[Morning — Hot springs grounds]
Alex woke up different.
Not dramatically. Just quieter. Like when a constant static that you’ve stopped noticing finally disappears and the silence it leaves behind feels almost uncomfortable.
The corruption was still there. But the background noise had dropped.
Raven was already awake when he stepped out of the cabin. Sitting on the steps with a cup. Sa as always.
Except when Alex sat down beside her, she shifted her shoulder slightly toward him.
One centiter. Maybe less.
Enough.
They didn’t say anything.
Kira walked past them with her bow across her back, heading toward the training grounds.
She looked at them both.
She didn’t say anything either.
But her ears moved in a direction Alex was starting to learn to read as approval.
---
[Central cabin — 9:00 AM]
Ishi was at the table when Alex arrived.
Two cups. As if she’d been expecting him.
Grim followed without being invited. He settled on the floor beside Alex, his eighty centiters still and his left arm moving better than yesterday.
Ishi poured without asking.
"You have the face of soone who wants to ask questions," she said.
"I have questions."
"I know." She drank. "Ask them."
Alex got straight to it.
"Last night Grim was talking with you."
"Yes."
"About what?"
Ishi looked at him.
"About things Grim will tell you when he’s ready." A pause. "That’s not what you actually want to ask."
Alex set his cup on the table.
"How much do you know about the Fragnts?"
"Enough."
"From where?"
Ishi looked out the window toward the mountains.
"I saw them."
Alex waited.
"Not the Fragnts. The sealing." Ishi spoke without drama, like soone recalling sothing that happened last week. "I was a witness. From a distance. But I saw enough."
---
Three seconds of silence.
"How old are you?" Alex asked.
"Very." Ishi drank. "Place spirits don’t age the sa way. This mountain has long mory and I am part of that mory."
"What did you see?"
Ishi set down her cup.
"Seven Ancient Gods working together. That only happens when sothing truly frightens them." A pause. "The Harvester wasn’t evil. That’s the first thing you need to understand."
"Then why did they seal him?"
"Because he was neutral."
Alex frowned.
"I don’t understand."
"The Harvester harvested souls." Ishi folded her hands on the table. "Without distinction. Without hierarchy. Without favoritism. An ordinary mortal, a legendary hero, a minor god, an Ancient God. To the Harvester, all of them had souls. All of them eventually surrendered it."
A pause.
"The Ancient Gods built an order. Good and evil. Rewards and punishnts. Souls that go up, souls that go down. A system they control." Ishi looked at him directly. "The Harvester didn’t operate within that system. Not because he rejected it. Because he didn’t know it existed. For him there was only the soul and the mont of the harvest."
"And that threatened their control."
"A being that can harvest the soul of an Ancient God with the sa indifference it harvests a peasant’s..." Ishi didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.
---
Grim hadn’t said anything since they ca in.
Still on the floor. Still.
Listening.
"So the Fragnt’s corruption," Alex said slowly. "It isn’t evil."
"No." Ishi shook her head. "It’s indifference. The Harvester didn’t hate life. He simply had no attachnt to it. To him everything was temporary and all temporary things eventually ca to him." She looked at Alex. "What the Fragnt does inside you isn’t turning you evil. It’s erasing attachnt."
"The reason why it matters who lives or who dies."
"Exactly." A pause. "The battle you’re fighting isn’t good against evil. It’s attachnt against indifference. And as long as you have concrete reasons for things to matter..." She gestured outside, toward where the rest of the team was training. "...the Fragnt can’t win."
---
**"Is that why you nad ?"**
Grim spoke without moving from the floor.
Alex looked at him.
"What?"
**"The na."** Grim turned his skull toward him. **"Grim Reaper. First day. Everyone laughed. You still decided to connect yourself to death."**
"I didn’t think of it that way at the ti."
**"Doesn’t matter how you thought of it."** A pause. **"You chose a na that says death is part of what you are. Not sothing chasing you. Part."**
Alex didn’t answer.
**"But you also chose this."**
Grim pointed toward the window.
Outside: Kira dodging Raven’s skeletons with both of them holding back laughter. Emily with her hands in the water, practicing sothing that glowed differently than yesterday. Maya and Akari on the upper grounds, visible from here as two moving points.
**"You chose people who matter. From the beginning."** Grim looked at him. **"That’s what keeps you. Not control. Not strength."**
A long pause.
**"Us."**
---
Ishi left them in silence for a mont.
Then she collected the cups with complete practicality.
"One more thing."
Alex looked at her.
"When you go for the fourth seal." Ishi stacked the cups. "Bring soone who rembers who you are."
"The whole team is going."
"Not to fight." Ishi turned. "To remind you. There’s a difference." Her deep-water eyes watched Alex with the sa calm as always. "The fourth seal isn’t like Matthias. Matthias wanted power. The Heralds of the Void want sothing different."
"What do they want?"
"They want the Harvester to return." Ishi moved toward the door. "But not as he was before the sealing. As sothing they can control."
She stopped in the doorway.
"And the only way to do that is to convince the bearer that attachnt is weakness."
She left.
The door stayed open.
Alex looked at Grim.
Grim looked back.
**"I already knew that,"** said Grim.
"About the Heralds?"
**"About attachnt."** A pause. **"That’s why I didn’t leave when everyone laughed on the first day."**
Alex looked out through the open window.
Kira had just managed to dodge fifty skeletons for the first ti.
Raven imdiately rejected it and reset the counter.
Kira protested with a vocabulary Alex wouldn’t have expected from soone so straightforward.
Grim made a sound that might have been laughter.
Alex too.
---
[Training grounds — 12:30 PM]
The group ca together for lunch looking like people who had actually worked.
Kira with her hair perfectly braided despite the chaos of training.
Emily with hands that were still faintly glowing, practicing without realizing it.
Raven with exactly the sa expression as always, but satisfied.
Maya arrived from the upper level without ntioning where she’d been, sat down, and ate.
Grim received his plate.
He held it in front of him.
**"The presentation is still correct,"** he announced.
"Thank you," said Ishi from inside the cabin without appearing.
Maya looked at Grim’s plate. Then at Kira.
"Do they always give him a plate?"
"Since yesterday," said Kira.
"And before?"
"Before, no one had bothered." Kira ate. "Now they do."
Maya looked at Grim.
Grim looked back.
Maya returned to her plate without saying anything.
But at the next al, she was the first one to serve Grim’s plate.
Without saying so.
Without looking at him.
She just did it.
---
[Alex’s cabin — 10:00 PM]
Alex was reading Viktor’s ssage again.
*...although maybe even they have no idea whether it’s a Fragnt or sothing else.*
Six weeks. Maybe less.
His device vibrated again.
Unknown number.
He opened it.
A single ssage. No signature.
*"Bearer of Fragnt 1 sighted in the Crystallines. Price updated: 500,000 crowns. Alive. The Temple pays double."*
Alex read the ssage three tis.
Then he looked at the quiet cabin. The mountains outside. The still hot springs.
**"Master?"**
Grim was in the corner.
"Soone knows where we are."
**"The Temple?"**
"Or soone who sells information to the Temple."
Silence.
**"How much ti do we have?"**
Alex pocketed the device.
"Enough to finish recovering." He looked at Grim. "And to leave before they arrive."
**"When do we go?"**
Alex thought about Ishi. The waters. The corruption dropping slowly, but dropping.
About what was still left.
"Two more days. Not one less."
**"Understood."**
Alex turned off the light.
Outside, sowhere in the mountains, soone already knew where they were.
And they were moving.
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