## Chapter 358 — The Things on the Table

Thomas did sit down.

Not because Isha had told him to. The chair was simply there when his knees stopped behaving as though standing remained the obvious choice.

He took her phone with both hands.

The message occupied the screen beneath an empty space where a sender should have been.

> Goodbye Isha. I enjoyed our talk. I hope you did and you don't hate me. I will be wishing, and imagining, the best for you, for Thomas. Ian.

Thomas read it once, looked at the blank upper edge of the message, then read it again.

“There is no sender. Not even withheld.”

“No number at all.”

Isha remained standing on the other side of the table with Tessa’s arrow in one hand. Her running clothes had dried unevenly during the journey home. The hair at her temples was still damp, and the long braid down her back had loosened enough that pale strands clung to her shoulders. She looked tired in a way the run alone would not have produced.

Thomas put the phone down carefully.

“Are you hurt?”

“Physically, no.”

He heard the qualification and did not ask her to improve it.

The object wrapped in the face towel sat between them. Thomas had looked at the arrow first because his body had recognised old-world construction before his mind found a place for it. Now that he was seated, every detail became worse. The fletching. The binding. The narrow black-grey stain on the shaft.

Isha moved the arrow onto the table without letting the point scrape the wood.

“Tessa made two for me before we left the farm,” she said. “I used one. Kelda returned this one to her after the Broken Court.”

Thomas did not touch it immediately.

He remembered Tessa making arrows. Not this exact afternoon with the clarity Isha possessed, but the phase of it: his younger sister too proud of anything that flew straight and too offended by any criticism that required cutting the binding off and beginning again. Isha had been better at correcting her because Isha could demonstrate the problem without sounding like an older brother.

The ash mark ended before the fletching.

Thomas finally placed two fingers against the shaft.

Wood.

Nothing moved under his touch. No interface answered. No System text appeared. The arrow remained an arrow.

“Where did he get it?”

“That takes a while.”

Thomas looked up.

“I met him on the train.”

“I assumed that part from the luggage?”

“He was going to the airport. Back to England.” Isha lowered herself into the chair opposite him at last. “He told me I would never see him in this reality again.”

Thomas’s eyes flicked towards the phone.

“Ian.”

“That is the name he used at the end.”

The name made the situation marginally easier to refer to and no easier to understand.

Isha unwrapped the towel.

The shallow wooden bowl appeared first. Empty now, a spoon resting inside it. Thomas saw the wear along the rim and knew only that it did not belong in flat 202. The next object made his breath stop.

The bird was crude.

Its body was too thick and one wing had been carved into a shape that made aerodynamic ambition irrelevant. The beak had a flattened edge where the knife had taken too much wood. One side of the tail rose higher than the other.

Thomas reached for it before Isha explained.

“No.”

The word escaped him quietly.

Isha put it into his hand.

He turned the bird once.

There was a shallow line under the left wing.

His thumb found it before his eyes did.

“I cut this.”

His voice had altered.

Isha watched him.

Thomas remembered being nine years old and angry that Rowan had made him use a small knife rather than the better one. He remembered believing the problem with the first wing was the grain. Rowan had said the grain had been there before Thomas touched the wood and therefore deserved less blame than the person holding the knife.

The memory arrived with enough useless detail to make his eyes burn: the smell of shavings, a split at the edge of the workbench, Mira telling him not to bring the knife into the kitchen, Mara laughing at the finished bird because its chest looked like a potato.

He had not thought about the workbench in years.

“My mother kept this.”

“I know.”

Thomas closed his hand around the bird and immediately loosened it, afraid of applying more pressure than the old wood deserved.

“How?”

“Ian said he suggested it to the thing that creates our reality.”

Thomas looked at her.

Isha did not soften the words.

“He calls it the thing because he does not think he is the writer. He suggested ‘architect’ once. I told him that was worse.”

Thomas would have laughed on almost any other day.

Isha lifted the final object from the towel.

The ribbon lay dark green across her palm.

Thomas stared at it.

Recognition did not need a childhood memory this time. The ribbon belonged to a much narrower part of his life: Isha’s hair, early roads, experiments when Magic Pocket had been new enough that they treated every object as a question, the High Elf preserve where being separated from her had turned a piece of cloth into evidence that she existed somewhere beyond the walls.

He took it from her with more care than the bird.

The cloth had wear along one edge. A tiny pull interrupted the weave near the end.

“This was in the Pocket. I gave it back.”

“You did.”

Thomas rubbed the worn cloth once between his fingers and stopped.

The room had become too full of old touch.

He placed the ribbon beside the bird rather than continuing to hold both.

Isha touched the bowl.

“He gave me food too.”

Thomas’s attention shifted to it.

“From where?”

“Sereth.”

His first thought was that Ian had produced an imitation. Isha’s face prevented him from saying it.

“Not something I had described to you. Not a dish anyone important would remember. A meal my mother gave me once when I came home wet and hungry. I had forgotten most of the evening until I smelled it.”

She looked at the empty bowl.

“It was the same meal.”

Thomas put his glasses on the table. He had not realised he was still wearing them.

He imagined Isha on the train eating food from Sereth’s hands while a strange English man watched. The image was too intimate and too absurd to settle into one feeling.

“You ate it.”

“All of it.”

“Good.”

Isha’s mouth moved slightly.

