Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 502: Chapter 497: Reiko Returns

Location:Dragon estate, outskirts of Obsidian City

Date/Time:3 Frostforge, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm, Doha

The bond woke her at midnight, and Yinxin’s favorite planter did not survive.

Jayde was out of bed and halfway to the door before her feet had agreed to be awake. The mantis, curled on the floor beside her with Green’s compound still drying pale along its flank, came up and followed and clipped the doorframe with its left blade-arm and took a piece of the wood with it.

In the corridor, a lamp came off a shelf. Nobody had touched it. The formation bridge between the estate’s wards and the Pavilion’s network was vibrating with an incoming frequency loud enough to shake loose anything that was not bolted down.

[Jayde.]

Not a thought. A detonation. The raw, unfiltered broadcast of a mind that had been running for two days without sleep and had spent a year forgetting how to control its own volume.

[Jayde. Jayde. Jayde.]

Her name three times, each one louder — the mental equivalent of somebody hammering on every door in a building because they had forgotten which one was theirs.

Yinxin appeared in the corridor in a robe, silver-white hair loose, golden eyes bright with the focused irritation of a woman who had been asleep for the first time in three days and was not asleep now.

"Something is coming through the eastern perimeter," she said. "The wards cannot classify it. It is—"

"Reiko."

"—extremely fast, and it is not slowing down."

"Drop the eastern ward."

Yinxin looked at her. "The eastern ward protects—"

"He is going to come through it either way, and a ward is easier to rebuild than whatever he hits on the far side of it."

Yinxin dropped the ward.

From the courtyard, Canirr: Something is approaching at a speed I am declining to estimate.

Amaya: I can feel it. So can the ground.

Jayde came out through the outer door. The mantis followed, blade-arms folded, sensory pits locked east. Canirr and Amaya were on their feet at full size, pale silver and heterochromatic eyes aimed at the treeline with the alert stillness of predators who had identified an incoming signature and elected not to engage it until they understood what it was.

The treeline broke.

***

Reiko hit the courtyard like something that had been thrown.

Four feet at the shoulder. Silver-black fur catching the moonlight in liquid ripples, shot through with silver that moved. The mercury rune on his forehead was blazing — not dimmed, not controlled, the liquid metal pattern pulsing bright enough to throw shadows off every wall in the yard. He had forgotten to dim it. He had forgotten everything that was not run.

He came through the gap at a speed entirely unsuited to a courtyard containing a stone planter, two Panthera, a Charling and his person.

The planter never stood a chance.

His hindquarters clipped it mid-stride. The stone cracked, the planter went over, and three months of Yinxin’s careful nursing went across the flagstones in a slow sad arc of soil and dormant root.

He did not notice.

He has done this before, Jayde thought, with the strange calm of someone watching a thing she had already seen once — a doorframe in the Pavilion, a shoulder into carved stone, a primordial shadowbeast wobbling like a foal on ice and announcing that it had been intentional.

Then he hit her in the chest and there was no room left for thinking.

Her shoulders went into the wall. The massive skull drove against her sternum with the blunt graceless urgency of a creature that needed to be touching her immediately and had no patience for doing it well. The bond detonated — two Nexus Cores finding each other after a year of wire and silence, locking, and the frequency they made went down through the flagstones and set the estate’s foundation humming.

[You were gone.]

Not the careful register. Not the one he used when he was trying to be a being with dignity. Ragged. Raw. The voice of something that had spent a year with a bond gone thin and had not known, on any single one of those days, whether the silence meant alive.

"I’m here," Jayde said. Her arms were around his neck.

[You were gone. For months I reached, and there was nothing there. Takara kept saying alive, but Takara says things, and I needed to feel it and I could not—]

He was broadcasting. Every thought, unfiltered, at full volume. Canirr could hear it. Amaya could hear it. Three wyrmlings who had appeared in the doorway in their nightclothes, because the bond detonation had woken every essence-sensitive being on the property, could hear all of it.

Reiko did not care. Reiko had forgotten that other minds existed.

"Breathe."

[—and then yesterday it came back and it was you and I ran and I did not stop and I am never letting you go into a mountain again, that is not a negotiation, that is a—]

"Reiko. Breathe."

The silver eyes found hers. Enormous. Wet. The rune pulsing at the rhythm of a heart that had been at sprint for two days and had not yet been given a reason to slow down.

He breathed. Once. Twice. The broadcast dropped from detonation to merely loud.

[You smell wrong,] he said. Quieter. The silver eyes going over her face detail by detail, verifying each one separately. [Thinner. Harder. You smell like stone, and metal, and something I do not have a word for.]

"War."

[I do not like it.]

"Neither do I."

He put his skull against her sternum again, hard, and from somewhere deep in his chest came a vibration that went through her ribs and into her spine and made her teeth buzz.

