CHAPTER 26
Azra'il - POV
Winter had decided, with the typical gradualness of diplomats who know they have lost the war but still try to negotiate the terms of withdrawal, that its occupation of Vila Buena was no longer sustainable.
The snow still covered the ground in thick layers. There was still enough cold in the air for every breath to become a small cloud of vapour, and for the extra layers of wool to be treated as a matter of survival rather than an aesthetic choice. However, the violent snowstorms had ceased with that abrupt quality of someone who has already said everything they had to say and sees no use in repeating it.
Inside the Greyrat house, however, winter had left marks considerably deeper and harder to melt than the snow in the courtyard.
The formal announcement that Lilia would take up the position of second wife of the family was made by Paul during an ordinary breakfast morning. He used the tone of voice of a man communicating an irrevocable administrative decision, not requesting the approval of the family committee. There was in his posture that somewhat forced dignity of someone who had weighed the few available options and concluded that this was the only route that protected the greatest number of those involved from the consequences of his own mistakes.
Zenith heard the declaration in silence, with the expression of someone who had already arrived at the same conclusion weeks before him and was merely awaiting the legal formality catching up with the domestic reality.
In the Kingdom of Asura, polygamy was not an eccentricity; it was a perfectly accepted and regulated institution for families possessing sufficient resources to sustain multiple households. There was no public scandal in the decision. It was a social structure that existed with the naturalness of taxes or the changing of seasons.
However, the fact that the practice was accepted by law did not make cohabitation any less complex inside a specific house where the second wife would continue being the domestic servant, and where the first wife had been betrayed by both of those involved under her own roof.
Asuran law smoothed the bureaucracy, but it did not resolve breakfast.
Lilia received the new status with the solemn resignation of someone accepting a burden they never asked for, but which they recognised as necessary to secure the future of the child she carried. With the pragmatic clarity that had always defined her, she declared that, regardless of the new civil title, she would continue performing all her duties as housekeeper of the household.
It was, in my technical assessment, the only decision in that whole arrangement that made complete practical sense.
Later that afternoon, Rudeus and I were watching the courtyard, partially covered in patches of dirty ice. He wore that concentrated expression of someone processing complex thoughts and weighing whether the benefits of voicing them outweighed the risk of being mocked by me.
He decided to take the risk.
"Do you think..." he began, feigning a purely academic interest in the social architecture of our world, "that the logistics of having two wives is very complicated in practice?"
I looked at him sideways, without moving my head.
"You are not interested in Asuran sociology, Rudeus. You are merely projecting your own ideal masculine fantasy scenario."
"I am merely conducting a comparative analysis of the family structure that has just established itself under our roof."
"You're daydreaming about a harem, Rudeus."
He opened his mouth to protest and deny the accusation, but his nervous system seemed to realise in time that any lie would be too transparent to survive my scrutiny. He sighed, defeated. "Well... it is not necessarily a bad concept for the future, if you think about it properly."
"It is not a bad concept if you confine yourself to the literary fantasy of low-quality novels," I replied, adjusting my posture. "But in physical reality, a harem is not a fantasy, it is a resource-management nightmare."
"Management?"
"Precisely. Let us analyse the structure as a dynamic system. You introduce two or more people into the same emotional contract. Each of them has distinct priorities, different pasts, emotional needs, and expectations of you that, by mathematical definition, will never be identical. You take on the obligation of distributing your attention, which is a strictly finite and non-renewable resource, in such a way that none of them feels they are receiving less than the others. Which is structurally impossible."
I picked up my lukewarm cup of tea before continuing.
"Then you add descendants to the equation. Each mother will want, by biological preservation instinct, her own children to receive priority in the division of assets and status. The heirs, consequently, will grow up competing with one another for the same reasons. The result is a system designed with one hundred per cent efficiency to generate civil conflict and domestic resentment."
Rudeus was looking at me with the expression of someone who had requested a casual opinion and received in return an extremely discouraging economic viability report.
"You are being unnecessarily pessimistic about human relationships, Azra'il."
"I am being scientifically precise. It simply happens that, in this specific case, precision and pessimism use the same terminology."
〈Eos, consult the historical records of my 476th incarnation.〉
[Accessing files of the 476th life. Record: Regent Empress Fèng Língxiāo of the Great Tianlong Empire.]
〈How many official consorts appeared in my imperial records at the time?〉
[Eighty-two consorts of varying ranks documented at the height of your reign. It is estimated the real number was higher, but many records were consumed by fire during the subsequent succession disputes.]
〈And what was the outcome when I decided I had worked enough and tried to abdicate the throne in favour of a peaceful retirement?〉
[The fragmentation of interests among the descendants of the different lineages generated the formation of four distinct military coalitions, resulting in five consecutive civil wars and a period of feudal anarchy that the chroniclers of that world later recorded as 'The Great Fragmentation'. A period that lasted approximately twelve years before a new dynasty established itself.]
