CHAPTER 35
POV - Azra'il
Certain forms of wisdom can only be acquired by dying an embarrassing number of times.
One of them: cold tea is the most honest metaphor available for most of life's emotional situations. The other, more pressing right now, is that when a warrior nearly two metres tall, with feline ears and a combat record equivalent to a private war, spends two hours staring at you unblinking inside a moving carriage, you have three options. Stare back until someone concedes. Fake sleep. Or accept it's going to continue all the way to Roa and try to make good use of the time.
I'd been on option three for an hour and a half.
〈Eos, she's still staring at me.〉
[Twentieth instance since the carriage set off. I'll switch to counting in blocks of twenty for efficiency.]
〈Thank you for the update.〉
[You're welcome. I'll also note you've looked out the window eleven times. The scenery hasn't changed much since the ninth.]
〈I'm appreciating the countryside.〉
[You're avoiding processing recent events using landscape as an alibi.]
〈That's appreciating the countryside with emotional context.〉
Rudeus remained sprawled on the seat with the serenity of someone who'd made peace with unconsciousness almost professionally. Someone had folded a coat under his head, probably Ghislaine, since I'd climbed into the carriage with my hands full and the firm intention of not letting on that I'd left Vila Buena carrying something heavy in my chest that technically had no physical shape but that my body insisted on registering all the same.
This seven-year-old body did have its inconveniences.
The farewell had been shorter than I'd expected and longer than I'd planned for, the way these things arrive without checking your schedule first.
After the fight. After Paul got up off the ground with the dignity of a man determined to process everything in private, preferably far from the elder daughter who'd just knocked him flat. After that, I'd gone inside with a simple objective: pack, and leave.
But Zenith was waiting for me in the corridor.
No dialogue. No preamble. Just standing there, eyes still bright, wearing the look of someone who'd waited for me to pass and decided, at the last second, that she couldn't let me go without saying something.
"Azra'il."
Just that. My name, with that hesitation of someone who has a whole sentence ready and decides, right at the moment, that the sentence is too large for the moment to bear.
"Mother." I lowered my tone, the one I kept only for her. "I'll just pack my things and Rudeus's."
"I needed to see you. I need to talk to you." She twisted her hands, a gesture I already recognised as a sign of words being chosen with excessive care. "What you said out there. To Paul."
"So you heard all of it."
"I heard..." Her voice wavered. "Every word."
I stayed quiet, letting her decide how far she wanted to go.
"You know, I forgave him," she said, looking at her own hands. "Or that's what I kept telling myself, month after month. That I'd forgiven. That we were fine." She laughed, without any humour inside the laugh. "But I don't think real forgiveness should hurt this much every time he comes home late and I catch myself working out where he'd been."
"You never told me any of that..."
"Because it isn't the sort of thing you tell a seven-year-old daughter." She raised her eyes, and there was in them an ageless exhaustion, the kind that builds up in layers over time, not from a single bad night. "But you just fought your own father in my name today, so I think I've lost the right to pretend you're too small for the rest of it."
I didn't rush anything.
"I thought about leaving," she said, finally, quiet enough to be just for us. "Several times. Not right away, at first I was too shattered to think about anything. But later, once the dust settled and everyone pretended things were fine, that's when the thoughts really came. I'd lie there at night, next to him, doing the maths in my head. Where I'd take you two. What I'd tell my parents. Whether I could keep the house on my own."
"Why didn't you go?"
"Because every time I got close to deciding, I'd think of you and Rudeus growing up without your father around, even an imperfect father. And then Norn was born, only a few months old, depending entirely on me, and I thought: what kind of mother would I be, tearing down the only structure she knows before she's even formed a memory?" She squeezed her hands harder. "So I swallowed it. Every time the urge came back, I swallowed it again. Kept it in my chest and decided the whole family was worth more than my own pain."
There was something profoundly unfair in that logic, and I recognised the pattern with a clarity that shouldn't fit inside anyone: women who slowly erase themselves holding up an entire structure for others, falling apart in silence without anyone noticing enough to give it a name.
