Chapter 23:

Heran

JOB.

IN THE MATERIAL REALM

The air still tasted of scorched stone.

I don’t know how long I’d been kneeling there, Job’s head cradled in my lap.

I didn’t even notice that my knees had gone numb against the rubble.

Around me, House Bethar’s grounds crawled with people again, servants hauling broken beams, soldiers staking what furniture had survived into neat useless piles.

As if tidiness could undo what had happened here.

Nobody looked at us.

I think they were too afraid to.

His chest wasn’t moving.

I kept checking anyway.

What was left of his left arm, the one he’d conjured out of pure Karma when Ellane took the real one, had gone dull and grey.

It didn’t even flicker when I touched it.

“He’s not breathing right.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Dio, is he, I mean, do you think…”

Dio didn’t answer.

He sat a few feet off with a bandage wound crooked round his ribs staring at nothing, his knees pulled up to his chest.

He hadn’t said a word since the blast.

I didn’t blame him… it’s not like I had managed much better.

“Move aside.”

I looked up.

Hidel stood over us, her ceremonial plate cracked clean through at the shoulder, blood dried black down one side of her face, and yet she stood the way she always stood…

Like the ground owed her something.

Behind her, what remained of her family’s estate stretched out in ruin, smoke still curling off collapsed archways.

I caught a glimpse of Charlette further off, wrists bound, flanked by two guards as she was marched past a mound of rubble she’d no doubt helped cause.

Nobody offered her sympathy.

And I didn’t have room to spare her any of my own.

“Is he,” Hidel started, then knelt and pressed two fingers beneath Job’s jaw. “How long has he been like this?”

“Since the fireball. Maybe an hour, maybe more, I lost count.” My hands were shaking. “Hidel, I don’t know what to do, I’ve never seen anything like this, he’s not warm but h-he, he’s not, he’s not gone either, I-I think I can feel something, like, it’s s-so faint but it’s there-”

“I believe you.” She said in a way that steadied me more than any comfort could have. “There is no time to waste on grief, Mara. Not yet. Grieve once he’s safe, or once he’s beyond saving, but not now.”

“Safe where? What can anyone even do for this?”

“Heran. The Church keeps its holy capital there, and whatever remains of the old rites for calling a soul back before it’s fully judged, it will be found in that cathedral if it exists anywhere in this kingdom. I have no authority to grant such a thing… But I know how to get you through the door that might…”

She was already turning, already barking an order over shoulder to a groom I hadn’t noticed standing by.

The groom led out a carriage I’d only seen from the ground before.

Four unicorns stood harnessed to it, their coats near blinding even under all that soot and grey sky.

“Hidel, this is, I can’t possibl-”

“You can, and you will, because I am ordering it, and because I owe your grandmother more than a carriage could ever repay.”

Her voice caught, just slightly, on the word grandmother.

“Get him inside. Both of you. Go now, and do not stop until you reach the cathedral steps.”

Dio helped me lift him, and between the two of us we managed to lay Job across the carriage’s seats, his hand resting against the window.

I climbed in after, pulled Dio up beside me, and I looked back once through the glass.

Hidel hadn’t moved.

She stood watching us with her arms folded over her cracked breastplate. And for a moment she looked less like a countess holding a province together…

And more like a woman who had just watched someone else’s family nearly repeat her own.

The doors sealed.

The unicorns reared, and the carriage lurched skyward hard enough to knock the breath out of me, tearing up through the smoke and the grey clouds until Gorge shrank away beneath us.

We didn’t speak much on the way there.

Dio kept his eyes on Job the whole flight, like he was daring him to wake up out of spite.

I kept mine on the horizon, watching the land change beneath us.

Gorge slowly gave way to neat farmland, then to something older looking…

Stone roads that seemed to have been laid with more care than anything I’d seen since Paprika.

All the while I was stroking Job’s golden blonde hair.

By the time the cathedral came into view, the sun had nearly set, and I understood at once why they called it holy.

Its spires rose higher than anything I’d ever seen.

Pale stone gone gold in the dying light, and around its base the city of Heran sprawled outward in orderly rings, clean streets, uniformed soldiers, banners bearing a sigil I didn’t recognise, a spear crossed behind a stylised sun.

