...Just what would I be 'needed' for here, though? I'd eavesdropped on the poor guy's conversation, sure, but I was fairly certain that neither he nor his friends had noticed me. As far as I could remember, I'd never actually spoken to him before—why would Lirelle come fetch me for this?

"Lirelle!" The young man's obvious relief that his wait was over did little to overshadow the cloud of exhaustion that seemed to be weighing down his every movement, but he straightened up and hurried over to meet us halfway regardless.

"Shess?" 

...Right, that was his name.

As Shess came to a stop, his wary gaze lingered on me for a long moment before he eventually turned to Rosch. "Hello as well, Uncle," he greeted the tall old man, his expression not relaxing, exactly, but rather losing its edge of immediate caution.

Rosch gently clapped the younger man on the shoulder, gave him a nod and a sympathetic smile, and wordlessly continued past towards his house.

"...Lirelle," Shess addressed her again, more seriously now, "I—I haven't been able to focus on anything so I ended up just coming to check again but—" He took a breath and exhaled. "...Aunt Nassia said you'd figured something out."

Lirelle's eyes flicked towards me for a split second. "...I did," she said hesitantly. "...But I still need some time to sort through things on my own before I can explain."

Shess' face contorted slightly, but he seemed to be fighting to keep it under control. "If it's that serious, then it's all the more important that we don't delay, isn't it? It's been days already!"

Somewhat frustratedly running a hand through the tousled auburn mess that was her hair, which had long since come free of its braid after two days with no sleep, Lirelle visibly struggled for words. "...I know. I'm worried too. I may not have seen her in person in years, but my sister is no less important to me than she is to you."

"Then—"

"Even so," she interrupted, "this isn't the sort of thing we can afford to rush into."

"We have no idea what the situation at the border is like right now," Shess shot back, fists clenching at his sides. "Every hour we do nothing, someone might be dying. Ellis might be dying!"

...That last part got a tiny flinch out of Lirelle. "That's a pretty alarmist conclusion to jump to," she said, voice cool and tinged with a hint of venom. "All we know is that communications aren't getting through."

"But it's possible," Shess insisted. "How can you be so relaxed about this when there's a chance..."

The two of them continued on with their bristling back-and-forth, but by then I'd stopped paying attention. Was this what Lirelle had wanted me here for? So I could use my knowledge of the future to convince Shess?

Tilting back my head, I frowned up at the wisps of clouds drifting slowly across the early evening sky and began to dig through my memory, thinking quickly.

"...Um," I spoke up tentatively after a few moments, and both Lirelle and Shess turned to look at me with some degree of startlement. "...Things at the border probably aren't too dangerous at the moment."

There was a short stretch of stunned silence, and then Shess glanced towards his prospective sister-in-law with an expression that all too clearly said 'and who is this?'

"...My relative's apprentice," she answered him smoothly, though I could tell she was a little caught off guard. "What do you mean by that, Silt?"

I hesitated intentionally, trying to come off as though I was debating just how much I ought to say. 

"I... actually went over there earlier today, and ran into one of the soldiers."

In the same instant, Shess' eyes widened and Lirelle's narrowed. "You... took a casual stroll all the way to the border and back?" the young man asked, disbelieving. "...On foot?" 

"It's a lot shorter of a walk if you cut through the dense parts of the forest," I explained. "...But no, not exactly a 'casual stroll'; it still took something like an hour each way." I nodded towards Lirelle—although her expression told me rather bluntly that she had a lot she wanted to say, she thankfully remained silent. "She seemed really worried, and I know the area well, so I went to see if I could get an idea of what was happening."

"And?" Shess prompted, a complicated look on his face.

I shook my head. "I didn't get any details—all he would tell me was that things were mostly okay for now."

Lirelle's expression shifted slightly. I wouldn't be surprised if that was enough for her to connect the dots, knowing what was in those letters she'd copied last night.

Shess turned to her. "...Do you trust him?"

There was a tense pause. I'd love to know that too, I thought to myself, but I knew better than to expect whatever answer she gave to be entirely true.

"...Yes. What he said checks out with what I discovered, too." She sighed tiredly and rubbed at her eyes. "I'm serious about this being dangerous if handled wrong, and I'm running on no sleep right now. Please, just wait until tomorrow morning."

Although his discontentment was so glaringly obvious a blind man could probably see it, Shess eventually managed to push through his internal conflict and force a reluctant nod. "...Fine. I'll be back first thing tomorrow."

