Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

The sky had closed.

The petals had finished their slow articulation while the four of them had been standing on the roof - the great alloy plates sliding inward across the upper atmosphere until their edges met in the centre of the city, the activation lights along their joints fading from blue to a duller, quieter pulse as the dome stabilized into its sealed configuration.

Where the third-day phenomenon had been brightening the cloud cover ten minutes ago - that warm, colorful, half-named colours rising through the ceiling above Neoshima - there was now only the matte underside of the petals themselves. Featureless. Industrial. The sky reduced to a metal lid.

Arashi exhaled slowly.

"Welp. That was a vibe killer."

Keahi was still sitting cross-legged at the rooftop's edge, the bowl of whatever-she'd-made resting between her knees. She had been picking at it absently for the last several minutes, spoon in one hand, her eyes flicking between the closed dome and the lower districts where the emergency lights of some drones had slowly faded into the steady patrol patterns of a city stood down from alert. Most of the streets were quiet again. A few wardens still passed by, mostly bored and confused of all the fuss.

"Whoever it was," Keahi mumbled absently, "they're either caught or gone."

"Caught," Arashi said.

"Or gone."

"Caught."

"You don't know that."

"Kori went after her! What do you think!?"

Keahi shrugged. She picked up another lump of chili-coated whatever from the bowl and put it in her mouth. She chewed slowly, swallowed, made a face that suggested the spice had reached an interesting heat level, and continued eating anyway.

Raizen sat with his back against the slightly-angled, one knee drawn up, his slate resting against his thigh – he needed to grab it in order to satisfy Arashi's burning desire for photos and other interesting things from Ukai. The Evaluation requirements notification still glowed faintly at the corner of the screen - the competency tests, the seven-day deadline - but the document had stopped feeling urgent the moment Kori had launched off the roof with both knives in her hands.

He was tired in a way that wasn't physical. The lower-archive corridors, Eiden's office, the slate, the dinner stories, the rooftop, the figure cutting across the sky, the petals closing. Every hour of his first day back had been louder than the hour before it, and the small piece of him that just wanted to lie on Kori's couch and stare at the ceiling for a week was beginning to make its preferences felt.

Beside him, Hikari sat with her staff laid across her lap.

She was looking at the closed dome, mostly. Occasionally, briefly, she was looking at him. He noticed the third time her eyes shifted toward him - not staring, not lingering, just the small reflex of a person who had not been around him in a few weeks and was reminding herself, in small unconscious increments, that he was here again. When their eyes met, she gave him the small private smile that she gave only him, and looked back upwards.

Arashi clapped once, loudly enough to make Raizen's shoulders flinch.

"Okay. New topic. Because if I keep staring at this pot lid that isn't moving I'm going to start moaning."

"Please don't," Keahi said.

"Training. Let's talk about training, cuz I didn't finish my idea downstairs - while you've been off in your little secret mission Alteea didn't want to tell us about, the rest of us have been getting good."

Raizen turned his head. "Mm?"

"So basically the second-years have been letting us train with them, and it's been - okay, listen to this. Feris. You know Feris."

"The mace. How could I forget?"

"Yes, the mace, but also a person, Raizen, she's a person. Feris discovered something. She figured out that if Esen times a shockwave underneath her at the right angle, he can launch her straight up at like eighty kilometres an hour."

"...Esen's shockwaves can do that?" Raizen's brows desperately bent upward. "Without blowing her up?"

"They can do a lot of things when he's not gambling. Anyway. Feris goes up like ten metres, twelve metres. And then while she's falling back down, she swings her mace on the descent, and the energy from the fall combines with her swing, and she basically becomes a meteor. With anger management problems."

Keahi nodded slowly. "She broke a training wall last week."

"Through the middle. Like dynamite!"

"It was very satisfying." Kori kept nodding.

"And then they figured out - wait, this is the best part - they figured out that Ichiro can stack stone platforms during her descent. Like, he raises pillars from the ground, exactly where she needs them, so she can land, push off, and redirect. The two of them have been doing aerial chains for like a few days. She's hitting targets from angles nobody can predict… It's stupid! It's so stupid, I love it."

