Nephis slept for the rest of the day and through the night.
Sunny carried her back to the shelf. Cassie rode the Echo behind him, her staff across her knees, her silence heavier than usual. She'd heard the fight from the ridge and she'd heard Nephis go down, and she hadn't said a word about any of it.
He laid Nephis on the flattest section of stone he could find and checked her breathing. Steady and deep. The cuts on her back had closed completely, the skin beneath the torn seaweed smooth and unmarked, as though the scythes had never touched her. The flame had done its work. Whatever it had cost her, the body it left behind was whole.
Sunny sat beside her and dismissed the Echo into his soul sea. The scavenger's carapace was cracked from the fight, leaking fluid from the wound the bone scythe had opened, and it needed time to regenerate. Inside the soul sea, enveloped in a cocoon of light, it would heal. The crack would close and the lost fluid would replenish, given enough time.
He checked his status.
[Shadow Fragments: 32/1000.]
The Centurion had given him more fragments than any previous kill, which made sense given the creature's strength. He also had a new Memory sitting in his soul sea, the one the Spell had awarded for the kill. He examined its description.
[Memory: Starlight Legion Armor.]
[Memory Rank: Awakened.]
[Memory Type: Armor.]
[Memory Description: "Born in the all-consuming darkness, seven valiant heroes made an oath to return light to the cursed land. Time has erased their names and their faces, but the memory of the defiant oath still remains."]
An Awakened armor. The same rank as his Puppeteer's Shroud, and the description suggested it carried an enchantment tied to the oath that had created it.
Sunny already knew what he would do with it.
He watched Nephis sleep and thought about the fight. She had committed to the sword thrust that pinned the creature, knowing she couldn't dodge while her hands were on the hilt, and the scythes had caught her across bare skin because she'd given her armor to Cassie. The decision to heal herself afterward was survival. The decision to then heal his bruised leg was not.
He'd told her not to. She'd done it anyway, spending reserves she didn't have on an injury he could have walked off in a week. The mechanism inside him kept circling back to that detail and failing to process it, the way a gear fails to catch when the tooth it's looking for has been filed away.
Anvil would have called it irrational, and he would have been right. There was no tactical justification for what she'd done and no cost-benefit analysis that made the trade favorable.
She'd done it because she wanted to.
Sunny sat with that and let it sit, pushing at it produced a sensation he didn't recognize and couldn't categorize, and he'd learned from Anvil that unfamiliar sensations were best observed before they were acted on.
The night came and the water rose, and Sunny watched it from the shelf's edge while Nephis breathed steadily behind him. He didn't sleep.
She woke at dawn.
Sunny heard the change in her breathing first, the shift from the deep, even rhythm of unconsciousness to the shallower pattern of someone waking up.
He turned and found her sitting up, blinking at the grey light with the particular confusion of a person trying to locate themselves in time.
"How long?" she asked.
"Since yesterday afternoon."
She processed that. Then she looked down at herself, at the torn seaweed and the unmarked skin beneath it, and Sunny watched her run the same inventory he'd run the day before. She was checking for damage the way a soldier checked equipment after a firefight, systematic and thorough, and when she found nothing wrong she let out a breath that carried more relief than her face showed.
"The creature?" she asked.
"Dead. You put the sword through its midsection and the Echo held it while I finished it."
She nodded. Then she looked at him, and her eyes moved to his left leg with the focused attention that meant she was assessing whether the healing had held.
"Your leg?"
"Fine. You didn't need to do that."
The words came out flatter than he intended. Nephis looked at him for a moment, and something behind her expression shifted, though he couldn't tell what moved or where it went.
"You said that already."
"Because it's still true."
She didn't respond. Sunny let the silence sit for a while, then asked the question he'd been carrying since the corridor.
"The pain you feel when you heal someone, what does it feel like?"
Nephis was quiet for long enough that Sunny thought she might not answer. She was staring at the grey sky above the labyrinth, and her profile was as unreadable as it always was. When she finally spoke, her voice was flat and precise.
"Like burning alive."
Sunny let the words settle. Healing her own ribs had been survival. She would have died without it, that made a kind of sense he could understand. But she'd healed his bruised leg afterward, spent what little she had left on something he'd told her not to fix, and that part didn't fit inside any logic he knew.
"Yesterday," he said. "When you healed my leg, you were already spent. You'd just put yourself back together from the inside out, and you chose to burn again for a bruise."
Nephis turned her head and looked at him. The grey of her eyes was still washed lighter than usual, the aftermath of the flame visible in the diluted color.
"Yes."
"Why?"
She held his gaze. The answer, when it came, was the same flat tone she used for everything, as though what she was saying was no more significant than a weather report.
"Because you were hurt."
Sunny looked away. Anvil had built him to understand people as systems of inputs and outputs, predictable and exploitable. Nephis wasn't operating inside any system he'd been taught.
There was no leverage in what she'd done and no angle to exploit. She'd seen pain and chosen to remove it at cost to herself.
Anvil had never done that for him. Nobody had.
He was quiet for a while. Then he reached into his soul sea and pulled out the Memory.
"I got an armor from the kill. It's Awakened rank."
Nephis looked at the shimmering runes hovering in the air between them. Her expression didn't change, but her eyes lingered on the description longer than they needed to.
"It should go to whoever needs it most," she said.
"That's you. Cassie has your old armor and I have the Shroud. You fought that thing in seaweed."
He held out his hand.
Nephis looked at his hand, then at his face. She studied him for a moment with the same expression she used when evaluating whether a corridor was safe to enter. Then she reached out and took his hand.
The spark of Memory transfer moved through their skin, and the Starlight Legion Armor left his soul sea and entered hers. Nephis released his hand and walked a few paces away, then summoned the Memory.
Light spun around her body and solidified into armor. A black bodysuit appeared first, form-fitting and made of something that looked like treated seaweed but moved like fabric woven from shadows. Then the plate materialized over it, piece by piece. White metal greaves and vambraces appeared first, followed by articulated pauldrons and a breastplate engraved with seven shining stars. The engraving matched the carvings on the giant headless knight's cuirass. The connection settled into Sunny's mind alongside everything else about the Forgotten Shore that pointed toward a history he couldn't yet decode.
The armor looked light and elegant on her. She dismissed the helmet and tested her range of motion with a few experimental swings of her sword.
Cassie, who had been sitting quietly through all of it, tilted her head.
"The sound of your footsteps changed."
Nephis looked at her. Something almost like a smile crossed her face.
"It's from the creature we killed."
Cassie reached out and Nephis took her hand, guiding it to the breastplate. The blind girl explored the armor's surface with her fingertips, tracing the engraved stars, mapping the shape of it the way she mapped everything.
"It suits you," Cassie said.
Sunny agreed, but didn't say so. He sat on the stone and thought about what Anvil would make of the scene. A blind girl tracing the stars on an armored breastplate while the girl wearing it held her hand steady.
Anvil would have seen vulnerabilities to exploit. Sunny was finding it increasingly difficult to see the same thing.
He looked west, toward the castle he couldn't see, and thought about the Last Lesson sitting in his soul sea, patient and absolute.
Do what you were made for.
The words felt different now, not wrong but smaller than they used to be, as though something had expanded around them and left them occupying less of the available space.
He didn't examine the feeling. He just let it sit, the way he let everything sit these days, accumulating in a file that no longer looked like the one Anvil had taught him to keep.
They broke camp at midday and headed west.