Abidan's housekeeper looked first at Elham, whom she recognized, then at Yael, whom she did not. She stepped aside and let them enter with the quick silent judgment of a woman who had spent years learning which people carried danger into a house and which people did not.
Abidan's room was unchanged except for the open shutters. For the first time in weeks the morning light reached fully inside, grey and damp from the storm outside. The smell of wet stone drifted through the room along with salt air and the strange scent cities carried after surviving something they did not yet fully understand.
Abidan was awake, as he always was when Elham visited, but something about him felt different today. He was sitting up higher than he had managed in weeks, and there was a new quality in his eyes when they moved toward the doorway. Less inward. More alert to the world beyond the room.
His gaze settled on Yael and stayed there for several seconds. Elham could almost see him measuring the shape of the young man in front of him, the way sick people sometimes developed a strange sensitivity to the people who entered their rooms.
"Sit down," Abidan said.
Yael sat without hesitation. Not carefully. Not awkwardly. He simply settled into the chair the way he settled into conversations, fully present, the restless energy that usually surrounded him gone quiet beneath a more focused stillness.
Elham took his usual seat near the wall. Asher leaned against the doorway. Mara stayed beside the entrance, watching the room.
"You heard what happened," Yael said.
"I felt it," Abidan replied.
His eyes returned to Yael. "Who are you?"
"Yael. You might've heard of me arguing about justice in the temple with Eli since before this prophet arrived." He paused. "Which sounds less impressive than whatever happened at the harbor."
A faint smile touched Abidan's face. He studied him a moment longer. "I've heard about you. Mostly from people complaining about the one who talks too fast."
"That's fair."
"They don't actually want you to slow down," Abidan said. "They want you to stop being right."
That drew a real smile out of Yael.
"How long have you been sick?" he asked.
"It's been about a month now. The fever broke once. Then it came back." Abidan shifted slightly beneath the blanket. "The body is doing what it's doing."
Yael watched him quietly for a moment.
"You didn't come here to ask about my body," Abidan said.
The words echoed what he had once said to Elham, but this time there was no guardedness behind them.
"No," Yael admitted. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "I'm here to ask about something harder."
The room grew still.
"Your wife," Yael said softly. "When did she die?"
Something in Abidan changed at the question. Not breaking. Not collapsing. Just loosening slightly, like a door unlatching after years closed.
"Four years ago," he said.
"And since then you've been governing this city alone." Yael held his gaze. "Without the person who used to tell you the truth about yourself."
Abidan said nothing.
"The illness isn't only physical," Yael continued. "I think you already know that. You've spent four years carrying grief instead of grieving it because governing was something you knew how to do, and grieving required another person." He paused. "And there wasn't anyone left to do it with."
Abidan looked down at his hands resting on the blanket. His fingers pressed together unconsciously, the small movement of someone trying not to feel something that had already begun surfacing anyway.
"Her name was Leah," he said quietly.
"Tell me about her."
And Abidan did.
He spoke for a long time. Not about her role beside him, but about the woman herself. The way she laughed at things he had never intended to be funny. The arguments they used to have where both of them were right in different ways. The feeling of her presence in a room, and the strange truth that four years had not lessened the pain of her absence so much as made him used to carrying it. He spoke about returning each night to an empty house after spending all day carrying everyone else's grief.
Yael listened without interrupting. He never rushed the silences or tried to guide the conversation somewhere safer. He simply received it completely.
Elham sat against the wall and stayed quiet. The room no longer belonged to him. For weeks he had been visiting this house every morning without realizing he was preparing something, and now that preparation had finally reached its purpose.
When Abidan finally stopped speaking, the room held the quiet feeling of something heavy being set down after years of carrying it alone.
Yael looked at him for a long moment. At the grief now visible on the surface instead of hidden beneath everything else. At the thin hands resting against the blanket. At the man whose body had finally broken beneath a burden his soul had been carrying for years.
Something shifted in the room.
Elham felt it immediately. Not Gabriel's presence. Something gentler. Closer. The warmth of a healer rather than a messenger. It gathered around Yael with a patient stillness, as though it had been waiting for him to finally understand what he was.
Yael placed a hand over Abidan's.
Then he spoke.
"Be healed."
The change happened instantly.
The sickness released Abidan's body in the span of a single breath. Color returned to his face. His breathing deepened. Strength moved back into hands that had trembled all morning. The exhaustion that had hollowed him out for weeks simply vanished.
Abidan stared down at himself in stunned silence before looking back at Yael.
"What just happened?" he asked.
Even his voice sounded different now. Stronger. Clearer. No trace of illness left inside it.
Yael looked equally startled by what had happened. He stared at his own hand for half a second like it belonged to someone else.
"I have absolutely no idea," he said honestly.
Abidan laughed softly under his breath. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood without difficulty.
The woman in the doorway made a startled sound.
Abidan looked toward her. "Bring me my robe," he said. "The governing one."
She left immediately.
Then Abidan turned toward Elham.
"Walk with me," he said. "I need to remember how the city sounds from inside it."
Elham stood. Across the room Yael was still staring quietly at his own hand, turning it over as though seeing it differently now.
"Come," Elham told him.
Yael rose slowly, and together they stepped out into the wet morning streets of Gibeah.
• • •
Yael barely spoke afterward.
He walked through the city beside the others with the distracted stillness of someone whose understanding of himself had shifted so suddenly that part of him was still trying to catch up. Elham recognized the feeling immediately. He remembered experiencing something similar after the stream in Aram when he was a child, the strange split sensation of existing in the world while also realizing the world would never feel the same again.
Mara stayed beside Yael without questioning him. She understood instinctively that what he needed was not conversation but company.
Eventually Yael said quietly, "I've been doing it for two years."
No one asked what he meant.
"Not like that," he clarified. "Not with words like that. But the conversations. The way people changed afterward. I thought I was just good at talking." He let out a slow breath. "I wasn't just good at talking."
"No," Elham agreed.
"It was already happening."
"Yes."
Yael fell quiet again.
That evening Yael sat alone in the temple. For once he was not preparing arguments or rehearsing conversations. He simply sat in silence beside the lamp while the city settled into night beyond the windows.
Stillness did not come naturally to him. Which made the effort itself meaningful.
Then, without warning, his soul plane opened.