He was purring.

A lion-sized, primordial, mercury-runed shadowbeast, pinned against a wall in a courtyard full of witnesses, purring like something that had been set in front of a fire and given milk.

From the doorway, in a whisper considerably less quiet than she believed it to be, Tianxin said: "It’s purring."

Shenxin, with his mother’s restraint: "Be quiet."

"But it’s purring."

"Tianxin."

Reiko’s eyes opened. He had heard them. He had heard everyone. The rune dimmed — finally, belatedly — as the shadowbeast remembered, with the specific mortification of a creature who ranked his dignity somewhere near the top of his priorities, that he had just broadcast his entire interior at maximum volume to a courtyard containing two Panthera, three wyrmlings, a Silver Dragon Queen and a being made of golden light who was definitely keeping records.

[I was not purring.]

"You were purring."

[That is a respiratory function.]

"It’s purring, Reiko. It’s been purring for two years. You deny it every single time and it has never once worked."

The silver eyes closed. The rune dimmed further, which was as close as a shadowbeast came to going red in the face.

***

Then he saw the wyrmlings, and everything else stopped.

They had come out of the doorway without asking anyone. Three of them in nightclothes with their pendants glowing faintly, and they had stopped a few paces off, because a year is a very long time when you are three years old and none of them was completely certain what was supposed to happen next.

Reiko came off the wall.

He crossed the courtyard at a walk and lowered himself onto the stone in front of them, forepaws out, chest down, until his head was below theirs. Which put a lion-sized primordial shadowbeast flat on a cold flagstone floor at the eye level of three children who had spent a year waiting for two people to come home and had this night, unexpectedly, got both.

The mercury rune flared once. Bright. Deliberate. Then dimmed to a warm, steady glow.

[Small ones,] he said.

Tianxin launched.

She hit his flank and stuck there, arms as far around as they would reach, making a small keening sound of being claimed. Shenxin took two slow dignified steps, placed himself between Reiko’s forepaws, and pressed his forehead against the shadowbeast’s chest just below the rune, and shut his eyes, and said nothing at all.

Huaxin climbed onto his forehead and sat down on the rune.

Reiko held absolutely still.

[Jayde.]

Yes.

[She is sitting on my rune.]

I can see that.

[Again.]

Yes.

[...I cannot get up.]

No, Jayde agreed.

[I was not going to get up,] Reiko said, with enormous dignity, from underneath a wyrmling. [I want that recorded. I had no intention of getting up. But I also cannot.]

***

The mantis had not moved through any of it.

It stood three meters off with its blade-arms folded and its sensory pits aimed at the shadowbeast, wearing the flat, unbothered assessment it applied to everything — the expression of a creature that had fought a sixty-day war and considered a panicking shadowbeast to be a significant downgrade in threat level.

Reiko’s attention arrived at it eventually.

[What,] he said, [is that.]

"That’s the mantis."

[Is that a Charling?]

"Yes."

He did not sound surprised, which was itself surprising. He sounded like something confirming a thing it had been carrying around for a while and had not enjoyed carrying.

[Takara described them. He had it from the Lord of the Beasts — that the mountain they put you in was full of them. Chitin. Blade-arms. No eyes.] The silver eyes went over it again, slowly, from the folded arms to the sensory pits. [He did not say anything about them coming in this size.]

"That one’s unusual."

[There is a Charling in the courtyard.]

"It lives here now."

The two of them looked at each other across three meters of moonlit stone. The rune pulsed once. The sensory pits pulsed once. A shadowbeast who had run from Oceanus and a Charling that had fought a war, measuring, reading, deciding.

The mantis finished first. Its pits tracked Reiko’s bond signature, found the Nexus Core connection running back to the woman by the wall, and filed him where it filed everything that belonged to her.

Hers.

Reiko took considerably longer. Jayde could feel him through the bond, cycling between alarm and confusion and the particular outrage of a creature who had been his person’s primary companion for two years and had just found something enormous standing in the position.

[It is bigger than me.]

"Yes."

[Considerably bigger.]

"Yes."

[And you rode it.]

"Most of the year."

[You rode that. Instead of me.]

"You were at Oceanus."

[That is not the point.]

From the wall, dry as winter stone: He is taking this well.

Give him a moment, Amaya said.

Reiko’s tail had started to lash — the sign, in shadowbeast, of a being processing something it did not enjoy and not being finished.

Then the mantis hummed.

The low, deep vibration. Not aimed at Reiko. Aimed at Jayde — the sound it made when she was near, and the world was quiet, and it wanted her to know that it was there.

Reiko heard it. And through the bond Jayde felt the exact instant the outrage ran into something it could not stand against: the unwilling recognition that the sound the creature had just made was the same thing his purring was. That the thing three meters away had spent a year doing the one thing he had spent a year unable to do.

