The streets of London were slick with yesterday's rain — reflections of neon signs melting into cobblestone like whispers of forgotten incantations. Every puddle shimmered with unnatural depth, as though something waited beneath the surface to speak, if only you stared long enough.
Hiroyuki moved through it like a man chasing a prophecy. Earbuds in, hood half-up, hands buried deep in the folds of his charcoal coat. Not because it was cold — it was always cold — but because his limbs trembled with a familiar, sacred anticipation.
Today was not a normal day.
Today was Skyrim day.
Not the tired reissue. Not the "Remastered," not the "Special Edition," not even the gimmicky "VR Mage School Modpack With Real Dragon Screams." No, this was different. This was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Ultimate Restoration Edition.
The final edition, they dared to say.
As if a world could ever be finished.
New questlines. Dragons that no longer dive headfirst into mountains. Ten hours of orchestral re-recordings by a once-extinct symphony. Fully voiced Falmer — fully voiced Falmer, as if gods had decided to gift the blind with speech.
It struck the deepest vein in his inner lore goblin.
He grinned, alone in the early mist. They'd finally fixed the College of Winterhold. After fifteen long years — they'd done it.
Click. Click. Click.
His boots sounded out against the cobbles with mechanical rhythm, broken only when he slowed beside a smudged storefront window. Inside, behind the glass dulled by greasy fingerprints and urban grit, a painting caught his eye — a swirl of blues and molten gold that seemed to move when he blinked.
Starry Night.
A fake. Of course. No security wards. No prestige sigils. Just a tourist's print on stretched canvas, the kind hawked to people who confused madness with meaning.
But Van Gogh hadn't painted the stars as they were.
He'd painted how they felt.
And Hiroyuki respected that.
He turned the corner — and stopped.
The line. It extended past the storefront. Wrapped around the next block. Then merged with another line that may have begun as its own separate myth.
A low groan escaped him. "They're out of copies, aren't they."
A girl in Daedric cosplay — blood-red armor clanking with devotion — gave him a pitying smirk and said nothing.
Defeated, he turned on his heel, muttering to the wind, "Skyrim will still be there tomorrow. Skyrim is always there."
But as he trudged toward the Clock Tower, boots slapping through ghosts of puddles, a shoulder clipped his own. Not hard. Not enough to stagger. But enough to snap him from reverie.
"Ah, sorry—" he began, stepping back.
The boy turned.
And in his eyes — that brief glint — Hiroyuki saw something coil. Recognition. Not the warm sort. The cold, blade-half-drawn kind.
"Hiroyuki?" the boy said.
The name was spoken like a cipher. Careful. Measured.
It stopped Hiroyuki mid-step. He frowned, scanning the boy's face. Not familiar. Not from any lecture hall, not from any raid party, not from the Tower's whispering halls.
But that tone.
"…Do I know you?"
The boy blinked once. His features flattened into polite denial.
"No. Sorry. I… mistook you for someone else."
Too fast. Too neat. Too rehearsed.
And yet — Hiroyuki didn't react outwardly. He simply shifted his weight, as though repositioning a memory that hadn't yet solidified.
That face, he thought. I'll remember that face.
They parted without another word, the current of the crowd swallowing them in opposite directions.
And yet…
The silence that followed was too loud.
The boy had walked on. Shoes silent on wet stone. But something about his retreating form tugged at Hiroyuki like a loose thread caught on the teeth of a clockwork gear.
He blinked. Pivoted.
And followed.
Call it boredom. Call it suspicion. Call it Skyrim withdrawal-induced hallucination.
But he moved.
The boy — strange, quiet, unreadable — drifted through the crowd with the eerie grace of someone who had never learned to stumble. A few paces ahead, trailing behind like a thread wound too tight, was another figure.
Claudius.
And suddenly, Hiroyuki's mind sharpened.
Claudius was… different. Exceptionally so. The sort of person who wrote in fountain pen with invisible ink because normal ink felt too vulgar. To see him walking with someone like that — someone silent, mismatched, possibly from a different century — felt like a riddle badly hidden behind clean glass.
What are you doing, Claudius?
They crossed through a side gate. An old entrance. The kind most students forgot existed.
The gym.
Of course.
It stood like a mausoleum — hollowed marble, sealed wards, and a scent of old sweat and older secrets.
