Chapter 496: Chapter 496- Would you Stop?
In the Town, Few Minutes Later,
"Rika, I’m home."
The door of the apartment swung open with the practiced ease of someone who had opened it ten thousand times — not kicking it, not pushing it with excessive force, just the flat, forward press of a person arriving at a place that was theirs.
Esvan stepped inside.
The apartment was a narrow, warm thing on the main street — two rooms above a grain merchant’s storefront, the kind of space that accumulated personality through sheer occupancy rather than decoration. A cracked pot on the sill. A worn rug near the door. The smell of yesterday’s bread and the particular domestic order of a woman who kept things clean because chaos made her anxious.
Esvan was small.
Not child-small — adult-small, the lean, compact smallness of a body that had been built in a way that confused casual observation. The shoulders were slight. The jaw was fine-boned. The hair was short and practical. The voice, when it came, was male — or male-adjacent, the low register of something trained rather than natural, hitting the correct notes with the consistency of long practice.
The face, in profile, read feminine.
In full, it was ambiguous in the way of certain portraits — not wrong, just requiring a second look that most people never bothered to take.
Esvan stepped inside and stopped.
Luggage.
Bags. Three of them. Open on the floor, half-filled with folded clothes and wrapped objects and the small, dense collection of things a person grabs when they are leaving and have made the decision quickly. A fourth bag against the wall, already closed and buckled.
Rika was on her knees beside the largest one, pressing a folded shawl into the remaining space with both hands, her thick hips spread wide on the floor, her body leaning forward so that the back of her dress pulled tight across both cheeks.
Her shoulders were shaking.
"...What are you doing?"
Esvan’s voice came out flat with shock. Not sharp. Just — flat. The flatness of a person whose brain has received a visual input it cannot immediately categorize.
Rika looked up.
Her eyes were red. Not slightly wet — red. The full, comprehensive redness of someone who had been crying for long enough that the tissue around both eyes had joined the effort. Her face was warm-toned and full-lipped and currently dismantled in the way of a woman who had been holding herself together through sheer velocity of movement and had now been interrupted.
"We have to run," she said.
The words came out between controlled breaths — the rhythm of someone who has been crying and is trying to talk over it.
"We have to run now." She went back to pressing the shawl into the bag. "Empty this house. Leave this town. Go somewhere far. Far away. Very far—"
"Rika."
Esvan crossed the room in four steps and dropped down beside her, both hands finding her shoulders — the particular, instinctive grip of someone whose first response to a crying woman is physical proximity.
"Tell me," Esvan said. "What happened. Tell me slowly."
"There’s no time for slowly—"
"Rika." The voice firmed. "Tell me."
Her hands stopped on the shawl.
She turned her face into Esvan’s shoulder. The shaking intensified — a full-body trembling that moved from her shoulders down through her thick back and into her wide hips, the particular shaking of someone who has been holding something since morning and has finally found the place to put it down.
"A beast," she said, into the fabric. "A terrifying beast. It entered the town this morning. From the teleportation grid."
Esvan’s hand found her hair. "A beast."
"Not a beast like—" She pulled back. Her eyes found Esvan’s. "It looked like a man. It walked like a man. It had a man’s voice. But it is not a man. The mana coming off it—" She pressed her lips together. "Edda bowed to it. Lady Edda bowed."
Esvan’s expression shifted.
Not to fear. To the mild, skeptical adjustment of a person who loves someone and is weighing the credibility of what that someone is saying against the existing evidence of their tendency toward alarm.
The mouth twitched.
"Edda is there," Esvan said, and the voice carried the particular, gentle firmness of someone making a reasonable argument. "You think ’anyone’ gets past Edda? You think anyone is letting something happen to you? You? ally?"
Rika’s mouth opened.
She closed it.
She opened it again.
What she could not say — what her mouth absolutely refused to organize into coherent sentence structure — was the following: ’That man told Lady Edda to wear a skirt tonight. He told me, directly, that I should demonstrate to Edda how sex works. He grabbed Edda’s ass with both hands in the middle of the main street while every window in this village was watching. Lady Edda bowed after he said she owed him courtesy because he had allowed the dragon her team died fighting to be killed. The mana coming off him made my Truth-Sight return nothing but TRUE on everything he said.’
What came out instead was:
"No, no, no."
She stood up.
She picked up the buckled bag.
"We need to leave. Right now. Tonight. Before—"
"Rika—"
"Before tonight—"
"RIKA."
The word came out louder than Esvan intended. The small apartment caught it and held it.
Rika froze.
Her back was to Esvan. Her thick shoulders had gone rigid, the bag in her hands, her body stopped mid-motion like someone who has walked into a wall that was not there a moment ago.
She turned her head slightly.
The tears came differently now — not the panicked, velocity-driven tears of before. These were slower. Larger. The kind that came from a place that had nothing to do with dragons.
Her husband had yelled at her.
Her brain processed this information in the way of a woman for whom this particular event had not happened before — not in the full-voiced, sharp-edged way it had just happened. Her mind went through the sentence again. The volume. The word.
She could not find the place to put it.
"Hey—" Esvan’s voice dropped immediately, the sharpness dissolving as fast as it had come. "Hey. Rika. Wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—"
"You yelled at me."
The words came out very quiet.
"I’m sorry, I didn’t—"
"You yelled at me."
"I know, I’m—"
"You yelled at me."
She was not saying it to argue. She was saying it because her mind was still holding the sound of it and had not yet figured out what to do with the weight.
She pushed him.
Both hands on his chest — not hard, not with the full strength of a woman who milked cows and carried feed sacks — but with the , meaningful force of someone creating distance.
"You yelled at me."
She pushed again.
Esvan grabbed her wrists. "Rika, stop—"
She pulled away.
She turned.
She went for the door.
The door opened and she was in the stairwell and then she was on the main street, the afternoon sun hitting her face, her thick body moving at the speed of a woman who has decided that distance is the immediate priority and direction is a secondary consideration.
"RIKA—"
Esvan was in the stairwell behind her. Then on the street. Short legs moving fast, the slight frame threading through the afternoon crowd of Edenveil’s main street — merchants, villagers, the usual bodies of a town going about its afternoon business.
"Rika, would you just STOP—"
