— POV: Emerion —
Warmth.
Something heavy and warm pressing down on my stomach, and my body stiff in the specific way that comes not from sleep but from having been somewhere very far away and not quite finished returning. My thoughts arrived slowly, out of order, like items washed up after a storm.
Am I going to hell?
I did everything I could. I always do everything I can. And somehow it never seems to be enough there's always a moment at the end where I look back and see exactly where I went wrong, exactly which step was the one that mattered, exactly how I managed to fail the people standing closest to me.
"Ouch--hey-- why do I feel pain in my-- hey, stop jumping--stop it, stop, damn it--"
"Stop," I said.
My own voice surprised me. Rough and hoarse but present, air moving through my lungs with that particular burning quality of waking from something that should have been permanent.
"Good morning, brother."
I knew that voice before I opened my eyes.
Of course I did.
"You slept as though you hadn't slept in years," Arlienne continued pleasantly. "Which I suppose is almost true, given the circumstances."
The room was dim lantern light against wooden walls, soft and flickering. And there she was, silver hair catching the glow, orange eyes carrying that expression she reserves for moments she finds privately entertaining.
Sitting directly on my stomach with the comfortable ease of someone who has selected a perfectly acceptable chair.
She was sixteen.
"Arlienne." My irritation arrived before anything else, muscle memory more than decision. "Why are you here?"
"Aww." She pressed a hand to her chest with theatrical devastation. "That's the gratitude I receive for saving your life, healing your wounds, and traveling all this way? You're so cruel, brother."
I sat up slightly which displaced her, which she managed to make look graceful and took inventory of myself.
My torso felt wrong in the specific way that means someone has done significant work on it. Light. The skin across my arms and stomach tingling faintly, new flesh over old damage.
The fight came back in pieces. Pristilia's fans. My arms. Alec's sword going through me.
Right.
"You look confused," Arlienne observed. "Allow me. I arrived, knocked the unstable boy unconscious, healed you, healed the Sunfury princess, and secured her general and his soldiers." She tilted her head. "You're welcome."
I stared at her.
"The blast," I said slowly. "The messengers with the bombs. That was you."
"Shouldn't that be obvious? Who else had the resources and the planning capacity to execute something like that on that timeline?"
I ran a hand down my face.
I had already known. Some part of me had known the moment the explosion happened the precision of it, the timing, the way it served exactly one strategic purpose. It had Arlienne written through it like letters through glass.
"You sacrificed your own people," I said.
"They were middle-aged men," she said. "Past their most productive years."
"They were human beings. Yours. The ones you were supposed to protect."
"We are at war, Emerion." Her voice didn't sharpen exactly it cooled, the way metal cools, settling into something harder. "Your idealism is a luxury we cannot currently afford. I protected the future. That requires accepting costs in the present."
"The present you're protecting is filled with shame. What kind of future grows from that soil?"
She looked at me for a moment without speaking.
"At least our house still stands," she said finally. "At least we aren't agreeing to Sunfury's terms from a position of defeat. I was outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and working with what I had. I took back the advantage."
A pause, and something in her expression shifted not quite accusation, but adjacent to it. "Unlike you, who ran away instead of facing the problem."
The words landed.
Ran away.
"Father and Mother treated me like a pawn," I said. The bitterness came out before I could decide how much of it to show. Years of it, apparently, just waiting for the right crack in the conversation.
"I was less important. That was clear. So when they decided to use me as a piece in someone else's game why would I stay? What exactly was I staying for?"
Arlienne was quiet for a moment.
"You weren't wrong that you were treated as less important," she said, which was not the response I expected.
"I won't pretend otherwise. But did I not earn what I have? Did I not spend years building what I built for this house? Did I not take every risk, pay every cost, deliver every result they asked for?"
I didn't answer.
"Yes, I proposed the Sunfury alliance. Yes, it required you. But a pawn isn't nothing, Emerion a pawn that crosses the board becomes the most important piece on it. I wasn't diminishing you. I was trying to use you. Which at least implies you had value."
"How comforting," I said flatly.
"I'm not trying to comfort you. I'm trying to be accurate."
I looked at her really looked at her, for a moment past the irritation and the years of accumulated weight.
"You achieved everything you have because of the Nullborne Factor," I said. "Born with it. Everything else followed from that. You're a good strategist. But you're also--" I stopped, then made myself finish it.
"You're the worst kind of human being. You treat people as instruments. You worship power and call it something cleaner."
Something crossed her face. Brief. Real.
