~ KAEL ~
Three weeks into his new position, Kael discovered that the harbour commission's accounting office had a window.
This seemed like a small thing, but after two weeks of windowless rooms — Olen's office, the Conclave hall's narrow slits, his own tiny room at Aldric's — Kael had developed what he privately considered a healthy appreciation for natural light. The window looked out over the harbour itself: ships, gulls, the particular blue-grey color the water turned in late afternoon. He'd started leaving it open, even when it let in the smell of fish, because the alternative was a closed room and he'd had quite enough of those.
Master Renn had, against all odds, turned out to have a dry sense of humour once he stopped looking like a drowning man. The backlog had taken eleven days to clear — not because the work was hard, Kael explained to anyone who asked, but because untangling someone else's shorthand was always slower than writing your own, and three different corrupt clerks had apparently each invented their own private notation system, possibly out of spite.
By the end of the third week, the harbour's books were current for the first time in two months. Renn had taken to bringing Kael tea in the mornings, unprompted, with the quiet ceremony of a man who had decided, privately, that this was simply how things were now.
— ✶ —
The evenings had a rhythm too.
Most nights, Kael ate dinner at the Cracked Lantern — Bertha had started saving him a seat near the fire without being asked, which he'd learned, from long observation, was about as close as Bertha came to open affection. Biscuit the cat had, true to Nyxara's prediction, transferred his entire loyalty to Kael with alarming permanence, and could usually be found draped across Kael's boots by the second course.
Twice a week, he had dinner at Aldric's instead — Vesna had moved in within days of the reunion, on the grounds that thirty years was quite long enough to live alone, and the dinners had become something between a family meal and a continuing seminar on Nyxaran theology, depending on how much wine Aldric had had.
"The footnote is going well, by the way," Aldric reported one evening, with the satisfaction of a scholar whose research was finally bearing fruit. "I've drafted three full pages on 'expressions of presence' and the senior clergy haven't thrown me out of a single meeting yet."
"That's a low bar," Vesna said, fondly.
"It's the bar I've been working with for three years," Aldric said. "I'm allowed to be pleased."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Nyxara spent the three weeks doing something she hadn't done in seventeen thousand years, which was — mostly — nothing.
Not nothing in the sense of inactivity. She still watched the city, still noticed things — old habits, and useful ones. But she'd stopped watching for danger, specifically, which she realized only in retrospect had been a near-constant hum underneath everything since the moment Kael had first prayed to her. Two weeks of crisis had trained a kind of vigilance into her that she hadn't noticed until it had nothing left to be vigilant about.
Instead, she watched ordinary things. The way Kael's handwriting had changed slightly, becoming faster and more confident as the backlog cleared and the work became familiar again. The way he hummed, off-key, while walking to work — something he'd apparently done in his previous life too, an old habit his body remembered even when he didn't notice doing it. The way Biscuit had taken to sleeping curled against Kael's side at night, and the way Kael, half-asleep, would sometimes murmur something to the cat that was really meant for her.
She watched him be, simply, happy — in the unremarkable, accumulating way that happiness usually arrived, a little at a time, mostly in mornings and ordinary meals and the specific blue-grey of harbour water in late afternoon.
And in the distance, the Void Mother continued to watch too — still distant, still vast, still not approaching. But Nyxara noticed, now, that the quality of that attention had changed, subtly, over three weeks. Less like a light glimpsed from far away.
More like someone, very old and very patient, deciding it was worth coming a little closer to see what the light actually was.
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
On the evening of the twenty-first day, Kael walked home from the harbour commission along the sea wall — the same one, the same gold late-afternoon light — and found himself, without quite planning to, stopping at the same spot where he'd eaten a meat pie three weeks ago and written four lines about the sea.
"Nyxara," he said.
"Mm."
"I just want to say — I know things are probably going to get complicated again. The Void Mother, whatever she decides, whatever happens next. I know this—" he gestured, vaguely, at the harbour, the gold light, the entire ordinary evening, "—probably isn't going to last forever, in the sense of nothing ever happening again."
"Probably not," Nyxara agreed, and there was warmth in it, not sadness. "Things happen. That's sort of what existing is."
"I know. I'm not — I'm not worried about it, exactly." He sat down on the sea wall, the way he had three weeks ago, and looked out at the water. "I just wanted to say that whatever happens next — this part. Right now. Three weeks of ordinary evenings and Biscuit stealing my dinner and Renn's terrible jokes and you, just… here." He smiled. "This part was worth all of it. Even if everything else hadn't worked out. This would still have been worth it."
The warmth that answered was quiet — not bright, not spreading across the harbour the way it had before. Just steady. Close. The particular warmth of something settling, finally, fully, into a place it had been afraid, for seventeen thousand years, that it didn't deserve to settle into.
"For me too," Nyxara said softly. "Whatever happens next — for me too."