Chapter 30 – A Cold Revelation

June 1966

For weeks after finding the journal, I walked the fine line between solace and madness.

Its presence had answered one question—yes, I had lived before. Yes, I had been Sylvain Noirel: psychologist, brother, son. But in answering that question, the journal posed a hundred more, none of them kind.

Who—or what—had placed it here? Had it traveled with me, somehow buried and lost, only to be revealed now? Or had it been delivered after the fact, placed on that shelf with intent? And if so, by whom?

And then there was the matter of the final entry. That unfinished thought about Mahya, about memory lying. That phrase had nested in my mind, carving itself into the tissue of my doubt. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The idea that memory chooses what to reveal—that some truths don't vanish, but retreat—lurking just behind the veil, waiting for something to draw them forth.

It came to me on a still morning in early June.

I had just reread a section of the journal, searching for something—anything—to ground me. My fingertips brushed across the familiar curl of my sister's name, and I remembered how she'd laughed at me when I refused to read her favorite book.

"You're a psychologist, Sylvain. You'd love it," she had said, waving the paperback in front of me. "It's all repressed desire and supernatural metaphors. Come on—just try the first one."

I had refused, of course. I had deadlines, patients, and case notes to transcribe. I had no time for glittering vampire romances and teenage melodrama.

But I remembered the name she had said with a teasing grin.

"You'd be Volturi, definitely."

And suddenly, I couldn't breathe.

The name..

The name.....

Volturi

Not from history, and not from the fragmented memories of this second life.

From fiction.

From a book I'd never read—but had heard of, tangentially, on the lips of my sister.

A chill bled through me. I stood, light-headed, staggering toward the cellar wall as though struck.

No...

No, it wasn't possible.

I tore open the journal again, flipping through pages until I found the date.

August 28, 20xx

She had scribbled it in.

"Started rereading Twilight. Don't judge. Aro still creeps me out, but Demetri is weirdly hot."

And there it was, undeniable.

My sister had been a fan.

The Volturi weren't ancient history. They were fiction, characters, and part of a story. A series of novels that had never interested me—until now.

And yet here I was, living in a world where their name was whispered by a dying vampire near the Rhône. Where ruins bore markings I'd made instinctively, like a warning to others who walked the same inhuman path. Where thirst clawed at me each day, and the sun was an enemy of marble skin.

I pressed a hand against the desk, grounding myself.

This couldn't be a coincidence.

It couldn't

The crack in the mirror, the hallucinations. The instincts that weren't mine.

The Volturi.

I had dismissed the name after the monastery, and when the mad vampire gasped it through bloodied lips. Had filed it away under myth—an echo of something ancient and irrelevant.

But it wasn't ancient.

It was modern, marketed, and mass-produced.

It was a story.

I stumbled back to the mirror I had shrouded since the last incident. Pulled the cloth away, heart thrumming.

This time, the reflection held.

But I didn't recognize the man in it.

He looked like me—sharper, paler, hollowed out by years of silence—but something in his eyes had changed. A glint of knowing, and a shadow of horror dawning just behind the iris.

I whispered it aloud.

"Twilight."

The word felt absurd on my tongue, foreign and juvenile.

And yet I could see it now. The golden eyes, the silent strength, the venom, the thirst, the glittering skin, and the inhuman beauty.

It was all there, hidden in plain sight.

I was inside a story.

No—worse.

I was trapped inside it.

A world born from paper and ink, now solid beneath my feet.

I clutched the edge of the desk, trembling.

If this was true… if this world was truly the one imagined by that author—

What else did that mean?

Had my transformation been chance, or design? Was I the only one here who remembered Earth? Was this some kind of punishment? A cosmic joke?

Or had someone—or something—placed me here for a reason?

I thought of Mahya again. Her theories about narrative identity. How some patients believed they were characters in stories, not because they were delusional, but because reality had become too fragmented to trust.

She used to say, "When you lose control of your narrative, it finds ways to rewrite you."

Had that happened to me?

I wandered upstairs, journal clutched to my chest. The sun was weak that morning, filtered through a clouded sky, casting no dangerous gleam.

I walked the vineyard path in a daze.

What was real?

Was this real?

The birdsong, the soil, and the way the air still smelled faintly of lavender and distant fire.

Or had I imagined all of it?

I sat beneath the old cypress tree and looked up at the morning sky.

In the distance, thunder stirred.

Something was coming. I didn't know what.

But I knew, now, the rules of this world were not natural.

They were narrative.

And somewhere, in the pages I never read—in the lines my sister once underlined and mocked—lay the future I was being pulled toward.

And the Volturi?

They weren't just fiction anymore.

They were waiting.