The system didn't disappear when I blinked.
I had hoped it would maybe be a trick of the light, or the early symptoms of whatever illness a man contracted after three years of eating guild cafeteria food.
But it sat there in the middle of my vision refusing to move no matter how much I commanded it.
I tried blinking again, then squinting but it still didn't work.
I turned my head around to look away but it was still stuck in my view.
[Combined Marital Happiness: 12%]
Undeniably it was a poor number of my wives collective happiness and according to the system that number was both my problem and my power source, which meant I was currently running on the magical equivalent of a candle stub in a rainstorm.
I sat down on the nearest rock because my legs felt extremely weak the more I gazed at the holographic screen.
The only reasonable thing I could do right now was to tell someone. Seraphine was still probably close. I could call after her and show her the floating text maybe she would have an idea about it.
She was four hundred years old so she had probably seen some cases like this, or more that were far stranger.
I thought about that for some time, then I thought about what happened the last time I had shown any one of my wives something unexpected about myself.
Yenna had immediately begun designing what she called a "diagnostic apparatus" that had taken out the kitchen wall.
Seraphine had spent three days observing me like I was an experimental subject still in progress.
Riven, my dark elf wife who expressed affection through the medium of sharpened objects had declared she would "personally ensure no one exploited the anomaly," and then disappeared into the city for a week doing things I later learned not to ask about.
Seven women from completely different races, temperaments, and definitions of the word help.
All of them were powerful enough that the word powerful felt a little inadequate, it was like calling the ocean "quite wet".
And me, F-Rank Leon Greaves, standing in the middle of it with a system I didn't understand and a happiness score that was somehow already making me feel guilty.
No. I wasn't telling anyone.
I stood up, shouldered my satchel, finished the last three clusters of Silverleaf and walked back down the ridge toward Caelford.
The system hummed along at the edge of my vision the entire way.
I didn't look at it directly, maybe if I ignored it, it would probably go away itself.
It didn't go away.
---
We lived in the Thornwall District, which was one of those Caelford neighborhoods that had been built by people with ambition and maintained by people with significantly less of it.
The streets were wide and the houses were solid old stonework, built to last things that weren't extinct three centuries ago.
hich meant they were sturdy and graceless and had staircases that creaked in the dark like they were narrating your insomnia.
Our house was the one at the end of Crestfall Lane with the reinforced front door, the garden that Sylvara kept in a state of aggressive botanical order, and the upper window that still had scorch marks from the incident we didn't discuss at dinner anymore.
From the street, it looked almost normal.
From inside, it sounded like a negotiation between forces that did not share a common definition of the word reasonable.
I pushed open the front door.
The entrance hall was fine. That was the first thing I checked, it was a habit I had developed over months of marriage that I hd never quite been able to put down.
Single men could not relate to this pain but it was fine, no one had to suffer a fate like mine.
The entrance hall was fine but when I entered the hallway it was beyond fine. The smell of something burnt was lingering in the air but it wasn't harsh, which meant Yenna had either contained the blast radius or someone had gotten to her before she could escalate it, and either option was frankly a relief.
The voices were coming from the common room.
I walked in.
There were six of them, which meant Seraphine hadn't made it back yet, and the one missing was almost certainly intentional on her part because Seraphine had been alive for four centuries wandering like this was normal for her.
The remaining six were arranged around the common room in doing whatever dangerous or delusional things they always did.
Yenna was the smallest person in the room and the most immediately visible, because she was standing on the central table with a half-dismantled device in her arms that was still emitting small, determined sparks from its left side.
She was goblin-born, which meant she came up to roughly my sternum and had the big clever eyes and the quick restless energy of someone whose brain ran about thirty percent faster than the world around her could accommodate.
Her hair was an architectural disaster of copper-colored curls held up with what appeared to be two pencils and one of my spare boot buckles.
There was a soot mark across her left cheek that she hadn't noticed or had noticed and decided was a personality feature. S
Yenna was twenty-three years old and had seventeen registered patents across four kingdoms.
She smiled like someone who had just thought of something that everyone else was going to find deeply alarming.
"Leon!" she said brightly. "You're back. Good timing, I need an outside perspective on a load-bearing calculation—"
"Get off the table, Yenna."
"I will, I will, I just need to—"
"Off the table."
She stepped off the table with the put-upon dignity of someone who had been deeply misunderstood by history and would be updating her records accordingly.
Beside the fireplace was my dark elf wife, watching the proceedings with a cold gaze that I had come to recognize as her version of mild amusement.
She was tall and lean, with the long pointed ears of her kin and the silver-white hair that dark elves carried, and skin the deep blue-grey of a moonlit lake.
Her eyes were pale violet and missed nothing and had never once, in all the time I'd known her I could not know what she was actually thinking until she'd already decided to act on it. She wore black because she always wore black, and her hand rested near her hip with the unconscious ease of someone who had never, at any point in her life, been more than two seconds from a blade.
Her name was Riven Ashveil and she was a former shadow operative of the Undercourt. The woman who, when I had once asked her why she'd agreed to marry me, had said, "You were the least complicated option available at the time," and then refused to elaborate for three weeks.
She met my eyes across the room and said nothing, only offering the smallest possible nod.
Next to her, occupying the armchair that was technically the armchair everyone shared was Sylvara.
My elf wife, not a dark elf though she was a high elf, or forest elf, depending on which branch of the taxonomic argument you subscribed to, which Sylvara herself found tedious and said so regularly.
She was the oldest person in the room aside from Seraphine, though carried about her age difference more than the dragon did, in that she had the tired, precise quality of someone who had seen a great deal of the world and had developed very specific opinions about all of it.
Her hair was deep auburn threaded with silver, and she wore it in the elaborate braided style of the Aldenveil court she had gotten from three centuries ago but still dressed for out of what she called principle and what I privately suspected was habit.
She had a book open in her lap that she was pointedly reading despite the noise around her, which was either genuine focus or the performance of it, and with Sylvara the difference was often academic.
She glanced up when I entered. "The herb collection went smoothly, I presume, given that you've returned without any new injuries."
"It was fine."
"Marvellous. Two copper well earned."
I couldn't tell if she was being sincere. With Sylvara, I often couldn't.