〈Precisely. And I had planned it would be a perfectly organised, bloodless transfer of power.〉
[Your planning at the time neglected the variable of dynastic jealousy and maternal ambition. A primary miscalculation for someone with your accumulated experience.]
I decided not to share those specific historical details with Rudeus. He possessed an excessively romantic mind, or perhaps simply one dominated by latent juvenile hormones, to grasp the administrative weight of eighty-two consorts and five civil wars.
"Rudeus," I called, bringing him back to the reality of the Vila Buena courtyard.
"You are a girl," he replied, crossing his arms with the typical stubbornness of someone who prefers to maintain the illusion rather than accept the statistics. "You simply do not possess the mental wiring necessary to understand a man's biological ambitions."
I looked at him for a long second, considering the irony of that sentence directed at someone who had already governed empires under the most varied gender identities across millennia.
〈Should I detail for him the anatomy of desire and the maintenance costs of an imperial palace? No. It would be a waste of breath.〉
"Believe what I am telling you: I understand the subject considerably more deeply than your current imagination allows," I replied, taking the last sip of tea. "And what my understanding points to is that the fantasy of the harem is infinitely more pleasant than the bureaucratic and military reality of managing one."
He looked away, silently deciding that maintaining his theoretical disagreement was more satisfying than admitting the logic of my argument. It was a stubborn attitude I could respect for its consistency, even if I considered his conclusion almost touchingly naive.
The authorisation for us to leave the boundaries of the house finally arrived along with breakfast the following morning.
Paul had inspected the horizon through the window, assessed the consistency of the snow with the pragmatism of a warrior who knew the thermal traps of that region, and declared the temperature acceptable. We could go out, provided we did not stray far from the village outskirts. Zenith added the usual recommendations about returning before nightfall and forced us into extra coats that subtly restricted our joint mobility.
Rudeus practically leapt from his chair before the instructions were fully spoken. I finished my tea with my customary calm before following him. We were going to see Sylphiette after nearly four months of absolute winter confinement.
The route to Sylphy's house had already become part of our geographical routine. The village lanes, still partially covered in patches of ice, had that familiar quality of scenes we knew well but which had changed texture under the influence of the season.
Rudeus walked beside me displaying that accumulated energy typical of domestic animals that have spent too long locked in confined spaces. He took unnecessarily wide steps, nearly skipping over the patches of frozen water.
We reached Sylphy's house and I knocked on the wooden door with three firm knocks.
The door opened abruptly. For a brief second, Sylphiette remained still on the threshold, her large red eyes wide, as though checking whether our presence there was real or merely a mirage caused by sunlight reflecting off the snow.
In the next second, she leapt towards us.
It was a sudden movement, devoid of any calculation of trajectory or deceleration. Sylphy threw her arms open with the accumulated force of a child who had spent the entire winter counting the days until she saw the only friends she had. She launched herself at us before either of us could adopt a stable balancing posture.
She wrapped her left arm around Rudeus's neck and her right around mine. The momentum of her six-year-old body's impact, combined with our complete lack of readiness, resolved the equation of gravity in the only way physics allowed.
The three of us collapsed into the soft snow covering the entrance.
Sylphy was already laughing before we even hit the ground, that clean, unguarded laugh of someone too happy to care whether the fall had hurt or whether snow was getting in through her coat collar. Rudeus joined the laughter, shaking his head to dislodge the ice that had gathered in his brown hair.
I remained lying on my back in the cold snow, watching the grey late-winter sky through the treetops.
Sylphy lifted her head from the middle of our tangle of arms and heavy coats, her cheeks flushed from the cold and her eyes shining in a way I had not seen since autumn. "I missed you both so much!"
"We missed you too, Sylphy," replied Rudeus, wiping his face with his coat sleeve.
She turned her face towards me, awaiting my confirmation.
"I did too," I said, allowing my voice to sound a little less formal than usual. It was a simple statement, devoid of any dramatic exaggeration, but it was the plain truth.
We walked towards the open field at the edge of the village, where the accumulated snow was deep enough to be fun, but not so much as to prevent the movement of a six-year-old's short legs. Sylphy wore the thickest wool coat she owned, a gift from her father to face the rigours of the season, and her expression was the perfect translation of someone too content to register the thermal discomfort in her extremities.
"What happened at your house this whole time?" she asked, keeping pace beside us. "Tell me everything."
Rudeus and I exchanged a quick glance over her head.