"I worship knowledge," she said, and there was a precision in the correction that told me it mattered to her. "Not power. Power is what people reach for when they can't think of anything more interesting."
She held my gaze. "And as for the Nullborne Factor yes. I was born with it. It also kills its user if they're deemed unworthy. Did you consider that? Did you consider that I've spent every year since childhood proving to something I can't fully control that I deserve to keep living?"
I hadn't.
The silence stretched.
"I also didn't know," she said quietly, "that my own brother hated me."
"I don't--" I started.
"You assumed I worship power. You've been measuring everything I've done against some image of who I should be. That isn't neutrality, Emerion. That's a verdict that was already written."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
Am I being gaslit right now?
I turned the conversation over carefully in my head, the way you check a rope before trusting it with your weight.
No. She was wrong about the messengers. She was wrong about treating lives as variables. Those things were still true.
But she wasn't wrong about everything.
"You can't justify sacrifice that way," I said, more carefully this time.
"I'm not justifying it. I'm explaining it. There's a difference." She looked out the window for a moment. "I can't be good for everyone, Emerion. If I'm the villain of your story, then I'm the villain of your story. I can't fix that by pretending I made different choices."
There was something underneath her voice that she had almost but not quite hidden.
I sat with it.
The hatred and jealousy I'd been carrying I could feel the shape of it now, held up to the light. Years of accumulation. The specific grief of a child who watched someone else receive what he needed and decided that meant he was worth less. None of that was Arlienne's fault. Some of it was, but not all of it, and I had been charging her for the whole sum.
Maybe the freest thing I could do freer than running, freer than fighting was to put it down.
"Thank you," I said quietly. Looking at the wall rather than her.
A pause.
"What?" she said.
"You heard me."
"I want to hear it again."
"I'm not saying it again."
"Brother." She leaned forward slightly, eyes bright. "Did you just thank me? Voluntarily? Without being asked? I want to mark this date. This is a historic occasion."
"Stop."
"Truly, fighting for your life has softened you. I should arrange near-death experiences more regularly"
"I said stop." But something in my chest had loosened without my permission. "And get off my stomach. You're not five."
She slid off gracefully and settled into the chair beside the bed, smoothing her sleeve with the composure of someone who has been perfectly dignified the entire time.
"On a serious note," she said, after a moment. "Taking down a Sunfury heir in an open fight without a staff. That's not nothing, Emerion."
"It was a draw at best. I was unconscious."
"She's in deep mana sleep." Arlienne gestured toward the bed beside me.
I turned.
Pristilia lay there with her orange hair spread across the pillow, her expression peaceful in a way it had absolutely not been the last time I saw her. Her wounds were gone. Her breathing was slow and even.
Mana sleep. She had pushed past every limit she had.
"You healed her," I said.
"She's more useful alive." Arlienne said it the way you'd say the bridge is more useful intact. "And before you ask--"
A metallic sound drew my eyes to the corner of the room.
The eight-armed general sat bound in golden sealing ropes, each of his eight arms secured separately, his mouth covered by a seal that was doing significant work. His eyes communicated everything his mouth couldn't.
"I found him the night of the blast," Arlienne said. "I thought I might need him as leverage. As it turned out, you'd handled things before I could arrive." She snapped her fingers.
The mouth seal dissolved.
"If you have touched the princess--" the general began, immediately.
"She's sleeping peacefully in a clean bed with all her wounds healed," Arlienne said. "You're welcome."
He growled. The ropes held.
The door creaked open.
The uncle stepped inside moving carefully, the particular caution of a man who has recently been dead and is still recalibrating and stopped with one foot still in the doorway.
His eyes moved from Arlienne to me.
To the bed we were both in.
To the fact that I was shirtless.
His face went through several expressions in quick succession.
"I, ah." He cleared his throat with considerable effort. "My apologies. I'll we can speak later. When you've finished that is, when you're I'll come back."
"Wait--" I started.
The door closed.
I stared at it.
"Hey." I turned to Arlienne. "That's my sister."
She was already looking at her nails.
"You could have clarified faster," she said pleasantly.
"HEY, SHE'S MY SISTER!" I shouted at the closed door.
Silence from the other side.
Then, faintly, the sound of the uncle walking away at a pace that suggested he very much wanted to be somewhere else.
Arlienne's shoulders shook.
She was laughing.
I dropped back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling with the expression of a man who has survived a war, a captivity, a betrayal, and a stab wound through the chest, and is now being defeated by a misunderstanding.
What a way to start the day.