He stopped walking.
She stopped too.
He was looking at her — at the crimson eyes, at whatever he saw in her face that was both familiar and wasn't. The heavy dark eyes and the jaw that was their father's and the specific quality of someone who was about to say a true thing.
"You're different," he said. Quiet. Not accusatory. "I know they say it's the... um.. illness and the—" he stopped, feeling rather awkward. He didn't exactly know what to call it since it was quite sensitive, she didn't mind.
"You're different. And I don't know what that means. But I don't — " another awkward stop then a sigh, his gaze locked in hers.
"I'm not going to pretend I don't notice just because it's easier."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Two people in a cold garden in a timeline that felt like the 18th century she hadn't been born into, and this person was the only one in the house who had said a true thing directly to her face without wanting something from it. Facing her without running away or giving excuses not to. Excuses she expected. But the sudden raw vulnerability made her full body cringe and at that moment all she wanted was the ground to open up and swallow her or disappear. She wasn't comfortable for some reason. Analysing the reason why at the moment was too overwhelming and she felt the birth pangs of a headache encroaching so she did what she always does best.
Bury it.
"Thank you," she said, forcing her lips to parade a somewhat shy smile.
He nodded. Once. Small. Then again.
They turned back toward the house. She was glad, her need to escape was stifling.
Unexpectedly, the system pulsed. Her brow rose as she saw floating runes in her line of vision. She looked up at Cael to check whether he indeed felt something a miss.
He didn't.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE]
REWARD: ASCENDANT KNOWLEDGE — [BEGINNER'S FRAGMENT]
Her heart thumped. The system acknowledge the presence of Ascenders. For it to bring such valuable information now just after her conversation with Cael was all the confirmation she needed to know the system or the person behind it.
Wants her to ascend. Her body shivered.
[What the guilds call the Ascendant system has seven ranks.]
Hmm.. It's almost like a game. She wasn't actually a gamer, never was really interested so she lacks most knowledge, unless it was during her childhood when her and her brother struggled on who would hold her mother's phone for a game of Temple run. But now or rather then, before she died she rather read books. It was her brother who took things farther. He was a gamer true at heart.
[What you need to know now:
Rank 1 — THE WOKEN. Threshold: accessible. Cost: sleep, as you know it, ends.
A Woken ascendant perceives more than baseline humans. Heightened sense. Earlier warning. Faster reaction.
The threshold substance for Rank 1 is called Veilwort tea. It is not difficult to obtain. It is not safe to take without a witness.]
[Note: You are not ready for Rank 1.]
[The guild will assess you at the academy.]
[We recommend you understand the system before they try to explain it to you.]
[People who understand systems before being explained to them are harder to manage.]
[This is, for you, a survival strategy.]
Her eyes widened. What?
The cost of ascending to rank one is sleep? Why were they starting of strong. She was one who couldn't do without sleep. How can she survive if it was taken away from her? What was happening? Isn't it not too much. Why was life unfair?
No.
Her lips moved. She cannot allow herself to mentally spiral into despair. She can't afford to do that anymore. From her observation ascending seemed to follow a specific pattern of equivalent exchange. To receive power something of equal value must be taken.
But sleep as the first baseline was too much. She wondered what rank two and above would be taking away from her.
She shuddered at the thought.
From what she was told for sleep to be taken away she receives faster reflexes.
Was that really enough?
She didn't have to think about it too much now. After all the system mentioned she wasn't ready. Yet.
Though that seems to explain the candle questions from the Count. He was probably wondering whether I ascended.
After exchanging goodbyes with Cael, she found Dorian on the way to the library.
Worse luck.
In the second floor. He was coming out of a room she hadn't identified yet — documents in one hand, something in his expression that rearranged itself when he saw her. Fast. Practiced. The rearrangement of someone who had been doing this long enough that it happened below conscious thought.
Warm. Brotherly. The face settling into something that said I'm glad you're here before he'd had time to decide whether he was.
She looked at him.
Dorian, her mind said, with the flat clarity of Elowen's memory arriving in complete sentences. The one who put her in the dungeon. The one who stood in a stone corridor with a haughty voice and made a remark on how she had been very tiresome.
Tiresome enough to be expendable.
Tiresome enough to be dead.
The one who ordered she should be poisoned.
The poison she later vomited on the priest holding her funeral procession.
She was at the moment more aware about the cold knife in her boot. The thought of the knife stained with Dorian's blood flashed in her mind before she could take hold of it.
She thought about the current distance between them. Three metres. The documents in his hand — he'd have to set them down. The doorway behind him — he'd need two steps to reach it. The width of the corridor. The specific angle of the candlelight.
All the creative ways a person could be taken apart slowly enough that they had time to understand what was happening to them.
She considered Dorian specifically with the particular detached focus of someone running a calculation. Contemplating, the bones of the wrist and how they responded to sustained pressure. The slow kind — the patient kind — the kind that started small and invisible and arrived fully formed somewhere he wouldn't see it coming.
She smiled.
"Elowen." His voice was pleasant. Easy. "I'd hoped to run into you today."
"Good day, brother." she greeted with an undertone of sarcasm, she couldn't help herself.
He crossed the distance with the unhurried confidence of someone who expected space to accommodate him. Tall — broad through the shoulders. Their father's jaw. Their mother's coloring. The kind of face that had probably always been believed.
His hand found her shoulder. A brief squeeze. The gesture of an older sibling checking in.
"How are you feeling?" Warm eyes. Genuine concern in the voice. "It must be overwhelming. Waking to all of—" a small gesture encompassing the funeral, the manor, the general chaos of her resurrection. "We were so relieved."
"Overwhelming," she agreed.
She was now thinking about how long it took a person to bleed from a chest wound if the bullet was placed carefully enough to avoid instant death. The specific window of time. The specific quality of understanding that arrived in that window. Whether it would feel, to him, like the poison he'd put in Elowen's drink. Whether he would have time to make the connection.
She hoped so.
She wanted him to have time.
"If there's anything you need." He was already shifting — the subtle reorientation of someone whose attention had somewhere else to be. "Anything at all. You only have to ask."
"Of course," she said.
He smiled.
She smiled back.
Two people performing a conversation. Both of them knowing it. Neither saying so.
He left.
She watched him go.
His eyes throughout the warm voice and the shoulder squeeze — working. Assessing. Taking stock.
Warm eyes, she thought. Working eyes.
Her lips pulled upwards in a resemblance of a manical smile. Her crimson gaze gleeful.
It would be creepy to anyone who say her at that moment. Her reaction then slowly relapsed into an expressionless face as though it was never there to begin with.
She had twelve days and few hours before she goes to the academy. Then probably years of learning what this world was and what she was capable of becoming inside it.
First, she thought pleasantly, become something worth fearing.
For that she needed power. The encounter only reminded her that if sacrificing her sleep to get there was needed, she would gladly oblige.
She continued to the library.