Thomas looked from the bowl to the arrow and then to the bird beneath his hand.

“Start at the beginning.”

---

Isha began with the train.

She had run farther than intended, chosen the railway rather than turning the return into unwanted endurance work, and found Ian already sitting in the carriage with luggage. He had known her as soon as he looked up. The same strange weight had returned.

Then he had called her **Isha Vaeloren of Green Road**.

Thomas interrupted only once during the first part.

“He said Green Road exactly? In English?”

“Yes.”

Isha described the cold towel and the bottle of water that had been waiting beside him before he knew she would board. She described his answer when she asked how he knew: he had read about Green Road, Thomas and Kelda. In a story.

Thomas’s fingers remained around the crude bird throughout.

The story was still being written, Ian had said. He did not know exactly what happened next. He *steered* it.

Sometimes a little. Sometimes not at all.

Isha told Thomas about the ridiculous Lysenne shirt before reaching the part where Ian described himself as editorial oversight, perhaps a co-author, and admitted that their reality rarely became exactly what he expected.

Thomas closed his eyes for a second.

“He was wearing Lysenne while telling you this.”

“In her sensible-trousers period.”

Thomas closed his eyes again, this time for a different reason. “That detail is not improving my model.”

“It improved mine.”

Thomas opened his eyes again. Isha’s expression had become almost dry. He recognised the effort beneath it and let the humour pass without adding another joke.

Then she told him she had asked whether Ian chose the things that hurt them.

Thomas stopped moving the bird.

“He said yes.”

The room seemed to lose the quiet hum of the air conditioner even though it continued behind him.

Isha repeated Ian’s answer as closely as she could. Heroes and adventures had pain. The calmer Earth story had smaller challenges. Arguments. Lamps. He said he had not taken joy in their suffering; he had nearly cried, and had taken pleasure in their survival and triumphs. He had used the phrase that he had not let Isha die because he could not let go, then apologised when she reminded him that she had died more than once.

Thomas looked towards the balcony doors.

For a while, the only movement at the table was Isha’s hand resting near the ash-marked arrow.

“The lamp,” he said. “He claimed he chose that.”

Isha watched the fingers around the bird. “He said the argument was his solution to a problem the thing that creates our reality had introduced. He mentioned the medical fault as part of the pressure that let us fix it.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened.

“He used her illness?”

“I heard it as him using the circumstances. He said the thing introduced the problem. He did not claim he created the Graves fault.”

“That distinction should matter more than it currently does.”

Isha nodded.

Thomas stood, walked three steps towards the kitchen and stopped because he had nowhere useful to go. He returned to the chair.

The lamp had been theirs.

His months of yielding before it had been his. Isha’s overreach had been hers. The disease had amplified one part of the pattern without making the choices. The repair had belonged to two people finally saying things neither wanted to hear.

Someone outside the room claiming to have arranged the collision did not erase any of those causes.

It still made Thomas want to be angry at a man already on his way out of their reality.

“Did he apologise?”

“Yes. He also offered to let me hit him.”

Thomas looked at her.

“Twice.”

The first laugh came out before he wanted it.

It lasted less than a second.

Isha’s shoulders loosened anyway.

“I declined.”

“I’m glad.”

“I told him I do not hit people so they can feel an account has been balanced.”

Thomas looked at her for a long moment.

“That sounds like you.”

“I hope so.”

He reached across the table and took her hand. She turned it into his automatically. Her engagement ring was absent because of the run; the pale line at the base of her finger was visible between his own.

“You fixed things with me,” Thomas said. “Whatever he thinks he arranged, he didn’t do that part.”

Isha squeezed his hand.

“I know.”

They did not say more about the lamp yet.

Isha continued.

Ian had said he wanted Thomas not to have to Hero everything, wanted Isha to be less compressed by Thomas’s approaching power and wanted them to have ordinary lives—proper happiness, in his words. He denied being a god. He called himself a man in England.

Then he gave her Tessa’s arrow.

Thomas glanced at it again.

“He produced that after the conversation started?”

“From his bag. The towel and water were already beside him before he knew I would board.”

Thomas’s eyes moved towards the empty bowl.

“The other things?”

“Some from the bag. Later he made photographs appear in his hand.”

The sentence waited for its own turn.

Isha told him how the arrow had changed her willingness to treat the conversation as merely impossible knowledge. She told him what Ian said about the reality engine following his instructions literally during this experiment, while often refusing, misinterpreting or inventing things at other times.

“He said he came to care about us,” Isha said. “He said meeting directly was the only way he could interact.”

Thomas’s expression changed slightly.

“Us.”

“He started with you. He said he thinks he has come to like me more.”

Thomas looked at her.

Isha held his gaze.

“He also said he has a little crush on me.”

Thomas’s eyes closed.

Not jealousy.

Isha knew the difference immediately.

He was trying very hard not to laugh at a point in the story where laughter felt morally questionable.

“You may,” she said.

Thomas covered his mouth with the hand not holding hers.

“That is generous.”

“He did not ask me for anything. I told him I would not return it.”

Thomas recovered enough to look at her again.

“Did he respect that?”

“Entirely.”

“Then his taste is inconvenient rather than dangerous.”

Isha raised an eyebrow.

“He also said the real version of him would enjoy being lifted and pinned by a real version of me.”

Thomas’s laugh escaped properly this time.

