She rolled up the papers containing the blueprints of her perfect weapon and placed them in a leather case. It also contained information on how to treat the Mana Stones, the silver ore, and the blade's edges.

Of course, she hid it among the plush dolls on her perfectly made bed, while Norina left the room briefly to inform the estate staff that she wanted to have a cup of tea and to ask where the best place would be.

Since it was cold outside, the garden was out of the question. Rowena had felt it a little when she had arrived, but she did not want to sit there and drink tea while she was probably getting colder by the minute.

Standing up straight, she put her hand to her stomach and channeled the Mana she had just used to sense her surroundings and sent it through her own body. The damage caused by the real Rowena's bad eating habits was severe. Still, she frowned at the end.

She had had that feeling from the beginning, but now it was even more obvious that there was more to her health problems. She wasn't a doctor, but she used to run her Mana through herself to look for possible invisible damage done to her cells by the Visitors.

In her case, it would have happened after a conflict with the enemy. But Rowena was not a fighter. 'How did her cells get this messed up?'

There were some that were broken beyond repair. If it didn't affect a whole body part, but just some stray cells in her body, she could restore them. The Mana would use the now healthy parts of her body to sort out the broken ones and fill in the missing spots by growing new tissue.

Those cells were ejected through the pores, which led to Rowena smelling quite a bit and coming back dirty after her training in the basement. Norina could probably tell as well, though it mixed "well" with her accumulated sweat.

After all, it was on a microscopic scale; if the real Rowena hadn't been underweight, she probably wouldn't have looked sick at all. Not yet, that is.

Where did this come from? Was it a remnant of her body dying for a moment?

'That is not likely,' Pan corrected her assumption.

'But what else could have caused it?' The more she thought about it, the more it bugged her.

'There is nothing more to say.'

This time she actually felt the annoyance she had trained herself to overcome since the day they had met. "Is this one of those 'you have to ask the right questions' moments?" she asked aloud, because she was upset and talking in her head had never been her thing.

She always spoke out loud to him, unless it was to be more secretive. People had known that Pan was there.

Suddenly, as she turned around, her body froze.

'Right, that's it.' She licked her dry lips and cleared her throat. "Say," Rowena began, tucking some of her lavender waves behind her left ear, "you mentioned that things have happened before, right? Certain people acting the same here and there."

Broodingly, Pan admitted, 'So I did.'

"Does that just refer to this world and 'Celia's World'?"

There was a moment of silence that became a minute. A minute became two.

When she expected him to have muted out of this conversation, he suddenly made a deep buzzing noise, as if he was considering how to respond.

'There is nothing more to say.'

Her heart was pounding, making her dizzy. He must have known what her intention was, what information he would give her by answering the right questions.

It didn't help her with the problem at hand, but it answered the other thing she had been thinking about so much. Were there more than two worlds? The answer was... yes.

'The Divine Principle has always acted quite rationally. That's why this game of questions works,' she thought, swallowing hard, 'if there was no problem with an answer, he could and would give it. If it was just this and the other Earth, even if there were more, saying 'yes' wouldn't change anything - but saying 'no' would. If you can't tell the truth, it's better to say nothing.'

She couldn't believe it. Tumbling back into her chair, there was a certain feeling of vastness in her head. As if she had just opened herself up to infinite possibilities, even though she had always considered this possibility very likely.

'You would not lie to me, right?' she asked calmly.

Yet another pause occured. 'I would not.' That was what he had promised her the first day they had met.

If there were two worlds, why shouldn't there be more? She should get over it, she knew, but it made her feel endlessly irrelevant and like she knew something that no one else knew at the same time.

'Wait, what about Sarah? Does she know?' Celia wasn't quite sure what this was all about, she wasn't sure she could blame a woman for what had happened to her, but she was sure the author wasn't completely innocent. 'What if she unwittingly, somehow, marked my soul or connected it to this world because she was sort of connected to it? I mean, she wrote the book.'

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'A prophet,' Pan replied, because Celia had already come to that conclusion.

'So she had that connection, wrote that prophetic book, which is now invalid because I am here, but no one knew it was prophetic because it was about another world.'

Prophets passively used Mana without training in it, which sometimes happened to carry information about the world beyond their current time, hinting at the true potential of this very special power that they could barely grasp the concept of. Some believed that there may even be Sentinels or Numbered with this special ability who spread this kind of Mana around, causing prophetic visions.

These visions became part of the prophet's mindset and understanding, so most of them didn't even know they weren't simply inspired or had a strange dream until it started to come true. Few of them knew the moment they received it because they felt a tingling sensation, nausea, or even blacked out.

Sarah Dent must have had no idea, so it might have happened by accident, but in Celia's - no, Rowena's - eyes it was the only link she had to this world, which made her cling to it even though it wouldn't change anything. She would have to figure out how her heart had stopped beating in the first place, so that she could travel through the World Beyond the Surface to another... universe? Dimension?

