Liona said nothing.

Her silver eyes had gone cold the moment Celestia had casually mentioned what she’d overheard from the balcony, the part about Azael, about seducing the Empress, about the whole ridiculous exchange between him and Lucas.

The temperature of her gaze dropped several degrees.

Celestia noticed. Of course she noticed it clearly.

She pressed her lips together, trying and failing to hold back what came next.

She laughed.

It was not a polite, but a genuine one, bright, the kind that rarely escaped a woman of her composure. She set her wine glass down before she spilled it.

"Oh, don’t look at me like that," she said, waving a hand. "I’m not interested in him. Not in the way you’re clearly imagining." Her blue eyes were bright with amusement. "Relax, Liona."

Liona’s expression didn’t soften.

"I am relaxed," she said flatly.

"You look like you’re deciding where to bury someone."

"I’m deciding nothing."

"Mm." Celestia tilted her head, studying her with undisguised interest. "You know, I’ve known you for a long time. Longer than most people are even aware you exist. And in all that time..." she paused for effect, "I have never once seen you react to another person the way you react to that boy’s name."

"I don’t react," Liona said.

"You went cold the second I mentioned what he said on the balcony."

"I went cold because it was a foolish conversation."

"You went cold," Celestia said pleasantly, "because the idea of him saying he’d seduce me bothered you. Even as a joke." She leaned forward slightly in her chair. "Didn’t it?"

Silence.

Liona looked at the window.

Celestia smiled.

"I can help you, you know," she said, her voice dropping into something warmer and more deliberate. "If you want to get closer to him. Genuinely closer." A pause. "Very close, if that’s what you want. Like a lover. "

The red color that moved across Liona’s cheeks was subtle but unmistakable.

For a woman with silver eyes and centuries of composure behind her, it was remarkable.

Celestia stared at her.

Then her expression broke entirely.

"Liona," she said, with pure delight. "Are you blushing?"

"No."

"You are." Celestia pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment, shoulders shaking.

"You are actually blushing. You, the witch who made three warlords disappear without leaving a trace are sitting in my chair with pink cheeks because I mentioned getting close to a young man."

"I am not—!!"

"Like a maiden," Celestia said, with great wonder. "Exactly like a maiden. I didn’t think I’d live to see this."

"Shut up," Liona said sharply.

"I don’t think I will." Celestia reached for her wine again, thoroughly enjoying herself. "This is the most entertaining thing that has happened to me in months. Possibly years."

"Celestia."

"Yes?"

"Stop."

"I’ll stop when it stops being funny." She sipped her wine. "Which won’t be for a while yet, so you may as well settle in."

Liona pressed her lips into a thin line and stared very hard at the opposite wall.

Celestia watched her for a moment longer, still smiling, then let the laughter ease into something gentler. She set her glass down and folded her hands in her lap.

"I mean it though," she said. "The offer is real. I can help you. I have ways of arranging things situations, circumstances, proximity, that would give you time with him naturally. Without it being strange." She paused.

"You’ve been watching from a distance for long enough, haven’t you?"

Liona didn’t answer immediately.

That itself was an answer.

"He’s going to the academy," Celestia continued, her tone practical now. "He’ll be in the capital for extended periods. You don’t have to stay in that little shop in Elaris forever, you know."

"I like Elaris," Liona said.

"You like being near him," Celestia said simply. "Which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it." She tilted her head. "But there are better ways to be near someone than lurking at the edges of their life and pretending you’re not paying attention."

Another silence.

Liona’s jaw moved slightly.

"...What do you want in return," she said at last.

"Information," Celestia said. "About the Obsidian Hand. You’ve been in Elaris. You’ve been watching. You know more about their movements in that city than anyone I have access to." She looked at Liona steadily. "Tell me what you know. That’s all I’m asking."

Liona considered this for a moment.

Then she began to speak.

She kept it measured and precise — the way she did everything. The Obsidian Hand had been establishing a quiet presence in Elaris for longer than anyone in the Ignivar household had realized.

Small operations at first. Supply routes. Contacts embedded in the lower merchant districts. They were careful and patient, which made them more dangerous than the organizations that moved loudly. She had been tracking the threads for months, pulling at them carefully, documenting what connected to what.

Celestia listened without interrupting. Her expression had shifted entirely, no more amusement, just focused attention, the face of a ruler processing intelligence.

When Liona finished, Celestia was quiet for a moment.

"And the purple fire," she said. "The incident a few days ago. The masked figure."

Liona’s expression stayed neutral.

"I don’t know anything about that," she said. "I don’t know who it was."

Celestia looked at her.

Long enough that most people would have filled the silence with something. Liona didn’t.

Celestia knew she was lying.

