"The journey toward a thing you have been building toward for months is almost never what you imagined. It is smaller and more real and smells of road and wet grass and the specific silence of people who have decided."
They left before dawn.
Vael had ridden north three days prior under the cover of her family visit — she would meet them at a waypoint twelve miles south of the Hollow, arriving from the provincial road with a garrison identification pass that would, she had noted, hold up to casual scrutiny and had been designed not to hold up to thorough scrutiny, which distinction would matter if anything went wrong. Luceo and Seris traveled together, east through Ardenveil and then north on the post-road, dressed as traveling merchants in the functional, unmemorable style of people who go unnoticed as a professional practice.
The road was real and the morning was cold and Seris walked beside him with the focused quiet of someone who has been carrying a plan for six weeks and is now carrying it toward its destination.
They did not talk much in the first hour.
In the second hour, Seris said: "Tell me something that is not about the plan."
He considered this.
She is managing the approach. The plan has been managed, the intelligence has been gathered, the preparation has been done, and now there is the time between preparation and execution, which is the hardest time, and she is trying to fill it with something other than anxiety.
"My world," he said. "The one I came from." He paused. "It had a different quality of light. Everything here is slightly more vivid — the colors are more saturated, the shadows longer. Where I came from, the light was more ordinary. More diffuse."
"Do you miss it?" she asked.
He thought about this honestly.
"I miss certain things about what I was there," he said. "Not the world. The world had its own problems, none of which were significantly more elegant than Aethermoor's." He paused. "I miss a version of myself that had not yet had the experiences that made me what I am."
"Before the fracture," she said quietly.
"Before the fractures," he said. "There were several. The Void here is one. The others predate it."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I was nine," she said, "when the cultivation first manifested. A silver current — that is what wind-affinity looks like in early development. My mother called it beautiful." The word beautiful landed carefully, carried with precise weight. "She was proud. She was a Hollowed cultivator herself, and she was proud that I had the gift too, even knowing what it meant in a world that brands it." A pause. "She did not know then how they would use it."
"Seris."
"I am telling you because you told me something true," she said. "And because we are about to walk into a building together and I would like you to know what the building means." She looked at the road ahead. "It means — I have been waiting for her since I was twelve years old. The year they took her. I have spent three years building a network and gathering intelligence and staying quiet enough to stay alive, and I have done all of it for this."
Three years of a fifteen-year-old's life. Compressed into a map and a network and a plan. And underneath all of it, a twelve-year-old who came home to an empty house.
"I know," he said.
"I know you know," she said. "I am saying it anyway."
They walked.
✶
The waypoint was a traveler's rest station — a stone structure, roofed, with a well and a fire-pit and the smell of old smoke and older decisions. Vael was there when they arrived, sitting on the stone bench with her coat pulled close and her cultivation signature as suppressed as someone of her training level could manage, which was considerable.
She stood when she saw them.
There was a moment — brief, unrehearsed — of the three of them simply occupying the same space, and in that moment Luceo felt, through the Extended Resonance that was always partially active now, the Aether signatures of all three of them: Seris's silver-threaded meridians with the brand's integration points and the bleed still running; Vael's dense, disciplined Iron core; and his own Void-core, the fracture deep and quiet at its resting state, the absence that was also presence.
Three people. Three kinds of power. None of them what the world was designed to accommodate.
"The misdirection triggers in fourteen hours," Vael said, without preamble.
"Then we sleep," Luceo said, "and move at dawn."
Vael had brought supplies: proper ones, the kind that travel well and provide what the body needs for sustained physical and cultivation effort. They ate without ceremony, and the fire-pit offered heat, and the night over Ashkar's Hollow was a sky full of the wrong, saturated stars that Luceo had long since stopped finding wrong.
They were simply the stars of this world. His world now, as much as anything was.
Seris fell asleep before him, which surprised him — the capacity for sleep under pressure, he had learned, was its own kind of discipline, the ability to rest while the weight was present because rest was a resource and she had learned not to waste resources.
Vael was awake. She sat across the fire and looked at him.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
"I have been afraid twice before," she said, matter-of-factly. "Once during my Iron Breakthrough, when the meridian surge was more violent than anticipated. Once when I found the census reports and understood what they meant." She looked at the fire. "This is the third time."
"Fear is reasonable," he said.
"I know. I'm not apologizing for it." She paused. "I am asking you — honestly, because I have discovered I prefer honest to managed — can you do what you described to me? Negate area-effect techniques from an Iron Seventh Stage cultivator?"
Honest answer: probably. At the range we will be operating in, against techniques I can see forming before they are released, the negation should be sufficient for the immediate threat. The problem is not the first technique. The problem is the third and fourth, if the engagement extends that long, because the Void absorption produces structural drain on the environment and I do not yet know how that interacts with the facility's monitoring infrastructure.
"Probably," he said.
"That is not a comfortable answer."
"It is an honest one."
She considered this.
"All right," she said. "Probably is better than certainly, which would have been a lie."
"Yes," he said.
They sat in the fire's warmth and the stars' indifferent light, and Vael fell asleep eventually, and Luceo sat alone with the blade across his knees and held the Extended Resonance northward, feeling the faint presences of sixty-three people behind their heavy glass, counting them, keeping them real.
Tomorrow. Hold on one more night.