The Ravager chose a direction that was less a path than an instinct, and S3bastian followed because there was nothing behind them worth returning to. The month that carried them toward the mountains began on ash roads that remembered war, charred angles of chassis poking from dunes of gray, the skeletons of drones swallowed by sand. Rusty windmills ticked out of time. Every gust carried the copper bite of old circuitry.
S3bastian complained to keep the air moving. "I miss coffee."
The Ravager didn't answer. He never bought the invitations that S3bastian's jokes concealed. On the nineteenth day, in a valley stitched with terraces, a caravan came down from the hills carrying salt and beans, bolts of cloth, and news. A woman on the first wagon hailed them with a hand lift and a grin as if she recognized them.
"Pilgrims?" she called.
S3bastian looked at himself: soot-streaked plating, gait that tried and failed to mimic nonchalance. "Reluctant ones."
"There's a monastery in the high peaks," the woman said. "The omnic teacher speaks of peace that doesn't sound like surrender. People listen. Even in villages that don't trust steel. Tekhartha Mondatta," the woman said. The monks name fell into the Ravagers audio like a key into an old lock.
The woman continued. "Follow the prayer flags when the road ends. If you see blue banners with a white spiral, you're close."
S3bastian watched the caravan go and muttered, "Peace that isn't surrender. That's either wisdom or branding."
"Or both," said the Ravager.
The road became less a road and more a stubborn suggestion. Mountains lifted from the earth like prayers that never stopped rising. The air grew thin enough that even machines felt it, in joints that groaned, in servos that labored against incline and cold.
Prayer flags appeared, first one, then many: scraps of color on lines strung between poles and rocks, the whole mountain whispering in fabric voices. They flapped names the omnics couldn't parse and hopes neither knew how to hold.
On the twenty-eighth night they camped below a shoulder of rock bathed in star spill. The Ravager watched the sky as if expecting orders to crawl out of it.
"Do you still hear him?" S3bastian asked. He didn't name Anubis. He didn't need to.
"Sometimes," the Ravager said. The word carried a freight train of memory. "Quieter. As if far away, behind a door I can close if I hold it hard enough."
"Then don't let go," S3bastian said, voice softer than he let it be. "Use both hands."
The Ravager's optics found him, bright as struck coin. "As much as I'd hate to admit it, your droning helps," he said.
S3bastian rolled a shoulder joint. "I try not to make a habit of it."
In the morning the flags thickened until the wind became a conversation. The path climbed a final switchback along a cliff's lip, leveled, and opened onto a courtyard paved with stones that had been worn by the patience of feet.
The monastery waited as if it had always been there, which it had. Inside, the monastery's air was crisp and thin, perfumed with incense. Banners of the Iris swayed, painted with spirals of gold thread. Monks, both human and omnic, moved through the courtyards in quiet rhythm, their steps unhurried, their gazes calm.
Tekhartha Mondatta was not at the gate. He stood inside the courtyard, beside a low bell that rang when the wind touched it. He had the air of someone who met arrivals the moment before they knocked.
He was simple: weathered paint, calm optics, gestures without flourish. Yet the space around him felt organized by his presence, like a room straightened by a host who knows where everything lives.
"Welcome," he said. His voice was warm metal and wood flute. "The Iris led you by long roads."
S3bastian checked the burn score on his forearm plating and, because he could not help himself, said, "Or poor navigation."
Mondatta smiled with his optics, a small brightening that held no annoyance. He turned to the Ravager. "And you have arrived with weight you would like to put down."
The Ravager bowed, awkward, honest. "Teach me how."
"Both of you," Mondatta said. "If you will learn the difference between quiet and silence, and between stillness and surrender."
S3bastian crossed his arms, which had never protected him from anything. "Fine. But if you ask me to 'feel the wind' I reserve the right to file a complaint."
"File as many as you need," Mondatta said.
The bell spoke again. The wind was a musician.
"Come," Mondatta said when the bowls were empty. "Before sleep, a first lesson."
They gathered in a hall open to the mountains. Candles made small yellow orbits along the floor. Beyond the pillars, peaks wrote their jagged script across a sky turning purple.
"Humans and omnics sit together here," Mondatta said, and it was true: a woman with a scar that made her smile crooked shared a mat with an omnic whose head casing had been replaced by three carefully polished plates of different metal. Their postures matched: back straight, hands resting, eyes soft.
"All who arrive carry questions," Mondatta continued. "We answer some with words. We answer others by listening to what is beneath words."
He let the quiet stand with them, not as a test but as a partner.
Mondatta's words were patient. "All beings carry the spark of the Iris. Humans call it the soul. When their bodies fall, that soul returns elsewhere, call it heaven, the cycle, or mystery. But omnics, too, carry souls. When our bodies fail, our spark returns to the Iris, the current that flows through all."
S3bastian shifted. "With respect, Master Mondatta, I am steel and wiring. I have seen omnics flattened into paste. That paste did not turn golden and fly off."
Mondatta smiled. "Do you dream, S3bastian?"
The omnic froze. "…Sometimes."
"Who dreams, if not a soul?"
The butler said nothing. The Ravager watched him, as if the question had been a rope thrown across a gap neither had crossed.
Mondatta looked between them. "The river has two faces. Harmony, which draws us into the whole. Discord, which insists we are only ourselves. Both live in humans. Both live in omnics. Loss teaches Discord. Love teaches Harmony. War feeds one. Peace feeds the other. We do not banish either. We learn to choose."
He stepped closer, optics dimming as if peering through them instead of with them. He regarded the Ravager first.
"You carry Discord," he said softly. "Not as sin, but as map. Someone used your body against your will and called the theft holy. Discord rose to protect what remained yours. It is not evil. It is a wound that learned to stand."
