The hallways were empty.
They were always empty at this hour.
He didn’t know if it was a coincidence or arrangent, if the servants had learned to read the schedule of the narrow room and made themselves absent accordingly, or if they simply understood that so things were not ant to be witnessed.
The boy didn’t think about it, because thinking would an looking for the reason why they left...and he didn’t want to think about that.
So he walked.
His left leg dragged slightly, not enough to be called a limp, but enough that he could feel the difference between his steps, the way the right one landed and the left one arrived a half-beat later.
His shirt was back on. He had put it on himself, in the narrow room, before leaving. The fabric stuck to his back in places, damp and sticky.
The castle corridors were the sa as always. Too wide, too high, too pale. The torches burned in their brackets with indifference.
He counted them as he walked. Counting helped him steer himself away from the agonizing pain ravaging his entire being like a wild dog.
He preferred counting to the alternative.
The door at the end of the hallway was grand, the sa as every door in the castle was grand, but this one was grand in a different way than the study or the narrow room.
If those were the doors of hell, then this was the door to heaven.
He stopped in front of it.
He raised his hand and knocked. Three tis, each ti a little louder than the last.
The boy waited.
He was good at waiting; he had been practicing for a long ti.
He counted the torches in this corridor too, then counted the flagstones, then ran out of things to count and stood in the silence of the empty hallway with his left leg aching and his shoulder feeling like it had been smashed with a big hamr.
He kept his face neutral. There was no one to keep it neutral for, but the expression had beco sothing he maintained by default now, the sa way he kept his balance while walking.
Four minutes passed. He counted those too.
On the fifth, the door swung open.
He walked inside.
The room was different from the rest of the castle. Firstly, it was warm.
Not the warmth of fire, but more so the warmth of family, the warmth of a hearth rather than the flas that burned in it.
There were books on the shelves that looked like they had actually been read. There were flowers in a vase near the window, still alive, tended to recently.
A chair sat near the back window, velvet and plush, and it looked extrely comfortable to sit in.
The woman sitting in it looked up when he entered.
Cristali Hector Aristeus had gray hair the color of early morning clouds, a blessing to all they graced.
Her eyes were hazel, a color that shifted depending on the light and her mood. They found him almost instantly, a small smile curling on her lips.
The woman had a presence to her, sothing that made the boy feel at instinctual peace, as if he was looking at the very incarnation of the God of Peace himself.
Leonidas held her eyes for a bit longer than normal, then bowed, imdiatly regretting the decision.
"Mother."
A hiss of pain left his lips, his broken shoulder stabbing through his skin. How could he let his mother see sothing so disgraceful?
I should be ashad.
But instead of whipping him for it, his angel of a mother smiled.
She smiled at him and beckoned him forward, her fingers making funny shapes as he edged closer to her. The first thing she did was, bless him.
"My dear Leo, be at peace."
Her hand, soft and warm, touches his forehead, a soft light engulfing his body.
The healing was warm.
That was the word for it, warm, the sa warmth the room had, spreading inward from where her hands touched him. It was peaceful, as if he had sunk into a long sleep after a long day of lessons.
The ache in his leg resolved itself first, the bones settling back into their correct relationship with one another. He breathed out slowly.
"How was your day?" she asked.
Her voice was warm, just like everything else about her. It was also soft, like a cushion.
"It was great."
Her hands moved through his hair, calming his mind with each stroke. It was imnsely pleasing, the only thing Leonidas looked forward to in his hellish day.
"And your ti with your father?"
"Very fun,"
He smiled at her, the smile she had taught him, the one for facing things that were too hard to face.
"He worked with on my conditioning. I think I’m improving."
She smiled back at him, the sa smile, mirrored.
"Good," she said. "That’s good."
Her hands moved to his face. He felt the warmth concentrate there, working through the places where his nails had been, the shallow trails of it, closing them with the careful attention she always gave to visible things.
He held still.
She was gentle. She had always been gentle with her hands, even when she was not gentle with other things.
The cut above his brow closed.
The swelling at the corner of his eye receded, and so did the scratches along his jaw. He did not know what her Source Elent was, but Leonidas was sure it was sothing warm...sothing made to create instead of destroy.
Leonidas was back to new, except for the whip wounds on his back, which still remained.
"Those will heal on their own in ti. Punishnts shouldn’t be erased so easily, right?"
"Yes, mother. I was wrong, and this is my redemption."
Even as he said that, Leonidas could not help but think if his mother was right. But he dismissed the thoughts, after all.
Mother would never want anything bad for .
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