A leaf snapped from a branch and drifted through the air in a gentle zigzag, before landing on Kael's snow white hair.
He ignored it and moved the refinement orb to the next ingredient.
A few hours into the refinement, though it had only taken one to understand how different advancement refinements were. Simultaneously more difficult and easier, and he had a hard time putting it to words.
The closest he could get was this: it was like walking a road you had walked before, but years later. The foundation was familiar. The same curves, the same bumps, even that small spot where water always gathered after rain. But the laws already woven into the mote were like that road. Established. Load bearing. He couldn't pull them out or reshape them the way he could when building a mote from nothing. All he could do was study what was already there and find where something new could be pressed in without disturbing what held it together. Threading a new law between old ones without loosening either. Like carving a desire path through land that had already decided what it was.
Every time a new ingredient was absorbed by the orb, Kael summoned another from the stone coffin. The moment a yellow grass blade appeared he let it fall in, using his Will to draw out what he needed before the orb swallowed it whole. He moved the remains into the pile beside him. Whatever had made it yellow was gone now. What was left looked like nothing but a blade pressed out of white paper.
His eyes lingered on it.
'Did I really need Straw Hat grass for the refinement?'
Every now and then he would slip into something close to a flow state. He would feed in an ingredient without thinking and move straight to the next. That alone was strange enough given how much attention refinement demanded. But stranger still were the faint memories surfacing of ingredients he hadn't planned to use at all. Things that had no place in an advancement refinement.
The leaf slid from his hair as he shook his head.
It didn't make sense. If he was truly throwing in random ingredients the refinement would have collapsed by now. So something was happening, he just couldn't see what. Every time he tried to think back to those moments his mind came up blank.
He pushed the thought down and summoned the next ingredient.
A subtle rustle came from the bushes nearby. Kael glanced over his shoulder into the dark.
"What do you want." he said calmly, turning his focus back to the orb.
Syleena stepped out and walked over to sit on a log not far from him.
"How come you can see me so well?" she asked with a sigh.
Kael moved to the next ingredient without answering.
"Is it that eye? You didn't really answer when I asked last time."
"What do you want?" Kael repeated.
Syleena clicked her tongue and rested her chin in her palm.
"Nothing… just looking to pass the time."
Kael clenched his fist and crushed a mindstone.
He had no idea how she had found him. He had hoped she wouldn't, and yet at the same time he had needed her to.
He turned to look at her.
"You could escape now, you know. The only one besides me who can see you is locked in a fight with your father. With your motes you could walk straight past Valthorne's territory and disappear."
"Could I?" Syleena's voice was flat. "No matter who wins, my head is marked. My Soulbound motes have their uses, but there are countless others that make them ineffective. Useless, even." She shifted one leg over the other. "We're both as good as dead if the family heads don't die. My position might be a little better than yours, but not by much."
Kael rolled his neck. He had never expected her to speak so plainly about her own father's death.
"Besides…" Syleena continued softly. "I'm waiting for someone."
'Of course she is…'
This was the most vulnerable Kael had ever been around her. Around anyone, perhaps. He was already halfway through the advancement of a rank two mote, and while he had no real life experience to draw from, it didn't take much to understand that failing this refinement would carry immense backlash.
He was confident he could take her on even ground. But Syleena knew that too. Direct confrontation wasn't her path, which was exactly why she was here right now. Kael's life hung by a thread, and she held the knife.
All she had to do was break his attention and the refinement would fail. Either killing him outright, or leaving him crippled enough that she could do whatever she wanted with him.
"Could you lend me a graveyard moss and a hasspring grass while you wait."
"Sure!" Syleena said without hesitation.
Another large stone coffin appeared beside Kael's. Syleena walked over, took out the two ingredients, and placed them next to him before sitting back down.
Kael watched in silence.
He couldn't reason out why she had given them up so willingly. They were by far the rarest ingredients he had needed so far.
He had been around sixty percent sure Syleena would come to him here, though at the end of the day that was nothing but a qualified guess. Knowing her, she must have understood he was refining something, and there was no reason to do so under these circumstances unless it was absolutely urgent before the war began. It had started prematurely, but the point still stood.
Her being here made sense too. She wasn't going to flee. Kael knew that even when he had suggested it. They weren't friends, but they were still each other's strongest companion, whether they liked it or not.
What he hadn't accounted for was Sophie not being with her.
His original plan had been to take Sophie hostage and use her as leverage for the ingredients. But Syleena had handed them over without a second thought.
'Does she need me…' Kael glanced at her. '...Or is there something else?'
It was vaguely logical. If they were going to lean on each other they would need one another at full strength. Still, giving up ingredients that rare without so much as a condition was strange.
Kael ignored her for now and continued with the refinement.
—
Mael whipped her head back and dragged her fingers through her hair. Already at the first Luminaire had it come undone.
"Killing… why is it always killing?"
Over twenty lifeless bodies lay in the melting snow before her, severed limbs making it look messier than it had any right to. If the Mael she used to be could see her now, standing here bloodied with the bodies of young people scattered at her feet, she would have been disappointed. She had always thought war outright idiotic. But now, grown and with responsibilities heaped onto her, she understood it better. What choice did she really have?
Or at least that was what she told herself.
She knew how hypocritical it sounded. But it was the only way she could mentally work through what she was doing without crumbling under the weight of it.
She sighed and tilted her head down to tie her hair back up.
The Claymores were supposed to be neutral, no matter what. It was a promise they had made to every city they had expanded into. So the bodies here were more than just dead Luminaires. They were also the reason Mael was going to have a lot of paperwork in her future.
"Why couldn't things just get easier as I got older?" she murmured.
The older she got, the more she found herself thinking about ordinary Luminaires. She knew how good she had it. She knew. But her position came with its own costs.
Pouting softly, she started toward the Claymore estate.
Her mind drifted further with each step.
This was the first time she had used her Soulbound mote in real combat. She was surprised by its effectiveness, but still disappointed. Not by the result exactly, but by the pathway it came from. For as long as she could remember she had wanted to awaken as an Information pathway Luminaire. It was the reason she had studied so hard for so many years, the reason she knew smolten writing and could teach it to Kael at all.
But she had awakened in the Weaver pathway instead. The same as her father's. Noble, by most accounts. Just not what she had wanted.
"I'll cultivate the Information pathway every moment I can…" she said to herself.
The pathway you awakened as wasn't your only option, even if most treated it as one. Any Luminaire could cultivate any pathway. The problem was that natural talent didn't carry over, making everything harder. And since your main pathway was so deeply tied to that talent, most never bothered straying from it. Why would they? Advancing through your awakened pathway was simply faster.
But that didn't mean it was the only way.
'Weaver pathway…'
It was both a curse and a blessing to come from a rare one. On one hand it was less studied, which made it harder to predict in battle. On the other, there was far less knowledge surrounding it, making advancement far more dependent on your own efforts. There were no books on the Weaver pathway, as far as she knew, compared to something like the Blade pathway which had countless. Every insight she had reached, she had reached largely on her own, with only surface level guidance from her father.
When her thoughts drifted to other rare pathways, refinement among them, a shiver ran down her spine. That was one of her worst nightmares. She was already navigating the Weaver pathway blind. The thought of something even rarer, something with even less to guide her, she couldn't imagine the effort it would take just to move forward.