The crystal was on the bedside table.
She had felt it the mont Ren approached and his gallant and manly energy woke her up, that perception she always had of what was inside it, present even when she wasn't holding it, present even when she was horizontal and pretending to be asleep. The energy inside was so small and so fragile it barely registered. The contrast between what it had been and what it was now landed sowhere she wasn't going to examine closely right now because she couldn't afford to in this particular mont with her face already doing things she had limited control over.
She wanted to have it in her hands and hug it to apologize for using it so harshly, taking its warm energy so heartlessly .
'I'm sorry… I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry I'm so sorry!!!'
The apology ca fast and constant and entirely internal, directed at the crystal and at what was inside the crystal with the full worried focus of soone who understood that an apology didn't undo anything… But she still needed to say it.
'I promised. I promised no one would spend another breath of what was left inside you and I was the first one to break it.'
I'm sorry... But… But out of a hundred tis I would do it again a hundred!! SORRY!! There is no version of that mont in which I don't. None… I'M SO SORRY!!!'
'No… I'm sorry and I'm not sorry and both of those things are true at the sa ti and I don't know what to do with that…'
The silence of the crystal was the only thing a crystal could provide.
Then it weirdly wasn't.
Sothing arrived in Luna's mind that was closer to a warmth coming from inside, not necessarily from the small mana amount remaining but from sothing that didn't have a physical place. Like an ethereal rune made of two words, or the impression of two words, or what her mind did with sothing that wasn't exactly language but arrived in that form because that form was the one her mind could process. A sensation that was halfway between dreaming and being inside Ren's internal space.
'Love's good.'
Luna didn't move a single muscle at the ssage worthy of Lykea's motto.
'No… It's my imagination, she told herself. I'm half asleep and hallucinating what I want to hear because that's what minds do when they need sothing ridiculous they couldn't ask for.'
Probably…
It was almost like her mother had answered to not mind it, that it was alright.
Ridiculous.
Almost certainly…
But if she was allowed to have an imagination. If she was allowed to hear hope when it presented itself even if she couldn't verify it. If she was allowed to believe in sothing, even only to the extent that believing in it wouldn't destroy her if it turned out to be only imagination…
Then she believed in Ren.
In the fact that he was going to find a way as he had just said to her "sleeping" body, Liora and Larissa. Because he was Ren, and because he had done things that had no way of being done often enough that the pattern maybe already had his na on it, the pattern that said impossible was a description of the current state of information rather than a limit on what was available.
She believed in the crystal recovering sothing of what it had lost. In the people trapped inside being able to stop being trapped one day.
In her father, wherever he was trapped as Selphira told her, coming back with that quiet stubbornness that Luna had inherited without asking for it and recognized in herself with that mix of pride and irritation that she only felt toward things she loved.
She had been pretending to be fine without him. But she wanted him back.
The crystal… Her mother. Her father.
She still 'hated' him too, for breaking the promise, for disappearing the way he had disappeared, for leaving the shape of a reason without the full explanation that should have accompanied it. She hated him and loved him in the way you only hated and loved the people you ca from, which was completely and without being able to do anything about it.
Like her mother.
Like...
Liora's warm breath arrived at her ear with the bad timing of soone who had been waiting for exactly the right mont and had decided this was it.
"How much longer are you going to keep pretending?"
Luna kept her eyes closed.
Kept her face still.
What she couldn't keep still was the color of her face, which climbed from sowhere below her collar to reach her ears with the speed of sothing that wasn't going to wait for permission.
Ren's voice ca from the direction of the bedside table. Small... Not directed at anyone in particular, but directed at sothing specific that wasn't a person in the room.
"Thank you."
It was aid at the crystal. At the faint warmth still inside it. At the small presence that had remained through everything and was still there now, smaller than before but present.
Luna heard it.
She kept her eyes closed.
Completely red.
In silence.
Thinking that she had woken up at the worst possible mont, and that out of a hundred tis this would happen to her exactly a hundred would be extrely embarrassing.
So things were consistent like that.
♢♢♢♢
Ren was entirely focused on understanding crystallization.
The last ti he had looked at it differently was on the floor of the ceremony hall, his body in the state it was in, his consciousness fraying at the edges, watching the process move through Selphira's body in real ti with the kind of attention that only existed when sothing mattered deeply enough to cut through everything else. That mont of seeing it clearly, combined with the additional understanding the mushroom had briefly opened to him during the reconnection before going back to sleep, had given him an insight he hadn't had before.
The mana flow in crystallization was not chaotic.
What he had seen in that mont was the opposite. Order, a very specific, geotric order, the mana units solidifying not at random but following frequency patterns that organized the molecules into structures which repeated at very small scales, small forms echoing larger ones at every level of magnification if you knew what you were looking at. If you knew the runes… The geotry was consistent. If you knew the runes… The geotry was readable.
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