There was a considerable quantity of dramatic events that had occurred under the Greyrat roof during the winter. I was mentally assessing which fraction of that moral scandal and that complex marital reorganisation was appropriate to share with a six-year-old who lived isolated with her father and had no need whatsoever to understand the politics of Paul Greyrat's concubinage.
Rudeus appeared to have arrived at the same conclusion of discretion judging by his cautious expression.
"Our mother is expecting," announced Rudeus, choosing to focus on the biologically positive part of the situation. "We'll have a baby in the house very soon."
Sylphy blinked her red eyes, processing the information with that childish gravity that tries to understand the mechanics of new family members. "That's a good thing, isn't it?"
"Yes," I replied, intervening neutrally. "There will be a new individual in the residence."
"Actually, two individuals," I corrected immediately after, with the coldness of someone reporting an inevitable statistic.
Rudeus shot me a look mixing panic and silent censure.
"Lilia is also expecting a child," I added, unbothered by my brother's expression. "They are simultaneous biological processes with estimated delivery dates for the same period or very close to one another. It is a matter of logistical planning."
Sylphy stopped in the snow, trying to compute the information. "Two little kids at the same time?"
"Yes," I replied.
"The house is going to be extremely noisy."
"That is, without doubt, the most optimistic and charitable projection available at present," I agreed, nodding.
Rudeus sighed, clearly wishing I possessed a more developed social filter for dealing with children, but Sylphy simply accepted the information with the gravity of someone seriously pondering the acoustic impact of two babies crying in unison. It was a mental image she had no practical experience to assess, but which she was assessing with enormous seriousness regardless.
The phenomenon was, in a way, rather amusing to observe.
The playful hostility began without any formal declaration of war, which is exactly how the best and most efficient military campaigns tend to begin throughout history.
Rudeus shaped the first snowball using silent magic. He applied a precise compaction rate, only achievable by someone with refined control over water density to freeze the edges while maintaining the sphericity of the projectile, and launched it towards the empty space between Sylphy and me. His expression was that of a scientist testing the friction coefficients of a cold wind.
The ice sphere passed a mere five centimetres from Sylphiette's left ear.
Sylphy followed the projectile's trajectory with her eyes, then looked at Rudeus, and finally turned to me.
"My apologies," said Rudeus, raising his hands unconvincingly. "The launch vector suffered an unplanned deviation."
Sylphy's response was to shape her own snowball.
Without a wand it was slower for her. But with the wand I had lent her, the compaction had come out four seconds faster and with a precision that had improved considerably since the first weeks of practice. The ball struck Rudeus in the centre of his chest with the particular satisfaction of a projectile that had arrived exactly where it had been aimed.
Sylphy's sphere struck Rudeus exactly in the centre of his sternum, dissolving into a white cloud and leaving him with the expression of someone who had not anticipated that precision of response.
The ballistic war was declared.
〈Eos, project the ideal trajectories for me to exit this quadrant without snow residue in my hair structure.〉
[Simulations indicate a zero per cent probability of clean evasion, given the unpredictability of the specimens' movements and both parties' mana recharge speed. I recommend abandoning the defensive posture and adopting an active neutralisation strategy.]
〈A tactical conclusion perfectly aligned with my personal preferences. Let us proceed to combat.〉
The snowy field instantly transformed into an arena of dynamic calculations, where parabolic trajectories were traced through the air by three individuals with absurdly distinct cognitive capacities and mana reserves, but operating with the same level of destructive enthusiasm.
Rudeus had opted for the saturation-bombing strategy: he created entire rows of compacted spheres and launched them in continuous bursts, trusting that volume of fire would compensate for any inaccuracy of aim. It was the typical tactic of someone with near-infinite mana reserves and no concern whatsoever for the energy efficiency of his actions.
Sylphy preferred the doctrine of surgical precision: she shaped fewer projectiles, but applied to them a greater initial velocity and a rotational stabilisation that ensured the target was struck with minimal deviation. She had perfectly absorbed the concept that correct targeting nullifies the value of enemy volume.
I, for my part, adopted the doctrine of absolute mechanical efficiency: strictly calibrated speed, trajectories calculated to collide with and intercept Rudeus's projectiles before they reached my position, and counter-attack shots directed specifically at the defensive gaps that both he and Sylphy left exposed whilst attempting to annihilate one another.
〈Eos, mapping of active projectiles in the air.〉
[Detection: six medium-density spheres originating from specimen Rudeus on varied ballistic trajectories. Two high-density spheres from Sylphiette, both with impact vectors locked on specimen Rudeus. No projectile currently directed at your position within the coming time variables.]
〈Rudeus is committing the primary error of neglecting my physical presence out of excessive confidence in his volume of fire.〉
[A classic strategic error resulting from tactical arrogance.]
