Neil activated it and the familiar pull of the return journey took hold, and when it released them they were back in the settlement, the ordinary light and ordinary sounds of it settling around them like something resumed after a pause.

Neil looked at the sky for a moment, judging the time.

Then he turned toward his domain and walked home.

...

The shadow under his feet seemed a bit strange.

That was the first thing Neil registered, not a sound or a shape but the quality of the shadow itself near the edge of the path, the way it held its position slightly longer than the light justified before it shifted.

Magnar felt it at the same moment, his body going from the loose and easy movement of the walk home to something entirely still and coiled in the space between one step and the next.

Freya stirred inside him, which was more telling than anything else.

Freya did not stir easily. She had been in enough dangerous situations across her life that her internal alarm was calibrated to things that were actually worth alarming about, and the fact that she had come alert meant the shadow near the path was not a coincidence or a trick of the light.

Neil stopped walking.

He did not reach for a weapon but his hand was near one, and his eyes were on the shadow, and every sense he had was pointed in that direction without any of it showing on his face.

The shadow moved.

Not dramatically, not with any theatrical effect, just a quiet gathering of the darkness there into something with more density than darkness should have, and then a woman was standing at the edge of the path where the shadow had been, looking at him.

She was tall and composed in the way of someone who had not been in a hurry for a very long time and had no plans to start.

Her hair was black and long, falling past her shoulders, and she appeared to be somewhere in her late thirties in the way that certain powerful people appeared to be an age and then stayed there regardless of what was actually passing.

Her features were sharp and unhurried, the kind of face that had done a great deal of observing and very little being observed, and the look she gave Neil when their eyes met was not hostile and not warm but somewhere between the two, like someone evaluating something they had been thinking about for a long time and were now finally seeing directly.

Magnar made a sound that was not a growl but was adjacent to one, low and sustained.

Freya’s presence inside Neil sharpened into something that rarely happened with her, something that could only be described as recognition mixed with a caution that was very carefully held in place.

She knows who this is, Neil realised, before Freya said anything.

"Don’t be so tense." The woman said, her voice easy and unhurried. "If I had wanted to do something, the path home was a much better opportunity than this."

She looked at the space beside her and two chairs formed out of shadow, solid and shaped and entirely real, placed at an angle to each other that suggested a conversation rather than a confrontation.

She sat in one of them with the ease of someone sitting in furniture they had owned for years, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at Neil with a faint expression that was not quite a smile but was in the neighbourhood of one.

She gestured at the second chair.

Neil looked at the chair. He looked at the woman. He did not sit yet.

"So." She said, settling back slightly. "Has the Analyzer skill started causing problems?"

The silence that followed that question was complete.

Neil’s expression did not change on the surface, but something behind it shifted significantly, because that name was not available to anyone.

Not Randy, not the wardens he had encountered, not the lords who had been watching him in the clash realm. Not even Ileana, who knew he had an ability of that nature but had never heard its actual name spoken aloud, because he had never spoken it aloud to anyone.

The woman watched his reaction with the air of someone who had expected exactly this and found the confirmation of it mildly satisfying.

She laughed then, a light sound, not mocking, just genuinely amused at the expression she was reading on his face despite his best efforts to not have one.

"Sit down." She said, and this time it was the kind of suggestion that contained a reasonable expectation of compliance, not a command but close enough that the distinction was mostly ceremonial.

Neil sat in the shadow chair.

It felt like a normal chair. He had half expected it not to.

Magnar stayed standing at his side, not relaxed but not escalating either, holding the same careful alert he had been in since the shadow moved.

The woman looked at Neil for a moment with that evaluating expression, then she began to speak.

"Your father’s name is Jackal." She said. "He is a phantom. Your mother’s name is Mia. She is human." She paused.

"They met on this planet, Zoratian, after both had become lords. They were both young and this world was considerably more chaotic than it is now, and they found each other in the middle of that chaos the way people sometimes do when everything around them is difficult enough that another person becomes genuinely important."

Neil listened without speaking.

"They left Zoratian together eventually, the way lords do when they have grown past what a single planet can offer them. They married after arriving on Zenetor."

She paused again, watching him. "I can see the questions you actually want answered, so let me get to those before you spend the whole conversation waiting for me to arrive at them."

She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, unhurried about it.

"Did your parents abandon you." She said it as a statement rather than a question, naming the thing rather than asking him to name it. "The answer is yes and no, and which one applies depends entirely on which parent you are asking about."

Neil said nothing.

"Your father." She continued, her voice carrying no particular emotion about this, just the even delivery of someone presenting information they have fully processed already.

"Jackal has spent a considerable portion of his existence trying to produce a worthy successor. Not one child, many children, with various partners across various races, each one sent into conditions of extreme difficulty with the specific intention of seeing what they would become under pressure.

There is apparently another competitor in this arrangement, another powerful phantom doing the same thing on their side, and the two of them have turned the production of successors into something that resembles a competition more than it resembles parenthood."

She looked at him steadily while she said this, and her expression acknowledged the weight of it without dramatising it.

"Your mother." She said. "Mia is the original owner of Analyzer.

That skill did not come from nothing and it did not attach itself to you by coincidence. She gave it to you, deliberately, as a form of protection.

The woman named Linda, who came to help you in the early period, she was sent by your mother.

That arrangement failed, as you know, and you entered your father’s plan rather than being kept outside it." She paused. "The more you used Analyzer, the more of your mother’s life force it consumed, because she was carrying the penalty for it on your behalf. She has been carrying it since the beginning."

Something moved in Neil’s chest that was not a simple feeling and did not resolve into one.

He had been over the decreasing life force question many times, had examined it from multiple angles, had wondered at the sudden nature of the change. Too sudden, too sharp, not the gradual deterioration of something wearing down over time but the abrupt shift of something structural changing.

"Her condition worsened." The woman continued. "When it did, a portion of the penalty she had been absorbing transferred automatically to you. That is what you experienced."

She let that sit for a moment.

"Mia is currently being held by Jackal." She said. "She is not free and has not been free for some time. The situation is complicated by the fact that Jackal is not a straightforward enemy, he is a phantom of considerable power and the kind of person who does things for reasons that are internally consistent even when they are completely unacceptable to everyone outside that internal logic."

She reached into the shadow beside her chair and produced an apple, which was the wrong word for it because it did not look like any apple Neil had encountered, golden in the way that the Eye of the Future had been golden, with a depth to the colour that suggested the surface was not the whole of it.

She held it in one hand without any ceremony about it.

"I am a friend of your mother’s." She said. "You can call me Shadow."

She looked at him for a moment, then added: "And yes, before you ask, I know about the treasure you used. The Eye of the Future. It shifted the problem temporarily but it did not resolve it." She held up the apple slightly. "This will. Eat it and the life force problem is resolved properly, not temporarily.

Analyzer will be usable again without the penalty you have been experiencing." She paused and continued. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

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Thanks for reading... adios