Elizabeth was the first to recover her voice, though her expression was still caught between relief, shock, and a suspicion so sharp it almost looked like survival instinct. She remained standing beside the bed, her eyes fixed on Damon, observing every detail of the body that, until only moments ago, had seemed incapable of returning from the abyss on its own. The cold in the room was still intense, but it no longer possessed that dead, suffocating quality of the last few months. Now it was a living cold, pulsing, terribly powerful, as if a storm had learned how to breathe inside him.

"Who is Xue Lian?" Elizabeth asked, her voice low, far too controlled to be casual.

Damon blinked once, still with his hand over his chest, feeling the elemental root pulse somewhere too deep to be called merely an organ or spiritual core. The name had escaped without permission, torn from his throat by an echo that still did not know where the sealed memory ended and where his own consciousness began. The instant he noticed Elizabeth’s gaze, he understood he had spoken too loudly. Worse, he had spoken with too much recognition.

"What?" he asked, trying to look genuinely confused, though his face was probably performing one of the worst acts of his life.

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. "You just said that name."

"I did?"

"Damon."

He opened his mouth to improvise some minimally acceptable lie, perhaps something involving delirium, spiritual fever, or the very plausible possibility that he had dreamed of strange people while almost dying. However, before he could even build the first sentence, Ester crossed the space between the door and the bed with desperate speed, almost tripping over her own feet. She did not ask permission, did not evaluate risks, and did not consider whether hugging someone newly awakened from a glacial coma was clinically advisable. She simply grabbed him.

The impact was so strong that Damon let out a muffled sound, more from surprise than pain. Ester wrapped her arms around him with brutal force, burying her face against his shoulder as if she needed to confirm, with her own body, that he was truly there. The former general of the Empire, ice specialist, Elizabeth’s maid, and one of the most controlled women Damon had ever known seemed completely destroyed. There was no other word. Destroyed in a silent, accumulated, profound way.

Her blue hair was poorly washed, tied up any way she could manage, and full of loose strands falling over her face. The dark circles under her eyes were so marked they looked like bruises, deep and dark, drawn by nights and nights when sleep had stopped being a real option. Her shoulders trembled. Her hands, which had so often conducted energy with surgical precision, clutched Damon’s clothes as if he might disappear if she loosened her fingers. And then Ester began to cry.

Not discreetly.

Not with elegant tears.

She collapsed.

"I am exhausted," Ester said, her voice breaking against his shoulder. "I am so tired I do not even know what it means to sleep without waking up thinking you stopped breathing. I am exhausted, Damon. Exhausted."

Damon went still.

That word struck something inside him with more violence than any blow from Han Qirong. He was still trying to organize his return to his body, still feeling echoes of Xue Lian, the root, the passage, and the celestial cold reorganizing his meridians. But none of that prepared him to hear Ester like that. Not Ester. Not her, who turned pride into armor and sarcasm into a blade. Not her, who always seemed to have enough energy to call everyone incompetent even when she was injured.

"It has been six months," she continued, now sobbing without being able to control it. "Six months, you idiot. Six months without a single night of sleep. Six months keeping you alive, trying to stop your veins from freezing again, trying to thaw what did not want to thaw, trying to understand a body that changed every time I thought I had found a solution."

Damon felt as if someone had driven a fist into his stomach.

Six months.

Not six days.

Six months.

The difference did not immediately fit inside his mind. To him, Xue Lian’s memory had seemed to last hours, perhaps days in a distorted perception, but the real world had continued moving forward brutally. Six months in a coma. Six months trapped in a bed. Six months during which those people had fought against his death while he walked through ancient snow, argued with a doomed woman, and destroyed a sealed story.

He slowly raised his eyes to Elizabeth, still unable to hug Ester back with the strength he wanted. "Six months?"

Elizabeth did not look away.

The vampire, normally so careful with her own expression, seemed tired of hiding the truth. There was relief on her face, but also cold exhaustion, a kind of accumulated tension beneath her skin. She crossed her arms, perhaps to keep her hands steady, perhaps to prevent some tremor from betraying more than she wanted to show.

"It was six months," Elizabeth confirmed. "You stayed on the edge of death the entire time, freezing everything in this place while Ester tried to clear your veins. There were weeks when we did not know if you were truly alive or if your body was simply refusing to die out of stubbornness."

Damon swallowed hard.

The sentence should have had room for humor. At another time, perhaps he would have made some comment about stubbornness being an underestimated virtue. But he could not. His throat was too tight. Ester’s arms remained around him, strong and trembling, and now he noticed something that shock had prevented him from feeling before. She was thin. Not extremely so, but noticeably. Her body carried the consequence of months living around a single impossible battle.

Elizabeth continued, her voice still steady, but lower. "The mansion had to be adapted three times. Walls cracked. Two nearby rooms became unusable because of the ice. Morgana spent almost everything left of Arven on materials, rare blood, stabilization artifacts, and heating. Aria almost moved into the alchemy room. Cherry threatened to hit you while you slept at least once a week, because she said maybe provocation would work better than medicine."

Damon closed his eyes.

That hurt in a strange way.

Not like an injury, nor like simple guilt.

It was something larger.

The realization that his survival had consumed entire months of other people’s lives.