"That shouldn't have been your burden alone," I said, choosing my words with the care the situation called for, careful not to let slip anything beyond what a perceptive child could plausibly put together. "Holding an entire family together at the cost of slowly falling apart isn't the same thing as being strong, Mother. It's just pain locked away where no one can see it."
Zenith looked at me with a mix of surprise and relief, as though no one had ever said that out loud before, not even her, to herself.
"Where do you get things like that from, being so small?" she asked, with a trembling half-smile, more to herself than expecting a serious answer.
"I pay attention," I said. "I pay a great deal of attention to you."
That pulled from her a sound that was half sob, half genuine laugh, the kind that comes out when no one, not even the person making it, quite knows which of the two emotions is closer to the surface.
"What do I do now?" she asked, and it didn't sound rhetorical. It sounded genuinely directed at me, as though part of her hoped I had the answer she hadn't managed to find in all this time.
"That isn't my decision to make," I said. "Staying, leaving, forgiving properly, forgiving halfway, never forgiving, that's yours alone. No one has the right to take that from you. Not even me."
"But?"
"But whatever you decide, I want you to know something." I held her hands in mine, too small to wrap around them fully, but firm enough for the gesture to mean something. "If one day you decide you've swallowed enough. If you decide to leave, with Norn, without Paul, wherever that takes you, I'll take care of you both. I promise."
Zenith blinked, her already-wet eyes taking on a different shine, one of gentle shock.
"Azra'il..."
"It isn't a figure of speech," I continued, before she could dismiss it as childish sentiment. "If I need to work, I'll work. If I need to protect, I'll protect. You don't carry this alone, whatever you decide."
For a second her face did something complicated, somewhere between being moved and a tender kind of pain, as though the promise, coming from me, hurt and healed at the same time.
Then she laughed.
A low, wet laugh, but genuine, the kind that's born when the heart is too full to pick just one reaction.
"Would you look at yourself." She freed one hand from mine to stroke my hair, with that fondness only a mother can put into a simple gesture. "Promising to take care of me and your sister. Taking on an adult's responsibility." She shook her head, the smile trembling between amused and moved. "You're still a child, Azra'il. You don't need to carry this. The weight is mine, not yours."
"I know I'm a child," I replied, with the calculated seriousness of someone who knew exactly how much that would land as endearing rather than unsettling to her ears. "That doesn't make the promise any less valid."
"It doesn't," she agreed, still laughing softly, her hand still in my hair. "But I hope I never need to collect on it. I'd rather see you worried about toys and mischief, not your mother's upkeep."
"Toys are overrated," I replied. "But I'll accept postponing the collection, since you insist so much."
She laughed again, this time followed by a long sigh, as though part of the weight she'd carried for months had, at least for that day, found somewhere to rest.
That was when she bent down and pulled me into a hug.
And it was there, with her arms around me and my hand moving slowly across her back, that I began to hum, without consciously deciding to do it.
It wasn't a song from this world. It was an old melody, from a guitar I hadn't played in lifetimes, sung once to someone who had also needed to hear that she was expected back, in a time and place that now only existed as an echo too distant to have a name.
🎵 "Remember me,
Today I have to leave.
Remember me,
Do your best to smile." 🎵
I felt Zenith stiffen, surprised, and then settle deeper into the embrace, as though the melody had found some corner inside her that needed exactly that.
🎵 "No matter how far apart we are,
I'll never forget you.
As our song keeps playing,
Our love will only grow." 🎵
Her arms tightened around me, a little more with each verse, as though her body had decided, without consulting the rest of her, that loosening that grip even slightly would be the same as letting me go too soon.
I kept going, my voice low enough to be only hers, my hand still moving in that slow, steady rhythm across her back.
🎵 "Remember me,
I don't know when I'll return.
Remember me,
If you ever hear a guitar." 🎵
I felt the exact moment her breathing changed. It was no longer the held-back crying that disguises itself with a tight throat and a turned-away face. It was proper sobbing now, quiet but uncontrollable, shaking her shoulders against mine.
