Perhaps if I'd been willing to face what I'd done properly back then, things could have been different. If I'd embraced the truth, accepted the disgust I felt for my old self completely, I feel like I could have disappeared. Well, not completely-- My memories would still be there, obviously, but I could have overcome the way Samium had rewired my mind and have destroyed that identity. Or at least have sidelined it, which would have been better than nothing.

Instead, even though I adopted Utsushikome's life and behavior on the surface, I never even came close to letting go of the truth beneath. I despised myself, but my ego was bloated with bitter resentment at the world. I wanted my life to have meant something, even if that 'something' would only have been to serve as a lead-in to the new, brighter life I had now. That determined belief in the story of my salvation persisted, just pushed deeper into the depths of my soul.

I wanted to feel happy. I wanted to be saved. I didn't want to be a girl who got her brain molested.

Still, things might yet have been somewhat different were it not for the other half of my bargain with Samium. Maybe if I'd remained 'in-character' non-stop for that first year, I would have just settled into a groove where my innermost self held on to the role it was playing so tightly and for so long that, with enough decades, they'd fuse together into something that was no longer performative. And the crime I'd committed would just become a weird childhood memory I'd abstract into oblivion.

Would that have been better? Would it still have been murder if I deluded myself into becoming such a perfect doppelganger, I'd cease to even be self-aware about it? I'm not sure - like I said, I'm not much of a philosopher. But I'd still be filtering out all of the real Utsushikome's feelings about the situation which were inconvenient to me, so probably.

But I'll never know, because of course I had a second role I also needed to play.

True to his word, Samium contacted me a few days later, though not over my logic bridge as I'd expected, but with just a regular letter addressed to my new name. He wrote it as if there was nothing special going on, too, with it just talking about having set up a meeting with my grandfather like 'we'd talked about'. The whole thing was set up in a way where there'd be nothing which would be suspicious to my parents if they happened to find out; I could just tell them I'd wanted to get to know him a little before he passed away, since I was planning on being an arcanist too (and they weren't aware he was practically a total fraud in that respect).

Not that it would have been a total non-issue, of course. I only found out about this later, but about a year prior to this point, he'd been visiting my mother, and in a fit of confused anger, had crudely used the Power to break down a door while screaming at my father, and then had thrown a vase at his head. Even if that represented the limits of his capabilities, assault with the Power could still get you in serious legal trouble - as a general rule, any crime one commits as an arcanist is judged thrice as harshly as one performed through mundane means as part of the Censors policy on preventing uninitiated-arcanist hostility. Presumably he'd only got away with it on account of his connections.

The event had scared my mother out of her mind, and she'd tried to have him placed in care, only for the gulf in their wealth and social power to render that impossible; his lawyers had intervened and kicked up enough of a fuss that the state wouldn't dare touch it. After that, she'd settled for cutting him off completely, and grieving for him like he was already dead.

So Samium had moved him into the spare apartment he had in the city, and that was mostly where I saw him, except for a handful of times we went out to shop or eat. We met maybe once twice or a month on average for a little over a year. As for Samium, I only met him four more times - the initial meeting where he did a short checkup on me and re-explained how exactly I needed to talk to my grandfather, two lunches with him where we barely spoke personally at all, and then that final day. After that, I never saw him again.

I'm... still not going to talk about everything, because it's not relevant to what I did, and certainly not to anything about this scenario. Suffice it to say, the plan worked. I pretended to be Wen, and despite probably doing a piss-poor job of it in most regards, it was sufficient to convince him. (He'd obviously forgotten, or at least in his confusion and joy set aside, his decision to let the matter go.)

But obviously, this was uncomfortable for me, because it was an unwelcome reminder that I wasn't Utsushikome. That I was obliged to break character in this way periodically to satisfy the terms of my new existence. I wasn't allowed to lose myself in the fantasy that my old life had been nothing but an idle fantasy.

So, how did I cope with this cognitive dissonance? Well, I decided to lose myself in her grandfather's fantasy, too. I let myself believe that this really was all some kind of fairy tale. That I was this girl he loved reborn. I listened enthusiastically to his stories on the good days, and tried my best to care for him on the bad. I let him cry on my shoulder. When he bemoaned about the order or that his 'Great Work' had all come to nothing, I soothed him and told him that he'd done his best, despite having no idea what the fuck he was talking about.

Then some unpleasant things happened. After that, I didn't want to think about him at all. I wished he would just hurry up and die so I could stop and move on with my life.

Then, about a month later, he did.

"Oh, gods, what was that?!"

"Was that a--"

"Back this way, Anthios! Back to the station!"

My grandfather looked confused, his dull eyes darting back and forth. "W-Wen, what's happening?"

"It's alright," Samium said, before I could reply. "It's just a rowdy protest down the street. Let's just hurry into one of the shops in case--"

"I'm scared, Wen," he interrupted anxiously.

"I-It's okay," I said. "It's alright."

"Hey, watch it!" someone shouted.

"The horse..."

"No, ugh--"

"I heard another shot!"

