Lord Summoner's Freedom Philosophy: Grimoire of Love-Chapter 513: Children of Flesh and Shade (3)

"Two hundred stones here, three hundred there—you’ll bankrupt us," he teased Lyan. Yet his eyes lingered on a field medic binding a child’s ankle with strips torn from her own apron.

"Strange," he said a moment later, voice quieter. "How fast folk remember life. Like war was a fever dream." He nudged a broken door aside so a pair of nurses could push a stretcher through.

They came upon a schoolhouse—walls pockmarked, roof half-collapsed. Once it had rung bells at dawn to summon children for loyalty chants to the Serpent Throne. Now those bells lay twisted on the ground, serving bowls ladling stew for the wounded. The hallways echoed with coughs, not anthems. A dozen pallet beds lined the cracked flagstones, their occupants swathed in linen dark with antiseptic herbs.

Erich swung down first, shoulders rolling under the thin tunic. He produced a water skin and crouched by a limping old man waiting his turn at the healers’ triage. "Easy, grand-sage," the prince said with a grin too gentle for politics. He tipped water slowly, wiping dribbles from the man’s chin. The old fellow blinked, eyes filmy, then broke into a gap-toothed smile.

"Thought you’d be taller," he rasped.

Arnold snorted. "He gets that a lot."

Lyan chuckled beneath his breath, though the sound snagged on his next inhale when he saw a healer pressing cloth to a soldier’s side—Serpent livery hastily stripped, the man too feverish to care. Lyan recognized him: one of the conscripts who had surrendered at the north gate, barely nineteen, eyes the color of spring leaves. An Astellian bandage now wrapped the wound where an Astellian bolt had struck. The war had ended for him in confusion and blood; it might not end at all.

Beyond the triage pallets, a noblewoman swept ash from the marble steps of her tenement—her silk gown ragged, but posture unbroken. When she noticed the approaching riders, she paused. With hands that still trembled, she lifted a single apple from a chipped silver tray and offered it to Erich as though presenting a crown jewel. He bowed, took the fruit, then passed it into the waiting hands of a little girl who clutched a splintered doll. The girl’s eyes widened; she curtsied, the motion awkward around scraped knees.

They walked their horses the rest of the block, reins looped over forearms. Slag still cooled in gutters where Alchemist grenades had burst. Each step crunched glass and bone fragments too small to separate. Lyan’s gaze remained vigilant, noting every unstable façade, every hiss of escaping mana from cracked sigil lamps. His mind overlaid routes for supply carts, safe wells for water stations, proximity of still-standing granaries. Strategy never slept.

A streak of color on a low wall caught his eye: chalk lines—pink, yellow, blue—scrawled by a child’s unsteady hand. Lightning forks, a towering silhouette, a serpent with cross-hatched X’s for eyes. Curiosity tugged. He dismounted, boots crunching rubble, and knelt beside the artist—no more than seven summers old, cheeks smudged grey.

"That me?" Lyan asked, pointing at the broad-shouldered stick figure with crackling wings.

The boy looked up through a tangle of soot-clumped curls and nodded, solemn. "You had wings made of lightning," he said, as if describing a simple fact. "You flew. You burned the snake."

Erich crouched too, giving the boy a conspiratorial wink. "He came from the sky, didn’t he?"

The child nodded again, little jaw set. "He came with thunder," he whispered, as though thunder itself might answer.

Something tight inside Lyan eased then—not relief exactly, but a loosening of a knot he hadn’t realized strangled his chest. He ruffled the boy’s hair lightly. "Thank you," he said. The boy beamed, exposing one missing front tooth.

Later they shared coarse barley bread on a broken retaining wall, the dust rising in slow eddies with each gust. Arnold broke pieces as though rationing for winter, handing chunks around. The bread tasted of old yeast and smoke, but it filled hollow bellies. A gaggle of workers across the square hoisted stones with rope pulleys, laughing between curses when a pulley jammed. Laughter—real, human, raw—buoyed the air.

"Strange, isn’t it?" Arnold said, picking at his crust with the same slow patience he used to dress an arrow wound. Each flake of bread he flicked aside caught an edge of sunlight, drifting down like pale embers. "How fast people hunt for normal once the swords go quiet. War feels like a fever dream they’re already half-forgetting."

Erich leaned both elbows on his knees, chewing thoughtfully. His gaze never left the street where laborers braced a cracked beam against the shell of a townhouse. The workers’ laughter reached them in uneven bursts—jokes shared to drown out the splinter of wood, the grunt of effort, the occasional cry when a brick tumbled wrong. "They look to us now," he said, voice low enough that dust nearly swallowed it. "They’ll praise us tonight. But they’ll blame us next week. That’s what peace does—gives people time to blame."

Lyan let the stale crust soften on his tongue, counting the pulse in his throat as if steady metronome could keep guilt from crowding in. The chalk drawing lingered behind his eyes—himself rendered as a thunderwinged giant, larger than crowns, larger than consequences. The boy saw a storm, not a man, he thought. What happens when the storm clears and a man is all that’s left? He swallowed rye and ash. "As long as they have time," he answered, "I’ll take the weight."

Hammers rang somewhere in the distance—one, two, three—steady like a blacksmith mending the city’s broken bones. Another answered farther off, uneven but determined. The sound echoed over roofs stripped to skeleton rafters, over alleys still coughing tendrils of smoke. It felt like a second heartbeat layered beneath his own.

