Chapter 66: FROM FATHER TO THE SON

Sio kept his face buried against his knees as Silas sat beside him. There was no stone here, no dripping water from Veilhollow, no ache from the injuries outside. Darkness stretched in every direction.

"I spent nineteen years unable to have a proper conversation with you, and now that I finally manage it, you decide you’re done talking." Silas leaned back on his hands. "Your timing has always been terrible."

Sio’s fingers tightened around his sleeves. He sounds different here. Outside, Silas always felt hard around the edges. Here there was no borrowed face to hide behind. "I thought it was fun," Sio said eventually. "Going somewhere new. Seeing things nobody else had seen. Touching things I probably shouldn’t touch." He stared between his shoes. "Then Arch died and Angle..." The rest stuck behind his teeth. "Maybe being curious doesn’t help much in this world. Maybe being stupid stops being funny when somebody else pays for it."

Silas hooked two fingers into Sio’s collar and pulled until he had to uncurl enough to glare at him. "Good. You’re capable of learning something. I was getting worried." When Sio tried to fold forward again, Silas held on. "I didn’t say curiosity was the problem." Sio muttered that he’d just called him stupid, so Silas released him only to rake a hand through his hair. "The stupidity was implied. Curiosity tells you to look through a door. Experience teaches you not to put your face through it before checking what’s waiting on the other side."

"That sounds very specific," Sio said, slapping his hand away. Silas’s mouth twitched. "You’ve given me nineteen years of material." A laugh nearly escaped Sio before guilt stopped it. Silas noticed. "Arch knew the difference. What happened to him isn’t proof you should stop wanting to see what’s out there. It means you need to learn enough that your curiosity doesn’t start making choices for everyone around you."

Sio picked at a loose thread. "What is out there?" Silas looked almost pleased. "There he is. Silent for days and the first thing that drags you back is something dangerous." Sio muttered that he had been raised badly. "I was dead," Silas replied, and when Sio called that an excuse, he laughed. None of the fathers Sio had imagined growing up had laughed like that.

Silas turned one palm over. "I don’t know as much as you’re hoping, but Wayfarers keep mistaking the familiar for the complete. The Passage isn’t the edge of what exists. It proves there are edges we haven’t mapped." He looked at Sio. "You’ve seen Vessels. You carry a Scar that shouldn’t exist the way it does. An entity came out of the sky and somehow became yours. You’ve barely found out how much you don’t know."

Sio slowly lowered his legs. "You keep saying your memories are broken. Is that because you’re dead, or because you’ve been living in my head for nineteen years?" Silas flexed his fingers. "Both. My Scar could strike the soul directly. When I died, mine didn’t leave cleanly. You were still unborn, but there was already enough of a connection for something of me to hold on. When the Passage appeared around your birth, whatever remained was pulled somewhere it shouldn’t have been able to stay."

"So you’ve actually been inside me all this time?" Silas nodded. "A fragment. Not enough to wake normally or speak whenever I wanted. Mostly instincts and pieces of memory. Sometimes I could push back when something tried to touch your soul." His expression became suspiciously careful. "Which brings us to several decisions from your childhood."

Sio narrowed his eyes until the connection landed. "My Claims." Silas’s silence gave him away. He reminded Sio there were only three slots, then listed the evidence: a toy, a bicycle, an animal and part of his mother’s garden. Sio defended the bicycle and the animal, but his confidence weakened at the garden. "I was experimenting." Silas leaned closer. "You were trying to spend one of three Claims on vegetables."

"For nineteen years I’ve been keeping watch over what touched your soul," Silas continued. "Once you got old enough to start making Claims, you made that job unnecessarily difficult." Sio asked why he had allowed the entity. Silas scratched his jaw. "That was different." When Sio demanded how, his father answered as though it were obvious. "It fell out of the sky."

Silas spread his hands. "You spent years reaching for household objects, and then something impossible tore into your life. If you were determined to make one terrible decision, at least this one had potential." Sio stared at him. "You let me gamble my soul because the monster from the sky looked interesting?" Silas tilted his head. "When you say it like that, it sounds irresponsible." Sio’s stare hardened. "It was irresponsible." Silas shrugged. "It worked."

Sio rubbed both hands down his face. "You don’t even know what that thing is." Silas answered, "No. I know enough to know it wasn’t ordinary and that its arrival touched something larger than what was happening around you. But I don’t know exactly what it is."

My father protected my Claims and approved the eldritch sky monster because it looked expensive. Silas watched him. "You’re insulting me internally, aren’t you?" Sio admitted he was. Silas nodded. "Good. You sound healthier."

