I stood with that a while, the cold of the mountain chamber settling into my bones in a way that had nothing to do with the actual temperature of the air.
"Then why didn't Hallowmere burn seventeen years ago instead of now," I asked, mostly to myself, though Namey answered anyway.
"Because the schedule wasn't fixed," he said. "Because whatever they're building here takes time to mature, and Hallowmere wasn't a target they picked on a whim three weeks before the raid. It was a target they'd apparently had marked on some ledger since before you were even born, and they simply waited until the product was ready and the timing suited them, and your father spent every year of that waiting knowing it was coming and unable to do anything more about it than buy you and your grandfather the head start he already had."
"That's not comfort," I said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the exact thing I'd said to Luxy back on that bench in Corvane.
"It's not meant to be comfort," Namey said. "It's meant to be true. You said you'd rather have it that way."
I had said that. I still meant it, mostly, standing there with my chest doing something complicated and unpronounceable that wasn't grief, not exactly, and wasn't relief either, something with both of those folded into it and neither of them able to fully take the lead.
It was Savage who spoke next, and her voice had gone rough in a way I hadn't heard from her since the fire outside Corvane.
"He didn't abandon you," she said. "Not the way I keep assuming every father in every story like this one abandons somebody, because that's the only shape I've got a template for in my own head. He made a version of a terrible trade, and he made it for you, and then he apparently kept making it, year after year, long after the part where it would've gotten him anything he actually wanted for himself." She looked at the photograph a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her own eyes. "I don't know what to do with a father who did that instead of the kind I've got personal experience with. I don't have a template for this one at all."
"Neither do I," I admitted.
A sound behind us made all four of us turn at once, Aki already snarling low in his throat before any of the rest of us had fully processed the noise as anything worth reacting to, and a figure stood in the doorway we'd come through, framed against the pale lantern light of the cage chamber beyond, unhurried, unarmed as far as I could tell, watching us with an expression of mild, almost polite curiosity that made my skin crawl worse than outright hostility would have.
He was tall, ash grey through the hair in a way that looked less like age and more like deliberate coloring, dressed in a long coat the exact shade of the sigil we'd been chasing since Corvane, and when he spoke, his voice came out quiet, measured, the specific quiet of a man who had never once in his life needed to raise his voice to be heard by anyone he wanted to hear him.
"You found the file faster than I expected," he said. "Most people who make it this deep spend a good deal longer reading the cages before they think to check the paperwork behind them. I confess I'm a little disappointed. I'd hoped you'd take your time with Merit and her neighbor first. They so rarely get visitors who bother to look at them properly instead of simply flinching and moving on."
"Corvin Ashe," I said, and it wasn't a question either, not this time.
"Among other names, over the years," he said, inclining his head slightly, the small courteous gesture of a man being formally introduced at a gathering rather than caught inside his own hidden facility by four armed strangers and a wyvern. "Jon Marrow. I've been curious about you for longer than you'd find comfortable, as I believe I already told you once, though I suspect the note didn't quite prepare you for how literal I meant that."
"You knew my father," I said.
"I made your father," Ashe said, and something in the plainness of it landed worse than any cruelty could have. "Not in the sense you're picturing. I didn't create him from nothing. I simply found the raw material the mountain had already made, and I recognized what it was worth before anyone else standing in this valley did, and I offered him a use for it that let him salvage something out of a discovery that would otherwise have destroyed him for no purpose at all. He came to me. I want that understood plainly, because I suspect the people you've been traveling with have already started constructing a kinder version of that story in their heads, and kindness, in this particular case, would be a lie."
"He came to you because you'd already decided to burn his home," Namey said, and his voice had gone sharp and cold in a way I'd rarely heard from him. "That's not a choice. That's a man negotiating the terms of his own extortion."
"Call it what you like," Ashe said, unbothered. "The terms were real. The relocation happened. The boy standing in front of me is proof of it, alive, considerably more capable than any ordinary farm child from a valley like this one has any right to be, running around the world with abilities that, I'll be honest with all of you, still fascinate me more than almost anything else my work has produced." His eyes settled on me with something that felt uncomfortably close to fondness. "You know what you are, don't you. Tomiyasu's crown found its way onto your head for a reason, Jon. Daegon wasn't the first seed. He was simply the one who survived cleanly enough to matter. You're the second."