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Imius decided — without asking, without consulting, without any visible consideration that another person's preference might be a relevant factor in the matter — that they were staying.
He made this decision by grabbing Nocth's wrist and dragging him sideways with the easy, unself-conscious authority of someone who has never found it necessary to negotiate the small things. The motion came just as a cluster of lanterns overhead burst into fuller, brighter color — some mechanism within them responding to the deepening dark, their glow expanding and warming until the entire street beneath was washed in deep amber gold, every face and surface given the soft, burnished quality of old copper seen in firelight. The crowd thickened here, pressing in from both sides, bodies brushing and redirecting one another in the fluid, unconscious choreography of a dense public space. Voices overlapped and layered — laughter cutting through argument cutting through laughter again, the sounds braided together into something that was less noise than texture.
"No disappearing," Imius said, with the tone of someone issuing a policy rather than making a request. "You already look like you're halfway out of the city."
Nocth didn't resist. He let himself be pulled, his feet adjusting automatically and without drama to the uneven stone beneath them — one slab slightly higher than its neighbor, another worn concave at its center by the passage of countless feet across countless years. The pressure of the crowd around him felt strange, and he gave a moment's quiet attention to that strangeness, trying to locate what it reminded him of. Not unpleasant. Just dense. Like standing in water that moves when you do — surrounding without restraining, present without demanding acknowledgment.
A group of performers occupied the corner ahead, commanding the intersection the way fire commands a room: by making everything else orient around them without appearing to ask for it. Their faces were painted in broad, sweeping streaks of ash-white that caught the lantern light and returned it altered, cooler. Around their eyes, dark pigment was applied in heavy rings that deepened the sockets, giving each gaze a quality that was simultaneously more intense and less readable than an ordinary face. They wore masks shaped like beasts mid-snarl — jaws locked open in postures of frozen, eternal challenge, neither threatening nor safe, occupying some deliberate space between the two. Drums thundered in rhythms that were uneven by design rather than accident, the irregularity structured, intentional, keeping the body from settling into comfortable anticipation. One dancer leapt forward from the group — limbs snapping into sharp, angular positions with percussive precision, each shape held for just long enough to register before dissolving and reforming into something altogether smoother, older, as if the sharp angles had been a dialect and the fluid motion was the language underneath.
Nocth watched the way their feet struck the ground.
The timing. The weight transfer. The way force was generated from the hips and expressed through the extremities, each movement a conversation between momentum and control. He watched with the particular quality of attention that had nothing performed about it — no conscious decision to observe, just the natural orientation of eyes that noticed these things the way other eyes noticed faces.
Imius leaned close, pitching his voice beneath the drums. "They do this every year. It's supposed to scare off bad fortune." He paused. "Or invite it. Depends who you ask."
One of the dancers spun outward from the formation in a wide, sweeping arc — misjudging or deliberately choosing the proximity — and came within a hand's breadth of collision with them both. Imius laughed, the sound bright and unguarded, and stepped back with a theatrical exaggeration that transformed an instinctive retreat into a deliberate performance. He produced a bow — deep, sweeping, entirely unnecessary — and received for his trouble a playful shove from the dancer's shoulder as they spun back into the group, which Imius accepted with the satisfaction of someone who considers any acknowledgment a form of success.
Further down the street, long tables had been arranged in rows beneath woven canopies that filtered the lantern light into something softer, more diffuse — the kind of light that makes everything beneath it feel slightly more generous and slightly less sharp-edged. Families crowded around the tables with the comfortable, overlapping intimacy of people who have shared many such evenings and expect to share many more. Food and drink passed from hand to hand without ceremony, the transactions of shared abundance conducted without ledger or count. The hands that passed the bowls and cups were stained with oil and spice, dark at the knuckle and fragrant in a way that drifted outward into the surrounding air. Children moved in the spaces between adult legs with the fluid confidence of creatures for whom that particular terrain is perfectly navigated, each one clutching something — a skewer still trailing steam, a wooden toy carved into the form of a winged beast, its painted eyes wide and permanent.
Nocth accepted a small bowl from Imius without question, without examination — a small, uncalculated act of trust extended to the night and the hands that navigated it.
The food inside was unfamiliar in every specific — grain softened to tenderness in broth that had been cooked long and low, layered with thin slices of roasted meat and something beneath that, something sharp and faintly acidic, that reached the back of his tongue and made it tingle with a clean, bright insistence. He ate slowly, taking each bite at a pace that was almost meditative, tasting with the deliberate attention of someone who does not take for granted the act of receiving something new — as if the flavors were information and he was committing them carefully to some internal record that he might or might not be able to access later.