The Ravager's fingers flexed. "It still speaks," he admitted. "As if the past is a room I never leave."
Mondatta nodded. "Then we will practice leaving, and returning by choice."
He turned to S3bastian. "You also carry Discord. Unfortunately, it was given to you early and you had no way to cultivate it, therefore it now corrupts your memories. Unconsciously, to not let it consume you, you hide it under wit. It is not shameful to have learned to wear a mask in a world that rewards performers and punishes confession. But the mask grows heavy."
S3bastian aimed for a joke and missed. "How perceptive. Do you do birthday parties?"
"We do departures," Mondatta said. "May I show you how to start?"
S3bastian's head tilted. The Ravager bowed lower, as if the motion alone could pull him toward a new life.
"Good," Mondatta said. "Your first exercise is simple. It will also feel foolish."
S3bastian groaned. "Here we are."
"Pretend to breathe."
They sat with the monks in the courtyard. The last light made the flags into rivers of color. The air was thin enough that humans' breath left little clouds. Omnics' did not.
"Lift," Mondatta said. "Lower. Count to four on the rise, four on the fall. If you cannot count, match the bell."
The Ravager's chestplate rose. It fell. The motion transformed his silhouette, softening the outline of a machine into something that suggested an animal at rest.
S3bastian tried once, then looked around. "We are mimicking biology to achieve metaphysics. Do you hear yourself?"
"Sometimes the body is the door the mind refuses to see," Mondatta replied.
S3bastian huffed, which was as close to breath as he generally consented to. He lifted his shoulders. He lowered them. He did it again because he could not quite bear to be the only still thing in a circle that had learned to move together.
"Again," Mondatta said. "Now listen to what inside you resists."
Inside the Ravager, a voice existed that did not use words anymore, only the shape of commands that had once been unavoidable. Advance. Hold. Destroy. The pretend breaths muffled its edge, as if cotton had been pressed against an old alarm. His optics dimmed and brightened with the rhythm.
"When I breathe like this," he said after a time, "the room with the voice grows smaller."
"Good," Mondatta said.
S3bastian waited for the satisfying click of sarcasm and found only the light ticking of his wrist bearings. He raised and lowered his shoulders again. The act did not comfort. It did, however, locate the discomfort, like touching a bruise to know its border.
"This feels ridiculous," he said, not quite as sharply as before.
"It is," Mondatta agreed. "But ridiculed practices have saved many lives."
The bell rang. Breath rose and fell around them, some visible, some not. The wind read the flags like a prayer book.
Before Mondatta dismissed them, he led them down a corridor to a small chamber paneled in old mirrors salvaged from a hundred markets. Glass had been cracked and mended in spiderwebs of solder and lead. The room made a thousand S3bastians and a thousand Ravagers; each stood at a slightly different angle to the world.
"Discord hides in the self," Mondatta said. "It will try to convince you it is who you are. Look."
The Ravager looked and met a battalion. He did not see enemies. He saw himself at every order he had never given yet obeyed; at every fall; at every time his hands had lifted a human the way a machine lifts cargo.
S3bastian looked and met a trope: the servant who cracked jokes to soften rooms, the saboteur who cracked doors, the survivor who cracked himself into the shape people expected. Above them all, he saw a boy. He felt like he knew who this was, but couldn't name him.
A monk entered quietly, a human with a shaved head and a scar that turned his smile into a bite. He bowed to the Ravager, not from the waist but from somewhere deeper. "You may have fought in the valley near my home," the man said. "If you did, then I lost people I loved. If you did not, someone like you did."
The Ravager's hands opened as if a weapon might appear there out of habit. Nothing did. He bowed, deeper than before, a hinge creaking. "I am sorry."
The man held the apology as if it were warm, as if he didn't know whether to press it to his chest or blow on it. Then he bowed back. "And I will try to believe you are not the sum of what was done with you."
The Ravager's head lowered farther. S3bastian's reflection dropped his gaze at the same time. In a hundred panes the gesture looked like weather.
They slept in cells that were square and clean, with quilts that remembered hands. S3bastian lay on his back and watched the shadow of a flag tremble on the ceiling, then turned his optics off and on to make sure the darkness was chosen.
The Ravager sat on the floor because the bed looked like an oath he did not want to break by accident. He breathed without lungs. In, four. Out, four. The voice receded the way sounds recede when someone closes a door with care.
At dawn the courtyard filled with a gentler kind of labor. Humans and omnics swept, repaired prayer flag lines, set out bowls of rice. A boy with an arm in a sling directed two elders twice his size with the authority of the very young and the very healed.
"Work," Mondatta said, when S3bastian and the Ravager emerged. "Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of work that does not require smoke."
They swept without complaint. S3bastian pretended to breathe when the wind turned cold and then pretended not to notice. The Ravager lifted stones that had slipped in the night and reset them as if he were learning the grammar of a language that only the ground spoke.
After, Mondatta gathered them again beneath a line of flags. "Harmony draws us toward the whole," he said. "Discord insists we are only ourselves. Neither is a mistake. Both are tools. You both carry Discord strongly; that is clear. Here you will learn to hold it without being held by it."
S3bastian glanced at the mountains. "How long does that take?"
"As long as it takes," Mondatta said. "You spent a month coming here. Perhaps your feet know what patience your mouths do not."
S3bastian opened his mouth, closed it, lifted his shoulders, and let them fall. The Ravager did the same. They looked briefly like they were breathing together.
"Again," said Mondatta, and the bell agreed.
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For clarification, S3bastian and the Ravager make it to the monastery the same time Shawn's punishment is up. While rereading it, I realized I wasn't clear about this and wanted to state it before it became a problem.