Transmigrated Teri is an ongoing isekai/portal fantasy series about Teri Graves, an embittered middle-age GenX office lady who gets into a massive car accident and wakes up in the world of the fantasy series she loves to hate, The Allisar Fireborn Chronicles. She knows the characters, she knows the plot, and she knows that its all a massive coma dream…except for how nothing is as it should be. Worse? She woke up in the body of the doomed evil stepmother! She escaped a pandemic for this?
AUTHORIA
Astute readers might pick up on the fact that there was no update last week. That was because past!KimBoo decided to screw over now!KimBoo by moving a scene in the timeline but then never actually editing it to fit into it’s new position in the story. Which is to say, I had to rewrite this chapter not entirely from the ground up, but definitely from the baseboards up. 😭 Anyway, here it is, and now it even makes sense!
Previously: Teri reset…
Seven years had passed since the first Countess Allisar had slipped from the world on a blood-wet dawn, leaving behind a newborn son and a silence no amount of wealth could fill. In the halls of Castle Luttiron, her name was spoken less and less, as though time itself could be bargained with, yet the memory of her lingered in stubborn places: in a certain turn of phrase the servants still used, in the way sunlight fell through the eastern windows, in the old hangings whose colors had softened but not surrendered. To Robern, Vycette and Aurguth, she remained not a story but a handful of fragments—warm hands smoothing hair, a voice like a lullaby half-forgotten, the faint scent of herbs and lavender clinging to a shawl long ago thrown away. They could no longer recall her face with certainty, but they remembered the feeling of being safe, and in the years since, that memory had become both treasure and wound, sharpened by the knowledge that the last breath she drew had been spent to bring Gervyn into the world.
~ Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, Book 1: Embers of Destiny
The door crept open in slow stages. A mop of red hair appeared first, then one green eye, then the rest of him, easing the door shut behind him with a care that suggested this was not the first covert operation of his life.
He stood there a moment, watching her. Watching Theo, who had arranged himself into a boneless heap at the foot of the bed and was doing an admirable impression of a pillow.
Satisfied, Gervyn dropped to his hands and knees and crawled slowly across the room, as quietly as an eight year old troublemaker could, until he disappeared from her sight. She realized with surprise that he had crawled under the bed.
Teri kept her eyes at their careful half-mast and thought, as clearly as she could manage, :What is he doing?:
:Stealing the talky-paper. He tries to do this every night, but Lady Elisandar is usually in the way.:
:In the way? In the way of what?:
:I told you, he’s stealing the talky-paper.: Theo sighed heavily, and the sounds under the bed stopped for a few seconds.
:Every night?: That seemed like the kind of thing that mattered.
:I didn’t think it mattered.:
:You need to tell me these things! What is he doing? What is a talky-paper?:
There was a scrape and a muffled thump from under the bed, then the small, dtermined silence of a child trying very hard not to make noise while doing something that required both hands and complete concentration. Teri kept breathing slowly.
When Gervyn reappeared he had cobwebs in his hair and the parchment already half-tucked under his shirt, one corner of it sticking out like a guilty tongue. He was holding it away from her, tucked against his ribs, and creeping backward toward the door with the stiff-legged walk of a kid who thought that being quiet equaled invisibility, or at least deniability.
“Going somewhere?”
He froze mid-step, one foot still in the air, and looked at her with wide, terrified eyes.
“I was just.” His voice came out very small. “I was checking on you.”
“From under the bed?” Teri pushed herself up against the pillows, slow enough that her leg only screamed instead of shrieked, and held out her hand. “Give it here.”
He looked down at himself in betrayal, as if the paper had chosen to be visible entirely on its own. She kept her hand out.
He didn’t move. His jaw was working like he was chewing himself toward either tears or defiance, she genuinely couldn’t tell which.
“Gervyn.”
He slumped in defeat and plodded back toward the bed, holding the paper out. She took it and looked it over. It was a very nice, heavy piece of parchment or vellum, she could tell by the texture, and on it was a mass of jumbled writing that looked like a rabid cross between alchemy symbols and shorthand.
It was meaningless to her.
:It’s a spying talisman. Like a paper microphone! It broadcasts what you say to the other half of the parchment.:
:How do you know that?:
:I know what a microphone is!: If a dog could look affronted, Theo was trying hard to do it.
“That’s not what I meant. Never mind.” She looked over the paper again, remembering that spying talismans had been mentioned in later books of AFC, but never when the characters were still in Luttiron.
She was in a bind, because if she tore it up, whoever had the paired talisman would know it had been discovered. She could not ask Gervyn about it, since whoever was listening in would hear. Probably Ferdiff Allisar, she guessed, but given the politics of Castle Luttiron it could have been anyone.
As she sat there indecisively, Gervyn started to droop even further. Theo glared at her, then back at the boy, then at her again.
:And do what? I can’t ask him about it, not with this thing active.:
:It’s like you’ve never cast a maze charm before,: Theo said judgmentally.
“Because I haven’t!”
Theo barked.
She took a deep breath and did the spiral hand movement that Fuckin’ Chad always described mage’s doing when casting a spell, thinking heavily at the piece of paper, hide my words in a maze. She expected exactly nothing to happen, but the paper fluttered and the ink glistened as if wet.
“Huh. Did that work?” She brought the paper closer to examine it.
“I think so? It looks the way talismans do when Tutor Gorj does it.” Gervyn leaned closer to look at it too. Then he looked at her in surprise and bounced backwards. “Uh, sorry. Milady! Sorry, Milady.”
