Neil activated it and the familiar pull of the return journey took hold, and when it released them they were back in the settlent, the ordinary light and ordinary sounds of it settling around them like sothing resud after a pause.
Neil looked at the sky for a mont, judging the ti.
Then he turned toward his domain and walked ho.
...
The shadow under his feet seed a bit strange.
That was the first thing Neil registered, not a sound or a shape but the quality of the shadow itself near the edge of the path, the way it held its position slightly longer than the light justified before it shifted.
Magnar felt it at the sa mont, his body going from the loose and easy movent of the walk ho to sothing entirely still and coiled in the space between one step and the next.
Freya stirred inside him, which was more telling than anything else.
Freya did not stir easily. She had been in enough dangerous situations across her life that her internal alarm was calibrated to things that were actually worth alarming about, and the fact that she had co alert ant the shadow near the path was not a coincidence or a trick of the light.
Neil stopped walking.
He did not reach for a weapon but his hand was near one, and his eyes were on the shadow, and every sense he had was pointed in that direction without any of it showing on his face.
The shadow moved.
Not dramatically, not with any theatrical effect, just a quiet gathering of the darkness there into sothing with more density than darkness should have, and then a woman was standing at the edge of the path where the shadow had been, looking at him.
She was tall and composed in the way of soone who had not been in a hurry for a very long ti and had no plans to start.
Her hair was black and long, falling past her shoulders, and she appeared to be sowhere in her late thirties in the way that certain powerful people appeared to be an age and then stayed there regardless of what was actually passing.
Her features were sharp and unhurried, the kind of face that had done a great deal of observing and very little being observed, and the look she gave Neil when their eyes t was not hostile and not warm but sowhere between the two, like soone evaluating sothing they had been thinking about for a long ti and were now finally seeing directly.
Magnar made a sound that was not a growl but was adjacent to one, low and sustained.
Freya’s presence inside Neil sharpened into sothing that rarely happened with her, sothing that could only be described as recognition mixed with a caution that was very carefully held in place.
She knows who this is, Neil realised, before Freya said anything.
"Don’t be so tense." The woman said, her voice easy and unhurried. "If I had wanted to do sothing, the path ho was a much better opportunity than this."
She looked at the space beside her and two chairs ford out of shadow, solid and shaped and entirely real, placed at an angle to each other that suggested a conversation rather than a confrontation.
She sat in one of them with the ease of soone sitting in furniture they had owned for years, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at Neil with a faint expression that was not quite a smile but was in the neighbourhood of one.
She gestured at the second chair.
Neil looked at the chair. He looked at the woman. He did not sit yet.
"So." She said, settling back slightly. "Has the Analyzer skill started causing problems?"
The silence that followed that question was complete.
Neil’s expression did not change on the surface, but sothing behind it shifted significantly, because that na was not available to anyone.
Not Randy, not the wardens he had encountered, not the lords who had been watching him in the clash realm. Not even Ileana, who knew he had an ability of that nature but had never heard its actual na spoken aloud, because he had never spoken it aloud to anyone.
The woman watched his reaction with the air of soone who had expected exactly this and found the confirmation of it mildly satisfying.
She laughed then, a light sound, not mocking, just genuinely amused at the expression she was reading on his face despite his best efforts to not have one.
"Sit down." She said, and this ti it was the kind of suggestion that contained a reasonable expectation of compliance, not a command but close enough that the distinction was mostly ceremonial.
Neil sat in the shadow chair.
It felt like a normal chair. He had half expected it not to.
Magnar stayed standing at his side, not relaxed but not escalating either, holding the sa careful alert he had been in since the shadow moved.
The woman looked at Neil for a mont with that evaluating expression, then she began to speak.
"Your father’s na is Jackal." She said. "He is a phantom. Your mother’s na is Mia. She is human." She paused.
"They t on this planet, Zoratian, after both had beco lords. They were both young and this world was considerably more chaotic than it is now, and they found each other in the middle of that chaos the way people sotis do when everything around them is difficult enough that another person becos genuinely important."
Neil listened without speaking.
"They left Zoratian together eventually, the way lords do when they have grown past what a single planet can offer them. They married after arriving on Zenetor."
She paused again, watching him. "I can see the questions you actually want answered, so let get to those before you spend the whole conversation waiting for to arrive at them."
She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, unhurried about it.
"Did your parents abandon you." She said it as a statent rather than a question, naming the thing rather than asking him to na it. "The answer is yes and no, and which one applies depends entirely on which parent you are asking about."
Neil said nothing.
"Your father." She continued, her voice carrying no particular emotion about this, just the even delivery of soone presenting information they have fully processed already.
"Jackal has spent a considerable portion of his existence trying to produce a worthy successor. Not one child, many children, with various partners across various races, each one sent into conditions of extre difficulty with the specific intention of seeing what they would beco under pressure.
There is apparently another competitor in this arrangent, another powerful phantom doing the sa thing on their side, and the two of them have turned the production of successors into sothing that resembles a competition more than it resembles parenthood."
She looked at him steadily while she said this, and her expression acknowledged the weight of it without dramatising it.
"Your mother." She said. "Mia is the original owner of Analyzer.
That skill did not co from nothing and it did not attach itself to you by coincidence. She gave it to you, deliberately, as a form of protection.
The woman nad Linda, who ca to help you in the early period, she was sent by your mother.
That arrangent failed, as you know, and you entered your father’s plan rather than being kept outside it." She paused. "The more you used Analyzer, the more of your mother’s life force it consud, because she was carrying the penalty for it on your behalf. She has been carrying it since the beginning."
Sothing moved in Neil’s chest that was not a simple feeling and did not resolve into one.
He had been over the decreasing life force question many tis, had examined it from multiple angles, had wondered at the sudden nature of the change. Too sudden, too sharp, not the gradual deterioration of sothing wearing down over ti but the abrupt shift of sothing structural changing.
"Her condition worsened." The woman continued. "When it did, a portion of the penalty she had been absorbing transferred automatically to you. That is what you experienced."
She let that sit for a mont.
"Mia is currently being held by Jackal." She said. "She is not free and has not been free for so ti. The situation is complicated by the fact that Jackal is not a straightforward enemy, he is a phantom of considerable power and the kind of person who does things for reasons that are internally consistent even when they are completely unacceptable to everyone outside that internal logic."
She reached into the shadow beside her chair and produced an apple, which was the wrong word for it because it did not look like any apple Neil had encountered, golden in the way that the Eye of the Future had been golden, with a depth to the colour that suggested the surface was not the whole of it.
She held it in one hand without any ceremony about it.
"I am a friend of your mother’s." She said. "You can call Shadow."
She looked at him for a mont, then added: "And yes, before you ask, I know about the treasure you used. The Eye of the Future. It shifted the problem temporarily but it did not resolve it." She held up the apple slightly. "This will. Eat it and the life force problem is resolved properly, not temporarily.
Analyzer will be usable again without the penalty you have been experiencing." She paused and continued.
❖❖❖
Thanks for reading... adios
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