Chapter 48: Scarlet Domain
The daemon started changing.
I had maybe half a second to watch it before understanding arrived. Its skin tightened against the frame underneath. Muscles pushed outward. The sound it had been making, the low register that had been in my chest since the instrument appeared, just stopped.
The silence that followed felt wrong.
Then it burst.
Blood hit everything at once. Warm, immediate, the smell of copper arriving before I could see clearly. I waited with my forearm over my eyes.
When I lowered it, there was a woman standing where the daemon had been.
Red dress. Dark hair falling over one shoulder. She looked at me the way someone looked at a thing they had been expecting for a long time and were not surprised had finally arrived.
She started walking toward me.
Unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with casualness. The domain was still around us, the sky the color of dried blood, the ground dark beneath her feet. Every instinct I had said to move.
I did not move.
She stopped in front of me. Two fingers found my chin and lifted it. At close range her eyes had no category I could fit them into. The kind of certainty that had stopped being interested in contradictions.
She kissed me.
It was not a normal kiss. Something transferred through it, warm and metallic, moving along channels I had not built and did not recognize.
It reached the cracked ribs the Remis had been managing and finished what the Remis had started. Reached the reserve in my chest that I had been running on the bottom of and filled it with something that was not my mana. Older. Denser.
Her blood.
When she pulled back her eyes stayed on mine. She said something in a language I did not know. Quietly, to herself.
Then she turned my head slightly.
The bite was not what I had been bracing for. Pressure and heat, no sharp component, and whatever she had given me through the kiss was already moving through my system, accelerating, and the domain at the edges started dissolving and my vision went with it.
My legs gave out.
She caught me before the ground arrived.
The domain came apart in sections. Red draining out of the sky. Trees coming back. The light coming back, afternoon light arriving to replace what the domain had replaced.
Then I was out.
***
I woke up in my bed.
Ribs intact. Mana reserve full in a way that felt different from normal recovery, deeper, running through channels that had not been there before the forest, or had been there and were now wider than they had been.
I turned my head.
She was in the chair beside the bed. Same red dress. Same dark hair. She had been there a while. Long enough to belong to the space.
She looked at me.
"You were in the cave," I said.
She smiled.
It was the first expression I had seen her make that was not the certainty, and it did not help me locate her any better than the certainty had. It just meant something.
"I heard you," she said. "Every morning."
The room was quiet.
"All of it," I said.
"All of it."
I looked at the ceiling. The specific ceiling of Thorne Hold that I had looked at from this exact position on several previous occasions that had also involved waking up in conditions I had not planned for.
The system panel opened.
[Bond Formed.]
[Initiator: Anastasia.]
[Recipient: Host.]
[Nature: Blood Exchange, First Order.]
[The bond registers at the level of the soul, not the body.]
[This bond is permanent, bilateral, and non-transferable.]
[Ether Authority has recognized the bond.]
[Host mana pathways have expanded. New channels registered.] [
Current Ink: 2,340 → 2,340. No Ink awarded.]
I read that.
The system did not typically make that distinction.
I looked at her in the chair.
She was looking at me without classification, without category.
"You knew," I said.
"Yes."
"The fourth morning," I said.
She looked at me.
"I wonder if she can tell when I am not there," I said. "That is what you heard."
"Yes."
"You decided then."
"Yes."
I stayed with that.
Three months of sitting on a cave floor talking about Yui and the hospital room and the system and the duel and the academy. Three months of the warmth pressing in from the walls while I talked, which I had been interpreting as the cave responding.
It had been her.
She had heard the parts I had not been performing. That was what she had believed. The parts that were not directed at anyone.
I looked at the ceiling again.
"You have a name," I said.
"Anastasia" she said.
"Itsuki Amagi," I said. "Heir of House Amagi. Formerly the wasted heir."
"I know," she said. "I heard."
Outside the window the birds had come back. The forest at the edge of the training grounds was moving in the late afternoon light. The daemon was gone. The domain was gone. The seal that had been holding something back for two hundred years was gone.
She was sitting in the chair beside my bed looking at me like she had nowhere else to be.
"You are going to need to explain some things," I said.
"Yes," she said. "And you are going to need to explain some things."
"The system stopped me from explaining certain things."
"I know," she said. "You were going to tell me anyway."
I looked at her.
"Yes," I said.
"That," she said, "is what I heard."
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