Teri put the talisman down and rubbed her temples. “Why are are you stealing it?”
Gervyn’s chin came up, instantly mutinous. “It’s not any of your business.”
“It became my business when you crawled under my bed.” She kept her voice even. “Try again.”
He pressed his lips together and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Theo, unhelpful as ever, thumped his tail against the coverlet like he was enjoying the show.
“This is about the picnic, isn’t it?” Teri said. “The one for your birthday. The shadow hunt.”
Gervyn went very still, the way a child does who has just watched an adult produce a card he was certain no one else was holding.
“How do you—” He cut himself off, eyes darting to the parchment on the coverlet, then to Theo, then back to her, working through it with visible dread. “Is it the curse? Since the void howler?”
She could have told him no. She could have explained the actual truth, which was so much stranger and would not have helped either one of them.
“Something like that,” she said instead.
He deflated, apparently satisfied that the universe still made a certain kind of sense, even if the sense in question was magic ruining his life.
“If Father hears you being angry,” he said, all in a rush now, the words tumbling over each other like he’d been holding them since he crawled under the bed the first time, “if he hears you talking about the picnic, about how we snuck away, he’ll know it was bad, and he’ll ask who planned it, and Robern will say it was him because it’s always him, because he always says it was him—”
“Gervyn.”
“—and then Father will—” He stopped, eyes bright with unshed tears. “I just wanted it gone,” he said, smaller now. “So he couldn’t hear anything at all.”
She found herself wondering how such a sensitive boy grew up to be the battle-hardened Chosen One of the books. But the books had never spent much time on the before, other than for Fuckin’ Chad to make it clear that it was bad; bad enough to eventually kill Robern, and bad enough to turn the little boy in front of her into a powerful, dangerous mage bent on revenge and revolution.
He didn’t say anything about his father having other eyes in the castle, other mouths that reported back on children who vanished during lessons. But he was just eight, and Teri figured that in his accounting, the talisman was the whole danger, a single thread he could cut with his own two hands, and cutting it would fix everything. Teri filed the gap in his logic away and did not correct it. Some fears were survivable precisely because they were smaller than the truth.
“I’m not going to tell him anything.” She kept her voice low, the pitch she used to use on Theo when he’d been found digging into the trash and was two seconds from bolting. “But you can’t take it. If it just stops working, whoever put it there will know it’s been found. That’s worse for all of you, not better.”
He stared at her, working through that logic with the visible effort of doing long division in his head.
“Come here.”
He shuffled forward just a few inches.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to Robern,” she said. “Not because of this, not because of the picnic. I promise you that.”
He looked at her like he wanted very badly to believe her and didn’t quite dare.
“I mean it. But you have to trust me on this one thing. It stays where it was so your father doesn’t know we know about it.” She held up the parchment, the ink still glassy and wet-looking under the maze charm. “This is how I protect all of us, by making it scramble what we say. Then it becomes useless without anyone knowing the difference.”
He nodded slowly, then took a deep breath before speaking. “You’re not mad?”
“I’m tired,” she said, which was true, “and you’re eight, and eight-year-olds do stupid brave things for people they love. I’m not going to punish you for that.”
He ducked his head, cheeks going the same red as his hair, and slithered back under the bed to return the talisman to wherever he found it. When he came out again he was smiling, small and crooked and entirely unconvinced this wasn’t a trap.
:He still thinks you might be lying,: Theo offered, unhelpfully.
:He probably should. Lady Greyrage absolutely would have. I think it’s fair not to trust his evil stepmother.:
:Some bitches don’t make good mothers,: Theo said with a shrug.
:Please, I’m begging you, please stop using that word.:
He grumbled and made no promises.
The door bounced open and the twins dashed into the room, stopping dead with their mouths open when they saw Gervyn. He quickly mimed at them to keep their mouths locked shut.
Vycette stared at her brother suspiciously before curtsying. “We apologize, milady, but we have been looking for Gervyn.”
Aurguth just squinted between them in confusion.
“Well, you found him.” She flapped at hand at him. “Explain what you did somewhere else,” she said pointedly, and he nodded excessively.
“Yes, yes! Excellent suggestion, milady. We’ll go now!” Vycette grabbed her siblings and dragged them out of the room.
Teri let out a breath, then turned to glare at Theo.
:Who put the ‘microphone’ in here?:
:Smelled like Lord Ferdiff.: Theo answered nonchalantly, flopping back over for more belly rubs.
Was Ferdiff already suspicious of Lady Greyrage, even just four months into the marriage? It spoke to the fact that there was more behind their wedding than previously understood (at least by fandom).
What in the wild headcanon was her brain trying to concoct?
No answers came to her, but she became increasingly curious about the world her imagination was creating for her to live in.
She resigned herself to waiting longer than last time before she could start walking around, which was annoying, but not a big deal. At least the pain meds got through to wherever her brain was. She could simply relax in between treatments and rest up in a way she had not been able to do since childhood. Then, once she was mobile, she would grab the kids make a break for it, maybe travel around her self-designed fantasy land as a bard or merchant or something. Did she even need to worry about Gervyn’s “destiny” as the Allisar Fireborn Mage who was meant to destroy the evil Emperor Nikodosis?
She didn’t, she decided, but it might be fun to do it anyway. Fuckin’ Chad had wasted half the story in inconsistent plot points and some god-awful tropes, and what was the point of living out a good fix-it fic if she wasn’t fixing anything?
She had time to plan things out while her leg healed, and figure out how to get the rest of the kids on her side. She had already changed one major plot point, how hard could it be?
NEXT: SpyXFamily
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