Emrys froze, the mask still in his hand.
Her presence had vanished all at once, as if it had been torn out of the spot where she stood. He spread his Haki around him, but found nothing.
He didn't understand what had just happened. He had simply taken off his mask, as she had asked, and she had vanished before she had even examined his eyes.
What did I do?
He slowly turned his head toward his mother.
"Mom."
"Yes?"
"Do I really have a face that ugly?"
Nimue stared at him for a moment, mouth half open. Then she burst out laughing.
It wasn't a small, discreet or polite laugh. She laughed heartily, so loud that her voice echoed across the whole stretch of water and Emrys flinched.
"I'm serious," he said.
She wasn't listening. She was holding her ribs with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other, unable to catch her breath.
"Mom."
"Sorry, sorry..." She coughed to compose herself, without success. "It's just that... I expected a lot of things, Rysrys, really. But not that."
She started up again.
Emrys crossed his arms. He had no idea what was so funny.
Thanks to Structural Grasp, he knew his face down to the smallest detail, every feature and every proportion. He had never found anything repulsive in it, let alone anything scary enough to make someone run away.
He still ran a hand over his cheek, then over his forehead, as if the analysis might have been wrong. It never was, and it got him nowhere.
"That doesn't answer my question," he finally said.
"I know." Nimue breathed deeply, once, twice. "I promise you I didn't expect such a strong reaction. I had guessed she'd be surprised, annoyed, or even incredulous, but I never imagined it would go as far as her disappearing."
"Great. So I'm ugly, and my own mother finds it hilarious."
"I never said you were ugly."
"Your reaction says otherwise, though."
She laughed a little more, then shook her head.
"You're my son. I'd find you handsome with any face."
"That's exactly what someone would say if they were trying to tell me I'm ugly."
Nimue opened her mouth, closed it, then burst out laughing a third time.
Emrys sighed and instinctively raised his hands to put his mask back on.
"Don't put it back on."
He stopped.
"She'll come back," said Nimue, a little calmer. "And she'll need to see your eyes."
"If she has a fit every time she looks at me, I'd still rather keep my mask."
"She'll come back."
He didn't understand how she could be so certain, but she said it with enough conviction that he didn't have the courage to argue. He kept the mask in his hand without putting it back on, and decided not to ask any more questions for the moment.
I know beauty is subjective, but does she really find me that ugly?
He refused to believe it, but he had no other explanation.
* * *
Merlin had landed on her knees on the ground, one hand clutching her chest, and she couldn't breathe anymore.
She didn't know where she was, and she didn't care. All she could hear was her own breathing, hoarse and ragged, scraping her throat as if she had just been running for hours.
"Calm down," she murmured. "Calm down, calm down, calm down..."
Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the ground, but her fingers kept trembling against the stone.
"You have to calm down. It's imperative. You can't stay like this."
Breathe. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
She tried, but the air ran out in the middle of her third breath. She coughed, choked, and doubled over, her forehead against her knees.
"He's just a man. He's just a man you saw for five minutes an eternity ago. You're an adult. You're a genius. You've seen far worse things than this."
None as dangerous as that face, said a voice at the back of her head.
She bit her lip to keep from laughing, or crying, she no longer knew which. Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it thumping in her ears.
"Calm down. Calm down. You have to calm down. If you keep this up, you'll faint, and that would be really stupid and pathetic."
She remembered that she had taught breathing techniques to panicking apprentices in Belialuin, with a condescending smile. She mentally apologized to every one of them.
She stayed like that for several minutes, repeating the same words until they lost all meaning. Little by little, her breathing slowed. Her fingers stopped shaking, and her heart finally found a rhythm that was more or less bearable.
When she finally lifted her head, her cheeks were wet and her hair was stuck to her forehead.
"Okay," she said in a cracked voice. "It's fine. I'm calm."
She took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, then let it out slowly.
"I never expected to find him again."
The words hung in the silence. She had spent years searching for him, with everything magic could offer, and then one day she had ended up giving up.
It wasn't because she had stopped wondering whether he was alive, but because she had come to understand that she would never know.
And now there he was, standing in front of her.
"Who would have thought I'd find him in a place like this," she murmured.
She closed her eyes, and the memory came back to her without her asking for it.
A boy her age, with white hair and silver eyes, who appeared out of nowhere without the slightest trace of magic. Who took her in his arms when she had just tripped, and who leapt from spot to spot without her understanding how.
She could still see his legs trembling when he had stepped in front of her. She could still hear his youthful voice, a little too high to sound sure of itself.
I don't want to fight... But I can't let you take her.
She felt her cheeks catch fire.
And don't look back.
She pressed both hands against her face, but it didn't help. That moment had been the first time in her life that someone had chosen to defend her without expecting anything in return, and her heart had started beating in a way it never had before.
