sighed, sitting back and lacing his fingers across his stomach. "But it'd be pretty daft for us to sit around waiting for that to happen. I can't manage the territory on my own and we'll be done for if news of this gets out."

He wasn't wrong. The ruling families of Whitecliff were opportunistic, the Calvides most of all – meaning there were plenty of people out there, noble or otherwise, who wouldn't hesitate to capitalise on a moment of weakness. Cyrus mercilessly beat down the twinge of guilt making itself known in his chest. None of this was his fault, it wasn’t like he asked to wake up in such a bizarre situation.

He averted his gaze and took another calming sip of what tasted suspiciously similar to Earl Grey. Would Darius still be so blasé if he knew there was no chance of Cyrus's memories returning at all? He wouldn't speak with him so easily if he knew that a stranger was wearing his brother’s body like a stolen suit, that much was certain. Maybe it was fortunate, then, that out of all the possible characters he could have replaced the universe dropped him in Cyrus’s body. Knowing what he would have eventually done to Darius made it hard to feel any guilt for taking his place.

Still... not destroying the Calvide family with hubris wasn't an excuse to destroy it through incompetence instead.

"You had best find me a teacher, then."

It was a simple, straightforward solution. The owlish blinking on the Count’s face was completely unwarranted.

"Someone discrete, of course; the more knowledgeable the better. Source them from within the household wherever possible," he elaborated, the tension in his shoulders unwinding just a bit. "An overview of general knowledge and history, use of magic, self-defence, my duties in managing the territory... Yes, that should be enough."

Some of the weight lifted from Cyrus's shoulders as he spoke, having encountered a problem he could actually solve. He didn’t have to pretend to know what he was doing, at least not within the estate. Cyrus 1.0 may have left him with a terrible headache and the eventual blame for at least one murder but his final screw-up was nothing but a boon: the momentary freedom of presumed stupidity.

"You know," Darius's lips quirked up in a hesitant little grin, "when we were little you bet me fifty gold that you'd never have to take remedial lessons."

Cyrus's returning glare was withering. "What a shame; I can't seem to recall."

Darius clapped his hands against his thighs with a boisterous laugh, rattling the table. He downed the rest of his own tea in a smooth motion before rising to his feet, the relief in his posture clear as day.

"Graces, I'm glad you're not nuts. Even if word does get out you'll probably be able to convince them all it's just a tall tale." He pressed a hand to his heart and bowed slightly. "As his Lordship commands, your humble servant will procure a most illustrious tutor to meet your exacting specifications."

The teasing bow sent sandwich crumbs tumbling from Darius's frock onto the carpet and Cyrus, whose initial urge was to thank him, suddenly found himself biting his tongue.

"Oh yeah, remember to yell for the servants if you need anything," he said as an afterthought, already making his way towards the door. "I'm pretty sure that worried little maid of yours will be hovering within earshot all day. Maybe even all month."

Cyrus hummed in response, ignoring Darius's waggling eyebrows even as a faint sense of embarrassment washed over him. Trying to puzzle out how a character as arrogant as the original Cyrus could have earned such... exuberant loyalty and concern left him mystified. Was that just the power of beautiful people?

A final parting chuckle signified his "brother's" exit, latch clicking as the door closed behind him. Nursing his teacup in his hands, he sat quietly and listened as Darius's heavy footsteps became quieter with distance.

Once his ears were met with nothing but silence he set down the cup, took a deep, shaking breath, and snatched a fistful of sandwiches from the tray on the table, meat and bread smearing messily across his palm. God. God. Beef? Was it still beef in a setting without cows? Who cares, it was dry-aged and smooth against his tongue, deliciously savoury and filling. He'd never been so hungry in his life.

The trembling weakness he'd been battling ever since he woke seemed to abate with every hastily-swallowed bite. And if his hands were still shaking from the adrenaline he'd been fueled by, fingers knocking against his teeth as he licked sauce from the skin, he blamed that on hunger too.

Resentfully he made another addition to Cyrus Odelia Calvide's list of crimes: skipping meals.

Compared to the crushing dread he'd felt being approached by the healer and told, slowly and gently, that his brother had had an incident, Darius felt like he was walking on clouds: weightless and giddy with relief. He whistled cheerfully on his way to father's- no, his study, thumbs hooked in his pockets.