He trudged away unhappily, leaving the two of us who remained to watch him go in silence. Once he was a fair distance away, Lirelle turned her attention to me. "I take it that was something you remembered from the future?"

"Yeah," I confirmed. "The current situation isn't particularly dire, they just realized information was getting to the Ielyan side somehow and decided to temporarily cut all contact."

"That's... good to hear." She hesitated. "Though I'm guessing things aren't going to be nice enough to stay that way."

My grimace in reaction gave her all the answer she needed.

"...Of course not." Lirelle chewed her lip in thought. "How long do we have until it gets bad?"

I closed my eyes and took a moment to concentrate, searching my memory again. I was fairly confident that I remembered the series of events correctly, but trying to recall precisely how much time there'd been between them...?

"At least four days." Opening my eyes, I hesitantly met her gaze. "Probably more—if I had to guess, I'd say maybe somewhere around eight or nine... but it may have just felt longer than it actually was. Four days is as much as I'm willing to say with any sort of certainty."

"Hm. That's... not particularly helpful." She looked up at the sky for a few long heartbeats. "...Though I guess it would be a bit of a problem if I got too accustomed to basing my plans off of knowledge of the future." With a quiet groan, she stretched her arms out in front of her and rolled one of her shoulders. "Well, that was an unexpected drain on my energy. Shess... seems like a good kid, but damn is he tiring to deal with when he's like this."

I smiled faintly at the word 'kid'—I wasn't the only one who saw him that way, it seemed. To be fair, though, Lirelle was definitely old enough to be justified in referring to the younger man in that way—she'd never told me her exact age, but I knew she was in her late twenties, at least.

...Wait, 'unexpected'? So that conversation wasn't what she brought me here for? Then what—

"Uh, Silt? You coming?"

I snapped back to reality to find that Lirelle was already a few paces away from me, looking back at me with an arched eyebrow. I blinked, my mind suddenly so empty of words that it felt like I'd nearly forgotten how to speak.

"Why did you—" The door to her aunt and uncle's house swung open behind her, and I choked on my question as a small, all-too-familiar figure burst out of the building: a kid—an actual one, this time—with fair skin and a messy head of short, ashy brown hair, wearing a simple tunic and trousers covered in dirt, tears streaming down flustered cheeks from bloodshot hazel eyes.

"Sil!"

The voice made obvious what I probably would have struggled to immediately figure out from appearance alone, after all this time—it was Aster.

The still-open door entirely forgotten in his rush, he raced over and practically tackled me with an embrace.

I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. It had nothing to do with Aster's hold on me—the boy was skinny, barely came up to my waist, and couldn't hope to restrain me if he tried—but everything to do with seeing Aster himself. 

"Sillllll...!"

It felt like my heart had stopped. Staring down at the top of his head, frozen in shock as he sobbed my name, a constricting dread rose like bile in my throat, carrying with it the excruciatingly vivid images that I'd spent a year and a half trying desperately to forget.

A pair of painfully thin bodies slumped limply against each other in a dim, filthy alley. They sat unmoving in the deathly silent wreck of what had once been a peaceful town, beneath an angry sky of reddish-brown mana clouds that drifted and flashed oppressively overhead like a heavy blanket of dried blood. 

...That had been my first time seeing them in almost three years, and it should have been the last... but here he was, in front of me. Alive.

"Silt...?" Lirelle's hesitant voice pulled me back to the present.

My eyes stung, and as a wave of heat washed over my face, my vision blurred. Startled, I blinked through the tears and glanced down to find Aster looking worriedly up at me with puffy red eyes the size of saucers, sniffling quietly. "Sil? W-what's wrong?"

I opened my mouth to say something, but my voice wouldn't come out—swallowing hard, I knelt down and wrapped my arms around his slender, trembling shoulders.

"...It's nothing," I told him hoarsely when I'd finally recovered enough to speak, releasing him and pulling back so I could see his face. "I just... remembered a really sad dream, is all."

"A dream...?"

I forced a shaky smile. "...Yeah. Just... a very long and vivid dream."

Aster tentatively reached up and cupped my face in his little hands, still struggling to stop his own tears as he looked straight into my eyes. "I-it's okay. I'm right here. It... wasn't real."

'You're okay, Aster. Look, I'm right here—it was just a nightmare,' my own voice whispered from the distant past. 'It wasn't real.' 

Those words were ones I had said many times before... but now that they were directed back at me, they landed like a knife to the gut.