He bent forward, forehead nearly reaching their joined hands, while Isha waited with controlled patience.

“This is the part you find funny.”

Thomas sat up, still visibly failing to look repentant. “I’m sorry.”

“You are not.”

“No.”

His shoulders moved once more. When he sat up, his eyes were wet for a reason that had nothing to do with the wooden bird.

“Ian has a difficult relationship with self-preservation.”

“He repeatedly asked me to punch him.”

“That supports the diagnosis.”

The humour lasted only long enough to give them both room to breathe.

Thomas wiped beneath one eye and glanced again at the gifts.

“You said he started with me.”

“Yes.”

Isha hesitated before the next part.

“He said there is probably some of him in you.”

The last of Thomas’s amusement disappeared.

“What does that mean?”

“He named insecurity. Liking systems. Shrinking. Avoiding conflict.” She paused. “And some private things. I did not ask.”

Thomas’s first reaction was embarrassment on behalf of an absent man. His second lasted longer.

He turned the bird over.

“I like systems because Daniel did.” Thomas looked down at the bird again. “I shrink because Crownholt taught me that being easy to use kept other people safer. And because I already avoided conflict before that.”

Isha did not interrupt. The list did not need her agreement to remain his.

Thomas rubbed his thumb across the cut beneath the wooden wing.

“If he imagined some starting shape, that doesn’t mean he owns what caused it afterward.”

Isha’s hand tightened once around his. “I thought about that on the train.”

Thomas gave her a brief look of gratitude. He did not need reassurance that he was real; the bird in his hand and the life behind it were already too inconveniently specific for that. What bothered him was narrower: the possibility that traits he had spent years understanding as history might also have begun as preferences in a stranger’s mind.

Both could be true.

He disliked that possibility without needing to resolve it tonight.

“Did he say he made Daniel?”

“No. He said he imagined us in the fantasy world and here, and the thing gave us form. He was uncertain even about how to describe that.”

Thomas looked towards the photograph bundle still wrapped beneath the towel.

“Show me.”

Isha slid the photographs out from under the bowl lid.

The first showed a computer monitor beneath a webcam, a dark interface, project names and English text. Thomas put his glasses back on.

His face changed before he enlarged anything.

“That’s ChatGPT.”

“You know it.”

“Yes.”

The ordinary recognition was perhaps the strangest part. Thomas picked up the photograph by the edges. The interface belonged to the same broad category of Earth software he could have opened on a phone or laptop. The text inside it did not.

He found **Isekai 2.0** in the project sidebar.

Then **Employment and Life Planning**.

His own name appeared repeatedly in the conversation.

Isha’s too.

At the bottom of the visible exchange, Ian was composing words that Isha had heard later on the train.

Thomas read them twice.

“This photograph existed before he said these things to you.”

“He made it appear after I asked to see the mechanism. The text shows him preparing something he said a little later.”

Thomas turned the photograph over. Blank white.

He looked again at the date visible on the screen.

“August 2026.” Thomas looked from the printed date to Isha.

“For him. He said our time advanced faster than his over roughly three hundred and fifty chapters.”

Thomas’s mouth tightened at the word *chapters*.

Isha understood. She had already had her turn with it.

The second photograph showed the view from Ian’s window: garden, pale stone houses, trees climbing towards a hill. Thomas studied it for less time.

“This is somehow more invasive.”

“I thought so too.”

Thomas studied the ordinary houses beyond the photographed window. “It’s just a garden.”

“That was part of it.”

Thomas placed the photographs side by side.

A man in a room. A software interface. A garden beyond a window.

No throne. No celestial machinery. No divine geometry.

Thomas tapped the edge of the first photograph.

“He calls the system behind this ‘the thing’?”

“Yes. And our System called something in the geographic area an unknown anomaly while he was still in Sendai.”

Thomas leaned back.

“I think Ian is the obvious candidate.”

“So do I.” Isha glanced towards the correspondence cabinet. “It is still not proof.”

He picked up the correspondence notebook from the cabinet shelf beside him, then stopped.

“Not there.”

Isha watched him take a separate household notebook instead.

At the top of a blank page, Thomas wrote **IAN — observed / claimed**.

The act helped immediately.

Under **observed**, he wrote only what Isha could support: four encounters; repeated unexplained sense of significance; knowledge of Green Road and private relationship history; physical objects with remembered provenance; response to an unspoken thought; two photographs; anomalous message with no sender; apparent local reality effects involving the train and his clothing.

Under **claimed**, he wrote more slowly: their lives presented to him as narrative; some steering/editorial influence; external time not matching theirs; past immutable; future partly influenceable; no future high-drama death/separation; no physical return to their reality.

Thomas left space beneath both headings.

Then he added a third line on its own:

**16 AUG SYSTEM MESSAGE — Ian plausible anomaly; not established.**

He read the page and stopped.

“The thing in the photograph and the Hero System are probably not the same system.”

Isha looked towards him. “Because the System noticed him.”

“That is part of it. Ian spoke about the thing as what turns his prompts into our reality. The System exists inside our history, has its own grammar and apparently had to label his presence from here.” Thomas tapped the word *plausible*. “If he were simply operating the same System interface, I’d expect him to describe it differently. But that’s inference.”

Isha nodded.

Thomas was beginning to sound more like himself.

That helped her enough that she continued into the part she had been postponing.