Sure, Cyrus had bitten off more than he could chew and paid the price for it, the rascal – that wasn't going to happen again on his watch, and he made a note to hire an archivist to catalogue and move the more sensitive books out of the first floor library and into a vault. But he still had his faculties, acerbic tongue included, even if memories of their childhood (hell, memories of yesterday) were now out of reach. Darius didn’t know much about illusory magic but he knew enough to understand that was a miracle in itself. Asking the divines to shield his brother from every consequence of his poor decisions would be ridiculous.

Besides, it was kind of nice to have the chance to be a real big brother again. Relied on. Cyrus had been fiercely independent for so many years, the distance between them only growing more obvious when their father passed away.

A servant nearly ran right into him as he rounded the corner; the stumbling youth blurted out an apology that Darius waved off genially, too busy remembering Cyrus's pinched face as he'd scattered crumbs all over his carpet. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he sighed happily – his brother hadn't reacted to his antics so much in ages.

The following week passed in a blur of constant lessons. Geography, history, etiquette, politics, magic and fencing; information bombarded him in such a volume Cyrus almost regretted making the suggestion.

Count Calvide had followed his advice in keeping the illusory backlash matter close to the chest. The tutors he'd procured were all existing members of the Calvide household – two of the private guards for his physical classes, one swordsman and one mage, while an elderly woman who had apparently been both siblings’ childhood instructor taught the rest. Save for the healer, whose confidentiality was mostly assured, the "truth" of Cyrus's situation was known only to a select few employees within the estate.

Between the rapid-fire lectures of his academic tutor and the rapid-fire blows of his fencing instructor, Cyrus found himself considering more than once the benefits of leaking his secret to the world and letting the Calvide family fall, if only to take a moment to catch his breath.

It was both easier and harder than he had anticipated. The passing grade in world history was something he expected for the most part; he wasn't respected on the Eden Online forums for nothing. That respect had been hard-won thanks to his own near encyclopedic knowledge of N2E lore – before he'd joined in on editing the wiki it had been practically empty save for gameplay mechanics, enemies and the page reporting bugs and exploits. So while "noble etiquette" left him wanting to drill a hole through his head and the intricacies of Whitecliff's politics were new to him, he found himself able to recite its broader history with ease.

The real surprise was in the swordsmanship lessons.

It seemed to happen only when Cyrus forgot to pay attention to it: a sudden burst of muscle memory that had him managing to smoothly counter one blow in ten, only at the last second, his own movements taking him by surprise every time. He was disarmed immediately afterwards, of course, because as soon as he realised he'd made the movement he found himself right back to having no idea what he was doing.

His instructor had laughed openly when he described it. The trepidation the guard had exhibited on the first day of their lessons had waned with time and the realisation that an amnesiac Lord Calvide, though prone to complaining, was markedly more even-tempered than before.

"That's because your mind has nothing to do with it," he’d said, lending a hand to help Cyrus off the grass. "This isn't your first time learning how to fight: your body remembers the motions, even if your mind doesn't. It's why you need to stop thinking and let your body take the reins."

Not thinking seemed contrary to the entire concept of taking lessons and was easier said than done. Of course his brain didn’t turn off when a sword came swinging towards his face, it was rightfully busy yelling at him to get out of the way. The guard insisted it would all click with him eventually, that his awkward and halting movements would transition into efficient dodges and swipes, but Cyrus had his doubts: this new body of his may have remembered how to fight, but he himself remembered twenty-odd years of deliberately avoiding physical exertion.

At the end of each lesson Cyrus left sweating, stiff from ducking and swaying, knowing he was going to get caught up in the footwork and tangle up his own legs again the following day. The scuffs, bruises and scrapes from his training never lasted though, and watching them fade away with a few drops of a potion – real potion – never failed to mesmerise him.

Instruction in magic, meanwhile, was an entirely different story.

Even with the undercurrent of fear, confusion and disbelief that had followed him since he first woke up in a world so familiar and so terrifyingly different, the prospect of doing magic had his body thrumming with nervous excitement. It was something he could see, learn, and immediately put to use, but more importantly it was magic. He recalled being in middle school, sitting in front of a computer screen with the kind of fierce, single-minded dedication only middle schoolers could possess, watching videos with less than a thousand views that promised to make him a sorcerer in real life. He had been utterly enraptured with the idea of having magic, indulging in fantasies of discovering his powers while facing down a bomb threat in his school, of raining fireballs down on evildoers, of healing the boy he liked when he was injured with a whisper to keep his abilities a secret.