There was an old ache folded into that melody, a memory of when I once sang it to a fallen angel with dark hair, the first person, across any of my existences, I ever called mother without a single drop of shared blood between us. She chose me anyway, and decided that was enough.
That was only one of countless songs I used to sing to her, in that life.
I told Zenith none of that. I didn't need to. Perhaps she felt some echo of it regardless, of whatever the melody carried, because her embrace only grew tighter with every line, as though she were trying to hold onto the sound before it ended.
🎵 "It will stay beside you,
With its gentle, mournful song.
And until I can hold you again,
Remember me." 🎵
I let the last note dissolve into a whisper that faded into the silence of the corridor.
Zenith didn't pull away right away.
She stayed there, her wet face buried against the top of my head, the sobs gradually turning into deeper, slower breathing, like someone who'd just cried out something that needed to leave for a long time and had only now found the right opening. When she finally stepped back far enough to look at me, her eyes were completely swollen, red, with no attempt at hiding it.
"Where did you learn that song?"
"Somewhere," I said, letting my forehead rest for a moment against her shoulder before continuing. "A long time ago. I don't even remember quite where."
She didn't press. Perhaps she recognised, with that maternal instinct that needs no full explanation, that the true answer wouldn't fit into a single sentence, and that the question had already received enough.
"Take good care of Rudeus," she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand, her voice still a little thick.
I sighed.
"I'll look after that chubby pervert," I replied, in the tone of someone accepting an arduous task out of pure sense of duty. "But if he gets up to too much nonsense along the way, he'll get a fair few knocks from his elder sister to help him grow up properly. I'd rather correct it now than discover in a few years he's turned into a cheap copy of Paul."
"Azra'il!" But there was a smile there, genuine, behind the token disapproval.
"I'm merely offering a service. Free of charge, even. Consider it a parting gift."
That pulled a weak laugh from her, still wet with tears, but genuine.
"And if Paul acts up again," I continued, the tone sliding from playful to something with more weight underneath, "write to me. I'll come back to Vila Buena in person and kick his backside until he remembers why he decided to marry you in the first place."
Zenith looked at me for a moment, and something in her face melted completely, any trace of tears losing ground to a pure, unguarded fondness.
"Would you look at you," she said, quietly, almost to herself. "Threatening your own father, promising to raise your brother through a fair few clouts, declaring yourself my personal protector." She laughed, and this time it came out clean, no sob mixed in. "You really are Mummy's girl, you know that?"
Before I could formulate any dignified objection to that label, she bent down and pressed a kiss to the top of my head.
A soul spanning countless existences, one that had witnessed empires rise and crumble, was reduced within seconds to a silence with no adequate reply, all because of a kiss on the head and the phrase "Mummy's girl." There was something deeply humbling in that, the kind no accumulated wisdom could shield against.
"I'm going to consider that an offence I choose not to retaliate against," I murmured, finally, for lack of any more dignified response.
Zenith just laughed harder, not looking remotely impressed by my attempt to recover composure.
She straightened up, the smile still on her face, and it was with that, not the tears from before, that she finally let me go pack my bags.
I waved one last time and left.
Ghislaine had picked up the unconscious Rudeus with the ease of someone who carries dead weight the way most people breathe, and set him in the carriage with the precision of someone who'd transported knocked-out bodies before and developed her own method for it. No cruelty in it. Pure efficiency, which was, I was discovering, her particular vocabulary of care.
I climbed in after. The carriage set off.
And there we'd been for hours, facing one another, Rudeus horizontal and oblivious to everything, Ghislaine staring at me with that fixation of someone who's found something outside the existing categories and is trying to solve the problem through prolonged observation.
I'd asked about the job once, to break the ice.
She said it was better to wait for Rudeus to wake.
Went back to staring.
〈Is she going to stare at me all the way to Roa?〉
[Current projection: yes.]
I sighed.
"I'm still thinking about the fighting style you used today."