We touched down in a courtyard just outside the outer wall.

I’d barely climbed down from the carriage before two soldiers approached us, their armour polished to a mirror shine, spears held at a precise diagonal across their chests.

I noticed, before either of them spoke a word, that the taller one’s eyes weren’t on us at all.

They were on his own weapon, and there was something in the way he held it that unsettled me before I could name why.

His gaze was akin to the same care you’d give something breathing, which I found extremely odd.

“State your business in the Holy Jurisdiction.” His voice was flat. Seemed rehearsed.

“We carry a wounded man in need of the Church’s aid, on the authority of House Bethar.”

I held up the token Hidel had pressed into my hand before we left.

It was some sealed insignia I didn’t fully understand the weight of, only that her expressions signaled to me it mattered.

“Please, he doesn’t have much time.”

The soldier studied the seal for a long moment.

His gaze flicking between it and Job’s still form through the carriage window.

Then he finally stepped aside.

“The cathedral will receive you.”

He said nothing further, only turned and gestured for us to follow, his spear tapping once against the stone with each step.

I could have sworn, just for a heartbeat, that the sound it made back wasn’t an echo at all.

IN THE SPIRITUAL REALM

I woke into nothing.

Not darkness.

Darkness would have had an edge to it, somewhere the black stopped and something else began.

This had none.

White in every direction.

No floor beneath me.

No weight pulling me down toward one.

When I tried to look at my own hands, there weren’t any hands to look at.

I should have been afraid.

Yet all I felt was quiet.

The claymore’s weight was gone.

The ache in my side where Ellane had opened me up was gone.

Even my sister’s face, which I’d carried behind my eyes every walking hour since the camp, felt strangely far away, like a memory belonging to someone else.

Is this what it is to die?

I thought the question rather than spoke it for I had no mouth to speak with.

I drifted.

There was nothing else to do.

The white wasn’t entirely still.

I noticed after what might have been minutes or years, it moved, very faintly.

Then the tide spoke to me.

“You always did think too loudly, even without a head to think with.”

The voice hit me, and it hit hard.

I turned, though I had nothing to turn with.

The white around me buckled, folding itself into a soft yellow glow.

I recognized the glow immediately.

“Grandma.”

She looked exactly as I remembered her the morning we left the camp.

Straight backed.

Sharp eyed.

A woman who had never once let the world decide how tired she was allowed to look.

But she didn’t rush to embrace me.

She only watched me for a long moment, and beneath the warmth in her face there was something else.

Something I hadn’t seen from her since the night she told me who my grandfather truly was.

“Am I dead?”

“Not yet.” She said plainly. “But you are unravelling, grandson, and if you keep drifting the way you have been, that will change soon enough.”

“Unravelling into what?”

She raised a hand.

The white around us bent to meet it.

Gathering.

Thickening.

Until it wasn’t empty space at all but something woven.

Something alive in a way I had no word for.

“This.” She said, “You and most have spent your whole life thinking of Karma as something you called up, a glow on a blade, a trick you’d learnt to summon when you needed it most. Here there is no calling it up. Here, it is the floor you stand on and the air you’d breathe, if you still had breath to spend. You are made of the same substance as everything around you now, and unless you learn to hold your own shape within it, you will simply become part of it, same as anything else that stops fighting to stay itself.”

“How do I fight something I can’t even see?”

“You already know how.”

She closed her fist, and where her hand was, suddenly…

A spear, long and pale manifested.

“The claymore relied on your arms, your legs, the strength your father passed down to you without ever meaning to. Here you have none of that. Here, all you have is what you are, and what you are is going to have to be enough.”

“I have a question though…”

“Ask away.”

“Why didn’t you teach me this sooner? Granted you knew all this back then.”

“Well Job, that was the plan for after you returned from the academy, but… fate had other plans.”

I said nothing for a while.

I stared at the weapon in her hand.

Something in me stirred once more.

“Teach me.”

For the first time since she’d appeared,

She smiled.

The same hearty warmth I remembered from the backyard.

From the kitchen.