Chapter 36: Chapter 36: Dinner and a Promise
Dinner was loud.
This was Eclipse’s contribution.
She arrived at the table with the specific energy of someone who had worked very hard during training and was now handling the resulting hunger as though it were a personal affront, and she communicated this primarily through noise.
"I am extremely hungry," she said, settling into her chair with the kind of emphasis that suggested this was a statement of national importance.
"You left," Alex said.
"I left gracefully," Eclipse corrected.
"There’s a difference." She looked at the spread on the table and immediately reached for the bread with the directness of someone who had decided that manners could wait for the second course.
"Also, Zara told me there were at least three more things mother was planning to explain and I took a strategic withdrawal before I started forgetting the earlier parts to make room for new information."
Zara, seated across from Alex, picked up her chopsticks with the measured calm of someone who was not going to acknowledge that she had absolutely also felt the same way and had managed it differently purely by walking faster.
"The information will be relevant," Vespera said, from her seat at the head of the table, with the composure of a woman who did not acknowledge complaints about her briefing length.
"All information is relevant until there’s too much of it and then it becomes noise," Eclipse said, through bread.
"It sounds like a complaint, Eclipse."
"It’s wearing complaint’s clothing, but it has different intentions, mom"
Alex looked between his sister and his mother and thought, not for the first time, that Eclipse was the only person alive who argued with Vespera Abyss about anything and did it comfortably, without calculation, because the love underneath the arguing was so established that neither of them were afraid of the argument.
’I want that,’ he thought. ’Not just for myself. I want it to stay intact. Whatever’s coming, I want this to stay.’
Zara passed him the soup without being asked, and he took it without comment, and neither of them said anything about that, and it was exactly the kind of small thing that happened between people who had been paying attention to each other.
Dinner moved the way family dinners do when no one is performing for anyone.
Eclipse complained about a training partner who had the technique of a master and the spatial awareness of a turnip.
Vespera offered one clinical suggestion that resolved the described problem in about twelve words, then moved on before Eclipse could process the implication.
Zara ate with the appreciation of someone who had not always eaten well, and said, at one point, that this was the best spiced lamb she had eaten since Vespera had brought her here, which she said in the same tone as someone stating a fact rather than giving a compliment, and Vespera accepted it in the same register.
Alex ate.
He listened.
He let himself be in the room fully rather than inside his head, which was harder than it sounded when the inside of his head was a fairly interesting place to be.
After the second course, when the conversation had settled into something quieter, Eclipse looked at him.
"Are you okay?" she said. "And don’t do the thing where you say yes and mean something else."
"I’m okay," he said. "I’m just thinking about a lot of things at once, and there’s more of them than usual today so it’s louder than it normally is."
"That’s your default state, though."
"It’s more intense than usual today," he said. "The briefing gave me a lot to sit with."
Eclipse set her chopsticks down and looked at him with the specific quality of attention she reserved for moments when she had decided something was important enough to stop eating for.
"The Core," she said. "Is it about the Core?"
"Partly," he said. "And partly about everything mother told us. And partly about something else that I’m still working through and don’t have the right shape for yet." He paused. "I’ll tell you when I have it more sorted."
"You always say that."
"And then I always tell you," he said. "That’s the important part."
She looked at him for another moment. Then she picked her chopsticks back up. "Alright," she said. "But soon. I mean it."
"Soon," he agreed.
Zara, across the table, had not appeared to be listening.
She was eating with focused attention.
But when Alex glanced at her, she met his eyes briefly in the way of someone who had been tracking the entire conversation and had filed it under things she would also be waiting for.
’I’m going to have to actually sort it,’ he thought. ’Because these two are going to hold me to soon.’
After dinner, when the plates had been cleared and the table had gone quiet, Vespera was the first to stand.
She looked at Alex in the way she had of looking at him when she had already said everything that needed saying for the day and was satisfied with where it had landed.
"Sleep well," she said. Not a suggestion.
"I will," he said.
She looked at Zara briefly, a look that carried nothing critical in it, just acknowledgment, the particular acknowledgment of someone checking that what she was leaving behind was in capable hands, and then she left, the door closing behind her with the quiet certainty of someone who never let doors make noise.
Eclipse stayed approximately forty-five more seconds.
She used them to hug Alex with the specific intensity of someone who had been holding that hug in reserve through an entire dinner and was releasing it all at once, said absolutely nothing while doing it, and then stood up and looked at him.
"Soon," she said again.
"Soon," he said.
She pointed at him once, a gesture that communicated I’m serious in a register that required no elaboration, and then she left too.
The room was quiet.
Alex and Zara sat on opposite sides of the table in the soft ambient glow of the new room’s mana-treated stones, which never fully darkened, the remnants of dinner between them and the corridor outside silent.
After a moment, Zara said, "The veil."
"Yeah," he said.
"You were looking at that word on the map for a long time at the end of the briefing."
"I know."
"What were you thinking about?" she said. "Not the summary version. What were you actually thinking about."
Alex was quiet for a moment.
Then: "That someone built it. That it’s been there long enough that everyone thinks it’s always been there. That the only person trying to understand it is doing it for a reason we don’t know." He paused.
"And that the warmth, the thing inside me that I still don’t fully have a name for, reacted to the word veil in a way it doesn’t usually react to things."
Zara stopped.
Not moving, just stopped.
The specific stillness of someone who had suspected something and had just received confirmation.
"It reacted," she said, very carefully, "like it knew something."
"Yes," he said.
They sat in the quiet room for a moment.
"Alex," Zara said, and she said his name the way she said things she meant, without decoration or lead-in, just the name and then the thing.
"Whatever you end up doing. Whatever you end up chasing, when you’re old enough and strong enough to chase things. I’m going to be there."
He looked at her.
"I’m not saying it as a shadow guard thing," she said.
"I’m saying it as me. I’m telling you because you looked at that map and I could see you were already planning something and I want you to know that you’re not planning alone. That’s all."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: "I see."
"Good," she said. Then, without any change in tone, as if it were the natural continuation of the same sentence: "Now go to sleep. You looked at the world today and it’s a lot, and your brain is going to chew on it all night whether you let it or not, so you might as well be horizontal while it does."
He almost laughed.
He went.
He lay down on the bed, stared at the ceiling in the soft not quite dark, and let his brain chew on the continent, the veil, the warmth that had reacted like it knew something, and the fact that he had people in this palace who were going to hold him to his word.
’Training first,’ he told himself. ’Then we worry about the rest.’
Outside, somewhere in the direction of the northern border, the veil shimmered in the dark against the edge of the world.
He didn’t know it was doing that.
But something in his chest stirred, faint and certain, like a compass pointing towards it.
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