Chapter 1006: Chapter 1006 - Taming Adulthood - 2

Those who could move moved toward those who couldn’t, the healers calling out for the worst cases, directing themselves by the signatures of mana that were faintest, the ones that needed reaching first.

Soldiers who had changed sides somewhere in the last hour, not always knowing exactly when the change had happened, knowing only that it had, began the process of figuring out what came next and where they stood.

Orion’s remaining followers, those who had been held together by his certainty and by the enormous force that had always seemed to sit behind him, ready to be called on, felt the absence of it at the same time. That power was gone. The certainty went with it.

They set down what they were holding.

The hall was quiet.

In the silence, something that had been pressing against the city from underground, through the soil, through the stone, through the roots of the ruined network the mutants had been building for months, released its pressure.

One degree was enough for now.

The afternoon light that had been coming in at an angle through the hall’s high windows had shifted toward evening while no one was looking. Gold and low, touching the fractured stone and the scattered chairs and the faces of the people still standing and the faces of the people who weren’t, without distinction.

Ren Patinder and Luna Starweaver lay unconscious on the floor of the ceremony hall.

Around them, the people they had fought beside and the people who had fought for them and the people who had arrived too late and the people who had been here from the beginning sat or knelt or stood in the specific stillness that came after something finished.

The city started the long work of accounting for itself.

The first ordinary day after something extraordinary was always the strangest one. The second was easier. By the third, people began to remember how to occupy the shape of their lives without the shape being defined by crisis.

The recognitions the ceremony had left incomplete or disputed required additional sessions held in considerably calmer conditions, and the results of those sessions were, in most cases, what they should have been from the beginning.

When the room was only a room and the arguments were only arguments, the outcomes tended to follow the logic of the evidence rather than the logic of who had the most force behind them.

Those who had been decisive in stopping the revolt would also receive additional rewards on top of what the recognition had already assigned.

Ren would be awaited until after his recovery and he was approximately a week away from bringing his Wolverine to Gold and his Mantis to Silver. The days lost during recovery didn’t change that in any significant way.

His beast system had taken external damage but was different from everyone else’s, it depended on a primary node too large and too complex for the ordinary rules to apply cleanly, and while it had taken damage, the fundamental function was intact.

Only his arms would hurt for a while.

But the nucleus was the same strong nucleus. The crack in it was still there, something that time and specific conditions that didn’t yet exist but were going to exist would eventually need to address.

The platinum node remained pending.

The jade-gold roots of the mushroom continued doing what they did.

The black-purple ones continued growing underground.

And Selthia continued being Selthia, wherever she was.

♢♢♢♢

The first thing Ren did when he woke up was not check the state of his bonds or calculate how many cultivation days he had missed.

His parents were there.

Larissa and Liora alongside several of their maids and guards.

Taro with the specific expression he had when he was trying not to show he had been worried and was showing it anyway. Liu and Min too.

Lin had a rare, restrained anxiety of watching any time her student’s muscles lose the minimum possible fraction of mass during the recovery days and was cataloguing what would need to be rebuilt. She was still holding her arm but it was much better now, and in it, it was obvious she had been biting her nails a lot lately.

Several more people were in the room and in the corridor beyond it, the accumulated presence that formed when people who cared about someone had been waiting long enough that waiting was the only thing left to do and they had arranged themselves around it.

He had barely sat up when the embraces arrived, before he could speak, before he had finished calibrating which parts of his body were still reliable and which had stronger opinions about the current situation. He received them with clumsiness, operating on incomplete information about his own limbs.

When he finally could speak, he asked about Luna.

He hadn’t seen her among the people who were standing.

Liora pointed.

Her bed was nearby, positioned in the same large VIP recovery room with the specific placement of someone the healers had arranged for access without interference, close enough that whoever needed to be near could be near, not so close that the two requirements worked against each other.

Luna, like Ren, hadn’t moved since they’d brought her in.

Ren got up and crossed to her.

The white crystal was on the bedside table. He had seen it before, in Luna’s hands during the urgency of everything, in the air for one second in his own palm. But now there was nothing more urgent than looking at it, and what he saw when he looked was more concerning than what he had expected.

Cracked... Not just dim relative to what it had been before the battle, but fractured at the surface in the fine-line pattern of something that had been worked past what its structure was built to sustain.

The light inside, what remained of it, was barely visible and without reaching for it with mana sensitivity, a faint warmth rather than the pulse it had been could be barely felt.

Ren extended his hand toward it.

He stopped before touching it.

Respectful.

The energy inside was perceptible to someone with enough sensitivity to read it, but only just, perceptible in the sense of being barely present, the way a sound was perceptible at the outer edge of hearing.

It was small and it was fragile like things that had given almost everything they had to give and were existing now in what remained after that.

It had saved him.

So Ren was going to repair it, if repair was possible... if there was a way for something that had been used the way this crystal had been used to return to what it had been.

He didn’t know yet. He didn’t have the full knowledge yet.

But he was going to find it, and if finding it wasn’t possible he was going to build it..

That was his new resolution, arriving quietly while looking at the dim light in the cracked crystal and the sleeping face of the person who had spent this treasure for him.

He then looked at Larissa, who was standing at a distance that gave space but close enough for an intimate and direct look to reach her.

"I’m going to find a way to control the crystallization," he said to her, since she was the one awake, and she was also a good person to say it to first.

Not like making a dramatic promise or performance for the room. He just felt like needing to state for her, Luna and even Liora, if taking Selphira’s state into account, the declaration of a fact that hadn’t happened yet but was going to happen, stated in the same register as a decision already made.

"Whatever it costs."

Liora smiled with pure happiness.

Larissa smiled in the way she smiled when something confirmed what she had already thought. Because she also understood that he didn’t mean only the crystal on the table, or only Selphira, or only the condition Victor was recovering from. But also about Dragarion, since she knew Ren well enough by now to hear the full scope of a sentence in its short form.

"To repair, heal, and free everyone," Ren added.

Larissa nodded.

♢♢♢♢

Luna had been awake.

Unfortunately, funnily unfortunately, only a short while after Ren opened his eyes, and too late, by just enough margin to constitute a genuine problem, when he had already gotten up and crossed the room and was standing near her.

’NO. NO. NO NO NO. YOU WOKE UP LATE. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO WAKE UP BEFORE HIM!’

’NOW HE’S GOING TO SEE YOU WITH THAT JUST-WOKEN-UP FACE AND YOU’RE GOING TO BE RED AND THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!’

She kept her eyes closed.

It was a terrible solution. It was the only solution available.

’You were supposed to be less exhausted than him. You were supposed to have time to compose yourself. Lykea Starweaver did not raise someone who would fall asleep while the boy she...’

She stopped.

’She lov...’

Tried hard but still replaced the word she had been about to use. She had decided to accept it, but changing that fast from what she had been almost all her life was hard.

’...THE ONE who matters too much to her wakes up first and says those things in front of everyone but her...’

The crystal on the bedside table she had felt again.

’Mom, I’m...’