Part Thirty-Four — Building, One Wrong Attempt at a Time

　The first thing I tried to make with Arcane Creation was a simple wooden beam, and it came out looking less like construction material and more like something a very confused tree had given up on halfway through growing.

<"That is not structurally viable.">

"Yeah," I said, staring at the lumpy, asymmetrical mess in my hands. "Yeah, I got that much myself, thanks."

<"You are compensating for lack of skill with excess energy. Reduce output. Increase precision.">

Great. Wonderful. Even my own soul is giving me notes on my form.

"You know," I said, out loud, to the empty clearing, "for someone who introduced himself as part of me, you're awfully comfortable criticizing my work."

<"Accuracy is not criticism.">

"It absolutely can be both."

　No response to that.

　I decided, somewhere in that first exhausting week, that "no response" was Anti-Subconsciousness's version of choosing not to argue a point it considered beneath addressing.

　Progress came slow, which felt, in a strange way, like the first genuinely familiar thing in weeks.

　Slow, hard-won progress was a language I already spoke fluently, six years of sword drills and control exercises behind me. This was just a different vocabulary of the same lesson.

　By the end of the first month, I could produce a straight beam reliably.

　By the second, something resembling an actual wall, rough but sound, standing at an angle that didn't immediately threaten to fall on me.

Small wins. I'm allowed small wins. Doran would've had some dry comment about my form by now. Fenrik would've made it into a running joke within the hour.

They're not here to make the joke. Guess that's on me now, too.

　I said the joke out loud sometimes, in their voices as best I could remember them, just to hear something other than silence and Anti-Subconsciousness's flat corrections filling the clearing.

　There were nights that first year I didn't build anything at all — nights the grief simply arrived without warning and sat on my chest until I couldn't do anything except lie in the dirt and let it.

　Anti-Subconsciousness didn't try to talk me out of those nights, which I came, eventually, to appreciate.

<"Your vitals suggest continued distress.">

"Yeah. That tends to happen when you lose everyone twice."

<"Acknowledged.">

Not exactly a comfort. Still — better than being told to just get over it. I'll take flat acknowledgment over false comfort, most days.

　Other nights were better.

　There was a genuine, embarrassing satisfaction the evening I finally managed a proper door — a real one, hinges and all, swinging cleanly on a frame that actually held its shape.

"Doran would've hated how long that took me," I said, testing it a third time just to watch it swing. "Man built an entire house without complaining once, from what I remember."

<"Comparative analysis unnecessary. Current output meets structural requirements.">

"You're really bad at pep talks, you know that?"

<"I was not designed to deliver pep talks.">

"No kidding."

Still. It's talking to me. Even badly. That's more than the silence was giving me, before.

　By the time a year had properly passed — fifteen now, a fact I only really registered because Anti-Subconsciousness informed me of it with the same flat precision it informed me of everything — the shape of an actual home had started to emerge from what had once just been rubble and grief and a stubborn, half-standing wall.

　It wasn't the house my parents had built.

　I didn't want it to be, if I'm honest — trying to recreate exactly what was lost felt like it would hurt more than building something new in its place.

　This one was smaller. Simpler. Built by hands that were still learning, guided by a voice that didn't know how to comfort me but never once stopped showing up to help anyway.

<"Structure is approximately eighty-three percent complete.">

　Anti-Subconsciousness reported it one evening, surveying the walls alongside me in whatever way it actually perceived anything.

"Eighty-three percent," I repeated. "That's oddly specific."

<"I am capable of precision. It is one of my few advantages.">

One of very few, honestly. Still. It's something.

　I stood in the doorway of my mostly-finished, entirely-my-own home, looking out over the same ridgeline where two dragons had once taken everything from me, where a Church I still barely understood had taken it again in a different shape, six years later.

I'm still here.

Whatever's coming next, whoever else decides I'm worth ending — I'm still here, and I built something out of all of it anyway.

That has to count for something. It has to.

　Some nights, still, the memories tried to surface anyway — Doran's laugh, Fenrik's terrible joke, the exact color of firelight on an ordinary Tuesday I hadn't known was the last one.

　I noticed, slowly, that those nights had started coming less often than they used to.

　I didn't yet understand why.