Imius, seated beside him and apparently fueled by a completely different relationship to the concept of quiet, talked.
He talked with the effortless, self-replenishing energy of someone for whom speech is as natural as breathing and approximately as necessary. He talked about how the Saevereth lanterns burned brighter this year than last, richer in color, and whether that meant something or simply meant someone had changed the oil. He talked about how someone — credible, he insisted, a person not given to exaggeration — had claimed to see a sky-craft drift too low over the western district two evenings before, close enough to make out the shape of whatever was beneath the hull. He talked about the festival, about the food, about the drums, his words flowing in and out of subjects the way the crowd moved around obstacles: continuously, without particular destination.
And then he talked about Doro's face — producing a sweeping, illustrative gesture with his free hand to indicate the precise expression of a man discovering, too late, that he has badly misjudged a situation — and how it had looked, in his considered opinion, entirely priceless in the moment it met the cobblestones.
Nocth's hand stopped mid-motion, the bowl held still in front of him.
Imius noticed immediately. He always noticed immediately — it was, Nocth was coming to understand, one of his qualities that lived beneath the performance. "— I mean," Imius said, his voice dropping to a register he didn't often use, the cheerfulness replaced by something more careful, more genuine, "you didn't have to step in like that." A brief pause, the space between words given just enough room to breathe. "But… I'm glad you did."
Nocth nodded once — a single, quiet acknowledgment — and lowered his eyes back to the bowl in his hands.
A sudden cheer erupted from the far end of the street — collective, sharp, the kind of sound a crowd makes when something has resolved itself in a direction they were hoping for.
Imius's head swiveled toward it with the immediate, involuntary attention of a person who has been waiting, at some level, for exactly this sound. Something shifted across his features — recognition, anticipation, and the specific delight of a person encountering a thing they already love. "Oh," he said. Then, with more weight: "Oh no." A pause, suggesting he did not actually consider this bad news. "They opened the ring."
Before Nocth could form a question around the words, Imius was already in motion, weaving into the crowd with the practiced ease of someone who has spent a great deal of time navigating exactly these densities of people — reading gaps before they opened, moving into spaces that were about to exist rather than spaces that already did. Nocth followed, stepping into the passages Imius left in his wake, the crowd parting and closing like water around two stones moving in sequence.
They emerged into a small open circle that the crowd had collectively agreed to hold clear — an informal arena ringed by bodies leaning inward, contained by nothing but the mutual understanding that the space was meant to be kept. At its center, two older teenagers squared off in the direct, unhurried way of people who are comfortable being looked at. Their stances were loose — deliberately, knowledgeably loose, the ease of trained bodies rather than untrained ones — feet planted at measured widths, shoulders relaxed and low, the kind of readiness that doesn't need to advertise itself. No armor. No blades. No implements of any kind.
Just bodies in space, and the understanding of what to do with them.
Nocth's gaze sharpened. A subtle shift — the quality of his attention changing, focusing, the way light focuses through glass into something more concentrated and more precise.
The first exchange happened quickly. A feint — the weight commitment incomplete, designed to draw a response rather than deliver a strike. A low kick following immediately after, directed at the space where the response created an opening. A shove at the conclusion — less an attack than a punctuation mark — that sent dust skidding in a low pale arc across the stone. The crowd reacted with the enthusiastic familiarity of an audience that knows this particular theater well: shouts, laughter, the rapid back-and-forth of shouted bets negotiated at volume.
Imius leaned in close enough that his shoulder touched Nocth's. "Friendly matches," he said. "Mostly."
The word mostly was left to occupy its own space, which it did with a certain comfortable confidence.
Nocth tracked every movement in the ring with the quiet, total focus that he brought to these things without deciding to. The way one fighter unconsciously protected his left side even in neutral moments — a habit of the body, revealing something the face wouldn't. The way the other reached slightly too far on strikes that were constructed more for the watching crowd than for the opponent — the geometry of performance rather than the geometry of combat, readable to anyone who understood the difference. He felt an itch beneath his skin. Not desire — not the pull toward participation, not eagerness. Something more precise than that. Recognition. The body registering something familiar the way it registers a known scent before the mind has named it.
Imius glanced sideways at him with the particular expression of someone who has read a room and drawn a conclusion. His grin arrived with slow, satisfied certainty. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"No," Nocth said. Honestly.
Imius laughed — the short, bright laugh of someone who doesn't entirely believe the answer but finds it endearing regardless. "Liar."