Ester tightened her arms around him, as if Elizabeth’s confirmation had reopened everything she had tried to keep buried. "I thought you were going to die so many times. So many. Sometimes your spiritual heart stopped for minutes. Sometimes your body became so cold the instruments broke when they touched your skin. Sometimes you whispered things I did not understand, in a language that was not from here, and your veins began to glow as if someone was trying to pull you away."

Damon felt Xue Lian’s name almost rise to his throat again, but this time he held it back.

Not now.

Not yet.

He took a deep breath and finally hugged Ester back.

Not with distant care.

Not with hesitation.

With strength.

Damon wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him, ignoring the residual pain, ignoring the numbness, ignoring the cold that still pulsed inside his bones. Ester trembled harder when she felt the embrace, as if that gesture confirmed something words never could. Then she cried even more, and Damon felt every sob pass through his chest like small blades.

"I am sorry," he said, his voice hoarse. "I am sorry. I am sorry for all of this. I did not know. I swear I did not know."

"You never know," Ester murmured, still crying. "You just explode something, almost die, and leave everyone else picking up the pieces."

Damon let out a broken laugh, without real humor. "I know. I know."

"You do not know enough."

"Then I will learn."

Ester tried to pull back a little, perhaps to look at him, perhaps to recover some control over her destroyed dignity. Damon did not fully let her. He only loosened the hug enough to face her. Her eyes were red, her cheeks wet, her expression devastated by an exhaustion no immediate victory could cure. That was his fault. Perhaps not by intention, perhaps not by conscious choice, but it was his consequence.

"I am sorry," Damon repeated, looking directly at her. "A thousand times. Ten thousand, if necessary. This will never happen again."

Elizabeth arched an eyebrow on the other side of the bed.

"Damon."

He looked at her.

"You know that promise is practically impossible."

"I know."

"Then why did you say it?"

"Because I want it to be true."

Elizabeth held his gaze for a few seconds. The answer was not enough. Not rationally. Not for someone like her. But perhaps, in that moment, she decided she also needed to allow a kind lie to occupy the room for a few instants. So she did not correct him. She only took a deep breath and slightly shifted her eyes away, as if relief were becoming too dangerous to show.

Ester sniffed, irritated by her own crying. "You are different."

Damon looked at his own hands, where bluish lines still glowed intermittently beneath the skin. "I know."

"Your veins..."

"I think they changed."

"They did not simply change." Ester touched his wrist with trembling fingers, and her expression immediately altered, the instinct of a researcher surviving even emotional collapse. "They were reconstructed. Not thawed. Reconstructed. That is impossible. That is... ridiculously impossible."

Damon tried to smile. "I have heard that word quite a lot recently."

Elizabeth uncrossed her arms. "From Xue Lian?"

Damon stopped.

Ester noticed too.

The silence in the room suddenly became sharper.

Damon looked at Elizabeth with the best innocent expression he could produce after six months in a coma and a traumatic journey through sealed memories. It was not a good expression. He knew that. Elizabeth knew that too. Ester, even exhausted and crying, probably knew it as well.

"What?" he repeated.

Elizabeth tilted her head. "You are very bad at this."

"At what?"

"Pretending."

"I have gone six months without practice."

"That was almost funny."

"Almost is progress."

Before Elizabeth could press further, the door opened again with the dangerous energy of someone who had no idea what atmosphere waited inside the room. Aria entered carrying a tray with vials, clean cloths, and some strong-smelling medicinal mixture, speaking before she had even properly looked at the scene.

"Ester, you need to rest now. A few hours will not kill him, and if you fall flat on your face, I swear I will ask Cherry to write on your forehead that pride does not replace sleep."

She took two more steps.

Then stopped.

Her gaze found Damon sitting on the bed.

Then found Ester hugging him.

Then found Elizabeth standing beside them, arms crossed, wearing that typical expression of someone who was about to interrogate someone and at the same time trying not to cry on the inside.

Aria blinked.

Looked again.

As if her own eyes were betraying her sanity.

The tray in her hands tilted dangerously, and Elizabeth had to take a quick step to catch it before everything fell to the floor. Aria did not even notice. Her eyes began filling with tears at an impressive speed, almost offensive in its emotional efficiency.

"No," Aria said softly. "No, wait. You are..."

Damon slowly raised a hand.

"Hi, Aria."

That was enough.

"BUAAAA!!"

The crying exploded out of her with such theatrical and sincere force that Damon was almost more startled than when he had woken up. Aria completely abandoned dignity, composure, the tray, and any medical intention she had brought with her. She ran to the bed and threw herself onto him and Ester at the same time, hugging them both with a mixture of desperation, relief, and total lack of coordination.

"You idiot! You frozen idiot! You stubborn white-haired corpse! I brought so much horrible dragon blood that I never want to see a large reptile again in my life!"

Damon let out a groan when the triple hug pressed against his newly recovered wound and all the bones that still seemed to be negotiating their permanence in his body. Even so, he did not push Aria away. He only closed his eyes for an instant and allowed that warm, loud, completely living chaos to surround him.

Ester cried against one shoulder.

Aria sobbed against the other.

Elizabeth stood beside the bed, holding the tray that had nearly been dropped, watching the scene with an expression that tried to be severe and failed in the eyes.

Damon took a deep breath.

The room was still cold.

His body still hurt.

The memory of Xue Lian still weighed inside him like an ancient winter.

But, for the first time in six months, he was awake.

And he was not alone.