Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users

Chapter 453: When I Was Young

They didn’t go far. The parlor opened into a smaller room that nobody had ever bothered to name.

It didn’t need one. It held only what it needed to—a pair of chairs that remembered who usually sat in them, a low table marked faintly with the rings of past cups, and a wall of soft crystal that could wake up without disturbing the rest of the house.

The wine waited quietly in a dark bottle, cool from the stone beneath. Lilith pulled the cork free with two fingers, and Elowen steadied the glasses without looking up.

They didn’t toast. Some nights didn’t ask for a ceremony. They only asked for presence.

The first sip was deep and dry, with the kind of clean edge that made you taste the day you’d just survived.

It was enough to reset the mouth, to take the grit out of the back of the throat. Elowen held her glass loosely and glanced toward the dark crystal wall, where the feed they’d left asleep still rested. Lilith touched the surface once, and one pane blinked awake.

It showed the canyon—the last stretch of the trial ground, now gray with fading light. The tile wasn’t alive anymore. It had become a recording. She set it to run once, without sound.

Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. The image did the talking. Three figures moved across the frame like something that had already learned its own rhythm.

Ethan lifted his hand, pointed, and didn’t need words to be understood. Evelyn’s lips counted quietly, even though no sound carried.

Everly spent energy where it mattered and saved the rest, as if she could feel time weighing her choices.

The wine breathed in their hands, catching the light with small motions. The house listened the way old houses do—quietly, but never absent.

"When I was young," Elowen said at last, her tone not bitter but filled with a kind of old steadiness, "I learned how to sit where I was told and keep my hands still while the world broke in the rooms next door."

Her voice stayed even. "They said it was a lesson. They told me that restraint was strength. And they weren’t wrong.

But it’s also a hunger that learns not to beg. It just waits. It grows patient. It becomes a second stomach."

Lilith turned her glass slowly by the stem, the wine catching the lamplight as if trying to listen. "You watched sieges," she said, and it wasn’t a question.

Elowen nodded once. "I did. I held the roots of a city in place so the walls wouldn’t crumble when the banners came.

I patched wells by feeling where the ground was willing to help and where it wasn’t. I argued with maps that thought rivers could be moved with ink.

I was strong in the quiet rooms, and no one noticed. And when the day ended, I came home, drank tea, and couldn’t sleep because I hadn’t touched any of the soil I’d saved."

The crystal flickered, showing a brief moment when Ethan slipped on uneven stone and Evelyn caught his arm.

Elowen’s eyes softened. "Restraint is honest when you choose it," she said quietly. "Not when it’s tied to you like a leash.

I want him to choose it. I want the girls to choose it. If we hold them too tightly, they’ll mistake our hands for the house itself and never learn where their own weight belongs."

Lilith nodded slowly. "We allow him his road," she said. "Not because we’re kind—though we try to be—but because roads tug at the people who walk them.

He needs to feel that tug, trip sometimes, and trust his own steps to find the ground.

If we flatten every stone for him, he’ll never learn which ones move and which ones teach balance."

Elowen smiled faintly into her glass. "And because we remember what it felt like," she said. "When we were told not to step."

She looked somewhere past the wall, eyes gone distant. "There was a winter when the elders spread a war across a map and told me to stay home and tend the orchards.

I obeyed, because it was correct. But it made me furious. When spring came, I asked them what fruit they had saved by leaving me out. None of them could answer."

Lilith’s mouth twisted slightly, not in humor but in recognition. "I have a shelf full of rooms like that," she said.

"The lesson I kept was simple. If you must hold someone back, tell them why. Show them where their work lands. And when it’s done, pay them in truth.

If we ever have to keep those three from a gate, we’ll walk them to the wall, let them put their hands on the stone, and feel the pulse for themselves.

We won’t tell them to stay home and expect gratitude for it."

The wine made old stories shine a little, but not enough to make them pretty. It softened the edges but didn’t erase the weight.

They drank and watched the recording loop again. Lilith reached out and paused it at a moment so small it might have been missed—the second Ethan shifted a corner by a fraction, just enough to change the outcome.

She zoomed in a finger-width. A shadow became a clean edge. A crack admitted it had been a step all along.

Elowen let out a small hum. "He edits," she said, repeating her earlier thought. "I used to think it was blood, because that’s what I always look for—the sound and rhythm.

But it’s more than that. It’s temperament. Patience. The way he carries himself. Somebody taught him that showing off is a tax you pay to people who will never pay you back."

She glanced at Lilith. "Was that you?"

Lilith raised an eyebrow. "Me? I teach plenty of taxes," she said dryly. "But not that one. He brought it with him.

I just noticed it early and made sure not to spend it where it would be wasted." She took another sip, unhurried.

"You did the same with the girls. You stopped letting applause set their pace."

Elowen’s smile flickered, here and gone again like a candle’s quiet breath. "They used to run until their lungs burned because they thought burning proved they were strong," she said.