From within the crowd, a voice called out for new challengers — loud, carrying, with the practiced projection of someone who has issued this particular invitation many times and enjoys doing so.
Imius raised his hand. Raised it perhaps halfway — the commitment approximately fifty percent complete — and then stopped. He held the pose for a moment, arrested in indecision, and then turned to look at Nocth with an expression that had somewhere along the way become genuinely uncertain. "I mean," he said, the performance stripped back to something underneath it, "we don't have to."
Nocth looked at the ring. At the dust still settling from the last exchange. At the dimensions of the space — the distance between the spectators, the quality of the light falling into the center, the geometry of it. The way distance and ground and the bodies within them related to one another.
"I'll watch," he said.
The relief that crossed Imius's face came perhaps a quarter of a second too fast and was perhaps a shade too thorough to have been successfully concealed, and carried in it the specific quality of someone who had been quietly hoping for exactly this answer and hadn't wanted to say so.
"Good," Imius said, with the crisp decisiveness of a person closing a subject. "Because I'm terrible."
He jumped into the ring anyway.
What followed was, by any strict technical measure, less a competitive bout and more an enthusiastic public performance of a person who has decided that commitment and coordination are separate qualities and that one can fully substitute for the other. Imius moved through the space with extraordinary energy and somewhat approximate skill — he dodged incoming strikes more often by fortunate geometry than by deliberate calculation, his footwork driven by momentum and instinct rather than the considered weight-transfer of trained movement. The crowd laughed, and the laughter was warm rather than unkind, the particular warmth of an audience that has recognized something genuinely likeable and chosen to embrace it rather than judge it.
Nocth found himself smiling. He noticed this after the fact — the expression already present, already settled into the lines of his face, arrived before any conscious invitation had been extended.
Imius took a solid hit to the shoulder — his opponent's strike landing clean and square — and stumbled backward two full steps, the impact moving through him with absolute democratic honesty, expression breaking open into helpless laughter even as he went. He found his footing, squared himself to the crowd with all the dignified gravity of a person performing a formal ceremony, and produced a bow of such theatrical depth and sincerity that it drew its own separate cheer. He retreated from the ring into the arms of the surrounding spectators amid applause that he accepted as fully deserved.
"That," he announced, rotating his shoulder carefully and finding it functional, "is how legends are born."
They moved on after that, carrying the warmth of the ring's laughter with them as the night deepened by degrees around them — the sky above the rooftops now fully dark, the stars beginning to assert themselves in the spaces between lantern glow and drifting light.
At some point — gradually, without announcement — Imius slowed his pace. The performance thinned in his voice, the layer of cheerful motion settling into something quieter, more unguarded. He pointed upward, toward the lanterns that had drifted higher now as the night cooled, rising on warm currents until they were small, dissolving points of gold at the edge of visibility, barely distinguishable from the stars beginning to populate the dark above them.
"My mom used to bring me here," he said. The words came out with the particular quality of something kept at a comfortable distance for a long time, brought forward carefully, held out without insisting it be taken. "Said if you let yourself have one good night a year, the rest doesn't hit as hard."
Nocth listened. He offered no filler, no reflexive comfort, no sound that would suggest he was simply waiting for the space where his own words could go. He listened the way the stone plaza had held its quiet — with presence rather than performance.
"I don't know where you came from," Imius added, his eyes still following the rising lanterns rather than turning toward Nocth, giving the words and the person receiving them the privacy of not being watched while they landed. "But I'm glad you're here."
Nocth stopped walking.
The crowd moved around him and Imius turned, finding him still, and his expression shifted — confusion arriving first, soft and genuine, without any of the usual armor of wit or deflection.
"What?"
For a moment, Nocth didn't answer. The words Imius had offered pressed against something interior — something deep and unresolved, something that had not yet been given a shape or a name or a location within him, but that had been present since before he knew how to acknowledge it. The pressure of the words against that unnamed place was not painful. It was the specific, fragile tenderness of a bruise being gently touched.
"I don't know either," he said finally. The sentence was small. It held everything it needed to.
Imius smiled — not the broad, performing smile of a person entertaining a crowd, but something smaller and altogether more real. Softer at its edges. The smile of a person who has said something true and been met with something equally true, and found the exchange sufficient. "Then we'll figure it out later," he said.
They walked on together beneath the fading lanterns, two silhouettes moving at the unhurried pace of people with nowhere more important to be, as the festival continued its breathing around them and because of them — the night holding them gently, without condition, in the amber warmth of one good evening against which, perhaps, the rest might hit a little less hard.