“He can read thoughts.”

Thomas’s pen stopped.

Isha told him exactly how they discovered it. She had been thinking that Thomas would hear everything first. Ian answered the thought aloud, then covered his mouth when he realised what he had done.

The chair beneath Thomas became very still.

“He said books can tell readers what characters think.”

Thomas looked down at the notebook for several seconds. The claim was abstract until he pictured his own unspoken thoughts arriving as ordinary prose on someone else’s screen. “So from his side, our internal thoughts can appear there.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask him to stop?”

“I asked whether he could instruct the thing to show only what a reasonable observer could see. He said he could try. Later he told me he could not promise he would keep that limit or that the thing would obey.”

Thomas looked down at the notebook.

His reaction was quieter than Isha had expected and more severe.

“No.”

Isha waited.

“If my thoughts appear to him because whatever mechanism creates the prose exposes them, I may not be able to stop that.” Thomas looked up. “That is not permission.”

“I told him the same for mine.”

The answer settled one part of Thomas’s expression. He closed the notebook halfway, not enough to lose the page. “He knows where you stand.”

“He does.”

Thomas nodded once.

His thumb pressed against the edge of the notebook until the paper bowed.

Isha knew what this touched in him. Crownholt had controlled letters, rooms, movement and usefulness. It had never reached into thought. The privacy inside Thomas’s head had been one of the few things no handler could requisition.

Ian’s mechanism could apparently cross even that line without intending harm.

Isha moved her chair closer.

Thomas released the paper before it creased.

“He said he was trying not to,” she said. “I believed him.”

Thomas nodded once. The restraint mattered; so did the admitted limit. “And he still would not promise.”

“No.”

Thomas’s voice remained calm. He took her hand again, this time placing his thumb across the pale place where her ring usually sat.

“What did you tell him?”

“That he may care about me. That he may remain part of my life from where he is. With limits.”

Thomas listened while Isha gave him those limits.

No claim because he imagined her. No deliberate pain merely because overcoming it made a better story. No treating the fantasy world like a cupboard for objects. No romantic entitlement. No prayer, bargaining or deity-shaped place in the household.

She told him Ian had accepted some limits and refused to promise others.

Thomas absorbed this in silence.

Then Isha told him the promise Ian said he *could* make.

No more killing them for high drama.

No more ripping Isha away from Thomas.

No return to fantasy-scale Hero catastrophe as the governing shape of their life.

Normally, slice-of-life things.

Thomas’s face changed.

The relief was so immediate that he hated displaying it.

Isha recognised that too.

“He said he could promise?”

“Yes.”

Thomas looked down at the bird in his hand.

“I want that to be true.”

“So do I.”

Thomas’s gaze stayed on the old ribbon. “And if he is wrong about his own influence, the promise may not protect us from everything.”

“No. But he meant it.”

Thomas nodded.

He did not ruin the relief by requiring certainty it could not support.

“What about ordinary harm?”

“He said he would not remove all conflict, illness or grief. I told him I did not want that either.”

Thomas’s mouth moved faintly.

“Good.”

Isha gave him a look.

“I have lived with you too long to request a world in which nothing inconvenient happens.”

“That sounded affectionate.”

“It was intended as a warning.”

He turned the wooden bird once more.

Another subject remained.

Isha told him Ian had used children as an example.

Thomas’s eyes rose immediately.

“He what?”

“Not as a decision.”

She explained. Ian said he might steer them towards the discussion at some point, suggest concerns or feelings, but would not choose the answer for them. Isha had told him he could bring them to the table; he did not choose what they said across it.

Thomas’s shoulders lowered.

“That is still an extraordinary sentence to hear from someone claiming editorial influence over our lives.”

“Yes.”

He glanced towards the wedding notebook in the cabinet.

“We were going to talk about children again eventually.”

“I know.”

Thomas exhaled and let the unopened future remain where it was. “Not tonight.”

“Not tonight.”

The answer came easily.

Thomas looked relieved for a second reason.

Isha continued to the last parts of the conversation: Ian’s request for permission to remain somehow connected, his insistence that he did not want worship or bargaining, her conditional yes, and his refusal to promise complete privacy. She told Thomas about the possibility of addressing him across the fourth wall if something truly mattered, without knowing whether Ian would hear.

Thomas stared at her.

“You negotiated a complaint channel.”

“I told him complaints were not worship.”

Thomas rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That is sensible enough to be irritating.”

“He also advised me not to get taken to a psychiatric hospital for talking to the air.”

Thomas removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“I dislike how often his practical advice is sound.”

“So did I.”

She told him about Ian changing his Lysenne shirt into an image of Isha in her old Wood Elf clothes. Thomas put his glasses back on solely to look offended more accurately.

“He did what?”

“I preferred Lysenne.”

“That was the correct response.”

The remaining pieces came more slowly.

Ian had said all he could send was imagination. He had asked for permission to remain connected. He wanted to look out of his own window and hope Thomas and Isha were happy. Sometimes, less nobly, he wanted to know when Isha would lift weights again.

Thomas’s eyes closed.

“You told him you still do?”

“Yes.”

Thomas’s smile returned despite himself. “Good.”

“You are enjoying that too much.”

Thomas did not deny it.

