Chương 15: Chapter 14: Oh, Father of Days

Elma snapped awake, body rigid. A violent tremor wracked her frame. Her hands flew to the center of her chest, fingers clawing at the fabric of her nightgown. She stared blindly at the wall opposite the bed, lungs dragging in frantic breaths. She ripped the collar of her robe down, exposing her sternum to the dim light. The skin was perfectly smooth. Unbroken. Not a single scar or drop of blood marred her flesh. Slowly she pulled the fabric back up. That wasn't possible. She had felt the blade.

She had felt it punch through bone, felt her own lung give out, felt the cold spreading through her hands like ice water replacing her blood. That wasn't a thing the body simply walked away from. There was nothing. Not even a seam. Was it Resonance? She didn't know of a single technique, a single Resonant in any text she'd read, capable of reversing death. Reinforcement could harden flesh. It couldn't resurrect it. No. Her hand flew up, fingers twisting into her own hair. She hadn't made a second deal. She hadn't.

She turned her head. Christa was sitting in a high-backed chair to her right, illuminated only by the flickering orange glow of a single candle resting on the bedside table. In the harsh, shifting shadows, the woman looked entirely hollowed out. Dark, bruised circles hung heavy beneath her eyes, and her posture sagged with a profound, skeletal exhaustion.

"What happened?" Elma asked. Christa didn't immediately answer. She stared blankly at the candle flame.

"You overexerted your body defending yourself against one of the infiltrators. Y—you did good."

"No," Elma interrupted, the denial cold and immediate.

"I… I was stabbed." Christa let out a ragged, trembling breath.

"Stabbed? You must've been hallucinating from the strain."

"What? You can ask the Alloys." Christa's head snapped toward her, a sudden flash of defensive agitation cutting through her fatigue.

"Then where is the wound, Elma? Where were you stabbed?" Elma opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. Pushing back would only set Christa off again, and lately, nothing Elma said seemed to land right anyway. She stopped fighting the gravity of her exhaustion and let her head fall back against the pillows, her small hand remaining flat over her chest. Christa stood up. The wooden chair scraped lightly against the floorboards.

She walked slowly toward the heavy oak door, her pale hand gripping the brass handle.

"Don't leave." The words were out before Elma could stop them. Christa froze. She didn't turn around. Her hand remained tightly clamped over the brass. Elma stared at her mother's back. The silence in the room pressed in on her, but it was nothing compared to the deafening silence inside her own head. She didn't want to think about it now. She didn't want to think about anything. She just wanted to sleep.

"Please." The word tasted like cold ash on her tongue. For a long, agonizing second, the only sound was the faint crackle of the burning wick. Then, Christa released the handle. She walked slowly back across the room, slumped into the chair, and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. Elma kept her eyes fixed on the woman.

"Are we safe?"

"We are," Christa murmured, her eyes still on the candle.

"I made sure of it personally." Elma didn't respond. She simply kept her gaze locked onto Christa's seated figure, using the rhythmic rise and fall of the woman's breathing to ground herself in reality, until her exhausted body finally dragged her under into a dreamless sleep.

Elma stood before the tall, silver-framed mirror in her room, her breath hitching. She peeled back her nightgown, her eyes scanning her own skin with the clinical precision of a surgeon. It wasn't just the stab wound that had vanished. The purple bruise that had bloomed across her face was gone. The small nicks where she'd scratched at her own skin—gone. Her skin was as smooth and unblemished as glass. Regeneration? Do I still have it?

She picked up a small, silver letter opener from the vanity and made a swift, shallow cut across the tip of her index finger. A bead of bright crimson blood welled up. She waited. One minute. Three. The cut remained open, stinging slightly in the morning air. No regeneration. Her physiology was still human, still fragile. So it wasn't innate. Whatever had repaired the damage in her chest hadn't rewritten her baseline biology—it had intervened once and then stopped. A Bio Resonant.

They are Resonants capable of manipulating living tissue directly. Could they heal people? If one had saved her, why had Christa said nothing? Either she didn't know—which meant someone had healed Elma in secret—or she did know, and had chosen silence instead. Elma turned her gaze toward the velvet chair. Christa was still there. She looked as though she hadn't moved an inch since Elma had drifted off. She was deep in a heavy, unnatural sleep, her head tilted sharply to the right.

Her breathing was shallow, labored. As Elma watched, Christa's silk gown slipped slightly off her shoulder, revealing the edge of a thick, white linen wrapping. She was injured. The Bio Resonant theory collapsed instantly. If they were capable of that kind of repair, Christa wouldn't need linen and gauze—she would already be whole. Whatever had healed Elma's wound, it hadn't touched her mother's. Which meant a second, more pressing question now sat directly beside the first. Why was Christa injured at all?

