Rob appeared from the direction of the storage building within about four seconds of this announcement, which suggested he had also been keeping half his attention on the gate.

"Welcome back." Rob said, with the simpler and more contained warmth that was his version of the same relief his brother had expressed with considerably more volume.

Mob came around the side of the main building at a pace that was slightly too fast to be casual, his broad face arranged into the specific expression he wore when he was trying to look like he had not been concerned and was not pulling it off particularly well.

"Any trouble?" He asked.

"Not more than expected." Neil said.

Mob nodded, satisfied by this in the way that people who have done difficult things themselves are satisfied by honest understatement rather than reassurance.

Fay came out of the cooking area with a cloth still in her hands from whatever she had been doing, and her expression when she saw him was warm and immediate and uncomplicated in the way that Fay’s expressions always were, because she had never developed the habit of filtering what she felt before it reached her face.

"You look tired." She said. "I saved food."

"Thank you." Neil said, and meant it.

Her brother Ray appeared behind her, taller and quieter, and gave Neil a nod that carried everything Fay had said with approximately none of the words.

Leon was at his post near the inner barrier, which was where Leon always was or close to it, and the look he gave Neil when he came through was the look of someone who had run the domain competently in his absence and wanted him to know it had been competently run without making a production of saying so.

"Nothing requiring your immediate attention." Leon said. "Full security rotation completed. Perimeter clean."

"Good work." Neil said.

Leon nodded once, returned to his post.

Magnar had already located the campfire pit near the centre of the domain, the one that had not been lit for some time because the weather had been warm enough that no one had bothered, and had arranged himself around it with the methodical precision of a large animal finding the exact configuration of rest that his body was asking for after a day that had asked a great deal of it. He put his head down on his crossed forelegs and closed his eyes with the complete and immediate commitment of something that was going to sleep and had no interest in anything that was not sleep.

Neil looked at him for a moment with something that was not quite affection and not quite amusement but was somewhere in the territory between the two.

He found Ileana near the healing hut.

She was sitting on the low bench outside it with her hands in her lap, and Jane was sitting beside her, which was the first thing he registered. The second thing was that Jane was sitting beside her in the easy way of someone who has been in a place long enough to stop sitting carefully in it, which was a faster development than he had expected.

Ileana looked up when he approached and her expression did what it always did, the immediate and uncomplicated version of relief that she had apparently decided she was not going to hide from him regardless of the audience.

"You look like you have been through something." She said. "And I don’t only mean the Realm."

"I have." He said, and sat down on the bench on her other side because there was space there, and looked at both of them. "Something happened on the way back. I need to tell you both about it."

Jane had gone from the quiet easiness of a moment ago to a careful attention, her eyes on him with the particular quality of focus she had when she was taking something seriously and not making a show of it.

"All of it?" Ileana asked.

"All of it." He confirmed.

So he told them.

He went through it in the order it had happened, starting with the shadow on the path and the woman who had come out of it, describing her appearance and the way she had spoken and the specific quality of the calm she carried that had told him before anything else that this was not an ordinary encounter. He told them what she had said about Analyzer, watching Ileana’s expression change when the name of the skill came out in the open for the first time, the slight widening of her eyes that she controlled quickly.

He told them about his father.

Ileana was very still while he described Jackal, the phantom, the competition, the deliberate construction of difficult conditions across multiple children of multiple races to produce something worth producing by someone else’s definition, the whole framework of it laid out plainly without editorialising. Jane’s expression across the bench had gone to something that was quiet and complicated and not yet resolved into a single feeling.

He told them about his mother.

This part took longer not because there was more information but because the information had more weight to it, and he found himself moving through it more carefully, the way you move through territory you are not yet sure of the footing on. Mia, the original owner of Analyzer, who had given it to him to protect him and had been carrying the penalty in his place for the entire time he had been using it. Linda, who had been sent and had not been able to do what she had been sent to do. His mother, who was currently held by the same person who had fathered him.

Ileana reached over and took his hand partway through this part, not saying anything, just holding it, and he continued.

He told them about the apple, what Shadow had said about it and what Freya and Nemo had confirmed, and that he had eaten it and the life force problem was resolved for now, with the two-thousand-use limit on the effect.

He told them what Shadow had said about the people who had died near the places he had visited, the people planted there by Jackal that she had cleared, and he watched both of them absorb this with the particular expressions of people processing that a situation they thought they had understood has significantly more layers to it than they had accounted for.

When he finished he sat quietly for a moment.

Ileana was still holding his hand and was looking at him with an expression that was thinking and feeling at the same time, the two of them not separated cleanly the way they usually weren’t for her when something mattered.

"Your mother has been carrying that for you." She said finally. "The whole time."

"The whole time." He confirmed.

She absorbed this, and her expression did the thing it sometimes did when she was feeling something on his behalf more clearly than he was feeling it for himself.

"How are you." She asked, and the way she said it was not a social question but a real one.

Neil considered it honestly rather than reflexively.

"Still sorting it out." He said.

She nodded, accepting the true answer over the comfortable one.

Jane had been quiet across the whole recounting, listening with the complete and steady attention that was one of the things about her that he had genuinely valued before everything had become what it became, and she was quiet for a moment after he finished too, looking at the ground in front of the bench.

Then she said: "Your mother sounds like someone worth finding."

It was simple and it was not wrong and he did not have a response to it so he said nothing, but the words settled somewhere.

They sat for a while, the three of them on the bench outside the healing hut, the domain quiet and well-lit around them with the people in it going about the ordinary business of the evening, the campfire pit dark where Magnar was sleeping, the barrier holding its soft luminescence at the perimeter.

"There is still a great deal to do." Neil said eventually, more to himself than to either of them, running through it internally the way he ran through things when he needed to take stock of where they actually stood.

The lost elven city was coming and Caleb would be there with intentions that were not friendly and a fighter named Rabid Wolf who apparently came with a reputation for finishing what he started.

The Diamond class section of the Mantel Stone Realm was still unmapped and uncleared, and both he and Magnar needed those Diamond class gene points before they would be where they needed to be.

The domain needed one more second Order Diamond class core to push into the third Order, and that was not a simple acquisition.

His mother was somewhere on Zenetor, held by his father, and he did not yet know enough to do anything meaningful about that.

And Shadow had said she would come back, which meant the information he had was not complete and would not be complete until it was.

He looked at the domain around him, at the people in it going about their evening, at Ileana beside him and Jane across the bench and Magnar asleep by the unlit fire.

There was a great deal to do.

He would do it.

"Fay said she saved food." He said.

Ileana looked at him with the expression of someone who had just come back from a significant emotional distance and found him having arrived at dinner, and her expression shifted into something that was warmth and exasperation in equal measure.

"She did." Ileana said. "Come on then."

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Thanks for reading... adios