Chapter 378 - 377: The Vigil
Location:Virescent Expanse — Confederate Territory
Date/Time:TC1854.05.15-17
Kairos was fifty meters away when she stopped talking.
He was consulting with Sera Vahn about deployment patterns — the healed soldiers’ tactical integration with the Storm-Claw’s aerial reconnaissance, a conversation that required his full analytical attention and was receiving approximately eighty percent of it because the remaining twenty percent was, as it had been for months, tracking a voice on the other side of the clearing.
Raven’s voice. Mid-sentence. Explaining something to Tarek about detection nodes and cloud-layer coverage. The voice that had become, without his permission or awareness, the baseline frequency against which he measured the status of every room he entered. Present: acceptable. Absent: noted. Speaking: the world was operating correctly. Silent —
Silent.
Not the silence of a pause between thoughts. The silence of a signal being cut. One moment her voice was there — alive, engaged, carrying the particular cadence that meant she was solving a problem in real time and enjoying the solving. The next moment: nothing. A gap in the air where she had been.
Kairos turned.
The green-golden light hit his retinas before his brain could process the visual data. Erupting from her body — not gradually, not building, all at once. Every pore. Every meridian. A cocoon of light forming with the speed of something that had been held back and was no longer willing to wait.
Raven’s knees buckled. She was falling.
Kairos ran.
Not the measured stride he’d adopted since manifestation — the careful management of a mortal body’s energy expenditure that he’d calculated to the step and maintained with the discipline of someone who’d spent millennia managing systems more complex than legs. He ran the way a mortal runs when something they cannot lose is being taken. Badly. Desperately. His robes tangling, his boots finding every root and stone on the ground, his arms driving forward in a motion that no amount of cosmic authority had ever required him to learn because cosmic beings did not run toward things.