Being there. When she needed somebody to be there.

The tail stopped.

[Fine,] Reiko said. [It can stay.]

"That’s generous."

[I am an extremely generous being. This is well documented.] A pause. [It is not sitting on the bench.]

From inside the house, Isha’s golden light flickered through the doorway. "On that point," the fox said, "we are in complete agreement."

***

Takara arrived twenty minutes later, at a walk.

He came out of the treeline in true form without any urgency whatsoever — eight feet at the shoulder, midnight-black fur drinking the moonlight rather than reflecting it, white-gold lightning moving through the crackling mane in slow living patterns, amber eyes taking in the courtyard with the flat weary competence of a being who had spent two days chasing a shadowbeast across a continent and had elected, somewhere around the halfway point, to stop trying.

He surveyed the scene. The shattered planter. The soil. The dropped eastern ward. The shadowbeast lying on the flagstones with a wyrmling on his forehead.

"He went through the ward," Takara said.

"I had it dropped."

"That was wise." The amber eyes moved to her and stayed there, and something underneath the weariness shifted. "Commander."

"Takara."

"Two days ago I felt a bond come back through a dimensional seal that is not supposed to permit anything at all, and then I watched five hundred kilos of shadowbeast leave a domain at a speed I would not have believed if I had not been standing next to it." He sat down. "I have had a very long week, and it is only the third of the month."

Amaya rose from the wall and crossed to him.

They did not speak — not out loud and not through the link, or at least not on any frequency Jayde could hear. Takara put his head against the side of the mottled grey-and-silver neck for a moment, and Amaya let him, and then both of them sat down and looked at nothing in particular.

A year on a ridge. A year in a wild domain. Two members of the same detail, back within reach of each other for the first time since the day the assignment went wrong.

Then Takara looked at the mantis.

"That is a Charling."

"Yes."

"An Outer Ring mantid caste, at roughly twice the recorded maximum." He tipped his head. "It is watching me the way something watches a thing it has already decided it could take."

"It probably could."

"Yes," Takara said. "I had reached the same conclusion. I dislike it." He did not move. "How long did you ride it?"

"Most of the year."

"Of course you did." The amber eyes closed briefly. "I want to state, for whatever record the fox is keeping, that I was told this was a student training exercise with a thirty-five percent mortality rate and that you were the most dangerous thing likely to be inside it."

"That was mostly true."

"Mostly."

"There’s a rule inside the seal," Jayde said. "Cultivation draws them. Any signature at all and the colony comes to the source. So nobody cultivates. For a year."

The courtyard went quiet.

The lightning in Takara’s mane stopped moving. It did not dim. It simply stopped, mid-pattern, the way a clock stops.

"Say that again."

"No cultivation. Not once. Not for anyone, for three hundred and sixty-five days."

"You were in there without cultivation."

"We all were."

"You fought a war," Takara said, very slowly, "in a sealed dimension, against a hostile ecosystem, with your cultivation sealed, for a year, while four Panthera sat on a mountain above you and could not get in."

"Amaya was on the ridge the entire time."

"I am aware of where Amaya was." The amber eyes had gone somewhere cold and operational, and it was not aimed at anybody in the courtyard. "I assessed the risk and I assessed it wrong. I told this shadowbeast every week for a year that you were the most dangerous thing in that mountain and I was comfortable saying it."

"You weren’t wrong."

"I was working from bad information, which is the same thing wearing better clothes." He was silent for a moment. "Fahmjir will want the full account."

"He’ll get it."

"He is going to be extremely unpleasant about it, and I am going to have to stand there while he is." Takara lay down on the cold stone with the enormous put-upon weariness of a five-thousand-year-old warrior who had run out of things to be professional about. "This assignment. Truly. When I took it there were ribbons."

***

Yinxin came back out and surveyed the courtyard.

The planter in pieces. Soil across the flagstones. Three months of careful tending lying on its side in the cold.

"I am adding this to the property ledger," she said.

Reiko’s rune dimmed to its lowest setting.

[The planter was in the wrong place.]

"It has been in that place for a year."

[Then it has been wrong for a year.]

Yinxin looked at the shattered planter. At the shadowbeast wearing a wyrmling as a hat. At the Charling. At the eight-foot Lightning Panthera lying full length on her flagstones, complaining about ribbons. At three children who should have been asleep two hours ago and were now vibrating at a frequency that meant nobody in this household was sleeping again tonight.

"I am going to make tea," she said. "We are going to need more cups."

She went inside.

In the courtyard, a shadowbeast settled against the wall beside his person, and a Charling settled on her other side, and neither of them moved, and neither of them spoke. The Panthera lay in the dark near the wall. The moonlight came down across all of it without preference.

The bond hummed. The mantis hummed.

And the girl in the middle of it was home.

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