Bob noticed her noticing him and gave her the broad and imdiate smile that Bob gave everyone, which was large enough to be slightly alarming at close range if you were not expecting it.
Rin blinked.
"That is Bob." Jane said, beside her. "He is fine."
"I am excellent." Bob corrected cheerfully, and went back to whatever he had been doing.
Ileana found Neil before he had gone far into the domain’s interior, which was how Ileana always found him, through whatever combination of awareness and attention ant she generally knew where he was before she went to look.
She looked at him with the thorough and imdiate attention she gave to his physical state when he ca back from sothing, and her expression moved through several things quickly.
"You healed." She said. Not a question.
"Yea, it was the fruit." He confird.
She absorbed this, and then the relief she had been carrying on behalf of his condition, the sustained version of it that she managed without expressing it constantly, released slightly in her expression in a way that he recognised.
She reached up and put her hand on his face briefly, a light touch, checking sothing she would not have been able to articulate but that satisfied whatever question it was answering.
"That’s good." She said.
Then she looked past him at the new buildings in the domain and at Jane standing nearby with Rin and at the general state of expanded activity that the rger had created.
"The domains rged." She humd.
"Yes." He said.
She looked at it all for a mont with the assessing quality she had when she was mapping a new situation and working out where everything fit.
"Jane is a sub-lord now." ileana continued.
"Yea..."
Ileana nodded once, a nod that contained a great deal of thought compressed into a small gesture, and then she turned back to him with the settled expression of soone who had processed the developnt and arrived at their position on it.
"Co and eat." She said. "You have not eaten properly since you left for the Realm."
"That was yesterday." He said.
"Yes." She agreed, with the tone of soone for whom this confird rather than mitigated the issue.
Dinner that evening was larger than usual, the combined domain population sitting across the extended table arrangent that Fay and Ray had assembled with the practical efficiency of people who understood feeding groups of varying sizes and had the equipnt for it.
Bob sat at one end and talked at a volu that covered approximately half the table’s length without effort, describing the rger from his perspective which was apparently one of great structural concern followed by great structural approval, and Rob corrected his account at several points with the quiet precision of soone for whom accuracy was a value independent of whether the audience noticed the correction.
Mob ate without contributing to the conversation, which was Mob’s consistent relationship with group dinners, and Leon sat with the asured attention of soone who was present and engaged but never the loudest thing in the room.
Rin sat between Jane and Fay, which had not been the original seating arrangent but had happened through a series of small adjustnts that Fay had facilitated without appearing to orchestrate, and she ate with the careful quality she brought to everything in the new environnt while Fay asked her questions that were warm and direct and not intrusive.
The elven archers from the periter rotation ca through in shifts, eating quickly and efficiently in the way of people whose primary identity was professional rather than dostic.
Neil sat between Ileana and Jane, which was the configuration that dinner had arrived at, and ate the food Fay had made, which was more substantial than the previous evening’s al and was the kind of thing that communicated soone had known he was going to need proper feeding.
The conversation moved around the table in the easy way of a group that had been together long enough to have established its own rhythms, and the new additions, Jane and Rin, were absorbed into it at the pace they were comfortable with rather than being required to integrate faster.
At one point Rin looked up from her food and found Leon looking in her direction, and the two of them held that for a half-second before Leon returned his attention to his plate with the practiced composure of soone who had not been doing what it had briefly appeared he was doing.
Neil saw this also.
He ate his food and said nothing.
After dinner the domain settled into its evening rhythm, the periter rotation continuing, Magnar occupying his preferred position, the various subjects finding their ways to their sleeping arrangents. Bob and Rob had a conversation of so length about the structural implications of the new wall configuration that Neil was not close enough to follow but that appeared to conclude in satisfaction on both sides.
Jane walked beside Neil for a short ti during the after-dinner movent through the domain, not saying much, just present in the way she had always been comfortable with. There was still the resentnt in him, honest and real, and he was not going to pretend otherwise to either of them. But there was also the Jane who had always been able to walk beside him without filling the silence unnecessarily, and those two things existed in the sa space.
Eventually she went toward the healing hut where her room was, and he watched her go with the complicated and unresolved feeling of soone who had not yet decided everything he was going to decide about a situation that was still developing.
Ileana found him again near the campfire where Magnar was sleeping.
"How are you." She said. The real question, the sa one she had asked on the path.
"Still sorting." He said. "The sa things and so new ones."
She leaned against him, her shoulder against his arm, and looked at the unlit fire and the sleeping familiar.
"We have ti." She said.
"So." He agreed.
They stood there for a while in the quiet domain, the barrier luminescent at the edges, the night settled around the wooden walls, and then Ileana went inside and Neil stood a while longer thinking about cores and origins and kingdoms that were lost and people who were held against their will far away, and the considerable distance between where he was now and where he needed to be.
’Nemo.’ He said internally. ’Find another domain that I need. Any tier, any race, closest available.’
"Searching, master." Nemo said, and the quiet of the night continued around him while she worked.
Neil’s room was quiet and warm in the way the domain always was at night, the barrier holding its low luminescence at the periter while everything inside it settled into the easy rhythm of sleep, and he lay beside Ileana in the comfortable dark and let the day decompress around him.
She was already in bed when he ca in, sitting up with her hair loose and a small light floating beside her that she had been using to read by, and she put the reading away when he arrived without making it look like a concession.
He lay down beside her and they talked the way they talked at the end of days that had been full, unhurried and without agenda, moving through the things that mattered without requiring them to be important enough to justify the conversation.
He told her about the twelve hours on the field, the full version of it, the cores colliding and the ruptures forming and the dual temperatures propagating across the landscape in both directions while he held the thod without stopping. She listened in the way she listened when sothing had been difficult and she wanted the honest account rather than the managed one, her expression moving through things she did not always put into words.
She reached over and put her hand on his chest when he described the worst of the pain, not saying anything, just placing it there.
He told her about Freya observing the whole process and what Freya had said afterward, and Ileana was quiet for a mont with that particular quality of quiet she had when she was thinking about sothing properly before responding to it.
"She trusted you to finish it." Ileana said.
"She taught the thod." He said. "That was its own kind of trust."
Ileana thought about this.
"The two of you have similar situations." She said. Not a question, just a thing she had been putting together from the pieces he had given her over ti.
"More similar than either of us expected." Neil spoke.
She nodded slowly, her head moving against the pillow.
"That is good." She said. "Having soone who understands from inside the sa experience rather than from outside it."
He looked at her in the low light of the room.
"You understand things from outside the experience and it is not lesser." He said.
Her expression shifted into the warm and slightly exasperated version of itself that appeared when he said sothing that she wanted to argue with and could not find the argunt for.
"I know." She said. "I am not competing with her."
"I know you are not." He said.
They lay in the quiet for a mont.
"One more core." She said. "And then the evolution."
"One more core." He confird. "And then both of them, the domain and ."
She was quiet with this for a mont, feeling the weight of how close it was.
❖❖❖
Thanks for reading... adios
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