Sio’s mind jumped back to the cave. "You used my Scar. I’ve never used my Scar." Since the breach, Sio had obsessed over Integration, Host Capacity, portals, Gumm and the entity while barely asking what the purple mark beneath his eye actually did. When he finally asked, Silas looked satisfied. "There. That’s the part of you I was looking for."

"Dad."

The word escaped before Sio meant to use it. Silas went still, but neither touched the moment directly. He shifted closer until their shoulders nearly met. "Your Scar finds paths. Not only tunnels. Connections, routes, ways something can move from one place or state to another. I don’t know its limits because you’ve never properly tested them." Sio leaned forward. "And my Claim?" Silas tapped two fingers against his knee. "Your Claim doesn’t just notice a path. You’ve already been forcing paths to exist."

The pull inside Veilhollow, the portals, the way distance sometimes felt negotiable; questions came faster than Sio could organize them. Silas let him reach the fourth before raising one hand. "You’ve been miserable for days and now you’re redesigning your entire ability in your head." Sio said, "I have ideas." Silas nodded. "Of course you do."

Sio looked down without curling inward. Silas placed a hand behind his neck. "You can feel guilty about Arch. You can miss him. You can look at Angle and have no idea how to help him. None of that requires you to bury yourself beside him." Sio swallowed. "I didn’t know what losing you was supposed to feel like. You were already dead. Then I saw Angle."

Silas pulled him sideways until Sio’s forehead bumped against his shoulder. "And now you’re trying to grieve nineteen years all at once. Terrible scheduling." Sio stayed there while Silas rested his cheek briefly against his hair. "I missed your entire childhood while sitting closer to you than anyone else. I’m not interested in losing whatever comes next because you’ve decided sadness makes you wiser."

A faint crackling reached Sio from somewhere far away. Warmth crawled over his face. "You should probably wake up." The sound swelled until the darkness tore away and Sio opened his eyes to smoke, orange light and the stink of burning cloth.

Angle was on fire.

His solar state had ignited in his sleep, flames crawling down both arms while Sterling dragged their supplies clear and shouted about thermal escalation. Sio reacted before his thoughts caught up. The cracked water basin vanished through a portal and reappeared above Angle, dumping cold cave water over his head. The flames died with a hiss, steam carrying wet ash and scorched fabric through the chamber.

Angle sat drenched in his bedding, hair plastered over his eyes. Sio rubbed his neck. "Sorry. That looked smarter before I did it." Excellent. Back in my body for ten seconds and I’ve assaulted a grieving man with a basin.

Sterling crouched beside Angle and examined the blackened sleeve through the lenses hanging around his neck. He inspected the upper seam, then stopped. Angle noticed. Sterling kept looking at the cloth. "Arch asked me to source material for this."

The steam drifted between them while Angle’s fingers closed around the ruined sleeve. Sterling sat back. "Heat-resistant weave from three labs. He rejected the first because the stitching failed. The second was too stiff around your shoulders. The third cost enough that I asked whether he planned to dress you or purchase another building." Sterling rubbed his neck. "He told me to mind my own accounts. Which was impressive, considering they were my accounts."

A sound almost became a laugh in Angle’s throat before breaking. He looked down at the wet fabric. "He was making it." Sterling answered more quietly, "Yeah. I think he was."

Sio watched four sleeps of forced acceptance come apart over something Arch never finished. He opened his mouth, expecting some piece of Silas’s wisdom, but nothing came. He crossed the wet stone and sat beside Angle instead. He offered no promise and no speech about what Arch would have wanted. He just stayed.

Sterling checked Angle’s burns, complained that they were too minor for his expensive salve, then used it anyway. Soon he was outlining a heat-sink system he could build once they escaped. Angle muttered that Sterling would have told Arch his design was wrong. Sterling admitted he had. When Angle asked what his father said, Sterling hesitated. "Something rude about rich people discovering one useful material and immediately thinking they understood engineering." Angle’s mouth shifted slightly, and Sterling returned to the gauntlet as if he had noticed nothing.

Sio leaned against the cold wall while Sterling rambled about thermal dispersion and Angle occasionally corrected him. Their voices filled the chamber until Sio noticed what was missing between them. No clicking against stone, no small feet scraping along the ledges, nothing climbing onto his shoulder.

He checked beside the basin, then the ledge where Gumm usually settled. Empty. His gaze moved to the passage leading deeper into Veilhollow, and the Scar beneath his eye gave a faint pulse in the same direction. Sterling stopped speaking when Sio stood, and Angle raised his head as Sio touched the mark and stared into the dark.

"Where’s Gumm?"