Gilded Ashes

Hikari sat up.

She rose from her mattress without making a sound, staff already in her hand – she had developed a weird habit of sleeping with it. She took a combat-ready stance, her bare feet silent on the floorboards, positioning herself around one meter away from the top of the stairs with her staff angled down toward the descending sound.

The luminite gem at the head of the staff came alive.

Pale blue light bloomed outward from the core, not the soft glow of the small flower construct moment an hour ago - but something brighter, denser, more aggressive. Particles of light began rising from the gem in slow, steady streams - small bright motes that drifted upward through the air around the staff and orbited around the weapon, the visible discharge of channelled Eon at a level Hikari had not used in front of Raizen. The air around the staff thickened. The temperature near the gem rose by a considerable bit. The light at the head went from glow to radiance, a concentrated brightness that cast hard-edged shadows from the doorframes along the wall behind her.

The Eon at the gem coiled into the shape of a strike about to release - a long, dense, focused cone of light that would have travelled the length of the staircase in a straight line and turned whatever was at the bottom of it into scraps.

The footsteps reached the last few stairs.

Hikari watched the top of the staircase. The shadow of the climbing creature was thrown across the upper steps by the light from her staff - small, jagged, asymmetric, the silhouette of a body that... Did not quite have the silhouette of a body. One side of the shadow was substantially shorter than the other - the thing was not the shape it was supposed to be.

Her grip tightened on the staff.

A black shape stepped onto the last visible stair.

Hikari almost attacked - The light at the head of her staff trembled with the held strike, the particles around it accelerating into a faster drift, the focused cone narrowing.

But she didn’t release.

The thing on the stair had stopped moving.

It was very small.

Maybe around seven centimeters wide. Black scales, dark enough that they absorbed most of the staff’s pale blue light rather than reflecting it. The bottom side of its body looked like it had not finished reassembling - the rear legs practically inexistent, and the scales on its back indicating that a tail should have followed – but there was none. Its eyes were big, shiny yellow points.

It looked up at her with its good eyes.

It did not move.

It did not attack.

It did not make a sound.

It stood at the top of the staircase with its small ruined body and looked up at her, in the blue light of the staff that was a single decision away from killing it, and waited.

Hikari stared back at it.

The light at the head of her staff did not lower... But it did not release either.

The lizard tilted its small head a few degrees.

It blinked.

Then, slowly, it climbed onto the attic floor and lay down on the floor, halfway between Hikari’s staff and the foot of Raizen’s mattress.

It didn’t move for several seconds.

Then... It spoke.

"Before you reduce me to wallpaper, drama queen, would you mind lowering the lethal portion of your stick? It’s making my barely functioning eyeballs water, and frankly the eyeballs have had a rough time."

Hikari did not lower the staff.

"Right. Of course. Look - I just walked across two entire cities on my front legs. I had to scale the side of your house, which is, I might add, not the climb it advertises itself to be. I am running on what I would describe as leftovers of energy, and being vaporized at the finish line by a young lady with frankly inappropriate weaponry for indoor use was not the welcome I had been envisioning. So if we could possibly skip the part where you turn me into atmosphere, I’d consider it a personal kindness."

Hikari watched it.

The light at the head of her staff dimmed. The focused cone of Eon thinned, then dissolved, the particles drifting upward and fading into the air. The gem stayed lit - a soft pale blue glow rather than a preparing strike.

The lizard’s eye closed for a second in something that looked very much like relief.

"Thank you. You have no idea how upsetting it is to be looked at by someone whose Eon could remove me from existence in a way I would not be able to negotiate back from. And I have been looked at by a lot of things in the last few hours."

Hikari took a slow breath... And knelt down.

The motion brought her face within a metre of the lizard, and she set the staff across her knees as she lowered herself, the light at the gem still glowing softly between them. She kept it within reach, of course - but it was better than miliseconds away from blasting the lizard away into oblivion.

It studied her – its eyes moving across her face with so much attentionm it didn’t match the sarcastic patter it had been delivering a moment ago at all.

"You’re his, aren’t you?" it said, pointing at Raizen.

Hikari tilted her head a fraction. "His what."

"That’s a good question. I’m working it out. You’re - the girl. The one. Some kind of one, I forgot. The one he’s been..." The lizard tried a few words, didn’t seem to like any of them, and abandoned the sentence. "Anyway. You’re connected to him in some kind of way. I know that much."

"You’re the lizard. From Ukai." Hikari’s jaw dropped.

"I am a mostly failed attempt at it. The original was deeply inconvenienced by a hydraulic door. This is the... Discount reissue, you could say. Less bottom-half, fewer working legs, marginally worse personality."

"You’ve still got a personality. Too much of it-"

"I’m holding onto it through sheer willpower and the hope that nobody pulls my strings too hard."

A small motion at the edge of Hikari’s vision: the lizard had limped one short step closer.

She let it happen.

Something in her chest had been doing a strange thing for the last minute or so. Not warmth, exactly. Not recognition, exactly. Something like both of them, mixed in a weird way. The feeling of meeting a person at a station where you had been told you were meeting a stranger, and finding that they looked at you and felt just the way an old friend would, before either of you could explain why.

She had no word for it.

Instead, Hikari just opened her free hand.

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