Chương 84: What Rethven Carried Back

Blood Moon's inner sanctum sat at the center of a valley I hadn't expected to find beautiful, terraced red-stone gardens climbing the hillsides in careful, deliberate rings around a central hall that looked considerably older than the sect currently occupying it. Serel led us in personally, no guards flanking the path, the formal truce holding exactly as promised the entire ride in.

"He's waiting in the memorial garden," she said, at the base of the final stair.

"He asked to receive you there specifically. I believe he wanted you to understand, before any words were exchanged, that he doesn't intend to hide behind ceremony for this conversation." The memorial garden, when we reached it, held row after row of modest stone markers, none of them ostentatious, all of them clearly tended with real care rather than obligation.

Rethven stood among them, a tall, unhurried man who looked considerably younger than three years of leadership should have allowed, dark eyes tracking our approach with an attentiveness that reminded me, uncomfortably, of the way Vashe had once looked at me across our very first meeting.

"Len Fan," he said, inclining his head with genuine respect rather than performed courtesy.

"Archmage Dororo. Thank you both for trusting an invitation from a sect that's given your family considerably more reason for caution than trust." His gaze moved briefly to the markers surrounding us.

"I keep this garden maintained personally. Every name in it belongs to someone Blood Moon has wronged across generations of leadership I did not choose and would not have chosen, if the choice had ever been mine to make. Your father's isn't here Chronos claimed the right to honor him properly, and I've never once tried to contest that. But I wanted you to see this before anything else passed between us. I don't intend to ask forgiveness I haven't earned.

I only wanted you to understand exactly what kind of man is asking you to listen." He led us, after a long, respectful silence, into the central hall itself sparse, deliberately unadorned, nothing like the ostentatious seats of power I'd half-expected from a sect with Blood Moon's fearsome old reputation.

"Three years ago," Rethven began, once we were seated, "I was not the heir apparent to this sect. I was fourth in a line of succession that should have taken decades to reach me, if it ever had at all. Then, within the span of a single night, every person ahead of me in that line simply stopped. Not died. Not fled. Stopped, the way a clock stops, still fully present, entirely unable to continue forward." He watched Dororo carefully as he said it, gauging a reaction I could see him already half-expecting.

"I was the only one in the hall that night who kept moving. I have spent three years since trying to understand why, and I have found exactly one document, in all that searching, that describes anything resembling it happening before."

"Fifty years ago," Dororo said quietly. It wasn't a question.

"Fifty-one, according to the account I found," Rethven confirmed.

"An archmage of Chronos, present at a working none of his contemporaries ever fully documented, who simply vanished from every record the same night three other scholars present at that working apparently stopped, the same way my own predecessors did. I didn't have a name to attach to the account until Serel returned from Baskerville and mentioned yours."

"May I ask how you found it?" Dororo asked.

"Fifty years of my own searching turned up nothing half so specific."

"By accident, mostly," Rethven admitted.

"It was catalogued under a different sect's records entirely filed as a curiosity rather than an event worth cross-referencing, the way most institutions file anything they don't know what else to do with. I only found it because I'd been searching those archives for anything resembling what happened to my own predecessors, and the search terms happened to overlap." A faint, tired smile.

"I've come to believe a great deal of what actually matters in this world survives only by accident, Archmage. Buried in the wrong shelf, under the wrong heading, waiting for someone patient enough, or desperate enough, to go looking anyway." Dororo had gone very still again, the same stillness I'd seen settle over him in the receiving hall days earlier, except deeper now, older.

"I don't remember that night," he said, very carefully.

"Not clearly. I remember beginning a working I'd spent a decade preparing for. I remember light that wasn't properly light. I remember waking fifty years later with no explanation anyone could offer me, and a world that had simply continued on without bothering to wait." He looked at Rethven directly.

"You're telling me something stopped the others in that room, the same way something stopped your predecessors, and only spared the one person actively at the center of it." This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"I'm telling you I believe so," Rethven said.

"I can't prove it. I've spent three years trying and found only fragments old references to a 'shattering,' scattered across sources that never agree on what exactly broke, or when, or why some people simply stopped while others kept moving straight through it entirely unharmed." He leaned forward slightly.

