Chapter 377: Among Mortals

Somewhere along the promenade, a small ridiculous incident happened.

A ball rolled to a stop against the toe of her boot.

Camilla looked down at it

It was a small brightly coloured sphere of the kind she had, in the past several hours, seen small human children kick around in every public space they had passed. Made of the same soft synthetic material as most modern objects. She had, she realized, no specific opinion about it.

A small human, perhaps five years old, perhaps six, with the earnest determined expression of a child who had chased a ball across a public space and was now committing fully to the recovery mission, arrived at her feet in a small breathless rush.

He stopped.

He looked at the ball.

He looked at her boot.

He looked, slowly, up at her face.

Camilla looked down at him.

There was a small held moment.

She had, in years, been looked at with fear by mortals of every station in every land she had walked through. She had learned to distinguish the small shades of it, the sharp bright fear of a soldier facing his death, the slow quiet fear of a courtier who understood exactly what she was, the small useful animal fear of a servant who would say nothing later. She had learned to use fear.

The small human at her feet was not afraid.

He was, in fact, examining her with the same open, unfiltered, entirely undiplomatic curiosity that Camilla imagined he brought to every new adult who had entered his field of vision that day.

"Auntie," he said.

Camilla blinked.

"Auntie," he said again, this time with the small patient repetition of a child who was not sure the tall lady had heard him the first time. "Have your eyes been red since you were born?"

Camilla stood very still.

Somewhere in the middle distance, a mother-shaped adult was calling a name that was presumably his and was not yet close enough to intervene.

Camilla considered the question.

It was, by any measure, a monumentally stupid question. It was the kind of question that only a small human could have asked, in the specific window of human development where one had learned that eyes came in colours but had not yet learned that certain colours warranted certain small silences. It was, in fact, so stupid that it circled all the way back around to being, in its own small unpolished way, sincere.

She crouched, in a single fluid motion, until her eyes were level with his.

He did not step back.

"Yes," she said, gravely. "Since I was born."

"Oh." He considered this with the small serious face of a child processing new information. "Cool."

He bent down. He picked up his ball. He looked back up at her.

"Thank you," he said, in the small careful voice of a child who had remembered his manners at the last possible second.

Then he turned and ran back across the promenade toward the mother-shaped adult, who scooped him up with the small anxious relief of a parent who had briefly, three seconds ago, considered the possibility of a missing child and was now processing having merely a returned one.

Camilla straightened.

She watched the mother carry the child away.

The mother, at some point during the carrying, glanced back over her shoulder at Camilla, and, upon meeting her eyes, produced the small polite alarmed smile of a woman who did not want to look like she was hurrying and was, in fact, hurrying.

Camilla inclined her head, one small precise fraction of a degree.

The mother turned around and walked, at a slightly increased pace, in the opposite direction.

Camilla stood on the promenade for a moment longer.

Then, quietly, entirely to herself, in the small amused tone of a woman who had not expected the evening to produce this particular small piece of information:

"...Cool...huh"

She continued walking.

She did not, in her own honest self-assessment, keep track of the time.

The sun set. The coastal light softened from gold into blue and from blue into the deeper indigo of a coastal evening. The advertising screens on the taller buildings grew brighter against the darkening sky. The lights along the promenade came fully on. The small warm-lit shops began, one by one, to lower their shutters and close for the night. The last of the day’s small crowds thinned into the smaller quieter crowds of a coastal city’s evening, young couples walking arm-in-arm, older people out for their nightly turn along the sea, the occasional lone figure moving with the small purposeful stride of a person going home.

Camilla walked past all of them.

She was, quietly, being surprised by how much she was enjoying herself.

The Inksea night was cool without being cold. The sea breeze off the coast was gentle. The small clean geometric patterns of the pavement, laid out beneath streetlights that came on at their own schedule and hummed at frequencies she could hear if she listened, were pleasant to walk on. The city did not, at any point in her walk, threaten her. It did not, at any point in her walk, particularly notice her. It simply, was. Continued. Rolled forward around her in its small patient hundreds of unremarkable evenings.

She catalogued it, all of it, with the quiet unhurried absorption of a woman who was, very slowly, deciding that she was going to enjoy the New Age.

Eventually, when the promenade had emptied to the small handful of late walkers and the small warm-lit shops had all closed and the moon had risen far enough that the sea beneath it had gone into the deep silvered black of full night, Camilla turned, at last, and made her unhurried way back toward Aurelia Heights.

She got into the elevator, and not long after it began to rise in silence.

The doors opened onto the small private vestibule of Stan’s floor. Camilla stepped out. She tapped her hand against the reader in the small precise imitation of the gesture she had watched Stan perform multiple times that afternoon.

The door unlocked with a soft mechanical click.

She stepped inside. The penthouse was dim.

Not dark, the tall glass along the far wall admitted the soft silver of the moon, and the small ambient lights along the low edges of the walls glowed at their patient nighttime setting, and the city lights along the coast below cast a soft warm underglow across the ceiling.

But quiet.

Stan was on the sofa.

Cross-legged. Eyes closed. Hands resting palm-up on his knees. The small clean line of his shoulders steady with the slow controlled rhythm of a cultivator deep in his practice. Around him, faint and invisible to any ordinary observer, the ambient Qi of the room drifted inward in slow patient streams, pulled, apparently, out of a city that contained no Qi at all, and settled into the small precise architecture of his meridians with the small unhurried competence of a cultivator seated at the heart of an ancestral formation.

Camilla stopped, one foot inside the door.

She looked at him.

Her red eyes narrowed by exactly one shade.

Then, slowly, the small corner of her mouth curved into the private amused expression of a woman who had already, that afternoon, filed her private conclusion about this and was quietly enjoying the additional confirmation.

She scoffed, softly, to herself.

"...Hidden master," she murmured, in the small amused tone of a woman speaking to no one in particular. "Cultivating in a Qi-empty city as though he were seated at a sect ancestor’s grave. Genesis Realm, he says. Genesis Realm."

She shook her head.

She stepped out of her boots. She hung the coat on the rack by the door. She padded quietly across the pale wood floor toward the bedroom, catching one final glance back at Stan, still cross-legged, still perfectly composed, entirely unbothered by her return, before slipping through the doorway.

The floating slab of pale green jade waited exactly where she had left it, hovering silent and level at its patient distance above the floor.

She approached it.

She ran one long pale finger along the polished edge. The stone hummed, faintly, at the contact, the small quiet note of a resonance she had known since childhood.

She let out a small unhurried breath.

Then she stepped onto the jade and lay back along its cool satiny length, arranging her hair over one shoulder in a single fluid motion, folding her hands on her stomach, and closing her eyes with the small satisfied composure of a Royal Blood settling in for the night.

For a long moment, she simply lay there.

The soft continuous ambient hum of the city drifted in through the tall glass. The distant small sound of the sea moved beneath it. The faint, invisible circulation of Qi in the next room continued at its patient rhythm.

Camilla’s mouth curved, very slightly, one final time.

’Cool,’ she thought, remembering the small human on the promenade with his small ridiculous question and his small serious face, and, still smiling, drifted into the deep unhurried rest of a Royal Blood at the end of a long strange first day in the New Age.