"Soo⦠What happened?" Raizen asked.
They sat side by side on the roof, the broken glass cleared from the area around them - Saffi's work, probably, done while he was unconscious. The hole in the sky above them poured amber light onto the marble roof edge, turning it into something that looked like a pool of liquid gold.
Saffi told him. Simply, in the way she delivered information when the information was too large for elaborate language - plain words, short sentences, facts arranged in chronological order.
The staff had erupted. The lightning storm had filled the room below, destroying everything it touched. Raizen had pushed her down, saving her. (her ears went a shade more pink at that part). The lightning had come through the glass and hit him in the chest, and he'd stood there - locked, rigid, his hand raised - and the energy had poured through him and out his palm and into the sky. She told him the way he screamed without air in his lungs, how the screech covered any sound. It had lasted less than a second. Then he'd collapsed.
"Less than a second?" Raizen frowned. Hearing Saffi telling all this about himself, it was incredibly hard not to doubt her and just trust her, word for word. Looking up again, he just couldn't believe that the hole in the sky was because of him.
"Less than a second" Saffi confirmed. "At least, that's what it felt for me."
He touched his own chest. Pressed his palm flat against his sternum, over the spot where the lightning had supposedly entered. The skin felt normal beneath his shirt - no mark, no heat, no tenderness. His ribs were solid, his breathing was even, his heartbeat was steady and singular. Everything about his body suggested that the lightning hadn't happened.
But it apparently had.
Except he couldn't remember it.
The realization arrived slowly, the way important realizations do - not as a sudden flash but as a gradual awareness that something was missing from a place where something should have been. Something was telling him that the lightning had hurt. He somehow knew the pain had been total, overwhelming, the kind that filled every nerve and left no room for anything else. He KNEW this. But when he reached for the memory of the pain itself - for the specific sensation, the actual experience of what it had felt like - he found nothing. An absence where a memory should have been, as if something had reached into his mind and removed the experience while leaving the knowledge of it intact.
He remembered that it had hurt. He just couldn't prove it.
That shouldn't have been possible. Pain that intense didn't just disappear from memory. It carved itself into the nervous system, left traces in the body's recall, haunted sleep and waking thought for days or weeks or years afterward. The kind of pain he'd experienced - if Saffi's description was accurate, if the lightning had truly passed through his entire body - should have been burned into his memory so deeply that forgetting it would require forgetting himself.
But it was gone.
Something else had taken his own memories, his own pain.
The thought formed without evidence and held without doubt. Something - not his Eon, not his conscious mind, not any system he could identify or name - had absorbed the memory of the pain. Had taken it upon itself, the way someone lifts a weight off another person's back while they sleep, the way a hand catches a falling glass before the owner sees it tip. Whatever he'd experienced in that fraction of a second, something had decided it was too much for him to carry, and had carried it instead.
He thought about the lizard. About the way it had known things it shouldn't have known, seen things it shouldn't have been able to see. About the way it had come from something that Raizen had accidentally touched during the summoning - a consciousness that wasn't his, a presence that had lived inside him since before the platform and had been ripped away when the sphere exploded and the small black shape landed in his cupped hands.
The lizard was gone. But the place it had come from - the connection it represented, the bridge between Raizen and whatever ancient thing had produced it - was that gone too? Or was something still there, sitting in the space the lizard had occupied, quietly doing the work the lizard would have done if it were still alive?
He didn't know. He couldn't feel anything in the places where answers should have been. Just the absence of pain where pain should have lived, and the unsettling gentleness of something that had protected him without showing itself or asking permission.
He sat with these thoughts for a while. The sunset light shifted, the amber deepening toward red and pink as the sun dropped lower behind the clouds. Saffi sat beside him, quiet, sensing that the silence was productive rather than absence, and giving it room.
Then Raizen looked down.
Through the broken sections of the glass roof, the Echelon chamber was visible below. The room was destroyed - Raizen could see the evidence even from this angle. Shattered glass, bent steel, cracked walls, the powdery residue of ash that must have been paper scattered across every surface. The chairs were destroyed, the table was split, the observation panels were gone. It looked like a bomb had detonated in a library.
A figure moved through the wreckage.
Alone. Small, thin, moving with the careful pace of someone who wasn't in a hurry because the task ahead would take as long as it took regardless of speed. White hair, pulled tight. Narrow shoulders, straight back. Hands that reached forward and touched things with the precise, considered contact of a craftsman examining materials.
Maren.
Maren moved through the ruined room like someone tending a garden after a storm.
She touched things. That was all she did - she walked to a broken object, placed her hands on it, and held them there. No channeling gestures, no visible Eon output, no theatrical flourish. Just contact. Skin against surface, held for a few seconds, steady and patient.
And the broken things fixed themselves.
Raizen watched from above, his face near the edge of the roof where the glass had been vaporized, and he saw it happen in real time. Maren's hand touched a pile of glass shards - fragments from the observation panels, scattered across the floor in a glittering carpet of razor edges. Her fingers rested on the largest piece, and the shards began to move. Slowly at first, then with increasing purpose, the fragments sliding across the stone floor toward each other, edges finding edges, surfaces aligning. They merged together. The breaks sealed, the cracks disappeared, the shattered glass becoming unshattered glass, the panel reassembling itself from debris into wholeness under Maren's quiet, patient contact.