"I brought you here because I think you're the only person alive who's actually lived through it from the inside, and I've spent three years wanting, more than almost anything else, to ask someone who has exactly what it felt like." Kromitos pulsed, once, sharp and sudden, hard enough that I had to steady my breathing before I trusted myself to speak.

"The shattering," the guardian's voice said, arriving instantly, urgent in a way I'd rarely heard it.

"He is not wrong to use that word, child. Listen carefully to whatever he says next. This is closer to my own fracture than anything you have found yet closer even than the road."

"What did it feel like?" I asked, relaying nothing of the guardian's words aloud, watching Dororo's face carefully instead. Dororo was quiet a long moment, hands folded tightly in his lap, something old and difficult surfacing behind his usual measured calm.

"Like the world tore along a seam I didn't know existed," he finally said.

"Like something considerably larger than the working I was performing reached through it from the other side, took what it needed, and left the rest of us to simply... fall through whatever gap it left behind. Some of us landed fifty years later. I've always assumed the others simply didn't land at all." Rethven exhaled slowly, something like grim vindication and genuine grief mixing in equal measure across his face.

"Then it wasn't isolated to my hall three years ago. It wasn't isolated to your working fifty years before that either." He looked between the three of us, something resolved settling into his expression.

"Whatever this shattering actually was, Archmage, I don't think it happened once. I think it's been happening, in scattered, unpredictable moments, for considerably longer than either of our two sects has ever openly admitted to the other. And I think, if we don't start comparing notes properly instead of guarding old grudges, neither of us is ever going to understand it before it happens again."

We rode back toward Chronos in near-total silence, the weight of the afternoon settling over all of us differently Dororo lost somewhere deep in his own fifty-year-old memory, Ellia watching me with quiet, careful concern, Kalio simply staring at the darkening road ahead with the particular stillness of someone still adjusting to how much larger the world had just become on his own watch.

"Tell me everything, later, when you're properly alone," the guardian said, quieter now, retreating the way it always did once the immediate urgency had passed.

"I do not think this is coincidence, child. I do not think anything about it has been coincidence for a very long time. Something is stitching all of this together my own fracture, the Old Reckoning's, Rethven's ascension, your Archmage's fifty lost years, doors that may or may not still be answering honestly somewhere out past every border either of your sects has bothered mapping. I am beginning to suspect the debt I mentioned may come due considerably sooner than either of us first assumed."

I didn't answer aloud. I only rode on quietly beside the others, Ember alert and watchful against my collar, Kromitos humming low and unsettled beneath my ribs, and understood, watching Trigatia's spires finally rise back into view against the darkening sky, that whatever answer this shattering eventually demanded, it had just stopped being a mystery any one sect, any one archmage, or any one vessel could reasonably expect to face alone.

Dororo broke the silence first, once Baskerville's gates finally came into view ahead of us.

"I owe Rethven a debt of my own now, I think," he said quietly.

"Not the kind ledgers measure. The kind that comes from finally being believed, after fifty years of half-suspecting even my closest colleagues privately thought I'd simply lost the years to some ordinary, unremarkable accident I'd been too proud to properly explain."

"Nobody who actually knew you thought that," Ellia said gently.

"Perhaps not," Dororo allowed.

"But a man can spend a very long time doubting even the things he knows to be true, if he's carried the doubt alone for long enough." He looked at me, something steadier settling back into his usual composed bearing.

"I intend to write to Rethven regularly from now on. Whatever guarded distance existed between our two sects before today, I don't believe either of us can afford to keep maintaining it, not with this many threads apparently running between us that neither side properly understood until now." Kalio nodded slowly beside him.

"I'll speak to my father as well. If Blood Moon and Chronos both have pieces of the same larger puzzle, the Nightsky Sect ought to know what's actually being assembled, rather than simply hearing about it secondhand once it's already too large to safely ignore."

We rode the rest of the way in a quieter, steadier silence than the one that had carried us most of the afternoon, each of us privately turning the day's revelations over into whatever shape we'd eventually need them to hold, and I found myself, watching the gates finally swing open ahead of us, grateful genuinely, fully grateful that none of us, this time, would have to carry the shape of it alone.