Then Isha told him about the train itself: how it had kept offering a station near flat 202 until she decided to leave. How Ian said she could stay as long as she wanted. How he seemed to understand that the version of him on the train and the version typing at the computer were not identical experiences even though they were both him.

Thomas wrote nothing for a while.

Finally he said, “His explanation might be wrong.”

“I know.”

Thomas looked around the table. The facts did not depend on Ian’s preferred terminology. “He knew Green Road. He produced objects. He answered a thought. The message exists. Whatever he is, we don’t need his full metaphysics to accept that something happened.”

Isha leaned back.

“That is close to what I thought.”

Thomas looked at her.

“Are you angry with him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you hate him?”

Isha considered the message.

*I hope you did and you don't hate me.*

“No.”

Thomas nodded as though the answer were neither surprising nor required.

“Are you glad you met him?”

Isha looked at the arrow.

“Yes.”

That answer hurt more.

Thomas reached across the table and pulled her chair the final few centimetres until their knees touched.

Isha leaned forward and let her forehead rest against his shoulder.

For several minutes they stopped discussing reality.

Thomas held her.

His hand moved slowly over the back of her head, fingers avoiding the loosened braid. Isha’s arms went around his waist. The old green ribbon lay on the table within sight but outside the touch.

When she eventually lifted her head, Thomas kissed her forehead.

“You smell like a long run and a metaphysical argument.”

“He gave me a towel.”

“That did not solve either.”

Isha’s laugh was muffled against his shirt.

It was nearly six before either of them looked at a clock.

Thomas had been home early because an afternoon meeting had been cancelled and he had brought reading with him rather than starting another office task. The accidental timing now felt suspicious only because everything felt suspicious.

They agreed not to make it one.

There was one person they both knew they needed to call.

“Kanno,” Thomas said.

“Yes.”

Isha reached for her phone.

---

The message they sent was short.

**Can you come to 202 tonight? The English man spoke to Isha again. No emergency. We need to tell you what happened.**

Kanno replied after three minutes.

**How impossible?**

Thomas looked at Isha.

She typed:

**More.**

The reply came almost immediately.

**Seven thirty. Eat before I arrive.**

Thomas looked at the message.

“She is becoming predictable.”

“She told us to eat.”

“That is unfortunately reasonable.”

Isha showered while Thomas remained at the table.

He did not examine the objects like evidence.

He tried once.

The attempt lasted until he turned the wooden bird over and found the shallow cut beneath the left wing again. After that he simply held it.

The memories continued arriving in scraps too small for any official history. Mira had kept the bird on a shelf that later acquired a jar of nails because Rowan had nowhere better to put them. Tessa had stolen it once to use as a target for a game Thomas could no longer reconstruct and been made to return it because he cried. Years later, when Mira gave it back before the western road, Thomas had been embarrassed to discover that he still wanted it.

He could not remember where it had been during the final campaign.

Magic Pocket, perhaps. One of the house bundles. Left at the farm after the death cover. The exact chain had not mattered enough to preserve.

Now it sat in his hand.

The uncertainty around its route did not make the object less his.

Thomas put the bird down and touched the ribbon instead.

The dark green looked almost black beside the wood.

He remembered Isha handing it to him when Magic Pocket had still felt like a useful trick rather than one item in the inventory of impossible things that would eventually make kingdoms dangerous. He remembered using it as a test because it mattered and because they were trying to learn whether the spell cared about meaning.

Later, inside the High Elf preserve, possession of something Isha had chosen to give him had become evidence in other people’s hands.

The pattern made him grimace.

Even their romantic relics had administrative history.

The bathroom door opened.

Isha returned in loose trousers and a soft grey top, hair damp and unbraided. The engagement ring was back on her hand.

Thomas noticed immediately.

Isha saw him notice.

“I wanted it back.”

He smiled.

She came around the table, took the green ribbon and held it against her hair. The colour still belonged there.

“Do you want to wear it?” Thomas asked.

“Not tonight.”

She folded it and placed it beside the bird again.

Thomas started rice because Kanno had ordered them to eat and because cooking something simple gave his hands a problem with known outcomes. Isha cut cucumber and tomatoes. They made grilled fish from what was already in the refrigerator and ate without turning dinner into an event.

The impossible objects stayed on the far end of the table.

Neither moved them out of sight.

At seven twenty-six the lift stopped on their floor.

Kanno knocked once.

---

She entered 202 wearing the same black work bag she carried most weekdays and an expression that had already rejected several possible explanations on the way over.

Her eyes found Isha first.

Then Thomas.

Then the arrow on the table.

Kanno stopped taking off her shoes.

“That was not here before.”

“No,” Isha said.

Kanno finished removing her shoes and put the work bag beside the genkan wall. “Your message understated the object count.”

Thomas waited until she reached the LDK before answering. “We did not know how to summarise.”

“I noticed.”

She sat at the dining table.

No tea had been poured yet. Thomas had set the kettle ready and three cups beside it, but the table already contained too much.

Kanno looked at the arrow, bowl, bird, ribbon and two photographs. Her gaze moved between them in the order of visual difference rather than emotional significance.

“What happened?”

Thomas answered before Isha.

“The English man claims he has been reading our lives as a story and has some ability to influence what happens through an external system.”

Kanno looked at him.

Then at Isha.

“Start smaller.”

Isha almost smiled.

She put her phone in front of Kanno.

“This arrived after I came home.”

Kanno read Ian’s message.