Elma stepped closer, her footsteps silent on the rug. Just as her fingers were inches from the silk, Christa's eyes snapped open. She straightened abruptly against the chair back, fingers digging into the armrests. Stolen novel; please report.

"What happened?" Elma asked, pointing a steady finger toward the linen. Christa didn't look down at the bandages. Instead, she reached up with a trembling hand and adjusted the silk of her gown, jerking it upward until the white cloth was swallowed by the fabric. Christa refused to meet her gaze. Her pale hands remained tightly clasped over her chest, gripping the hidden outline of the sun pendant beneath her silk gown.

"The house had... more visitors. Dangerous ones," Christa said, her voice thin and wavering.

"I had to protect it." Elma stared at the fabric where the pendant rested. Her small fists tightened at her sides, a sudden spike of irrational fury warring against her logic. But Elma forced her fingers to uncurl, consciously releasing the tension in her shoulders. She inhaled slowly, actively suppressing the hostility. This was an opportunity.

"You aren't crazy," Elma said, carefully modulating her voice to strip away the edge.

"The librarian... he saw the boy too." Christa offered no immediate reaction. She remained seated, as still as a corpse. She finally lifted her heavy, shadowed eyes to meet Elma's and pulled the little girl into her arms, holding her so tightly it almost hurt.

"I love you," she whispered against Elma's hair.

"I love you so much. But something has happened to you. Something's wrong, and it's my fault—it's my fault, Elma, I should have protected you better." Her voice cracked, breaking apart on the last word.

"But we can fix it. I promise we can fix it. I won't let anything happen to you again." Before Elma could process the blunt accusation, Christa pulled back reaching behind her own neck. She unclasped the heavy gold sun and leaned forward, draping the chain around Elma's neck. The metal settled against Elma's collarbone, heavy and uncomfortably warm from Christa's skin.

"Repeat the prayers," Christa instructed, her tone suddenly dropping into a hushed command.

"Nanar, Father of Days, first light upon the water," she whispered, "we turned our faces from your warmth, and still you did not turn from us. Eternal Sun, sleeping but not gone, forgive this age of apostasy. Forgive what we have become in your absence. Return to us, Nanar. We are waiting." Elma repeated it.

"Your father is on his way back now. They have finally won the war." Christa tightened her grip on Elma's hand.

"But you must keep this hidden from him. Do you understand?" Elma didn't argue. A suffocating wave of anger flared in her chest, hot and violent against the religious imposition—against a god Christa believed had cursed her real daughter by letting D-66 reincarnate in her place. But she swallowed it down behind a perfectly blank expression and gave a single, mechanical nod. Christa let out a ragged breath.

"Rest, sweetheart. You deserve it," she murmured, offering a final smile before slipping out of the room. The heavy door clicked shut. Alone, Elma immediately grasped the sun pendant. Her knuckles turned white. The urge to compress the air around her fist and pulverize the trinket into gold dust was nearly overwhelming. The rage was unbearable. She had felt anger before. This was nothing like that. This burned, raw and total, unlike anything she had catalogued in either of her lives.

To wear a symbol of a god who had condemned her very existence, who saw her as a curse to be prayed away… It is nothing important, she repeated to herself, forcing her grip to loosen fraction by fraction. It is a meaningless piece of metal. I will wear it until my position improves. Nothing more. She dropped the pendant, shifting her attention back to her own hand. A single, dark bead of dried blood crusted the tip of her index finger. Red Shore. Valerius Altheris had finally won.

Elma stared at the dried blood and wondered exactly what kind of war required years of grinding slaughter to secure a single victory.

Elma stepped into the hallway, the air thick with the smell of cold stone and ozone. The guard presence had tripled overnight; they stood like silver pillars every five paces. They didn't look at her, but she felt their fields overlapping in the air. She bypassed them, her stomach giving a sharp, impatient growl. In the kitchen, the usual morning bustle was replaced by a heavy silence. She snatched two bananas from a wooden bowl and scanned the room for Leta.

The maid's rhythmic, optimistic mumbling was missing today. Elma pushed through the rear exit into the gardens, but the sight stopped her dead. The manor didn't just look "damaged." It looked as if a titan had taken a bite out of the east wing. Massive, jagged cracks ran through the reinforced masonry, and entire stone balconies had been sheared off as if they were made of parchment. High above, workers were suspended by thin ropes, using their fields to stitch the building back together.

The scale of the devastation was absolute. It dwarfed her skirmish with Nagin. While she had been unconscious, a far more violent storm had visited the Altheris estate. Elma peeled the first banana, the mundane sweetness of the fruit a sharp contrast to the lingering smell of ozone and pulverized stone. She chewed slowly, her eyes tracking the workers. Then, the sound reached her—rapid, stumbling footsteps hitting the damp earth. It was that familiar, small "rock-like" weight.

