— POV: Emerion —
Birds.
Somewhere above me, birds were chirping light and unhurried, the kind of sound that belongs to mornings where nothing has gone wrong yet.
A breeze moved through the air carrying something floral, warm, absurdly gentle.
I lay still and tried to understand it.
The last thing I remembered was heat. White light consuming everything. The ceiling deciding it had held long enough. After that nothing. A clean, total nothing, the kind that doesn't feel like sleep because there are no dreams in it, just an absence where time used to be.
Am I dead?
"He's unconscious, not dead," a voice said nearby, slightly annoyed, as though correcting a mistake.
Another voice, quieter, heavier: "I should have moved sooner. If I had planned better--"
"You got him out. That's what matters."
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling above me was low, wooden, crossed with rough beams.
Warm light came through a single small window. A humble cottage everything in it worn smooth by years of use, built for function rather than comfort.
Someone had put me in a bed.
Someone had also changed my clothes.
I looked down at the plain shirt, rough fabric, the kind nobody would look twice at in a market. My hands were unbound.
The inhibitor collar was still at my throat I could feel its weight immediately, that particular cold deadness where my magic should have been but my hands were free, and I was horizontal, and nothing was actively hurting me at this precise moment.
That felt significant.
"You're awake!"
The hug arrived before I could process the green hair. It was enthusiastic and entirely without warning and I made an undignified sound somewhere between a cough and a shout as the air left my body.
"You'll put him back unconscious, you absolute fool," said a dry voice from across the room.
The grip released. The green-haired youth jerked back with his hand behind his head, sheepish and bright-eyed and apparently completely uninjured, which struck me as somewhat unfair.
"Sorry, I got excited--"
"The blast," I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected. "What happened after the blast?"
They exchanged a look. The specific kind that means we talked about how to answer this.
The green-haired youth sat down on the edge of a chair and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"When she took you after we couldn't stop it we decided we'd get you back." He said it simply, the way you'd say we decided to take the eastern road.
"We tracked the camp. But their numbers kept growing, and there was no opening we could use without getting killed immediately."
A pause. "Then last night, the blast happened. The whole eastern side of the camp just erupted. We didn't know what caused it, but the chaos was enough. We went in, found you thrown against a wall, and pulled you out before the smoke covered the exits."
I stared at him.
"You tracked a military camp."
"Yes."
"The two of you."
"Well. Mostly me. Uncle is better at the planning side."
The uncle snorted from his chair. "It was my nephew's gift that found you. I just told him which direction to run."
"Divine blessing," the green-haired youth said immediately, going slightly red. "And it's not as impressive as he makes it sound it only lets me sense people's emotional states. It's not a combat ability."
"It told you I was alive," I said.
"It told me you were in pain." He looked at his hands briefly. "Which meant you weren't dead. So we went."
I didn't know what to do with that. I sat with it for a moment, feeling the weight of it the specific discomfort of being owed something you have no framework for repaying.
"Why?" I asked. "You had no reason to risk your lives. I made a choice that was mine to live with."
The green-haired youth looked at me with an expression that was almost amused.
"You let yourself be taken so her soldiers wouldn't hurt us." He tilted his head. "We could ask you the same question."
Ah.
There wasn't much to say to that.
"I don't even know your names," I said after a moment. "Properly."
He blinked then laughed, sudden and genuine, the tension in the room cracking slightly around it.
"We really never did that, did we." He extended his hand. "Alec Kirtanson."
I took it. "Emerion. Just--"
"Still performing the mystery?" the uncle said flatly. "The princess announced your nobility to a hall full of soldiers. We are perhaps the least useful people to hide it from."
I exhaled.
He had a point.
"My name is Emerion--"
The wall exploded inward.
The blast tore through the wood like it wasn't there two ragged holes, splinters everywhere, smoke pouring through both gaps before the sound had finished arriving. I threw myself sideways by instinct, hit the floor, stayed low.
The smoke thinned.
And she walked through it.
Pristilia Sunfury, her red dress carrying scorch marks from the explosion days ago, her fan already open, her expression carrying the particular quality of someone who has been mildly inconvenienced and found the whole thing secretly entertaining.
"You still look lovely, pretty boy," she said. "Did you genuinely think you could run from your mistress?"
The collar was cold and total at my throat. No magic. No staff. My hands were free but that was essentially decorative at this point.
Alec was already on his feet, sword drawn, placing himself between her and the rest of us. His stance was solid.
His voice when he spoke was steady despite the fact that I could see his jaw working.
"You don't have an army behind you this time," he said. "Leave."
