Chương 57: Alone, By Choice This Time

Ellia found out before I'd worked up the nerve to tell her myself, which meant the conversation started considerably worse than I'd hoped it would, though perhaps no worse than it honestly deserved to.

"You're leaving," she said, arms crossed, standing in the doorway of my dormitory with an expression I hadn't seen from her since the day she'd first insisted on coming along to the Greyhold.

"Without me. That's Len Fan, that's not how this works anymore. We agreed. Together, the way we've done everything else since that road."

"This is different."

"Explain how." Her voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone sharp enough to cut.

"Because from where I'm standing, it looks exactly like the first few months I knew you, when you disappeared into a Tower alone and came out three days later half-collapsed and refusing to explain why you hadn't simply let anyone help." I sat down heavily on the edge of my bed, Ember shifting restless against my collar, and made myself say it plainly instead of circling the truth the way I'd once circled every hard conversation before I'd learned better.

"Vashe didn't beat me because I lacked people willing to fight beside me," I said.

"He beat me because the gap between what I am and what he is has nothing to do with numbers on a side. You. Dororo. Kalio. All of you standing there wouldn't have changed a single moment of that fight, Ellia. If anything, it would have given him more to threaten me with." Something in her face flickered, anger giving ground, reluctantly, to something closer to fear than she probably wanted me to see so plainly.

"So you're punishing yourself instead. Alone, where no one else can see exactly how hard you push, or when it finally becomes too much for you to carry properly."

"I'm training," I said.

"Properly, without anything to distract me and without anyone I love standing close enough to become leverage the next time something like him decides I'm worth testing again." I met her eyes, steady despite how much the words cost to say plainly.

"That's not punishment. That's the only strategy that actually makes sense, given what I just watched him do without even trying." Ellia was quiet a long moment, arms still crossed, though the sharp edge in her posture had softened by careful, visible degrees.

"How long, then. Give me a real answer, not a vague one."

"I don't know exactly. Weeks, at minimum. Possibly considerably longer than that." I held her gaze, refusing to look away from the hurt still visible underneath her composure.

"I'm not doing this because I don't trust you beside me. I'm doing it because the version of me that survives what's coming next needs to be built somewhere nothing can interrupt the building."

"And Ember," she said, glancing toward the small dragon still perched on my shoulder, watching the whole exchange with unusual stillness.

"Ember comes with me," I said firmly.

"Not because it can fight beside me the way you could, or the way Dororo could. Because it's the one thing in this entire mess that's never once made me feel like I had to perform strength I didn't actually have." That, finally, seemed to land somewhere real. Ellia crossed the room and sat beside me on the bed, close enough that our shoulders touched, and let out a long, unsteady breath.

"I hate this," she said.

"I want you to know that clearly, before you go. I understand it. I even agree with it, if I'm being honest with myself instead of just afraid. But I hate it anyway."

"You're allowed to hate it and still let me go."

"I know." She leaned her head against my shoulder, and we sat there a while in a silence that held considerably more than either of us seemed ready to put into words.

"Write to me. Properly, the way you finally learned to write your mother. Not the version of you that pretends everything's fine because admitting otherwise feels like a burden." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"I promise." Kalio caught me the morning I left, waiting near the academy gates with an expression that suggested he'd been standing there considerably longer than pride would normally allow him to admit.

"You're actually doing it," he said.

"Disappearing. Alone."

"I am."

"Good." He said it plainly, without the careful hesitation I might have expected from him even a few months ago.

"I watched what that man did to you without breaking a sweat, Len Fan. If there's a version of you that closes that gap, I'd rather you spend whatever time it takes building it properly than rush back into a fight you're not ready for a second time." Something crossed his face, complicated and considerably more honest than the boy who'd once mocked me across a training ground.

"My father's gone quiet since the waystation. I don't know what that means yet. I intend to find out, while you're gone, whatever it costs me to manage it."

"Be careful."

"You first," he said, something almost like a real smile crossing his face.

"Go get strong enough that the next time something like Vashe shows up, it's considerably more nervous about the conversation than we were." Dororo arranged the rest within two days a formal leave from the academy, framed as private family matters serious enough that even the stricter instructors didn't press for details, and a quiet word sent ahead to Mother explaining, in careful, deliberate terms, exactly why her son was about to vanish into the mountains for considerably longer than any previous absence.

"The Heavenly Sword Sect," Dororo said, spreading a familiar map across his cluttered table one final time.

"Your own courtyard. Ground that already knows your name, considerably safer to disappear into than anywhere entirely new, and close enough that your mother can look in on you without either of you pretending distance is easier than it actually is."

"You've thought this through."

"I've had two centuries to learn that the people who survive the largest gaps in power are rarely the ones who trained somewhere convenient," Dororo said.

"They're the ones who trained somewhere that mattered to them enough to make giving up considerably harder than pushing through." He rolled the map and handed it over, something almost paternal beneath the dry delivery.

"Go home, child. Rebuild yourself the same way you're still quietly rebuilding that sect, one patient season at a time. I'll keep working Vashe's trail from here, carefully, exactly the way I promised."

"Thank you. For all of it. Not just the map."

"Don't thank me yet," he said, something dry returning to soften the weight of the moment.

"Thank me when you come back capable of surviving a conversation with that man without ending up flat on your back in the dirt. That's the only gratitude I actually intend to accept." The road out of Trigatia felt different than every other departure this past year — no Ellia riding beside me this time, no Alfredo Van's careful, guarded company, just Ember settled warm against my collar and a mountain range waiting somewhere ahead that had already watched me leave and return considerably more complicated each time.

I thought of Vashe's hand stopping an inch from empty air, of the exact, patient scale he'd shown me without ever once raising his voice. I thought of Ellia's head against my shoulder, of a promise to write honestly instead of carefully. I thought of Kalio standing at the gate, steadier than I'd ever seen him, watching his own father's fear finally curdle into something he intended to face directly instead of simply inheriting. Whole hadn't been enough.

I understood that now, riding alone toward a home that still needed finishing as badly as I did. Two years had taught me how to survive being hunted. This next stretch would need to teach me something considerably harder how to become the kind of threat that made hunting me a genuinely costly decision, rather than simply a patient inevitability someone like Vashe could afford to wait out.

The farmland gave way to familiar hills by the second day, rivers I half-remembered from a much younger, much less complicated version of this same journey, and by the fourth, the mountains of home finally rose along the horizon, smaller than I remembered them the way places always seemed to shrink once you'd stood in front of something considerably larger than yourself.

"Time to actually close the gap," I told Ember, quiet, watching the last of the capital's spires vanish behind the tree line.

"However long it takes. However much it costs me to manage it properly this time." Ember chirped once, settling deeper against my collar, wings tucked tight against the evening chill, and I rode on into mountains that were, for the first time in longer than I could easily remember, mine alone to disappear into.