~ KAEL ~
Kael found Aldric in the small shrine room on the second floor — not the grand altar he kept for show, but a smaller one, plainer, with a single candle and a portrait of people Kael had never seen before. Aldric was kneeling in front of it, not praying, just looking.
"That's your family," Kael said quietly, from the doorway.
"Most of it." Aldric didn't turn around. "My parents. My grandfather. My aunt Vesna — she died when I was nine. Fever, they said." He nodded at a smaller portrait at the edge, slightly apart from the others, a young woman with a sharp, watchful face. "She was the only one who ever made me laugh. She used to sneak me into the kitchens to steal pastries before dinner and tell my mother I'd simply lost my appetite."
He finally turned. Whatever he saw in Kael's face made him go still.
"What is it."
Kael had thought about how to say this the entire walk back from Pale's townhouse, and every version he'd rehearsed had sounded wrong — too clinical, too gentle, too much like he was breaking news rather than handing someone back a piece of their life.
In the end he just sat down across from Aldric, on the floor of the shrine room, which felt like the only honest place to do this.
"Vesna didn't die of a fever," he said. "She was sent away. Before — before everything else happened to your family. And as far as anyone can tell, she's still alive. Living under a different name, in the temple district."
The candle flickered. Aldric didn't move for a long moment — didn't speak, didn't blink, just sat with it the way a man sits with a wound before he knows yet how badly it hurts.
"That's not—" he started, and stopped. Started again. "I was nine. I remember the funeral. I remember — there was a funeral."
"There might have been. People stage funerals for all kinds of reasons." Kael kept his voice level, careful. "I think someone wanted it to look final. Maybe to protect her. Maybe to protect what she knew."
"What she knew," Aldric repeated. Something was assembling itself behind his eyes — Kael could see it happening, the way a man who lived and breathed Nyxaran scripture put pieces together. "The ledger. The margin notations. That was —"
"We think so. Pale thinks Vesna might have more — a diary, letters, something that goes further than what I found. Something that could finish this properly, not just embarrass Olen but actually end him."
Aldric stood up abruptly and walked to the window. His back was to Kael, his shoulders rigid in a way that Kael recognized — he'd worn that same posture himself, more than once, in the days right after he'd woken up in this world and realized everything he'd known was gone.
"Thirty years," Aldric said, very quietly. "I grieved her for thirty years. I lit candles for her. I—" his voice caught, just slightly, and he pressed on through it. "I used to talk to her portrait. Tell her things. About the temple, about my studies. Like she could hear me."
"Aldric—"
"And she was alive. This whole time. Three streets away." He turned around, and his eyes were wet, and his voice, when it came, wasn't angry — it was something rawer than anger. "Why didn't she find me? Why didn't she — I was a child. I was right here."
Kael didn't have a clean answer for that, so he didn't pretend to.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe she thought reaching out would put you in danger. Maybe whoever arranged this told her you were gone too, the same way they told you she was gone. Maybe she's spent thirty years thinking she was protecting the only family she had left by staying away." He paused. "I don't know, Aldric. But I know we can find out. If you want to."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Nyxara had watched a great many griefs in seventeen thousand years — the loud kind, the quiet kind, the kind that calcified into ritual and the kind that simply hollowed someone out and left them walking around anyway. She had learned, mostly, to observe them the way she observed weather: present, significant, not hers to carry.
Aldric's grief was none of those things. It was thirty years old and freshly broken, like a bone that had healed wrong and was now being reset, and watching it happen in real time — watching this prickly, devout, exhausting young man fold in on himself in front of a shrine to people who weren't all dead after all — did something to her that she didn't have a category for.
She thought about Kael, sitting on the floor of the shrine room, not flinching from any of it. Not offering platitudes. Just staying.
She thought about her own thirty-year griefs, multiplied by hundreds, each one carried alone because gods did not have anyone to sit on the floor with them.
Until, perhaps, now.
"I want to find her," Aldric said finally, wiping his face with the heel of his hand, embarrassed and not quite hiding it. "Today. Now, if — if that's possible."
"It's possible," Kael said. He stood, offered Aldric a hand up, which Aldric took after only a moment's hesitation. "I know roughly where to look. Nyxara can narrow it down."
Aldric looked at the space beside Kael — the space he'd started, almost unconsciously, to address things to — and said, with a rawness that hadn't been there in any of his careful liturgical phrasing: "Thank you. Whatever you are. Whatever this is."
"You're welcome, Aldric Voss," Nyxara said — and let him hear her, for the first time, directly. Not through Kael. Just this once.
Aldric went very pale. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed — short, wet, disbelieving. "Three years of liturgy," he said, "and the first thing the Void Mother ever says to me directly is 'you're welcome.'"
"It seemed appropriate."
"It was," Aldric said, and for once, he didn't sound exhausted or aggrieved or like a man performing devotion. He sounded, simply, like someone who had just been handed back a piece of his life and intended to go get the rest of it.
"Let's go," he said. "I want to meet my aunt."