He helped everyone, yet no one knew his name.
He moved like smoke between the cracks of the city—fast enough that the eye could not catch him. Some whispered he was invisible. Others swore he was never really there to begin with.
But the results remained. A child pulled from fire. A thief stopped mid-strike. A scream answered before it became a sound.
He brought justice not through courts or kings, but through quiet hands and unseen steps. He was the whisper after danger passed. The ghost of mercy.
It is said he had the power to change the very shape of things.
A narrator once wrote of a robber, wild-eyed and desperate, holding a gun to an old woman's head. Then—before the trigger could even think to twitch—it became a stick.
A branch. Smooth. Harmless.
The criminal cried and fell to his knees, weeping at the absurdity of it all.
No one saw the hero.
But the old woman looked to the sky, and for a moment, she smiled—like she had recognized something no one else could see.
His gift was called carnation. Not illusion. Not magic. But the changing of things by soul, not by will.
And still, no one remembered him.
Not his name. Not his face.
Only the effects.
Only the silence that followed wonder.
It is said he came from nowhere—
And yet, he arrived just in time.
There are stories that stretch across generations, not because they are told, but because they are felt. Legends that exist not in the records of scribes, but in the hush that falls when a street grows silent, or in the flicker of candlelight when the night leans too close.
So it was with Robert Rous.
No one truly saw him. Not clearly. He was a shape in the mist. A breath on the neck just before calamity passed. He left no mark, and yet every mark bore his trace.
They called him the Unranked Hero, not because he lacked merit, but because no scale could hold his weight. No title could contain him. He belonged to no faction, no force, no royal bloodline.
He simply was.
They said he moved so swiftly that eyes mistook his form for wind. That he once caught a falling child midair three stories high—before even the scream escaped the mother's throat. That he stood, once, between a city and a siege, and by the time the invaders realized they had stepped into danger, their weapons were reeds and their war songs were whispers.
He didn't kill. He didn't boast. He simply changed things.
Not through violence.
Through carnation.
That was his gift. Or his curse.
He could change the essence of a thing—not just its appearance, but its being. A burning log could become a pool of water. A sword, a dove. A lie, a truth. He once turned a battlefield into a garden, they say—though none can say where or when. Only that it happened, and no one could find the field again.
The world does not remember him.
But it remembers around him.
Footprints without feet. Stories with no speaker. A legacy of missing pages, where all that remains is the effect—never the cause.
So who is Robert Rous?
Is he a man? A myth? A message?
Some believe he is a soul trapped between worlds—born in one, remembered in another. A thread sewn into a story that forgot the needle. Others whisper he is a relic of a failed future, walking backward through time to correct what cannot be seen.
And some say—quietly, carefully—that he never left.
That he walks still. Just outside of time. Just out of sight. That when things shift unexpectedly, when the impossible becomes real and the world pretends it didn't notice… that's him. That's Robert Rous.
He is not a mistake.
He is not an accident.
He is a question the world cannot answer.
---
Robert closed the book, the final words etched like flame behind his eyes.
"He is a question the world cannot answer."
He stared at his reflection in the library's dusty window. Not quite himself. Not quite anyone.
Who was he, truly?
Was he born of this world or another? A fiction walked into life—or a life written into fiction?
And if his presence here wasn't a mistake… what was it?
A warning?
A correction?
Or a beginning?
He didn't know.
But he could feel it now—deep in his bones.
The story wasn't finished.
Not even close.