Ghislaine spoke without preamble, with the economy of someone who'd decided the time had come and saw no reason to dance around a subject that already spoke for itself.
"Celestial Sword Art?" I said. "You're welcome to keep thinking. It's a system I developed on my own. It has no relative in any style I know of from here, so it's no surprise it looks strange from the outside."
Her ears moved, a gesture I'd already learned to read as active processing. Her eyes moved over my face with that combatant's read, searching for something the words hadn't fully delivered.
"Is it possible for me to learn it?"
The question arrived with its own weight. Not abstract curiosity, it was a swordsman who'd spent decades building a frame of reference for what was possible and had run into something outside it, asking, in earnest, whether there was a way in.
I considered it honestly.
〈Eos, analysis of Ghislaine. Does she have the prerequisites?〉
[Analysing physical structure. Touki: exceptional. Distribution, density, control, at a level that justifies King classification without argument. But mana channels for spellcasting... nothing detected in that direction. She uses mana, but all of it channelled into the body and into Touki. The infrastructure for conventional magic, let alone without incantation, simply doesn't exist yet.]
〈So is it possible or not?〉
[Wrong question. The right one is: does she have the physical foundation to develop it? But it would mean building from scratch a structure most mages spend their entire childhood forming. Possible? Technically. Easy? Not remotely.]
I nodded, internally.
"It depends on how much work you're willing to put in," I said. "Celestial Sword Art isn't a style you learn somewhere. It's one you build, on a foundation most swordsmen have never had to lay."
"What foundation?"
"First condition: deep knowledge of mana and spellcraft. Not enough to cast two or three when the situation calls for it, enough to understand the nature of each element. How it behaves under compression. How it reacts when directed in motion. How it changes when you're exhausted and the channels are at their limit." I let that settle. "Second condition: magic without incantation. And that isn't the hard part of the style. It's the price of admission."
Ghislaine's brow furrowed.
"A conventional mage needs to chant to cast," I explained. "Now imagine a swordsman stopping in the middle of a fight to recite a spell."
"They die."
"Quickly and without dignity," I agreed. "No incantation isn't what sets my style apart. It's the bare minimum before the rest of it can even function. Without it, everything I do in a fight is just pretty aesthetics you'll never be able to reproduce."
Her ears dropped.
A small movement, subtle, the kind that would pass unnoticed by anyone not paying attention. They dropped with the quality of someone who'd heard an honest answer and was making peace with it.
That triggered an instinct with no dignified explanation whatsoever.
〈Eos, I have the urge to stroke her ears.〉
[Fascinating. Survived thousands of empires, hundreds of apocalypses, and an undocumented number of creative deaths, and what threatens to undo you now is a pair of cat ears.]
〈I'm not going to do it.〉
[I know. But the fact that you're reporting the impulse suggests part of you is considering it.]
〈Part of me considers a great many things. That's what you're for, to log the bad considerations and not comment on them.〉
[I'm commenting now.]
〈I'm reviewing the terms of our contract.〉
I kept my hands in my lap. With dignity. Like an adult.
I'm not entirely sure when it stopped being an interrogation and became something else.
It happened with the gradualness of everything that changes state without a formal announcement, water that cools until it stops scalding without you ever marking the exact moment of the shift. Ghislaine gradually relaxed, her shoulders dropping half a centimetre from where combat habit kept them. Her ears returned to neutral. The air between us traded assessment for that silence that exists between people not yet close, but who've already concluded the other doesn't represent an immediate threat.
Progress.
We talked about the fight.
Ghislaine had observations, specific enough to sting the pride, technical enough to impress, with the precision of someone who'd spent decades refining her reading of movement and applied it to every strike, dodge and stance I'd used. Most of them correct. Some, impressive.
"Paul's hit on your right shoulder, early on," she said. "You absorbed it, but adjusted your posture afterwards. Third time the strike landed at that angle, you'd shifted your weight distribution."
"The body registers what the head is still processing," I said. "If you wait for conscious analysis before adjusting, you're already too late. The fight's over before that."
