Part Seventy-One — Seeing Without Eyes

　I caught myself, more than once in those first weeks after the mansion, hovering too close whenever Eris moved through unfamiliar terrain — a hand half-raised to guide her, words half-formed to warn her about some obstacle she'd already navigated around without my help.

　She noticed, eventually, same as she noticed most things.

"You can stop doing that," she told me, one afternoon, after I'd started to reach for her elbow near a training ground she'd crossed a hundred times by then. "The hovering."

"Habit," I admitted. "Guess I still think of you as someone who needs the help."

"I did, for a while," she said, honest rather than defensive. "Not anymore. Elaine helped with that."

Right. The technique. I keep forgetting to actually watch her use it properly, rather than just worrying on her behalf.

　Elaine explained it to me properly later that same evening, the two of us watching Eris run her three trainees through a drill from a respectful distance.

"Anti-mana isn't only useful for combat," Elaine said. "Properly refined, it can extend a user's perception well beyond ordinary senses — a kind of resonance, mapping the shape of what's nearby through the aura it carries, rather than light reflecting off it."

"You taught her that."

"She asked," Elaine said, simple. "Once she understood her blindness wasn't going to be undone by any healing available to us, she wanted an actual solution, not sympathy. I gave her what I knew. She mastered it faster than any student I've ever taught, myself included when I first learned the technique generations ago."

Of course she did. Fast learner's practically her defining trait, at this point.

　I watched her work with Elva, Celica, and Luke properly, for the first time really paying attention rather than simply worrying from the sidelines — and what I saw put every lingering doubt to rest entirely.

　She moved through the drill space with total confidence, correcting Luke's stance with a light tap before he'd even finished the motion, stepping fluidly around Celica's overextended lunge without so much as a hitch in her own footing.

"Your aura's leaking on the follow-through," she told Elva, not even facing her directly. "Same mistake as yesterday. Pull it back before you strike, not after."

"How do you always catch that," Elva asked, half-exasperated, half-admiring.

"I don't watch you with my eyes," Eris said. "I watch the shape of your aura instead. Leaking energy has a texture to it, once you know what you're feeling for. Yours spikes right before impact, every time. Fix the timing, fix the leak."

She's not compensating for a disability. She's operating on an entirely different sense that, if anything, catches things ordinary sight would miss.

"I used to worry," I admitted to her, once the trainees had been dismissed for the evening, the two of us sitting together near the training ground's edge, "that I hadn't done enough. That losing your sight was a cost I let you pay for something that should've been mine to prevent."

"You didn't let me pay anything," she said, firm. "The Church did that. Not you."

"I know that, logically. Doesn't always stop the guilt from showing up anyway."

　She reached over, unerring despite the dark settling around us, and found my hand with the same easy confidence she navigated everything else with now.

"I see plenty," she said, quiet. "Different than before. Not worse, necessarily — just different. You don't have to keep grieving something I've already made peace with myself."

Fair.

More than fair, honestly. I think I've been carrying guilt on her behalf longer than she's actually needed me to.

"Alright," I said, letting something ease in my own chest that I hadn't fully realized was still tight. "I'll work on that."

"Good," she said, and there was warmth in the single word that carried considerably more weight than the sentence itself.

　We sat together a while longer, watching Horizoncrest settle into its evening rhythm below us — lanterns lighting one by one, the distant sound of Ace's latest culinary critique drifting up from somewhere near the kitchens, Elaine's voice carrying faintly as she wrapped up some final piece of trade business for the day.

She doesn't need me hovering.

She never really did, not for long.

What she needed was someone who found her, gave her a name, and then got out of the way enough to let her become whoever she was always going to become anyway.

I think I can manage that.

Starting now.

"Ace's opinions on tonight's dinner are getting increasingly specific," Eris observed, tilting her head toward the distant commentary.

"He's cultivating a reputation as a food critic. I've stopped trying to talk him out of it."

"Smart choice," she said, smiling. "Some battles aren't worth fighting."

No. Some really aren't.

I'm learning, slowly, which ones actually are.