Pristilia's eyes moved to him with the calm assessment of someone deciding how interesting a problem is.
"Someone like me," she said, "doesn't need an army to deal with a peasant."
"Keep talking," Alec said. "It won't change what happens next."
"You should go, young lady," the uncle said from near the window, his voice carrying the particular authority of a man who has been underestimated his entire life and made his peace with it. "You won't like the outcome."
Pristilia laughed. It was a genuinely delighted sound.
"If you were from Lagrimor you'd know better than to speak to a Sunfury heir that way in broad daylight." She tilted her head. "But you're not. So I'll demonstrate instead."
Her fan moved.
A burning arc of light sliced across the room.
Alec caught it wind flaring along his blade, the impact rocking him back half a step, the cottage wall behind him cracking.
He reset his stance before the smoke cleared.
"You have some skill," Pristilia said approvingly. Then she began in earnest.
The slashes came rapid and merciless each one precise, each one slightly different from the last, probing and adjusting. Not a brawl. A dissection. Alec blocked everything, teeth set, sweat running freely, giving ground in inches rather than steps.
"Uncle, get back with Emerion!" he called between breaths.
The uncle's hand closed around my arm and pulled me back against the far wall. I let him, cursing the collar with everything I had. The inhibitor sat at my throat like a stone, and behind it my magic pressed uselessly against the seal present, building, completely contained.
I watched through the shattered wall.
Alec was good. Genuinely, seriously good the kind that comes from years of real training rather than comfortable sparring sessions, his defense tight and adaptive, never quite where Pristilia expected it to be. But she was better. Not by much. Enough.
Thirty minutes.
He was still standing at thirty minutes, which said everything about him. But his mana was nearly gone I could see it in the way his wind blade flickered between parries, the way each block cost him slightly more than the last. He was running on will and stubbornness and not much else.
Pristilia stepped over the broken floorboards and looked almost refreshed.
"That was a lovely warm-up," she said. "You fought well for a peasant."
Alec forced himself upright from one knee, his sword arm shaking with the effort.
"I won't let you pass," he said. His voice came out steady. I had no idea how.
"You have spirit. I mean that sincerely." She raised her fan. "I'll make it honorable."
The spear came from the side.
The uncle threw it hard and clean no magic, no blessing, just the arm of a man who had carried heavy things his whole life. Pristilia sidestepped it, and for one unguarded moment something moved across her face that wasn't amusement.
Irritation. Real irritation.
"The old man wants to join," she said.
"Stay away from my nephew." He had already grabbed a second spear from the wall. His hands were steady. "I don't care what you are or who your family is."
"Uncle, stop--"
"You be quiet." He didn't look at Alec. His eyes stayed on Pristilia. "I can't use magic. I can't fight the way you can. I know exactly what I am." A pause. "I'm not letting my nephew die in a broken cottage because some noble decided she was bored."
The room went very still.
Then Pristilia raised her fan with an expression that had gone cold and flat, all the amusement drained out of it, and the mana slash left her hand before anyone could move.
It was basic. Almost casual.
It hit him in the chest.
The sound he made when he fell was very small.
"No--"
Alec screamed it and launched forward and Pristilia turned and kicked him with a precision that sent him crashing sideways into the wall. He hit it and slid down and coughed blood onto the broken floor, hands pressed flat against the wood, trying to push himself back up.
I stood and could not move.
The collar. The sealed magic. The absent staff. Every single thing I would have reached for all of it stripped away, and underneath all of it, the truth I couldn't argue with: I had never once been trained for a moment like this. I had been kept.
Maintained. Carefully protected from exactly this kind of reality my entire life.
The uncle lay still. His chest moved barely, shallowly but it moved.
Alec's head turned toward me.
His face was a ruin.
"Do something," he said. His voice had lost its shape. "Anything. Please."
I had nothing.
Pristilia walked toward the uncle slowly, fan glowing faint at the edges.
Alec laughed.
It was the worst sound I had ever heard broken and high and completely hollow, the laugh of someone who has just watched something inside themselves go out.
"Why are you just standing there." Not a question. "Maybe-- haha--maybe my uncle was right. Maybe all nobles really are the same." He laughed again, wet and fractured. "I was such an idiot. I saved you and for what. I should have stayed a merchant. I should have never--"
He kept laughing.
I stood with my sealed hands at my sides and felt every word of it land exactly where it was aimed.
Pristilia stopped beside the fallen man.
She raised her fan.
The glow at its edge brightened.
And the only sound in the room was Alec laughing at himself for having believed in something.