"Careful," Samium said, as a man pushed into me.

"I'm okay, we're just--Oof!"

What exactly happened, in that moment?

Even if you have a good memory, if you think about something enough, it starts to slip away from you. That old trope about how you overwrite a memory every time you remember it isn't wholly true, but the experience of recalling it does slowly form new connections. Events become mixed with similar ones, fantasy blends with reality, feelings in the present are impressed upon records of the past, in future recollections feeling like they were part of the moment. The message lingers; the meaning is lost.

I remember a horse acting up and someone getting knocked aside. I remember the gunshot, and then a second one a few moments after the fact. I remember holding his hand tightly, though I'm not sure how tightly. And I remember thinking he was going to catch himself.

But did the horse - one of the carriage breeds designed to be as stoic as monks - actually act up, or did someone just bump it and force it to move, with me blending it with some other memory later? And was there really a second gunshot, or did I just hear people shouting about something they took for one, with it getting inserted into the narrative later?

And was I really holding his hand so tight?

Sometimes I wonder.

Maybe I wanted him to die, in that moment. Maybe it wasn't that I thought he was fine, but that I hoped he wasn't. Because he was an inconvenience to me. One more obstacle standing between me and Shiko. Maybe I let go of him and allowed him to fall.

Maybe the presence I sensed with me in that moment, that creature that might have been a bird or might have been a spider, wasn't death in the physical sense, but the embodiment of my epiphany. That in the end, everything is arbitrary. That meaning, even down to the lives of the people we love the most, is something we choose to invent every day, in each moment that we exist.

Empty. Profane. Individual.

Utsushikome's grandfather had lived his entire life devoted to the memory of one person who he loved more than anyone else in the world, to pursuing a dream of them being reunited and spending eternity together. But in the end, that story had ended with him spending his final days with a cheap imposter who didn't give so much as a single shit about him. His last thought, the culmination of all those years, was probably to wonder why his beloved didn't even seem to care as his skull tumbled to the ground.

In him, I saw a mirror of my own relentless magical thinking, and in the flippancy with which my heart responded, I saw my own essential self-centeredness. And I realized there was nothing mystical about what I had done. We hadn't been one person born separately. It hadn't been my destiny. My old life hadn't just been a dream.

The world was as it appeared. There was only me, and the choices I'd made. No stories, just things that happened.

I'd killed my best friend. There had never been anything more to it than that.

I couldn't accept it.

I spent a few days after it happened in a strange reverie, everything feeling derealized. No one blamed me for him dying; my parents barely even asked questions. My mother held a funeral for him at the fancy cemetery in the mountains behind the city, at the big temple to the Dying Gods, and cried about how she wished she'd rebuilt bridges with him before he'd died but was glad that at least I'd gone out of my way to make a connection. My little brother, who had basically never met him, kept trying to leave the reception to run around in the garden, and I had to fetch him three times.

I couldn't look any of them in the eye. I couldn't pretend to be the person they loved, knowing that I was her murderer. Knowing that my relationships with them were things I'd desired and stolen.

Samium didn't come to the funeral, though I did hear from him one last time in the form of a piece of registered mail I had to pick up from the post office. It was a simple and straightforward note discussing some business stocks my grandfather had apparently wanted me to inherit discreetly (he also left me the apartment he'd been living in, though I gifted it to my brother since the memories I had of the place were too offputting to ever imagine actually living there, and also because I'd hate to become a landlord) that only had a few lines of personal address. They read:

'For the sake of my family, I must humbly ask you to never speak of our relationship over the past year, now or after my death. Despite this ending so soon, I hope you are able to put this behind you and live happily, as I'm sure your grandfather would want even had he known the truth.'

The kindness in those words, the lack of judgement, felt like poison. A part of me had expected Samium to expose me after my grandfather's death. But now I knew that would never happen, and that if I threw this letter away, I could just live out my whole life without the truth ever being revealed.

My head felt the clearest it ever had in my entire existence, and every action I thought of taking was so obvious its implications that it was as if the world was made out of fragile glass. I remember sitting in my room, holding that letter and being so afraid. So overwhelmed by the shame I felt that it was like staring into the sun. So terrified in knowing that I would just continue to live that it felt like I was a step away from the vacuum of space.

I felt the weight of it. Of being nothing but a human being in an empty, uncaring world. Where there was nothing - no concept, no feeling, no law of gods or men or the heart - that could not be violated on a whim.

But above all else, now that I understood this, I could simply walk away. I could take what I had stolen, knowing I had stolen it with no veil of justification to the contrary, and choose not to care. To commit any sin, and choose not to care. To feel nothing.

A life without innocence. Without stories. A world of objects bumping into one another.

And that... Felt unbearable. Even more than having been my old self.

So, I chose one more story for myself. A story of redemption, where I would chase with everything I had the slim hope of setting things right. Where I would reverse fate, and bring Utsushikome, the girl who had saved me and shown me a brighter - if only for a few fleeting years - back from the dead, so she could smile as she had once again.

A story where I would die.