She had never known what to call that feeling. She had looked for it in books for years.
She slowly spread her fingers apart. Her cheeks were burning.
He has filled out nicely, said the voice, speaking up once again.
The thought had surged up without permission, and she regretted it immediately. The same white hair and the same steel eyes, but on a man's face, with something calmer and harder that she hadn't foreseen.
He was no longer the child from her memories. And he wasn't looking at her, he wasn't looking at anything, which made it even worse.
"No no no no no."
She slapped her cheeks, once, twice. It made a sharp sound in the silence.
"Focus. You're an adult. You're a genius. You have a job to do, and it's waiting for you."
She stood up, unsteady, and tried to put her thoughts back in order.
The problem wasn't that she had seen him again, but what she had done next. She had teleported without meaning to, from the shock, right in front of Nimue and him.
She had vanished without a word in the middle of a sentence, for a reason she obviously couldn't admit.
I need an excuse.
She took a few steps, arms crossed, brow furrowed. An excuse that was believable, mundane enough not to raise suspicion, and urgent enough to justify disappearing without warning.
She immediately dismissed the first idea that came to her, a family emergency, because she had no family. She dismissed the second one too, an attack, because Nimue would have sensed it.
She stopped in the middle of the room, or of whatever served as her room. Then her eyes lit up.
"A potion."
She nodded slowly.
"A potion on the fire. I forgot about it, and if I don't retrieve it, it might cause..." She thought for a moment. "... an epidemic. Yes, that'll do."
It was stupid, but not enough to be unbelievable. She had come close to causing worse before.
She smoothed her clothes, put her hair back in place, took a long breath and closed her eyes.
You're calm. You're perfectly calm.
Then the space around her warped.
* * *
The warping of space was felt before Emrys could hear it. Someone had just reappeared next to them.
"I'm back."
Merlin's voice was perfectly steady, almost too much so. He turned his head toward her.
"Where did you go?"
"I apologize for that." She cleared her throat. "I suddenly realized I'd left a potion on the fire. I had to retrieve it before it set off an epidemic."
A silence followed.
Emrys thought about the answer. It was probably the stupidest excuse he had ever heard, and he realized it the very moment he heard it. Beside him, Nimue began coughing with great diligence.
"That's a crap excuse," he said.
"I..."
"But coming from someone like you, I can conceive of it actually happening."
Merlin didn't answer right away, as if she didn't know whether she should feel insulted or relieved.
"Fine," she finally said. "In that case, I can start the inspection now."
She walked up to him. Emrys felt her presence come closer, then stop a few steps away.
"Stay still. You're lucky to be examined by the greatest genius in Belialuin, so at least try to be worthy of it."
"I remind you that I never asked for your help. And I'm still extremely reluctant about you touching me."
"Whether it was you or your mother who asked me makes no difference. And I'm not going to touch you."
He complied. A faint warmth brushed his face, something between a light and a current, and he understood that she had cast a spell. She circled him slowly, stopping every so often, murmuring words he didn't understand.
He kept his head straight, his eyes fixed on nothing. After a while, it seemed to him that Nimue was holding back laughter somewhere to his left, and he pretended not to notice.
"Do you have something to say, Mom?"
"Not at all."
"Then stop holding back, it's extremely bothersome."
"Rysrys, I'm not holding back at all."
She was holding back a lot.
She spoke in snatches, to herself. She seemed to be checking a series of things one after another, with an almost mechanical rigor, and he relaxed a little. It was reassuring, in a way, to see that she knew what she was doing.
That was when he noticed something.
The presence of the so-called Merlin, whose name made him believe even more that he was in some kind of distorted Arthurian legend, had changed.
Until now, all he had ever sensed in her was an immeasurable void, an absence so complete that it became uncomfortable, even suffocating.
Absolute, total nothingness.
No anger, no fear, no joy, as if something had been torn out from the depths of her and only the space it left behind remained.
Now it was as if that void had disappeared completely, replaced by other emotions.
He sensed joy, first. A quiet joy that pierced through her concentration like light under a door. Then a hope that was paradoxically both fragile and firm.
And finally something else, something that resembled love.
Emrys frowned slightly.
It wasn't really something he would have defined as love. He had sensed it in Rou, in Iklia, and in plenty of other people. The love he felt in them was as singular as the person themselves, but he could still recognize it as love.
What he sensed in Merlin was twisted. It had something heavy and distorted about it, as if another emotion had ended up evolving, taking its place and imitating it without ever truly having become love.
He couldn't say what it was. But it wasn't healthy.
Merlin murmured something, then circled him a second time. He kept quiet and let her work, but he was now listening to her far more closely than she realized. Her breathing was faster than before, and she avoided speaking more than necessary.
I didn't think it was even possible, but this woman has become even weirder than before.