The moonlight was generous tonight, spreading across the garden in soft silver that caught the edges of leaves and the tops of hedges and the quiet outline of a small boy sitting beneath a tree reading as if this were a completely ordinary thing to be doing at this hour.
Yong Hae Shi looked at him for a moment.
Then he looked at Ruth.
Ruth looked back.
"...This kid," Ruth said flatly.
"I know," Yong replied.
Neither of them moved and Fainyx turned another page without looking up.
Yong scratched the back of his head and stepped forward, stopping a few feet away and crouching down to Fainyx's eye level with his hands still in his pockets and his head tilted slightly to one side. "So," he said, keeping his tone light, "Are you always this calm when strangers appear in your garden at midnight?"
Fainyx closed the book.
He looked at Yong for a moment and then reached into his sleeve and pulled out his notebook and pen, wrote something, and held it up.
[ Only when I already know they're coming. ]
Yong blinked. Then laughed, short and genuine. "Fair enough."
Ruth stepped forward as well, stopping slightly behind Yong. Even in human form his presence carried weight, that particular quality of something ancient and unhurried that had nothing to do with how he was standing and everything to do with what he was. His golden eyes settled on Fainyx with open unblinking curiosity and didn't move.
Fainyx noticed immediately.
That mana. Dense and layered and structured in a way that felt nothing like any human mana he had encountered, not wrong exactly, just completely different from anything this world had produced. He kept his face neutral and his grip on the pen tightened just slightly.
A dragon.
Yong gestured loosely. "Introductions first, I think." He pointed to himself. "Yong Hae Shi. You already know that." Then he tilted his head toward Ruth.
Ruth exhaled once through his nose as if introductions were slightly beneath him but spoke anyway. "...Rutherio Alexander Eixthr." A pause, and then with clear reluctance, "...He calls me Ruth."
"Because it's easier," Yong said pleasantly.
"Because he is lazy."
"Same thing."
Fainyx observed this exchange in silence with an expression that revealed nothing and an internal reaction that was something along the lines of they're always like this? He looked down at his notebook and wrote.
[ Fainyx Von Nocte. ]
Yong read it and repeated the name slowly as if tasting it. "Hoh the son of Duke Nocte. That's a big house."
Ruth's golden eyes hadn't moved from Fainyx. "Hm..." he then said simply. "It's my first time hearing about a third son... It's like your hidden away. Not recognized publicly." It wasn't a question.
Fainyx's pen didn't move. He simply looked at Ruth and Ruth looked back and neither of them looked away for a moment.
Yong watched this with mild interest and then leaned forward slightly. "Different question. How old are you?"
Fainyx wrote.
[ Three. ]
Yong stared at the paper. Then at Fainyx. Then back at the paper.
"...Three."
"Three," Ruth echoed from behind in a tone that was completely flat.
A brief silence settled and Yong exhaled. "Right." He didn't say anything else about that, which was the wisest decision he had made all evening.
Ruth crouched now, closer than Yong, his golden eyes settling on Fainyx with that same focused attention. "You sensed the spell."
Not a question.
[ Yes. ]
"...And you didn't remove it."
[ It wasn't hostile. ]
Ruth stared at him for a moment and then let out a quiet sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite anything else, somewhere in the territory of reluctant acknowledgment. "...Hah."
"He likes you," Yong said to Fainyx, completely serious.
"I don't like anyone," Ruth said immediately.
"He tolerates you."
"...Barely."
Fainyx watched them and noticed something about the way they moved through this kind of exchange, easy and automatic, the particular rhythm of two people who had been in each other's company long enough that disagreements required no real effort from either side.
Yong dropped onto the grass cross-legged without any embarrassment about it and settled in comfortably. "So, Fainyx. What were you reading?"
Fainyx glanced at the book beside him and wrote.
[ It's some book about mana theory. ]
Yong looked at the cover and was quiet for a second. "...At three years old." He said it more to himself than anyone.
Fainyx looked between them and wrote.
[ You were talking about me before tonight. ]
It wasn't an accusation. Just an observation, offered the same way he offered most things, directly and without particular feeling attached to it.
Yong met his eyes. "Yeah," he said easily. "I was." No deflection, no redirection, just honesty offered without ceremony the way he seemed to offer most things.
Fainyx studied him.
This man didn't speak like nobility and didn't carry himself like a scholar or a soldier. His speech was too casual, too unguarded for anyone who had grown up in a world where every word in front of the wrong person carried consequences. His food had been unlike anything from this region. And his mana had been the first thing Fainyx noticed when he sat down at the restaurant, deep and dense and structured according to rules that didn't match this world's system at all, not wrong, just different in the specific way that things from somewhere else were different.
He wrote one more line.
[ Why me specifically? There are stronger people in that mansion or in other places. ]
Yong read it and was quiet for a moment and then smiled, not the easy surface smile but something underneath it that was more genuine and more considered. "...Because the stronger ones weren't interesting." He tilted his head. "You were."
The garden went quiet around them. Wind moved through the trees and somewhere distant a night bird called once and fell silent and Fainyx looked down at his notebook and thought about the man sitting cross-legged on the grass in front of him who ran a restaurant and traveled with a dragon and left tracking spells on three year old children purely out of curiosity and sat in garden dirt at midnight without a second thought about it.
'What exactly are you.'
He kept that to himself.
Ruth glanced briefly at the sky. "...It's late."
"I know."
"The child should sleep."
"I know that too."
"He's fine," Yong said, looking at Fainyx. "He chose to be here."
Ruth looked at Fainyx as well and then after a moment gave a small quiet nod, the kind that didn't need anything attached to it to mean something.
This one is different.
The night continued around them, unhurried and undemanding, and the three of them stayed beneath the moonlight without any particular urgency and Fainyx thought that whatever this was it had the feeling of something that was just beginning rather than something that was already finished.
He kept his notebook open on his knee and waited to see what came next.