She considered that with the seriousness of someone cataloguing new information and deciding where to file it.
"Your exact class. What is it?" she asked, afterwards.
That was, honestly, the hardest question anyone could ask me, not because I didn't know the answer, but because the honest answer was that what I'd developed didn't quite fit the existing categories. It was like trying to measure a liquid with a ruler. You get somewhere close, but the tool wasn't built for that.
"I don't have a clean classification," I explained. "What I do has grown in directions the systems here don't map with any precision. For practical purposes: enough to bring down Paul, who sits somewhere between Advanced and Saint."
Ghislaine's eyes moved over me, top to bottom, with that experienced combatant's assessment doing the arithmetic.
"You're seven years old."
"An information I am fully aware of, thank you."
The corners of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile, more the sketch of something that might become one if Ghislaine's facial muscles decided to cooperate.
"I reached King."
She said it with no fanfare, with none of the weight of someone waiting for a reaction. It was information offered as information, with that economy I'd started to appreciate in her.
King. I knew what it meant in theory, fifth rung, above Saint, below Emperor. But theory and concrete reference were different things, and Ghislaine was the first person I'd seen operate at that level closely enough to calibrate what it actually meant in practice.
"Are you the standard for the class, or at its edge?" I asked.
Ghislaine's ears moved slightly with the microexpression of someone who hadn't expected the question to go that direction.
"At the edge," she said. "Reached it a few years back. Still... consolidating."
Consolidating. The vocabulary of someone who'd reached a plateau and was learning what it weighed before trying for the next one.
〈Eos, if Ghislaine is at the edge of King and still considers herself consolidating...〉
[Emperor sits at a level she still can't see the ceiling of. And God sits at a level that probably doesn't have a visible ceiling at all.]
〈Exactly what I was thinking.〉
[Which is, in itself, useful information about how much room exists above where you currently stand.]
Useful was a polite word for it. The more honest word was humbling, but the productive kind of humbling, the kind that clarifies rather than diminishes.
"That's genuinely impressive," I said, and it was. "Thank you for the concrete reference point."
Ghislaine frowned slightly, as though she'd expected a different sort of response to that.
"How did you meet Paul?" I asked.
And here Ghislaine did something she hadn't done until then: she relaxed completely. Not the relaxation of someone lowering their guard. The relaxation of someone who'd been asked a question that belonged to familiar territory.
She talked about the party. Fangs of the Black Wolf, the name alone telling you plenty about the era's aesthetic ambitions. Paul, Zenith, her, and others. Adventurers. She'd joined the group after years of being rejected from others for reasons that didn't need naming to be clear.
"Paul's an idiot about a lot of things," she said, with the calm of someone who'd reached that verdict long ago and made peace with it. "But as a swordsman, he's genuine. And in the party he didn't treat me differently for being beastkin."
"Was that unusual?"
"It was." Her eyes went to the window for a moment, not with longing, but the way people look off into the distance when checking something internally before continuing. "Most parties wanted the sword. Not the person holding it."
There was something in that which needed no comment to land. Not resentment. It was the clean record of someone who'd learned to keep the things that mattered without letting their weight warp how she carried the rest.
I respected that.
"I have a question about beastkin," I said, in the tone of someone who'd been holding onto it out of courtesy and had concluded the moment was right.
Ghislaine's ears turned slightly towards me. A sign of attention, I'd learned. Not alarm.
"About the mating season," I said. "I remember Paul mentioning it once."
Ghislaine went completely still for a second.
Then her eyes closed, her fingers pressing lightly against the side of her knee with the restraint of someone who'd expected this subject to come up eventually and wasn't especially pleased it had come up now.
"He mentioned it."
"With unnecessary detail."
"That's Paul."
"It is," she agreed, in the tone of a final verdict on the matter.
〈Eos, file this as: Ghislaine/Paul, subject closed by implicit mutual consent.〉
[Filed. Efficiently.]
I let the subject die with the dignity it deserved.
"Why do the two of you need money so badly?"
