"After two thousand uses of the skill the effect of this fruit will wear off, so be aware of that, but that is a significant window."

She tossed the apple toward him.

He caught it, which was automatic, and then held it in his hand and looked at it with the appropriate level of caution for something thrown at him by a person he had met thirty seconds ago.

Shadow watched him look at it and made a sound that was the same light laugh as before.

"If I intended to harm you I would not need a fruit to do it." She said, with the particular patience of someone explaining something obvious without making the person feel foolish for needing the explanation.

"Research it if you want. Eat it when you feel comfortable. Either way."

She began to stand, and Neil spoke before she could finish the motion.

"The people who died." He said. "The ones near the places I had visited. The old woman from the market. The restaurant. All of them."

Shadow stilled and looked at him.

"That was you." He said. Not an accusation, just a question with a direction already in it.

She looked at him for a moment.

"All of them had been placed there by your father." She said. "Stationed to observe and report. Some of them had been there for years, long before you arrived in the area, positioned in ordinary-looking roles for exactly that purpose." She paused.

"I cleared them. It was necessary and I do not regret it, but I understand why you are asking."

Neil absorbed this.

"I could not move openly before now." She continued. "Your father’s network is extensive and your mother’s connection to you is something I could not make obvious without consequences neither of us could afford.

Even now, what I am doing here is at the edge of what I can do without triggering a response I am not ready to handle." Her expression stayed even.

"Those phantoms are genuinely unhinged as a category, and an all-out confrontation with that faction is not something I am looking for."

She straightened fully now.

"Take care of yourself." She said. "I will come back when there is more to tell."

"Wait." Neil said.

She paused.

He looked at her for a moment, arranging the many things he could ask into some order of priority, and then looked at the apple in his hand instead, and then back at her.

But she had already gone.

The shadow where she had been was just a shadow again, holding its position exactly as the light required it to, and the two chairs had dissolved back into the general darkness without leaving any impression on the ground where they had stood.

Neil sat in the empty path with the apple in his hand and Magnar pressed against his leg and Freya a very charged silence inside him, and he went over everything that had just been said one piece at a time.

Jackal. His father. A phantom who had children across multiple races and sent them into chaos specifically to evaluate them, not out of love or even out of ordinary cruelty but out of something more deliberate and more structured than cruelty, a competition with another phantom over who could produce the better successor.

Mia. His mother. Who had given him Analyzer to protect him, who had been carrying the penalty of it in his place for however long he had been using it, whose condition worsening was what had caused the sudden shift he had felt rather than any external attack or deliberate sabotage.

Who was locked up by the same person he happened to be the son of.

He had spent a long time operating under a particular assumption about his parents, had built the understanding of his own situation around that assumption, had made decisions based on it and felt specific things about it that he had never particularly examined because examining them required energy he had always needed for other things.

The assumption had been, in its simplest form, that they were both gone and the why of it was not something that would reflect well on either of them.

His father, it turned out, was worse than that assumption had accounted for.

His mother was something else entirely, something that sat in the chest in a way he did not immediately have a framework for, because the people you have written off and the people who have been quietly absorbing consequences on your behalf are not the same category and the shift between them was not a small one.

He sat with it.

Freya had been quiet all this time, which was unusual enough that he noted it.

Then she spoke, and her voice had a quality to it that was not her usual register, something more careful and more honest than her default.

"Let me look at what she gave you." She said.

Neil held the apple up slightly, as though that helped, which it probably did not but was the instinctive gesture.

A pause while Freya examined it through whatever sense she used for such things, and then she said: "Top class treasure. Zenetor origin. The density is real and the composition is clean, no impurities at all, nothing embedded in it that should not be there." Another pause. "Nemo."

"Confirmed." Nemo said immediately. "Consistent with Freya’s assessment. This is a genuine high-tier life restoration treasure. I cannot find any contraindication in the composition."

"Eat it." Freya said, with an urgency that was slightly out of character. "Before anyone with sufficient sensing ability passes within range of it. Something this concentrated will register from a considerable distance to the right person."

Neil turned the apple in his hand once.

Then Freya said something that he had not expected.

"Wait." Her voice had shifted again, into something quieter. "Jackal." She said the name like she was tasting whether it meant what she thought it meant. "Your father is Jackal."

Neil said nothing, waiting.

"Jackal and my father." She said slowly. "They have been rivals for as long as either of them has existed in any meaningful capacity. Both of them strong enough that direct confrontation would be catastrophic for both sides, both of them too proud and too competitive to simply leave each other alone." A pause.

"My father did the same thing to me. Put me through conditions specifically designed to produce something, to see if I would become what he wanted, with no particular consideration for what I wanted or what it cost."

Another pause, longer. "Jackal is apparently doing the same thing to you."

The silence that followed this between them had a different texture than the silences before it.

"So." Freya said finally, and her voice was doing something complicated that she was not entirely managing to contain.

"Your father and my father are competing with each other. And you and I are both the product of that competition." A short sound that was not quite a laugh. "Of all the things I expected to find out today."

Neil looked at the apple in his hand.

"Yeah." He said, which was inadequate but was the honest response.

"I cannot bring myself to be angry at you about any of this." Freya said, after a moment. "I want to establish that clearly.

You did not choose your father any more than I chose mine, and finding out that our situations are mirrors of each other does not make you responsible for his behaviour." A pause. "It does make the situation considerably more complicated in ways I will need to think about."

"Same." Neil said.

He bit into the apple.

The effect was not subtle and it was not gradual. It moved through him like something finding a circuit that had been partially interrupted and completing it, warm and clean and precise, settling into his life force in the way that something specifically designed for that purpose settled rather than the way a general treatment applied.

He felt the Analyzer problem, the weight of it that he had been carrying and had partially stopped registering as a weight because it had been there long enough to feel normal, simply resolve, the way a tension in a room resolves when the thing causing it leaves.

He took a breath that went further than the ones before it had been going.

’Better.’ He thought, which was the accurate word for it.

He stood up, tucked the core of the apple into his coat for no particular reason except that discarding it on the path felt wrong, and looked at Magnar.

Magnar had been watching the entire exchange with his amber eyes moving between the space where Shadow had been sitting and Neil with a steady and evaluating attention, and now he looked at Neil with an expression that was, in the way that Magnar’s expressions worked, asking a question.

"Home." Neil told him.

Magnar fell in beside him and they walked the remaining distance to the domain in quiet, the night air ordinary around them, the lights of the domain appearing ahead in the way they always appeared, warm and familiar and exactly where they were supposed to be.

Bob saw him first, which was how it usually went because Bob was almost always doing something near the outer area that meant he was positioned to notice arrivals before anyone else.

"Lord is back!"

He announced this with the particular energy of someone who had genuinely been waiting and was genuinely relieved, his large frame straightening up from whatever repair work he had been doing to the outer fence section, a mallet still in one hand.

❖❖❖

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