She also knew that pressing Liona on something she had decided to protect was like pressing a wall, it didn’t move.

She let it go.

"Alright," she said simply. She rose from her chair, smoothing her nightgown with one easy gesture. "Then we’re done for tonight." She glanced at Liona with that small, knowing curve at the corner of her mouth. "I’ll keep my end. Go back to your shop."

Liona stood.

She gave a single, short nod.

Then the mana shifted in the room, a brief and barely perceptible ripple.

And she was gone.

Celestia stood alone in her chamber.

The fire crackled. The city lights glimmered through the window.

She picked up her wine glass, looked at the empty chair across from her, and smiled to herself, genuine.

"I thought she had gone back to Elaris," she murmured to no one in particular, her voice light with private amusement.

She glanced toward the general direction of the guest wing.

"But I don’t think she did."

She took a slow sip.

"Not yet."

---

Azael’s guest room was still and dark.

The fire in the hearth had burned down to a low, comfortable glow, casting soft amber light across the ceiling and the far wall. The curtains were half drawn. The room was quiet in the deep, settled way of a space that had been undisturbed for some time.

Azael lay on the large bed in casual clothes a simple shirt and trousers, nothing formal, one arm resting across his stomach, his breathing slow and even. He had fallen asleep without much effort in the end, the long and eventful day pulling him under quickly.

He didn’t hear the air in the room change.

He didn’t feel the subtle shift in mana.

A figure appeared at the foot of the bed.

Liona stood completely still for a moment, her violet hair falling forward over one shoulder as she looked down at him. Her silver eyes moved over his face, taking in the details that she didn’t usually allow herself to look at so openly.

In sleep, he looked younger. The composed, easy confidence he wore during the day had softened into something unguarded and genuinely peaceful. His features were relaxed. His breathing was quiet.

Her chest did something she didn’t fully have a name for.

Warmth and something that had been building for a long time and had no clean resolution.

Her cheeks, which she had managed to cool considerably in the time between Celestia’s chamber and here, betrayed her again immediately.

She pressed her lips together.

’This is ridiculous,’ she told herself.

She stood there for another moment anyway.

Then, slowly and carefully, she climbed onto the far edge of the bed. The mattress shifted imperceptibly beneath her, she controlled it with a thread of mana, making sure her weight registered as little as possible. She settled beside him, lying on her side, close but not touching.

She looked at his face from this distance.

Up close, the details were different. The line of his jaw. The way his lashes rested against his skin. The quiet rise and fall of his chest.

"How can you look this calm," she murmured, so quietly it was barely sound at all. "After everything you have done to me."

A faint smile touched her lips.

"Ridiculous," she said. To him. To herself.

She raised her hand slowly.

Her fingers hovered over his cheek, a hair’s breadth away from contact.

She stopped.

Pulled her hand back. Put it forward again, slower.

Stopped again.

Her heart was doing something genuinely undignified for a woman of her age and power and she was fully aware of that and it was not helping.

She exhaled very quietly through her nose.

Then she made a decision.

Her fingers moved through a small, precise pattern barely a gesture, more like a thought made physical. A magic circle bloomed in the air above him, thin and luminous, rotating slowly before dissolving into him without a sound.

A sleeping spell. A deep one. It was something that settled over a person like a second blanket and held them under regardless of what happened around them. He would not wake for hours. Nothing would disturb him.

She watched the spell settle.

Then, with considerably more ease than before, she reached out and touched his cheek.

Her fingertips made contact light and careful.

His skin was warm. She had expected that, but it still registered as something distinct, something worth noting.

Her own hands ran cold most of the time, the natural result of the kind of magic she practiced, and the contrast was immediate.

She let her palm rest against his cheek fully.

Something in her chest unwound by a small and significant degree.

She stayed like that for a moment, just her hand against his face, not moving, not thinking about anything in particular.

Then her fingers moved slowly, lightly brushing across his cheekbone. Following the line of it.

Moving to his hair briefly, tucking a strand back from his forehead the way she had seen him do for Arista in the garden, which she had watched from a distance and not admitted to watching.

"You have no idea," she murmured, very quietly, "how much trouble you are."

He slept on, entirely peacefully, completely unbothered.

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then she lowered her hand and settled into the pillow beside him not close enough to touch, but close enough that the warmth reached her.

Her silver eyes stayed open for a while, fixed on the low glow of the hearth across the room.

Eventually, without quite deciding to, they closed.

Her huge figure lay beside him. Even though Azael was kind of tall he was nothing in front of her.

And Liona, the witch who had made powerful men disappear without leaving a trace, who had walked through centuries without letting anyone within arm’s reach, lay beside a sleeping young man in a palace guest room.

And her expression, for the first time in a very long time, was completely at peace.