The question arrived after a comfortable pause, the kind that exists once a conversation has found its own rhythm and no longer needs constant filling.
"Ranoa Magic Academy," I said. "The fees are significant. And I intend to go along with Rudeus and Sylphiette."
Ghislaine looked at me with the expression of someone reorganising everything she'd understood so far.
"You want to go to a magic academy."
"With considerable enthusiasm."
"With the skill you have." Her brow furrowed slightly. "In the Sword Land, masters would queue up to make you their disciple. You'd be famous before your first year there was over."
I considered that with the seriousness it deserved.
It was probably true. Celestial Sword Art was the sort of thing that caught the attention of serious combatants, and Ghislaine had been impressed enough during the fight to keep asking questions for hours. A seven-year-old swordsman with that repertoire in a land that valued swordsmanship above almost everything else, the outcome was predictable and, honestly, a little dull to anticipate.
"Paul mentioned the Sword Land," I said. "Perhaps it's an eventual destination. But first I want the academy, and it isn't for the swordsmanship."
"Then why?"
"Libraries."
Ghislaine looked at me, waiting for the rest.
"Serious magic academies have collections that took decades or centuries to accumulate," I continued. "Texts on mana theory, on magic systems that fell out of use, on spells that stopped being practised for reasons no one bothered to document properly because the people who knew died before writing it down. That kind of knowledge doesn't turn up anywhere else, not with private tutors, not with swordmasters queuing up, not in the Sword Land." I looked at her. "I want to read all of it. Every volume. Every marginal note. Every index."
Ghislaine went quiet with that particular kind of silence of someone who'd received a complete answer and still didn't fully understand what she'd asked.
Her ear twitched.
Then her hand went to her head, scratching behind her ear with that involuntary gesture of someone whose bewilderment had arrived before her composure could intercept it.
"I know books can be useful," Ghislaine replied, her eyes going to the book I'd set beside my bag as though it were an object of undetermined function. "But to me a book is paper with marks on it. A sword's done more for my body than any paper ever has for my life."
"Depends what's written on the paper."
She shrugged one shoulder slightly. "Truth is, I can't read. So to me it's just paper."
It wasn't surprising. Literacy wasn't particularly accessible in this world; it needed a teacher, a family with means, someone who considered the child in front of them worth the effort. Whatever Ghislaine's childhood had been, it apparently hadn't included any of the three.
I looked out the window.
The countryside carried on being countryside with that admirable consistency of things that have no ambitions beyond what they already are.
Then a sound came from the floor of the carriage.
The sound of someone climbing out of unconsciousness in stages, the involuntary shift of position, the breathing changing pattern, the moment the body decides it's slept enough and starts negotiating a return with consciousness.
Then:
"—where—"
Rudeus woke with the panic of someone who'd opened their eyes in an unfamiliar place, his brain having sent the emergency signal before it had enough data to make sense of it. His eyes scanned the inside of the carriage at the speed of someone cataloguing threats, ceiling, window, the large feline figure on the front seat, the—
His eyes found mine.
The panic didn't vanish. It dropped to the level of someone who'd found a familiar anchor and was using it to start piecing together the rest.
Then the memory arrived.
You could see the expression of someone reassembling the last known events and concluding that the last known events included his own father knocking him to the ground with the Water Style while I watched with cold tea and a settled opinion.
Rudeus's face went through roughly four distinct phases in five seconds.
The last was somewhere between indignation and the sort of silent processing of someone who'd concluded that he'd lost a fight, been knocked unconscious, and woken up in a moving carriage in the company of his sister and a muscular woman with feline ears, and that this particular set of facts deserved a moment before any verbal response.
I respected the moment.
[He's fine. Vital signs normal. Though the ego may take a little longer to recover.]
〈Rudeus's ego is resilient. He'll be fine.〉
[History suggests it usually is.]
Rudeus looked at me.
Then looked at Ghislaine.
Then looked at the carriage ceiling with the expression of someone making peace with present reality before deciding what to do with it.