Movement Seven — What Eremos Said, Later, When Only Ilyrisse Was Listening

[The frame steps back one final time, into the quiet of the crystal castle's western hall, hours after the household has scattered to their own corners to sit with what they have just been told.]

I woke to Ilyrisse's hand still resting against my chest, the way it always is when Vaelira has been the one to carry me home instead of letting me walk there myself. I did not open my eyes right away. There is a particular comfort in the seconds before you have to be a person again, and I have learned, over the centuries, to take what I can of it while it lasts.

"She told them," Ilyrisse said. Not a question. She already knew, the way she always seems to know things about her family before anyone thinks to tell her directly.

"I heard," I said. I had not, in truth, been asleep for all of it — some small awake part of me had stayed near enough to the surface to catch pieces of Vaelira's voice through the doorway, the shape of what she was giving away on my behalf. I found, when I searched myself for it, that I was not angry. I had expected, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I would be. I was not.

"Are you going to be alright," Ilyrisse asked, and it was not really a question either — it never fully is, when she asks it, because she already knows the answer will be some careful, complicated version of yes, the same way it always is.

I thought about the god. I have thought about it many times since, in the years between that night and this one — not with regret, I want to be honest about that, because I do not think I owe that particular soul my regret, not after what it chose to say and who it chose to say it about. But I thought about the shape of my own face while I did what I did. The laughing. The satisfaction sitting right alongside the fury instead of replacing it. That is the part I have never fully told anyone, not even Ilyrisse, not even now, in the quiet safety of her hand against my chest.

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"I don't know what it means," I said finally, "that some part of me enjoyed it."

She did not answer right away. She rarely does, when I hand her something that heavy — she has never once, in all our years, rushed to fill a silence just because it made her uncomfortable to sit inside it, and I have loved her for that particular patience longer than I have loved almost anything else about her.

"It means you loved her enough that the world owed her something," Ilyrisse said, eventually, "and for one night, you were the one who made it pay. I don't think that makes you a monster. I think it makes you someone who has spent far too long being told he isn't allowed to want anything for himself, even justice."

"I keep thinking about the alters," I said, after a while. "How each of them costs a piece of whoever I actually am, underneath all of them. Vaelira asked me once, a long time ago, whether I know if the version of me sitting in the middle of all seven of them is the real one, or just the smallest, most fragile caretaker piece of the whole arrangement. I still don't have an answer for her. I don't have one for you either, if you're going to ask me the same thing."

"I wasn't going to ask you that," Ilyrisse said. "I know the answer already. You're the one who comes home afterward. You're the one whose hand I'm holding right now instead of a stranger's. Whatever the seven of them are, whatever they take out of you when they arrive, they have never once kept you from finding your way back to the people who love you. I think that's the only definition of real that has ever mattered to me."

I did not have an answer for that either. I still do not, most days. I only know that when the ring comes — orange-red, coals that refuse to cool — some part of me, however small, however carefully I keep it folded away the rest of the time, is glad of the excuse to finally stop being patient.

I do not know what that says about me either. I have stopped expecting, some centuries ago now, to ever fully know.