For a heartbeat, everything that made sense to Asher lined up and quietly fell over.
Duncan's words—you are of my blood, son—still rang in his chest like a hammer that had found the softest place to land.
He stared at the old man and searched the gravel of his mouth for a joke. There wasn't one. He searched the hard lines of his face for a lesson. There might be—later—if he survived the next minute without the world re-shelving itself again. And he tried to remember all the times Duncan had watched him suffer in the Tower—impassive, distant, yet committed in a way that felt like cruelty only until hindsight named it care. A pattern emerged where before he had only seen difficulty.
"Your… blood," he said finally, the words dry in his mouth.
Duncan's smile thinned. Not warmth. Not exactly. Approval, perhaps. Or ownership. "Hard to believe? I know…" he said, and the dark-green lightning licked the clouds above him in lazy agreement. "It's a lot to take in, but you'll manage."