I formed three ice spheres in under a second using magic without incantation. I directed the first two to collide directly with Rudeus's artillery line, nullifying his attack in a small explosion of pulverised snow, and launched the third with a curved trajectory designed to strike him exactly at the moment he was recovering his balance after the collapse of his offensive.
The impact of the third sphere was perfect.
"That was—" Rudeus spat out a considerable quantity of ice that had entered his mouth, "that was a radar-coordinated attack!"
"It was merely an efficient response to careless tactical positioning," I replied.
"You intercepted my projectiles in mid-air and still managed to counter-attack without a gap!"
"It all comes down to having a neural processing time superior to yours, Rudeus. I suggest you train your calculation capacity before initiating a ballistic duel."
Sylphy let out that loud laugh she only displayed when she was so entertained she forgot to monitor whether the surrounding environment was safe for expressing her joy. It was a sound that had appeared very rarely in the childhood of a girl who had learnt very early that her own existence and the colour of her hair were reasons for hostility from others.
I noted that, over the past several months of companionship, that laugh was becoming an increasingly frequent habit.
That was good. That she could laugh in that unguarded way. That there existed a space of physical safety where she did not need to calculate every gesture for fear of suffering violence. And that the two brats fate had placed around her were the kind of company that drew out that joy, rather than suffocating it beneath the weight of the world.
It was a satisfying conclusion. I would never verbalise it to either of them, of course, but it was the truth.
Rudeus, feeling that his pride as a mage was at stake, began shaping a snowball with considerably larger dimensions than the previous ones. His expression indicated he had concluded that volume was not the answer; the raw size of the projectile was the new variable he intended to test to break through my defence.
〈This attempt is going to generate unnecessary noise.〉
[And a wide-scale dispersal impact. Inevitable.]
The large mass of ice was launched with kinetic energy sufficient to force me to activate my ocular perception to project its trajectory with accuracy. I sent a focused counter-projectile, designed to penetrate the centre of Rudeus's sphere and cause its structural fragmentation before it crossed the halfway point.
The collision resulted in a snow detonation that covered all three of us in a cold white mist.
Sylphy emerged from the mist with her green hair completely white with ice and her cheeks red with excitement. Rudeus emerged shortly after, with the expression of someone critically analysing the collapse of his superweapon and attempting to calculate a new combat strategy that might overcome my reaction speed.
I emerged from the ice dispersal with a layer of snow covering the top of my head, an accumulation that, as Eos informed me mentally, blended homogeneously with the tone of my own hair.
Rudeus looked at me with the left corner of his mouth slightly raised, displaying that smile of complicity he used to wear when he thought he had won an aesthetic argument.
"You've got snow in your hair, Azra'il," he pointed out.
"We all present an accumulation of ice particles in our hair structure at this moment, Rudeus."
"No, but on you it's different." He tilted his head, clearly pleased with his visual observation. "Actually, with that white hair of yours and that absurdly pale skin of yours, with the snow on top of it all... you're practically invisible against the winter backdrop of the field. If you closed your eyes, I doubt anyone could find you here."
Sylphy looked me up and down, then compared my image against the white expanse of the field, and looked back at me, with that gravity of someone assessing Rudeus's technical opinion.
"He's not entirely wrong," she admitted, with the typical honesty of someone who did not wish to be unkind, but who refused to lie in the face of obvious physical evidence.
〈Eos, project the launch vector and rotational velocity necessary for a snowball to strike the geometric centre of Rudeus's face under the current lateral wind conditions.〉
[Processing fluid dynamics... Launch vector defined at 12 degrees of inclination. Recommended initial velocity: 14 metres per second. Probability of direct impact on target with no time for a defensive reaction: 94.7%.]
〈A perfectly acceptable safety margin by my standards.〉
The ice sphere left my hand with the millimetric precision of someone who had spent centuries studying ballistics and classical mechanics in worlds where survival depended on the trajectory of an arrow or a bullet.
Rudeus received the impact exactly in the centre of his face, without his nervous system managing so much as a dodging reflex. The snow dissolved over his nose, trickling down his cheeks as he blinked, stunned.
"Was that really necessary?" he asked, trying to wipe his eyebrows with frozen fingers.
"It was a proportionate and educational response to your attempt at forced camouflage," I replied, keeping my voice flat.
Sylphy let out another one of those clean, unrestrained peals of laughter, covering her mouth with her gloved hands as the laugh echoed across the open field. I allowed the corner of my own lips to rise by a millimetre in response, a gesture discreet enough to go unnoticed by anyone not conducting continuous optical monitoring of my face.
Nobody was paying attention to my expression, as everyone was too occupied trying to shape their next snowballs for the resumption of hostilities.
It was, in every practical respect of that cold late-winter morning, the ideal condition.