Her eyes moved to the top of the screen.

“No sender.”

“None,” Thomas said.

Kanno tapped once near where a contact or number should have appeared, then stopped rather than experimenting with the phone. “Can you reply?”

Isha opened the message thread. There was no reply field.

“No.”

Kanno handed the phone back.

“So Ian acquired a name after leaving.”

“Yes.”

Kanno returned the phone. “And he says goodbye as though we have already reached the part where I understand anything else.”

“That is why you are here.”

Thomas poured tea.

The action gave Kanno time to look at the arrow again.

Isha told the story from the train in a more compressed form than she had used with Thomas. She began with **Green Road**, because that was where ordinary explanations ended. She did not attempt to reproduce every sentence Ian had said. The objects carried the sequence for her.

When she placed Tessa’s arrow directly in front of Kanno, Kanno did not touch it.

“You are certain.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

Isha described the corrected binding, the short feather, the small nick and the ash mark. She told Kanno that Tessa had made two and that Kelda had returned the surviving one after the Broken Court.

Kanno looked at Thomas.

“Can you confirm it?”

“Not the tiny corrections the way Isha can. I know Tessa made the pair. I know what her early arrows looked like. This is consistent.” Thomas’s hand rested around his cup. “And it is not the only object.”

He slid the wooden bird across.

Kanno picked that up.

She turned it over once, then looked at Thomas’s face.

“You made this?”

“At nine.”

“It shows.”

Thomas took the insult without defending his childhood craft.

Kanno’s thumb stopped near the shallow cut beneath the wing.

“He knew about this object?”

“Ian apparently had access to enough of the story to know it existed. Isha says he asked the reality engine to provide it.”

Kanno put the bird down.

“Reality engine.”

“His language was worse,” Isha said.

“He tried architect.”

Kanno looked at her.

“I corrected him.”

“Good.”

Thomas slid the dark-green ribbon forward.

Kanno knew less about this. She had heard broad accounts of the early roads and later separation, but not every object that had moved between Thomas and Isha or the storage experiments behind them.

Isha explained the ribbon in three sentences.

Kanno touched the cloth only after Isha nodded.

The wear along the edge interested her more than the colour.

“This isn't new.”

“No,” Isha said.

Kanno let the cloth run lightly between two fingers before returning it. “You believe it is the same ribbon.”

“I do.”

Kanno returned it exactly where it had been.

The bowl came next.

There was no food left to show.

Kanno looked inside anyway.

Isha described the meal from Sereth and the memory it returned. Her voice changed enough that Kanno stopped asking questions until she finished.

“You ate it all.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The answer matched Thomas’s so closely that Isha looked between them.

Kanno noticed.

“I am not wasting the impossible elf-mother food for testing.”

Thomas said, “That was my reasoning.”

“You are both occasionally correct.”

The tea had cooled enough to drink.

Kanno took one sip and reached for the photographs.

She handled them properly: fingertips at the corners, glossy faces kept apart until she had looked at the first.

The computer image held her longer than any object except the arrow.

“I know this interface.”

“So does Thomas,” Isha said.

Kanno leaned closer.

The photograph contained monitor glare, the upper frame of the screen and the webcam above it. It was plainly a photograph *of* a monitor rather than a screenshot printed onto paper.

She read the visible project names.

Her mouth tightened at **Isekai 2.0**.

Then she found the text.

“This is the conversation you were having.”

“Part of it.”

Kanno leaned nearer to the photographed monitor, following the visible composition box. “And his text is there before he said it to you.”

“Yes.”

Kanno looked at the date.

“2026.”

“He says his time does not match ours,” Thomas said. “He experiences the story in chapters across a shorter external period.”

Kanno did not answer immediately. She lifted the second photograph instead.

Garden. Houses. Hill. Window frame.

“This one proves less.”

“Yes,” Isha said.

“I believe it more.”

Thomas’s eyebrows rose.

Kanno placed both photographs side by side. “The first photograph is evidence selected to demonstrate a mechanism. The second is the sort of photograph someone sends because they want you to know where they sit when they think about you.”

Isha had felt almost exactly that and disliked hearing Kanno articulate it so neatly.

Kanno looked at her. “Did that bother you?”

“Yes.”

“More than the computer?”

“Differently.”

Kanno accepted the answer.

Thomas gave her the notebook with **observed / claimed**.

“This is where we are.”

Kanno read the observed column first.

Her eyes stopped at **response to unspoken thought**.

She looked at Isha.

“He read your mind.”

“Not like a spell.”

“That is not the part of the sentence I object to.”

Isha described what happened after Sereth’s meal. She had thought that Thomas would hear everything first. Ian answered the thought aloud and immediately looked horrified.

Kanno’s face became flatter as the explanation continued.

“He can see interior narration.”

“That is his model,” Thomas said. “He admitted he can't reliably promise not to.”

Kanno put the notebook down.

For once, no dry reply arrived immediately.

Thomas watched her fingers settle around the tea cup.

“I told him he does not have permission for mine,” he said. “Isha told him the same for hers.”

“Can he honour that?”

“He said he might ask the mechanism to restrict itself to observable narrative,” Isha said. “Then later admitted he did not trust himself or the mechanism enough to promise.”

Kanno looked towards the ordinary ceiling of flat 202.

Thomas knew what she was checking because he had done it himself once after Isha showered.

