Chapter 67: Fate: [UNSTABLE]
He set the cup down. Picked up the pen. Started to turn back to the diary and then did not,
"You came here first."
"I arrived and walked here. Yes."
"Before eating."
"I am not hungry."
"<<<:)>>>"
"Meal time,"
"You could say hello first."
"Hello," I said. "Meal time."
He waited to see if I was going to add to that.
I was not.
He turned back to the diary.
The room was better than the hall. Small, book-crowded, with a draft from the window he had long since stopped registering.
The lamp threw light across the pages. The whole space smelled like ink and his mana signature,
"Move," I said.
He shifted the pen. I took the cleared portion of the desk properly.
"I need to eat."
He turned his head.
I put two fingers against his jaw and tilted it and found the place on his neck that had been mine since the forest, since the moment I had chosen and he had not yet understood what I was choosing.
Whatever was running in his head at any given moment, his pulse never reflected the complexity of it. It just moved, steady, like his body had decided not to be dramatic about the whole thing.
I bit down.
He kept reading.
Or performing reading. He was holding still on purpose. Very well. He had been practicing.
The blood was different from when I had last tasted it. Stronger.
I finished.
He turned a page.
I stayed on the desk.
"You missed me," he said.
"I completed seventeen obligations," I said. "And left before the eighteenth."
"Nythera."
"I wrote the melody for the fourth movement of the cave composition," I said. "The one I had been working on before I left. I finished it on the train."
"Nythera."
"The elder used tradition seventeen times in forty minutes," I said.
"I counted because I needed something to count. Because the alternative was thinking about how long three weeks was."
He was quiet.
"Three weeks is not long," I said. "I was in a cave for three hundred years. Three weeks is nothing. Three weeks is not even a measurable unit against three hundred years."
"And yet,"
"And yet," I said.
The room was quiet.
"I did not like it," I said.
"Being away. I did not like the compound and I did not like the elders, " I looked at the desk, at the diary he had been writing in. "I wanted to come back. I came back."
He looked at me.
"I know,"
"You cannot know—"
"I know," he said again. "The same way I knew the number."
I sat in the chair beside the desk.
The eastern tower was still visible in the window.
"The academy," I said. "Tell me what I missed."
"Volcano," he said.
"Explain."
"Hiratsuka transported twelve S class students to the base of an active volcano and told us to race to the summit with no rules."
"And."
"Caelum spatially stepped to forty-two meters when his range was forty and arrived eight minutes before anyone else."
"And the hot spring."
"And here I’m still trying to close gaps."
"You will."
I looked at the side of his face. "I know exactly what they are."
He considered that for a moment.
"Fair," he said.
The pen moved across the page.
"I thought about the recipe," I said.
"Which one."
"The morning version. The fat incorporation temperature was too high. Lower heat, longer time, the flavor will bind properly."
"I worked it out during the second day’s tribute session."
He set the pen down.
He turned and looked at me with the expression he wore when something was amusing him.
"You solved a cooking problem," he said, "during a formal clan audience."
"Elder Maren was citing a treaty from centuries ago. The mind found its own occupation."
"And the occupation was fat incorporation temperature."
"The occupation was the specific flavor compound that was missing," I said. "The fat temperature was the mechanism."
"Right." He picked the pen back up. "Important distinction."
"It was."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You missed cooking," he said.
"The hall kitchen is staffed. It is not available for personal use."
"You missed cooking," he said again,
I looked at him. "The hall does not have a kitchen I can use. Yes. That is what I said."
"You can use it tomorrow."
"I am aware I can use it tomorrow."
"Then the problem is resolved."
"The problem," I said, "is that I spent sixty-eight hours underground watching people who have exceeded any useful relationship with the passage of time and then I came back and you are at a desk with cold tea and gap notes and apparently that is just a normal evening."
He looked at the diary.
"It is not Tuesday," he said.
"Kael."
He looked at me.
"I know," he said.
That was it.
"In thirty days Maren will have found a new audit. Voss will have found a new interpretation. The border families will have regrouped." I straightened the coat over the chair back once. "I will be back in that room."
"Yes."
"That is simply the nature of the institution."
"Is this the first time you have found it inconvenient?"
"No," I said. "It is the first time I have found it actively annoying rather than just structurally inefficient."
The room stayed quiet. He turned a page.
"The challenge," I said.
"Tomorrow morning. Second-year captain, filed by name, which means they have been watching long enough to have something specific in mind." He turned the pen over. "Not random."
"No. Someone watching you who has identified what they want to test."
"The gap is still there," he said. "The point of failure moved, but the underlying problem didn’t."
"Show me the sequence in the morning."
"I can run it now—"
"In the morning," I said. "When the light is better and you have slept."
I looked at his hands on the page. "The break is in the aether step exit. You are carrying rotational inertia out of the step that your close-range entry does not account for.
The correction is automatic by now but it costs you roughly half a second every time."
The pen stopped.
He looked at me with the full version of that expression.
I was not going to tell him that I had run the sequence mechanics in my head during Maren’s second tribute session while she cited treaty language I had personally witnessed being signed,
tracing the inertia path from the step exit through the theoretical contact window while she spoke.
I had run it four times.
Each time it confirmed the same half-second.
I had not told him because he had not been ready, and I had the patience for that, and also because watching him identify it himself eventually and being there when he did was on a completely different list.
***
The air in the room changed.
Not temperature. Not mana density.
As space itself, pulling inward.
I was on my feet before the shape of it resolved.
A rift.
Opening.
Already doorway-sized,
"Kael..."
The rift was directly around him.
I reached for it.
The formation resisted me with the force of something that had been prepared against exactly my category of interference.
Prepared.
Someone knew I would be here, I thought. Someone built this to exclude me specifically.
"Nythera—"
His voice cut off.
The rift closed.
My hand closed on nothing.
He was gone.
The rift was gone.
The lamp was still burning. The diary was still open. The pen rolled toward the edge of the desk.
The tea cup. The coat on the chair. The draft from the window.
Everything was exactly the same except him.
I did not move.
The rift swallowed him.
Nythera took one step forward, then her aura detonated across the room in a wave of crimson light.
For the first time in centuries, Nythera forgot restraint.
"Give him back."
Crimson aura erupted from her body and the walls cracked. The window shattered before the aura reached its peak.
I put on my coat.
I was going to find out who.
Three centuries. I have killed things that registered as threats.
I stood in the middle of his room, alone.
The rift residue was still present. Thinning.
Whoever had opened it had done it with significant force and considerable precision.
This was constructed. Aimed.
"Alright,"
The lamp threw its light across the empty desk.
I closed the diary and put it under my arm.
I walked out of the room.
Someone had taken him.
I was going to find out who.
And then I was going to have a very thorough conversation about it.
Crimson mana flooded the corridor. Doors slammed shut before she even reached the stairs. Several academy alarms triggered simultaneously.
They had taken the wrong person.
More importantly, they had done it in front of me.
***
Welcome to Hell.
The game is about to begin.
Please be seated.
***
Name: Kael Ardyn
Fate: [UNSTABLE]
Threat Level: [INCREASING]
Narrative Position: Main Character
Observed By: ■■■■■■
Current Condition: Alive
Warning: The original plot no longer exists.