"Mm." was the only reaction Raizen gave.

"And Keahi -"

Keahi raised her spoon in her universal, threatening gesture of "don't."

"- Keahi has been cooking, dude."

"Arashi." Keahi gave another warning.

"Not the food. Well, the food too, the food is also concerning, but I mean with her flames. She built a wall, a whole ass fire wall. Like five metres wide, three metres tall, held it for at least fifteen seconds. Ryuu tried to walk through it and a few of his mechanical limbs are still suffering."

Keahi looked at her bowl. "It's not a big deal."

"She burned ten targets with one blast."

"Arashi."

"Ten."

"It was an exercise."

"Ten targets, Raizen, one blast. The instructor's exact words were "oh dear," and then he stopped recording the test because most things around were on fire."

Keahi was looking very intently at her food. The colour rising in her cheeks was visible even in the dim streetlight glow, and Raizen, who knew her well enough to recognise the specific shade of red Keahi produced when complimented, watched it climb to her ears before she shoved another bite of chili into her mouth and stared at the street in front of her.

"It's not much," she muttered. "Just a wall and a small blast."

"A small -"

"Arashi, drop it."

Arashi held both palms up in surrender. The grin on his face suggested he had achieved exactly the reaction he had wanted and was now content to let the silence collect his earnings.

Raizen watched Keahi blush. It was a good feeling. He'd missed it, sitting with the people he'd gotten attached to, listening to Arashi inflate the little victories at the speed and volume Arashi inflated everything, watching Keahi protest just hard enough to encourage him - it was the kind of moment that, three months ago, would have been unremarkable. After two weeks in Ukai, it landed differently. The chili air, the cold roof, the people. The place he could call "home" without feeling awkward about it.

He let his head fall back against the roof, and closed his eyes.

Arashi cleared his throat. "Hey, uh… Random thought."

"Mhm."

"The Underworks have been kinda silent lately."

Raizen opened his eyes.

Arashi was looking at him sideways - grin still there, but it had thinned at the edges - the look Arashi had when he wasn't sure he should be saying something but was going to say it anyway, because Arashi had no real internal filter and never had.

"Like, properly silent. The trade routes are weirdly active, you can see the shipments coming up if you watch the lower south gates at night, but the people - Obi, Cinderette, the others - nobody's heard from them in weeks. I figured maybe you'd been in touch?"

Raizen sat up straighter.

He had been planning to visit Obi. He had been planning to visit Obi from the moment he'd stepped off Alteea's aircraft this morning, and the entire day had filled itself with other priorities - the slate, the lower-archive corridors, the rooftop alarm - before he could so much as send a message. The guilt landed lower than he expected.

"No," he said. "Not since Ukai. I was going to -"

"The smith?"

A voice came from behind them.

It was casual. Conversational, even. The voice of someone who had wandered into a conversation she found mildly interesting and wanted to participate in, the kind of voice you might hear at a café when a stranger overheard your table and offered an unsolicited opinion. Warm. Female. Slightly muffled at the lower register, as though something were partly covering the speaker's mouth.

"…What about him?"

Raizen turned his head, alarmed.

Behind them, lying on her side on the cool tiles of Kori's roof with one elbow propped beneath her head, was a woman.

She was wearing a cloak. The fabric was shredded along the right side, dark with dried blood in several places. Bandages were visible where the cuts had opened the cloth - fresh ones, white and recent, wrapped tight against her torso. A black mask covered the lower half of her face, leaving only her eyes and the upper edge of her cheeks visible above the seal. Her hair, short, dark and slightly damp, fell onto her shoulder. One leg was bent. The other was extended along the roof, the boot at its end faintly scuffed with the kind of wear that suggested recent vertical travel.

She looked entirely relaxed. She looked, in fact, like she had been there for some time now.

Her eyes met Raizen's.

The smile beneath the mask was visible only in the lift at the corners of her eyes. Friendly, lazy, amused, even.

"Don't mind me," she said. "I just needed somewhere quiet to sit for a minute."

She tilted her head slightly.

"Soo, you were saying something about the smith downstairs?"

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