'This is beyond the World Beyond, right?' she asked, 'It's not just another planet in the universe, is it?'

Another drawn out pause made her fidgety; she didn't even notice the footsteps approaching her door and the knocking that lasted for about half a second. 'We are not on the moon.'

It took a moment for her brain to process what had been said when the information didn't match her question. Then she realized he'd given her the answer she needed.

"Not on the moon" was not the question, of course. But by extension, it meant she was not on any other planet in the universe she had known.

Sometimes it wasn't just a matter of asking the right questions, but also of giving the right answers. Maybe it worked because they knew each other well by now.

"Why do you look like you just saw a Visitor in the flesh?"

Rowena's slightly lowered gaze shot up at the sudden voice that reached her from outside her mind, and she stared into her brother's eyes with a puzzled expression. "What?"

"I said, 'You look like you just saw a Visitor in the flesh,' have you gone deaf as well?"

She sprang up from the chair and tried to shake off all the feelings that had overwhelmed her, which of course didn't work at all. "Where do you get off, barging into my room like that?" the young noblewoman shouted at him, forgetting everything she had learned about manners and everything she had known before coming here. She felt her privacy violated.

Her brother, on the other hand, was taken aback. He had expected her to come at him sooner or later, but it felt different. It felt as if he had actually come at a bad time and made her angry.

There was nothing to blame him for.

He hadn't even come unannounced! Colin had waited exactly thirty seconds after knocking, but she hadn't reacted at all, so he let himself in. But his sister didn't even notice him opening the door. She just sat there, very pale and with a shocked face.

"Whatever," she said suddenly and turned away so that he was looking at her back, "get out. I have nothing to discuss with you right now."

"I just wanted to remind you that I will be checking up on you, so you can see that I mean it."

"I came here to get some fresh air and some alone time. You have no right to interfere with that." Rowena was angry, and getting angrier by the minute.

Having someone around wasn't the problem. Norina seeing her blueprints after Rowena had already gotten a feel for her wasn't a problem. But having someone she didn't know at all invade her space like that was a problem.

Her plan had been to try to get him on her side so that he would stop being annoying about the fact that she was a known troublemaker to him. 'I still have to do that, but right now I want to bite his head off.'

He looked at the spare papers on her desk that she was now facing and realized that she might have been in the middle of some type of work. "Fine. I'll leave now, since you don't seem to be in a good mood."

As he said that, the door behind him opened after a short knock. "My lady, I have..." Norina looked at the young master who blocked her view as she stepped in, bending to the side to look past him at her mistress's slightly quivering back. "Young Mater Colin, the lady was about to leave for tea. If you want to talk, why don't you schedule a meeting for another time?" The young maid was angry, but she swallowed it.

She could only imagine what could have happened, since the young master had been rather rude whenever he had met the lady. Norina hadn't known any of the young lords and ladies of the House of Varnhagen before she had been hired as a maid in the annex.

She hadn't even met Lady Arabella, who was well known among the staff in the capital, or the eldest young lord, Lord Alan van Varnhagen, who was sure to inherit the title of Grand Duke in the foreseeable future.

But it was this young lord, Lord Colin, that she had never heard much about. She knew that he would soon become an official High Priest, with the talent he had, but it wasn't a hot topic at all.

She felt that he didn't deserve to criticize her mistress. Of course, her logic was skewed because she had a vested interest in her lady's well-being, but she didn't care about that. It looked like she was hurt, even if she could only see her back, which was enough to judge him guilty of whatever.

"Thank you, Norina," Rowena said quietly, "did you find a place for my tea time?"

"I have, my lady," the blonde replied at once, "follow me, please."

Colin watched as the hair, so similar to his own, though wavy and a little softer to look at, bobbed around as she walked past him a tad faster than etiquette would dictate. Was he in the wrong?

He shook his head. 'Definitely suspicious,' he thought instead, following her out as well, the two of them looking at him standing alone in her room.

She tried to calm down a little more, going over her plans for the night in her mind as she walked through the estate.

"Since it is too cold outside, you will have your tea in the Winter Garden," her maid suddenly announced.

'A Winter Garden?' She had seen them in movies, and once a café she had passed had a winter garden.

And when a huge double door opened in front of her, that was what she saw - and more. It was like walking into a botanical garden placed inside a snow globe, only the snow was outside instead of falling on the garden.

Her eyes grew wide as she slowly entered, amazed at the size of the dome itself. It wasn't cold at all, there were even trees. Beautiful wisteria trees and flowers of all colors and shapes covered most of the ground, except for the white marble path that led to an elegantly decorated table and chairs in the center.

As she approached her destination, her eyes fell on a bed of very special flowers, roses with pale lavender blooming heads and silvery white stems.

"Isidoras," she heard Norina say softly behind her, "I don't know much about them, but I know that's what they're called. Beautiful, right?"

She sat down as her maid pulled back the chair and a kitchen maid brought in the cart with the tea. But she already knew this flower. It was the flower named after Rowena's great-grandmother.