Hiroyuki pressed himself against a crumbling column and peeked through a jagged slit in the window.
Inside: residual mana still clinging to the air like ghosts that hadn't yet learned they were dead.
Rin Tohsaka stood at the center.
Rin. The prodigy twice named. The girl who turned down four Departments like they were bad invitations to a tea party. Who studied under Zelretch — and didn't die doing so.
Hiroyuki's heart hiccupped.
He ducked back into the shadows.
What in the Root's name is going on?
Another peek. Claudius was speaking to Rin, but the words were lost to distance and warding.
And then — they left.
The two of them. Out of sight.
Leaving only the boy.
Standing alone beneath the fractured chandelier.
Still.
Not lost.
Not bewildered.
Just… waiting.
Then he moved.
Fast.
The gym doors flung open with the weight of a spell uncast. Hiroyuki threw himself into the bushes nearby, dirt embedding into his knees as the boy shot past him like a creature half-starved of time.
"Jesus Christ," Hiroyuki hissed. "Is he a cheetah?"
He gave chase.
Ten seconds.
Twelve, if one was charitable.
Then he stopped. Bent. Wheezing like an old spellbook cracked open after centuries.
"I'm… gonna die here," he gasped. "Death by cardio. Someone carve that on my gravestone."
The boy — already gone.
So Hiroyuki returned to his dorm in defeat.
Skyrim content would have to suffice.
That night, the study hall smelled of scorched ink and damp parchment. The kind of sterile, scholarly musk that clung to one's ribs and refused to leave.
Candles floated above in magical stillness, casting amber light through glyph-etched glass. Students murmured over sigil diagrams, fragments of chants like lullabies for exhausted minds. Somewhere, a spell misfired with a gentle pop, and laughter followed.
But Hiroyuki heard none of it.
His book — Magical Ontologies and the Twelve Frames of Self — sat open, ignored.
His pen hovered over blank pages.
He saw only the boy.
That stare. That gait. That predator's sprint.
He scribbled.
A diagram. Messy. Not a spell. A theory.
Mystery Boy → Claudius → Rin → Gym → Disappearance.
A thread wove itself in his mind.
Claudius's absences. His coldness fraying at the edges. The refusal to answer questions directly. The flickers of something unsaid behind his eyes.
And then, the boy.
Hiroyuki's pen stilled.
A memory floated up. Claudius — mentioning something absurd. Something terrifying. A confession, once dismissed.
Body-swapping.
Hiroyuki leaned back, breathing through his teeth.
That would explain everything.
Every inconsistency.
Every fracture in Claudius's persona.
The boy had known his name.
But not him.
He was about to turn another page — chase the thought deeper — when a voice interrupted.
"Did you hear about Selene?"
He didn't look up.
"She got expelled. Temporarily. They say she's… unstable."
"No," another voice said. "Not unstable. Missing memories. Weeks. Maybe months. Gone like vapor. She woke up and didn't even know who her friends were."
A beat.
"They're saying it was her brother. Claudius Mornveil."
"I guess it was bound to happen. Selene was always better than her brother."
A pin-drop silence.
Then Hiroyuki stood.
Chair scraping. Pen forgotten.
He moved.
First to Claudius's dorm.
Empty.
Then the library annex.
The Binding Wells.
The alchemy cellar — half-renovated and cursed.
Nothing.
Only when he'd nearly surrendered to exhaustion did he see it.
Movement.
A coat.
The boy.
Hiroyuki melted into shadow, heart ticking like a miscast rune.
He followed.
Corridors darkened. Wards flickered.
Down into the older dorms — where the air felt thick with forgotten rituals and the stone remembered names the world had chosen to forget.
Raised voices.
A blow.
Another.
Hiroyuki edged closer.
Claudius. Surrounded. Bloodied. Bruised. Still upright.
Hambrock — sneering, barking.
And then the boy moved.
No spells. No rituals. Just violence, distilled.
A storm in human form.
And then — Claudius intervened.
A headbutt.
Raw. Real.
The moment passed.
The fight died.
And the others vanished.
Hiroyuki didn't step forward.
He stepped back.
Into shadow.
Into silence.
For the first time in years, Hiroyuki — curious, cynical, always certain — found no answer.
Only a question still echoing.
And two faces that now felt dangerously close to being one.