Before Elma could turn, a pair of small, trembling arms wrapped tightly around her. Jorm buried her face into Elma's shoulder, her body shaking with violent, rhythmic sobs.

"I'm glad you're okay, my lady... thank the gods you're okay," the girl wailed, her voice thick with terror and relief. Elma stood frozen, the half-eaten banana forgotten in her hand. Why is she holding me? Her hands rose, palms flat, ready to shove the girl away and re-establish their boundaries. Her hands stopped. She looked at Jorm's messy hair, felt the dampness of the girl's tears soaking into her collar. For a fleeting second, the "Iron" in her soul felt heavy. She's insignificant, Elma told herself.

A variable with no weight. Shoving her away now would only draw attention—risk damaging the fragile disguise she wore. Slowly, she lowered her hands back to her sides. Jorm didn't let go for a long time. For nearly an hour, the only sounds in the ravaged garden were the distant shouts of workers and the girl's fading sobs. Elma remained a still, silent anchor, the banana turning brown in her hand. Eventually, they sat together on a weathered stone bench, the weight of the morning pressing down on them.

"It... it was extremely strong," Jorm whispered, her voice wavering as she stared at the ruined masonry.

"It just tore the maid house in half. Like it was made of paper."

"It?" Jorm shook her head, pulling her knees up to her chest.

"I couldn't see it clearly. There was too much dust and falling stone. But there were these... massive red whips. Like raw muscle or sinew. They were everywhere. It slaughtered people before the guards even drew their weapons. The Alloys who survived said it took Lady Christa and that other woman just to drive it away." Christa fought it. Elma's brow furrowed.

"What other woman?"

"A woman in black," Jorm said, her trembling fingers tracing a jagged shape over her own face.

"She had a black mask. Like a cat. One of those red whips came right at me, and she just... appeared. She cut it in half and saved me." The new intel contradicted Elma's established parameters. Sable and Christa fighting on the same front? It made no sense. Christa clearly didn't know Elma's true identity as D-66, which meant Sable hadn't told her. So why would Sable intervene to protect the Altheris estate? Christa wouldn't give her an answer. She'd already proven that twice this morning alone.

If she wanted real answers, she would have to wait for Sable to surface again. Beside her, fresh tears spilled over Jorm's face. The girl averted her eyes, staring at her own scuffed boots.

"I'm sorry," she choked out, her voice suddenly thick with guilt.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there to help you fight." Elma looked at her, entirely bewildered by the statement.

"You would have died immediately if you had intervened," she stated flatly. It was a statistical certainty. Jorm stood up abruptly, her small hands balling into tight fists.

"I froze!" she cried out.

"I saw it coming! I even grabbed the stones and everything, but my legs just... stopped! I couldn't move! I couldn't do anything! I… I hate myself!" Elma watched the emotional cascade, completely unable to map the logic. Recognizing her complete inability to navigate this kind of human psychological minefield, Elma opted for absolute silence. She simply let the girl unravel. Slowly, the adrenaline drained out of Jorm. She slumped back onto the cold stone bench, wiping her face with the hem of her ruined apron.

"Have you ever frozen?" Jorm asked, her voice hollow and quiet.

"No." Jorm let out a bitter, exhausted breath.

"Must be nice. The guards said you fought off an assassin all by yourself." She looked at Elma, a faint trace of envy flickering beneath the exhaustion.

"And you're younger than I am." An hour passed in silence. Both of them were lost in their own thoughts, the garden around them fading into a quiet blur. Jorm's tears had dried, leaving her eyes wide and shadowed with a deep, lingering sadness. Despite the dirt and grief, there was a weight to the girl's voice—a cadence that didn't match her small, scrawny frame.

"How old are you?" Elma asked. Jorm froze. The vacant look in her eyes snapped away, replaced by a deep crimson that spread from her neck to her forehead. She looked down at her boots, fidgeting with her apron.

"I'm... I'm ten," she mumbled. Ten. Elma turned the number over and found nowhere to file it. She stared at Jorm, frozen, for a long moment with no response ready. Jorm jumped to her feet, her grief momentarily forgotten as her insecurity took the wheel.

"You think I'm small too, don't you?! I'm just a late bloomer! My mother said I'll be taller than the garden walls one day! Just you wait!" Elma looked up at her, then down at herself.

"You're... almost exactly as tall as I am," Elma noted.

"And I am four." Jorm's demeanor shifted in a heartbeat. The sobbing child vanished, replaced by a whirlwind of indignity. She started shouting, her voice rising an octave with every word, a barrage of defensive excuses about "nutrition," "genetics," and "impending growth spurts" that began to drown Elma's brain. Elma sat on the bench, feeling the "Iron" in her soul retreat in the face of this verbal assault. I should have never asked.