Nothing waited there.

Kanno looked back at them.

“I don't know how to protect a thought from a text box.”

“No,” Thomas said.

“I also don't intend to start editing what I say because an English man in another reality may read the paragraph later.”

The sentence was not advice. Kanno picked up her tea again immediately afterward and drank.

Isha let the practical refusal stand.

Thomas turned the notebook towards the **claimed** column.

Kanno read more slowly now.

The past immutable.

Future partly steerable.

No more Hero-scale death and forced separation.

No physical return.

She stopped at the promise.

“He promised not to kill either of you again.”

The words sounded absurd in Kanno’s voice.

“Yes,” Isha said.

Kanno sat with them for a few seconds.

“I dislike that I am relieved.”

“So do I,” Thomas said.

“Fine.”

Kanno continued reading.

She reached **some of Ian in Thomas** and looked up.

Thomas lifted one hand. “We have already had that conversation once.”

“I haven't.”

“You don't need it.”

Kanno ignored him and looked at Isha.

“What did he mean?”

“Insecurity. Systems. Shrinking himself. Avoiding conflict. Some private things.”

Kanno’s gaze returned to Thomas.

Thomas looked offended. “This is not a diagnostic checklist.”

“No. It is annoyingly plausible.”

He opened his mouth.

Kanno lifted one finger and returned to the notebook before an argument could form.

Thomas stared at her, then at Isha.

Isha did not rescue him.

The next line produced a different reaction.

**Ian asked permission to remain connected / part of Isha’s life; conditional yes.**

Kanno read it twice.

“You gave him permission.”

“For me.”

Kanno’s gaze flicked towards Thomas and then back. “Only for yourself.”

“Yes. I told him I could not give him Thomas’s permission, yours, Kelda’s or anyone else’s.”

Kanno nodded. “Good.”

Thomas leaned back in his chair.

“Ian apparently likes you.”

Kanno’s eyes narrowed.

Isha said, “He said he is coming to like you and finds you funny.”

Kanno looked at the booklet shelf as though *Until Replaced* had personally created the problem.

“I sold him one book.”

“That was enough,” Isha said.

“This is excessive reader retention.”

Thomas laughed.

Kanno did not.

For almost three seconds.

Then her mouth betrayed her.

The humour passed quickly. The table still held an arrow from another world.

Kanno turned to Isha.

“And he has a crush on you.”

Thomas made a small sound into his tea.

Isha looked at him first.

“You have already used your allowance.”

“I said nothing.”

“You made a sound.”

Kanno looked between them. “I am pleased at least one component of this is stupid.”

Isha told her the rest because omission would only make the stupidity more dangerous later: Ian’s reassurance that he did not want to write himself into their romantic dynamic, his unfortunate admission about being lifted and pinned, and Isha’s equally unfortunate confirmation that she had inferred the preference.

Kanno put her cup down very carefully.

“I regret knowing this.”

“So did he,” Isha said.

“That helps slightly.”

Thomas’s shoulders were moving again.

Kanno looked at him. “You are enjoying this because it is not your private preference being discussed.”

Thomas stopped laughing with visible effort.

Isha decided not to mention Ian’s phrase *some private things* again.

The conversation moved back to the parts that mattered.

Kanno asked whether Ian had called himself a god.

“No,” Isha said. “Repeatedly the opposite.”

“He said all he could send was imagination,” Thomas added. “He seems to think his influence is mediated through the interface rather than an in-world power he personally possesses.”

Kanno looked at Tessa’s arrow.

“That is a strange definition of *all*.”

“We told him that too.”

Isha described the T-shirt changing from Lysenne to an image of her old Wood Elf self. Kanno’s face went briefly blank.

“He wore you.”

“On a shirt.”

Kanno closed her eyes briefly. “I understood the grammar.”

“I told him Lysenne was better.”

Kanno considered that and nodded. “Correct.”

Thomas looked from one woman to the other.

“I’m glad the anime has become a stable metaphysical reference.”

Neither rewarded him.

Kanno returned to the external photographs.

“This photograph shows ChatGPT.”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

Kanno looked from the familiar interface to the impossible arrow on the table. “Are you saying ChatGPT makes reality?”

“No.” Thomas answered quickly enough that her expression softened a fraction. “We are saying Ian uses that interface to interact with something he describes as generating or resolving our reality. We don't know what the causal chain is. The software in the photograph is observable. His explanation of what it ultimately does is his claim.”

Kanno looked at him for a long moment.

“Better,” she said. “Now you are separating what is in the photograph from what Ian says it means.”

Thomas’s mouth opened, then closed. He accepted the correction.

They returned to the System message.

Isha fetched the correspondence notebook and opened it to 16 August.

**INFORMATION ONLY: UNKNOWN ANOMALY PRESENT IN GEOGRAPHIC AREA**

Kanno read the line.

Then the passage time.

Then the thirty-cycle count.

“Ian was in Sendai.”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

Kanno read the dated hotel note next. “His hotel was still open then. And the System did not call him dangerous.”

“No. It did not call him a person either.”

Kanno traced no finger across the page, but her gaze followed the wording as if checking typography.

“Information only.”

“That was one of the reasons we did not do anything,” Isha said.

Kanno looked at the arrow.

“Now?”

Thomas shook his head.