Erich stood, brushing crumbs from his knees. "Come on, you two. If we take any longer brooding, Wilhelmina will conscript a new wall out of us." He swung into the saddle and let the reins sag so his horse could pick its path around cratered cobbles.

They started down the slope, hooves crunching charred debris. Above the triage tent a cracked bell swayed in the lazy breeze—its clapper gone, throat empty. Once it had called children to memorize loyalty chants. Now it watched those same halls shelter groaning soldiers and mothers nursing infants too shell-shocked to cry.

A gust lifted soot into faint swirls. Lyan’s eyes burned; he blinked hard, half from ash, half from the sight of the school that had traded dogma for bandages. The chalkboards leaned against the walls, still chalked with arithmetic left unfinished mid-lesson. A healer had scribbled new sums between them—morphine doses, fever counts, the tallies of life and loss.

Erich dismounted outside the doorway, joints creaking like old hinges. He knelt to a limping veteran whose boot flopped around a swollen ankle. Wordlessly he offered a dented water skin. The old man drank in slow gulps, throat moving with grateful effort, then lowered it. His mouth twisted into a familiar mischief that looked borrowed from decades ago. "Thought you’d be taller," he rasped, wiping spillage with the back of a shaky hand.

Arnold barked a laugh behind them. "He gets that a lot," the big man said, thumping his chest in greeting. The old soldier’s chuckle dissolved into a cough, but the humor stayed bright in his watery eyes.

A noblewoman across the lane paused mid-sweep, grey silk skirts dulled by ash. Her broom bristles scratched stone in slow, tired arcs. When she saw Erich, she straightened—not regal, merely polite—and produced a single red-gold apple from the fold of her sleeve. A treasure here. She held it out with both hands, head bowed. Erich accepted as though receiving a crown, then turned and crouched to the height of a small girl clutching a splintered doll. The doll wore a dress ink-stained with road tar, one porcelain arm missing. Erich placed the apple in her free hand. Her eyes widened—two lanterns in a sooty face—then flicked to her mother. Permission granted, she cradled the fruit like fragile glass.

They pressed on, leading their horses now—too many jagged stones, too many places where a misstep could snap a fetlock. Every few strides a new tableau unfolded, demanding attention. Two bakers kneaded dough on a salvaged door laid across crates, flour dusting their hair like first snow. A bookseller stacked volumes warped by water, pages peeling back like wilted petals. A boy no older than ten hammered nails into a half-built coop, muttering the rhythm of a shanty his father had sung. Three lanes over, a barber set a cracked mirror on a barrel and trimmed a farmer’s beard with shears salvaged from a surgeon’s kit.

"Strange how resilient hope is," Lyan murmured. "It’s like weeds in paving stones. You torch it and it just sprouts between new cracks."

Arnold sniffed, half amusement, half sadness. "Hope and weeds feed on the same dirt, friend. That’s why both keep coming back."

They turned a corner and almost missed the chalk marks at ankle height. Only Lyan’s habitual scanning caught the streaks—pinks, yellows, blues scribbled on a section of soot-black wall. He tugged his reins and crouched. The boy’s tongue poked from one corner of his mouth as he added purple sparks to the wings of the drawn hero. Chalk dust smudged his cheeks, but his strokes were careful, reverent.

"That me?" Lyan asked gently, earning a scuff of embarrassment in the dust as the boy pivoted wide-eyed. The child nodded once, curls bobbing.

"You had wings made of lightning," the boy said matter-of-fact, like reciting geography. "You flew. You burned the snake."

Thunder god. The title settled on Lyan’s shoulders like armor made of stories instead of steel. Too heavy, yet somehow right that a child would believe in impossible wings.

Erich crouched, boots creaking. "He came from the sky, didn’t he?"

Another solemn nod. "He came with thunder," the boy whispered, then offered Lyan a stub of yellow chalk as if gifting him a piece of sunrise. Lyan accepted, pressing it into a pouch once meant for coins. I’ll keep that, he thought, prove tomorrow that today existed.

They shared bread later on a toppled retaining wall, stones still warm where yesterday’s fire had licked them. Wind tugged at Lyan’s char-stained cloak, lifting the hem so it snapped, then fell. Arnold rationed the loaf with a quartermaster’s precision, passing thick hand-torn hunks along. He teased about how Lyan would lose his intimidating aura if he starved to a scarecrow frame.

As they ate, workers across the square wrestled a cracked lintel back into place. Two lost their grip and the stone thudded, sending a puff of dust high as a flag. Laughter erupted—tired, genuine. Someone made a joke about building houses for ghosts. A second attempt raised the beam higher; this time it held. Cheers spilled across the debris field like water escaping a broken dam.

Arnold twisted a crust between thumb and forefinger, gaze distant. "Strange, isn’t it? How fast people learn to live again."

Erich’s eyes followed a young couple carrying salvaged planks; even with bandaged arms they stole a kiss behind the shattered archway. He breathed out, slow and heavy. "They look to us now," he repeated, "but they’ll blame us next week. That’s what peace does. Gives people time to blame."

Lyan pictured council chambers yet to convene, scrolls yet to accuse, heirs yet to claim injustice for fathers who fled at dawn. His jaw tightened. The bread felt heavier on his tongue. "As long as they have time," he answered, soft but firm, "I’ll take the weight."

He meant it—Carrying blame was easier than carrying more bodies.

The three men stood, brushing crumbs away. Some scattered into wind, joining the omnipresent ash. Others caught on charred beams and stayed—a promise that bread, too, could find new roots in ruined soil.

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