The journey home was long, and by the time the carriage finally rolled to a stop in front of the house, the familiar sight of it was enough to make the exhaustion of the last week and a half settle all at once into everyone's shoulders simultaneously.
They filed inside. The house was exactly as they had left it — untouched, unhurried, carrying the particular stillness of a place that has been waiting patiently and has no complaints about it.
Aniya crossed the room and dropped onto the couch with the full and unashamed commitment of someone who has earned it. Elia, as always, moved with quiet composure to the dinner table and sat as though she had simply chosen to be there rather than collapsed into it. Leom drifted somewhere deeper into the house, already half somewhere else in his mind.
Ivel stood in the middle of the room and looked at his sword.
The katana that Aldrius had made him — sharp and clean and perfectly balanced when he had first buckled it on — was a ruin. The edge was chipped along its entire length, the blade worn down by everything it had been put through over the last several days. It had served him well. It had served him past the point where most weapons would have given up entirely. But it was done now, and looking at it felt like looking at something that deserved better than what he had put it through.
He set it down and stood up.
"I'm heading into town. I'll see you all in a bit."
He was out the door before anyone had fully processed the sentence.
"Already," Aniya said, to the space he had been standing in.
She did not get up.
He moved through town quickly, keeping his head down and his pace steady, navigating the familiar streets by instinct while avoiding the gazes that followed him the way they always did. He had learned long ago that eye contact with the villagers was an invitation to something he didn't have the patience for.
He knocked on Aldrius's door — properly this time, with a reasonable amount of force at a reasonable hour.
The door opened. Aldrius looked down at him with the expression of a man who had been mid-swing when the knock came and was reserving judgment about the interruption.
"Ah. The little one." He stepped aside. "Come in."
The heat of the shop wrapped around Ivel the moment he crossed the threshold — immediate and total, the forge doing what it always did, turning the interior into something closer to the inside of a furnace than a room. He had stopped noticing how much he missed the outside air until he was back inside it.
"What can I do for you today?"
Ivel reached back and drew the sword.
He held it out.
Aldrius looked at it. His mouth opened. A long moment passed in which he appeared to be choosing between several possible responses.
"What in the world were you fighting, boy?"
Ivel scratched the back of his head.
"Well — there was a tournament. Against some other young fighters, as it turned out. Royals, mostly. They were reasonably strong."
Aldrius pressed his palm to his face and held it there.
"And?" he said, from behind his hand.
Ivel blinked.
"And what?"
Aldrius lowered his hand and looked at him directly.
"Did you win?"
"Of course I did." Ivel paused, then added, with the particular generosity of someone offering a concession they consider quite significant: "And for what it's worth — if it wasn't for your sword, I would have had considerably more trouble."
Aldrius stared at him for a moment.
Then he laughed — a short, disbelieving sound — and shook his head.
"Well. At least it didn't go to waste." He picked up his hammer and turned back toward the forge. "What are you thinking for the next one?"
"I wasn't thinking about just one, actually."
Aldrius looked back at him.
"A sword and a dagger," Ivel said. "If you can manage both."
"Easily. Any specific requests?"
Ivel thought about it for a moment.
"Just make them stronger than last time."
He turned and walked out.
Aldrius watched the door swing shut behind him.
"Little brat," he said.
He set the ruined sword aside and reached for his tools.
Ivel went home, passed through the house without stopping, and followed the familiar path down to the cliff above the shore.
He sat on the edge with his legs hanging over the drop, the ocean spread out below him in every direction, the wind coming in cool and salt-heavy the way it always did. The eye opened at his shoulder without being asked and settled there, its gaze moving slowly across the water.
"The Isles of Rom," he said, to no one in particular.
He laughed quietly at the sound of it.
"Is it really the right choice." He turned the question over without urgency. "Am I actually strong enough for that?"
A beat.
"I'm still genesis. Not even enlightened or ascended made it back from that place."
He glanced at the eye on his shoulder.
"What do you think?"
The eye looked at the ocean. Then it looked at him — with the particular expression it always seemed to produce when he asked it things, somewhere between patience and mild irritation.
"Right," he said. "No mouth. My mistake."
He turned back to the water.
He extended his perception through the eye, pushing it outward across the ocean's surface — and felt it stop. Somewhere out past the visible distance, his sight simply ended, as though the world had a wall built across it at a certain point, beyond which nothing could be observed or even approached. He had felt it before. He had never been able to account for it.
"I've never been out there," he said quietly. "Well." He paused. "I have. But I don't think it was a pleasant experience."
The wind moved. The water shifted below him in long, slow rolls.
He had never spent much time thinking about where he came from — Ardan, most likely, or somewhere above it on a boat his parents had fled from before he was old enough to know anything about anything. They had died the day he was born, or near enough to it that the difference didn't matter. He had never known their faces. He had never expected to. But sometimes, sitting here with the ocean in front of him and the barrier at the edge of his sight, he found himself wanting one small thing.
Not their faces. Not their story.
Just a name.
One of their names.
He exhaled and let the thought settle without resolution, the way he always did.
"I'll get to Ardan one day," he said. "The Isles of Rom are near there either way."
He looked out at the point where his vision stopped and the unknown began.
"I really need a map."