the reception hall of House Rotchy held the morning like a kept secret — pale light pooling on obsidian stone, runes along the pillars humming in a low, patient key. The sofas were dark and heavy, their velvet eating sound, and the air carried that precise rotchy scent: incense tempered with iron, warmed stone, and the faint metallic tang of mana. When Jin set Rina down upon the couch it felt at once domestic and strange — as if a tender human moment were being staged inside a palace built around the geometry of power.
He pressed his palm to her brow in the small, automatic gesture of someone who knows the language of small consolations. Rina's lashes trembled and parted; her silver-white hair spread across the cushion like a spill of moonlight, red tips brushing the obsidian like embers. She blinked, red eyes foggy for a second, and then recognition came like a tide. She scrambled up and wrapped herself around him as if she had been flung into some long-held hollow and found the one thing she had been missing. Tears came quick and hot; her sobs were raw and immediate.
Jin stood there with that half-smile he wore when he meant to tease and did not quite. The expression softened the hardness around his eyes for an instant: mockery braided with fondness. "Hello, my love," he said, voice light and teasing as if he could defuse oceans with jokes. "Were you dreaming of me?"
Heat rose to Rina's cheeks; she swatted at his chest with a small, half-angry hand and spun her face away. "You are infuriating," she sniffed. "I missed you. And you treat me like this. I hate you." The words came fierce and honest — the old, half-playful litany lovers repeat to make the moment real.
Laughter threaded through the room then — a softer, altogether different sound. From the shadowed corner of the hall, Elizabeth, Tishara, and Sion watched the scene from the sofa. Elizabeth's face was open and warm, the kind of smile a woman gives when she has folded her years into gentle patience. Tishara lounged with a dangerous glint in her eyes and a sardonic smirk, which soon dissolved into mischief when she heard the playful spats. Sion, who never abandoned spectacle, watched like a hawk that had folded in its talons something personal.
"Ah," Elizabeth said, voice honeyed and maternal, easing into the room like perfume. "So this is Rina. Your wife, dear Jin."
Jin inclined his head with theatrical formality. "Indeed," he said, grin edged with irony. "Rina Amberhart, heiress of House Amberhart — now, officially, Rina Rotchy." He watched Rina as if cataloguing small, delightful contradictions. She watched the women, puzzled at first, their faces unfamiliar — strangers in the story he had not yet told her — and wondered briefly at a grandmother who called herself Elizabeth and at the golden-haired woman who seemed to cause both tension and laughter.
Rina, still flushed and raw from recent fear, did not have names for these people; she had only the stubborn, immediate impressions: the soft, maternal tilt of Elizabeth's smile; the sharp, luminous beauty of Tishara — like a blade that also laughed; Sion's audacious swagger that demanded attention. They felt close enough to be kin and distant enough to be oddities. In the press of the hall, the two women on the couch began to argue like cats edging a dish of cream.
"Come on, Rina, come sit here," Sion called, voice bright and teasing. "Elizabeth won't bite. But don't trust Tishara — she's a nasty little dog who bites."
Tishara's face snapped, green eyes flaring. The air between them tightened like a wire. "I am a dog?" she snapped back. "You insolent—" Without warning, hands flew; a slap sounded like paper against skin. A storm of scolding, then giddy snatches of hair-pulling and hissing laughter: Sion and Tishara crashed off the sofa and tumbled to the carpets, trading light blows and theatrical insults with the terrible tenderness of sisters whose quarrels always end in the same exhausted truce.
Rina watched, the scene folding into her like a strange, living tapestry. For a beat she thought of how differently combat could look when it was wrapped in laughter: the fierce choreography of two women who knew one another's bruises and used them like jokes. She thought of her own scuffles with Sarafina — rawer, harsher, edged with real danger — and felt suddenly that this was another sort of war: domestic, raw, human.
A soft hand brushed the crown of Rina's head and cut through the fray. She looked up into Elizabeth's gentle face. "Hello, dear," Elizabeth said, voice like a caress. "I am Elizabeth Rotchy. I am Jin's grandmother — your grandmother-in-law, if you will. And the young one rolling about the carpet is Tishara, my youngest."
Rina took in the words, the names falling into the soft architecture of the hall like new tiles. Elizabeth's age was a small, puzzling paradox: she looked younger than the word grandmother painted in Rina's head, more sister than matron, and that delicate mismatch stirred quiet curiosity. Tishara seemed like warmth wrapped in blade; she laughed as she untangled herself with theatrical flair, a flash of charm beneath the scuffle.
Footsteps sounded then — crisp and measured on stone. The temperature of the room shifted with the weight of that gait. Naoko descended the staircase from her private wing with the economy of someone for whom presence is a tool. Her silver hair fell like a polished curtain, and the black of her dress made her look carved from night. In her wake came a coolness that felt less like absence and more like a sealed vault.
"What is happening here?" Naoko's voice struck the room; it was flat, iron-true. She looked over the skirmish, disdain soft and quick, then fixed her attention on the one thing that mattered: her son. "This house is not a sty," she told the two women with the clipped disgust of a sovereign who despises disorder. "If you must brawl, take it outside. I will not have my halls sullied."
Elizabeth answered with the honey that softened nearly everything she touched. "They're only playing, Naoko. It's harmless."
Naoko's gray eyes slid past everything and everyone until they rested upon Jin. She offered no greeting to the assembly, no small acknowledgment to Rina; the only warmth in the room that briefly gathered like a scent was directed at the son on whom her claim was plain.
"Jin," she said then, voice like a cold blade, "come to my room at once."
Jin's wry smile vanished as if an invisible hand had folded it down. He inclined his head. "As you wish, Mother." The teasing tone drained from him and he walked after Naoko with the obedient ease of someone who knows what duty requires.
Silence rolled for a beat like winter folding itself in. Rina stood still, watching the tall back of Naoko and the steady retreat of Jin. Sion and Tishara froze as well, the fight ending as if someone had called time. Naoko's parting words — soft in content but sharp in delivery — landed hollow and heavy: "Jin is my son. That should be obvious."
Something in the air rearranged itself. The statement was not boastful so much as absolute; it took the room and defined it in terms of ownership and hierarchy. Rina felt the smallness of the moment — house, lineage, the carved importance of blood. She realized, with the dizzying clarity of someone newly married into a dynasty, how each household defined its own gravity and how those rules bent the people who lived inside them.
Elizabeth smiled on, in that soft way of hers, happily oblivious to the hardness that had just passed between mother and son. The hall settled. Outside the carved windows, the gardens held their breath; inside, life folded back into its quiet routines with the composure of obsidian that had learned to endure much and to show little.
....
Heat: Thank you so much for reading