“Now he is apparently gone. The train was taking him towards the airport. He told Isha he would never enter this reality again. Then the final message said goodbye.”

Kanno looked towards Isha rather than Thomas. “Could he be lying?”

“Yes,” Isha said. “I do not think he was.”

Thomas did not contradict her.

Kanno closed the correspondence notebook.

“Then Ian is the best candidate for the anomaly and we still do not know that the anomaly was Ian.”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

“Good. I dislike when impossible things make standards easier.”

She slid the notebook back.

The kettle clicked softly as it cooled.

Outside, evening had deepened enough that the balcony glass reflected the three of them faintly over the darkened buildings beyond.

Kanno looked at the gifts again.

“One question.”

Isha waited.

“If that arrow is the actual arrow Tessa had, does Tessa still have it?”

The question had been sitting beneath the table from the moment Thomas understood what the object was.

He looked at Isha.

“I asked Ian not to keep taking things from our old world,” she said. “I told him it was not a cupboard. He agreed with the boundary in the sense that he heard it. We did not establish how these objects were sourced.”

Thomas rubbed his palm over the back of his neck.

“The bird may already have been lost with me. The ribbon may have been lost with us. The arrow was with Tessa.”

“According to Kelda’s final account,” Kanno said.

“Yes.”

Kanno studied the fletching.

“So the next page asks.”

The September window was still weeks away.

Thomas imagined the sentence in Common and hated it.

*Do you still have the arrow? We have it too.*

Isha understood his face.

“We cannot avoid the question because it is difficult.”

“No.”

“Do we tell them about Ian?”

Thomas did not answer immediately.

Kanno looked between them but did not offer a solution.

The fantasy-world circle knew Thomas and Isha survived on Earth. They knew the System still moved tiny pages. Telling them that an English man claiming to observe their lives had produced one of Tessa’s arrows would widen the metaphysical problem without giving anyone there a useful action.

But if the arrow had vanished from Tessa’s possession, silence would leave her with an impossible loss.

Thomas tapped the table once.

“Ask about the arrow first. Say an impossible event on Earth put an ash-marked arrow in Isha’s hands that she believes is Tessa’s surviving one. Ask whether Tessa still has hers.”

Isha nodded.

“No explanation of Ian until we know what happened to the object.”

Kanno said, “That seems proportionate.”

Thomas wrote the outgoing-page note in the correspondence notebook.

He did not draft the Common sentence yet.

Another thread remained closer to home.

“What do we tell Matsuda?” Kanno asked.

“Nothing,” Thomas and Isha said almost together.

Kanno looked satisfied.

Thomas continued after a moment. “He does not know Green Road. Explaining Ian would require explaining everything underneath him first. There is no practical reason.”

“Neighbours?”

“No.”

“Employers?”

Thomas gave her a look.

“I am checking whether reality collapse has damaged your judgement.”

“It has not.”

“Good.”

Kanno stood and carried her empty cup to the kitchen without asking where it belonged. She had used 202 often enough to know. Thomas followed with the others.

Isha remained at the table.

The impossible objects looked different with three people knowing about them. Isha stayed at the table while Kanno returned and sat beside her this time rather than across from her.

“What did you tell him when he asked permission?”

Isha repeated the answer more fully.

She had permitted Ian to remain part of *her* life from afar. She had refused any claim of ownership. She had allowed care and hope. She had asked him not to turn pain into entertainment, not to mine the fantasy world for keepsakes, not to intrude on thoughts if he could avoid it. Ian had been honest that he could not guarantee every boundary.

Kanno listened with her hands folded loosely on the table.

“And you told him he may sometimes hear you if you deliberately speak outward.”

“Yes.”

Kanno’s fingers tightened loosely together on the table. “Are you going to use it?”

“I do not know.”

Thomas returned from the kitchen and leaned against the end of the table.

Isha looked at him.

“He said I should not constantly wonder whether he is listening. He might not know either.”

“That is one of the healthier things he said,” Thomas replied.

Kanno’s gaze moved towards the ceiling again.

“I am not addressing the ceiling.”

“No one asked you to.”

“Good.”

She looked back at Isha.

“If you ever do say something, tell Thomas afterward.”

“I would.”

Thomas crossed his arms.

“I appreciate being included in the policy meeting about communications with the semi-author.”

Kanno’s expression barely changed. “You married an elf from a different reality before legally marrying her on Earth. Your complaint about procedure is late.”

“We are not married yet.”

“That is the part you chose to correct.”

Isha laughed.

For a few minutes, the room became almost ordinary.

Then Thomas picked up the wooden bird again.

Kanno watched his thumb find the shallow cut beneath the wing.

“What do you remember?” she asked.

Thomas looked down.

“A workbench.”

No one spoke.

He continued because the memory had already arrived, not because Kanno had requested a story.

“My father made me use the small knife. I thought the grain ruined the wing. He said the grain had been there first.” Thomas turned the bird. “Mara said the chest looked like a potato.”

Isha smiled.

Kanno leaned closer to inspect it.

“It does.”

Thomas looked offended on behalf of his nine-year-old self.

Kanno remained unmoved.

He found another mark near the tail, a tiny flattened cut whose edge had darkened with age.

“I did this trying to fix the first mistake.”

His thumb rested there.

“I remember that too.”

The three of them looked at the bird.

No interface appeared.

No message arrived.

Thomas turned it once more in his hand.