In retrospect it was all incredibly embarrassing, but what middle school fantasy wasn't? The fact remained that the possibility finally existed, long after his childish wonder was replaced with the reality of his very mundane life.

The first several days were pure theory: an overview of the different branches of magic, their uses in battle and in everyday life, the legality of firing off a barrage of lightning bolts in the middle of the market square. Symptoms of mana exhaustion and the effects of prolonged magical overexertion. Protective equipment to be worn to defend against magic, their materials and where they were sourced, the telltale signs of faulty or fraudulent products.

Cyrus couldn’t even bring himself to be bored by it – he hoarded every drop of new information in the well of his mind, not wanting to forget anything as he related the new knowledge to what he already knows about the game's lore. His fingers itched to edit a wiki page every time he learned a new piece of trivia about the world he'd found himself in, but the disappointment of remembering the internet no longer existed only ever lasted a moment before he was distracted by even more new information.

Despite his hidden excitement, a week was nowhere near long enough to prepare him for the reality of throwing lightning around with his hands. The guard tutoring him, a young mage named Oswick with shaggy, mouse-brown hair, informed him in hushed tones that the second district's Mage Academy required a full six months of preparation before moving on to spells that could be used in battle. The fact that he was standing in front of a series of training targets so early was definitely jumping the gun. But after Cyrus's excursion into the ninth district the other day…

The memory of flashing steel surfaced for only a moment before he snapped his head to the side, inhaling sharply through his nose. His fingers flexed uncomfortably at his sides. Darius had insisted he be equipped to defend himself, theory be damned – and it was good, he reasoned with himself, to have more security in a dangerous new world. Since he wouldn’t be taking the same shortcuts to power as the original Cyrus, he would need all the practice he could get.

The main courtyard of the estate would be better suited for their purposes, but its central location meant servants came and went from it every hour. His instruction in swordplay had instead been relegated to a half forgotten, out-of-the-way private garden attached to a disused bedroom. Now a third training target joined the existing wooden dummies, its material dark with a rubber-like sheen.

"Do you remember what this material is, sir?" his instructor inquired with him as he set the target up, crouched on the ground to secure the base with a series of thick wooden nails.

Of his three tutors, Oswick was the one whose lessons he most enjoyed. The mage had picked up on Cyrus's fascination with the small, mundane details of the world early on and frequently indulged him in tangents and book recommendations he'd obtained from his own studies.

Cyrus swept his gaze over the practice dummy and cast his mind back to the young mage's lectures. A black, slightly bumpy material with flecks that shone lime green in the sun, and considering what he would be casting...

"Guttamandra hide?" he ventured, raising a hand to touch his chin. "Although... it looks a little too thick."

"No, you're right," the instructor reassured him with a smile. "Guttamandra have thin skins, since they're amphibious and all. When they're used in armor you can't just use one layer; for gloves you'd have maybe ten layers of skin, but for something like this they use up to twenty-five, more if it was going to the second district."

"How do they ensure the skins stick together without compromising its lightning resistance?"

"I'm not sure, actually... I think it was some sort of tree sap?" Oswick frowned thoughtfully as he tested the balance of the dummy, apparently satisfied when the stakes held it firm against his pushing. "Sorry, they don't teach much about artificing at the Academy, so I only know a few tidbits."

Tree sap... Cyrus clasped his hands behind his back, hoping to shield his uncharacteristic eagerness from view. He hadn't even thought of looking into the unique properties of the flora of this world – already he was itching to bury himself in the library again, this time to dig out as many botany books as he could find.

One thing at a time, though. The training target was fully set up and once he had the go-ahead he was going to cast spells at it until he drained his MP bar dry.

The instructor smiled at his furtive energy, moving a safe distance to Cyrus's side.

"Let's start out with a practice shot then: no special techniques, just point and cast. Are you ready?"

Nervous energy bubbled in his chest as his gaze flicked between his tutor and the target. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep it from showing on his face.

"Yes," Cyrus replied, holding his hand out palm down in the target's direction. The snap of air when his fingers extended felt unnatural as Oswick's instructions played in his head on repeat.

Your chest is the dam, your fingertips the outlet. Find the spark in your core and feed it until it's big enough to chase, to channel down your arm to the point of release.

The spark caught.