The Exiled Elf Prince Next Door Dies on Day Seventy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Day One
She wakes as the farmer of her favorite game and finds the grumpy neighbor is the elf prince who dies on Day Seventy. His hand closes on her wrist: 'Say my name again.'
Aoi Sakurai woke up to a rooster, which was wrong, because her office had no rooster.
She lay still under a patched yellow quilt and looked at the ceiling.
The beams were dark wood, with a crack shaped like a lightning bolt over the bed.
She had stared at that crack for two thousand hours.
She had stared at it on her phone, on the train, and on her lunch break under her desk.
The last thing she remembered was 3:40 in the morning at her desk.
The Sunhollow Days theme song had been playing very quietly on her phone while her heart did something awful in her chest.
Now the song was real, and it was the birds.
She sat up.
Her hands were small and pink and had no calluses at all.
Her hair fell over her shoulders in two long black braids.
She was wearing the cream shirt and denim overalls she had picked for her farmer on the first day of the game.
"No," Aoi said. "No way."
She pinched her arm and it hurt.
She said "Menu" out loud, and nothing came, because there was no menu.
She said it again, louder, for a rooster.
Then she ran outside in her socks.
The farmhouse porch looked out on the valley, and the valley was exactly right.
Green hills lay under a pink sky, with the village of Pellmoor smoking quietly in the distance.
A wooden fence ran around her plot, and the shipping bin stood at the gate with its little red flag.
A single brown hen stood in the dirt and stared at her.
"Hello, Biscuit," Aoi whispered.
The hen did not say anything, and that was the most real thing so far.
Aoi put both hands over her mouth and laughed until she cried.
She knew this farm by heart.
Turnip seeds were in the chest by the door and a hoe was in the shed.
Mother's pear jam sat on the pantry shelf, one jar, free, for the first neighbor gift.
She knew the cat in the village, the baker's schedule, and which night the fireworks went off over the square.
She also knew that this was Spring the First.
On Autumn the Fourteenth, at the Harvest Festival, the worst ending in the game would begin.
She turned her head slowly toward the next plot.
Plot Two was a rectangle of grey stony dirt with a leaning hut at the back and no crops at all.
A man stood in the middle of it.
He was very tall and lean, in a dark green coat worn through at the elbows.
A long green scarf was wound twice around his neck.
His hair was ash-grey and tied low at his nape, and it lifted a little in the wind.
Under the hair, his ears came to a point.
He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at the dead ground.
Aoi's stomach dropped.
"The Silent Neighbor," she said, very quietly.
In two thousand hours she had unlocked him once.
It took eight hearts and a hundred and eleven gifts.
The reward was a hidden route that nobody on the forums could explain.
Then, on Autumn the Fourteenth, soldiers in grey came down the valley road in torchlight.
They burned his field.
He walked out in front of her farmhouse with a sword he had sworn never to draw.
He stood on the fence between the plots until the fire reached him.
She had cried for an hour.
She had never gone back to that save file.
Aoi looked at the real man on the real ground, with his real breath fogging in the cold.
Seventy days, she thought.
I have seventy days.
She went into the house, took the pear jam off the shelf, and marched across her yard to the fence.
He heard her coming, and his shoulders went stiff.
"This is my land," he said without turning around.
His voice was low and rough and tired.
"I know." She climbed the fence and dropped onto his stones.
"I did not say you could come over."
"I brought jam. It's pear. You like pear."
He turned his head.
His eyes were green, and they were very cold.
"I do not know you," he said. "And I have told no one what I like."
"I know that too, Caelrin."
He moved faster than she could see.
One second he was ten feet away.
The next his hand was around her wrist, tight, but not enough to hurt, with his thumb flat on her pulse.
The jam jar stayed in her other hand and did not so much as clink.
He had pulled her close enough that she could smell cold air and cedar and, faintly, woodsmoke.
He was staring down at her face.
"Say my name again," he said.
Her heart was going so hard he had to feel it under his thumb.
"Caelrin Aldoreth," Aoi said. "Third son of the Elf King. Exiled two years ago for refusing to burn the border mills."
His grip did not loosen.
"Nobody in this valley knows that."
"I do." She swallowed. "And in seventy days an army burns this field with you standing in it."
Something moved behind his eyes, slow and dangerous.
He did not let go of her wrist.
"Then you had better tell me how," he said, "all of it, starting now."
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