The ceremony continued...

The arguments over Luna’s personal jurisdiction advanced with the complexity they deserved, each faction pressing its interpretation of the territorial structure, each claim requiring its own verification against the record, the session moving forward with the people who were fighting over something real valuable and knew it.

But several of those present had started glancing toward the door with a frequency that increased as the session moved toward the recognition phase.

On Luna’s side of the hall, the accumulated tension was visible in small ways, the set of Larissa’s posture, the direction of Liora’s attention.

Julius followed the session with the focus of someone for whom every remaining minute had a higher value but still was running down.

The recognition phase arrived anyway...

"The session proceeds to the conferral of recognitions for the fifth academic year," announced the master of ceremonies. "First-place finisher: tamer Ren Patinder."

Nobody walked to the podium.

The door didn’t open.

Ten seconds.

Orion shifted forward in his seat, just enough, just at the moment when the wait had become slightly uncomfortable. Not a dramatic movement. The small, deliberate adjustment of someone who has been patient and is choosing now to let that patience show its teeth.

"You see," he said. "You see how this works."

"The protocol establishes a one-minute waiting period," said Julius.

"The protocol establishes many things that you apply when convenient." Orion directed it at the hall, not at Julius. "If he doesn’t appear, I formally request that my objection to the conferral of recognitions in his absence be entered into the record... That it be noted."

"Noted," said the master of ceremonies, because that was what he was required to say.

Twenty seconds.

Liora stopped looking toward the point at the far end of the hall she had been watching since the session began. She looked at her hands instead. Something in the shift was visible to anyone paying attention, the particular quality of someone who has been waiting for something and has stopped believing it will arrive in time.

"He’s gone, isn’t he," said Orion, low enough that it reached only those nearby but clear enough that it carried to all of them. "You’re waiting for him to appear by some miracle. Waiting for the experiment to come back in time to silence the questions nobody wants to answer."

"Enough," said Arturo.

Thirty seconds.

Julius didn’t change his expression. But something in his posture adjusted, a small, involuntary shift that someone watching closely would have read as a calculation not producing the expected result. The kind of tell that only appeared when there was nothing left to do except wait, and waiting wasn’t working.

The master of ceremonies opened his mouth to announce the representation-in-absence procedure.

Time was over.

♢♢♢♢

Luna had stopped listening to the debate some time ago.

She was following it, in the technical sense, the arguments reached her ears and she processed them with enough attention to know whether Julius or Arturo needed anything from her. Larissa had been passing ideas in a very low voice throughout the last hour, and those ideas had entered the debate obliquely, through the right mouths, without either of the two men having to break protocol directly.

But most of Luna was somewhere else entirely. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

’This is my fault.’

Not all of it, she knew that perfectly well... But enough of it that the difference mattered.

Ren had been carrying things that were hers, situations she had placed on his shoulders assuming they would be strong and available because they had always been strong and available, without asking herself what it cost him to keep them that way...

Without asking how much he had already been holding before she arrived with her own story and added it to the pile.

And now he was asleep in a hidden position somewhere in this hall that she couldn’t look at directly without the guilt showing, while the man she had once called her uncle, a title that already felt wrong in her mouth, that she had stopped applying inside her own head, built arguments across the room for taking what Ren had earned with his own effort. And she was standing here in archaic protocol waiting for someone else to resolve things.

’No.’

She had believed she needed Ren for this. That without him there was no way for things to end well, no way to do anything worth doing. That thought had settled into her as though it were a fact at some point, without her ever consciously deciding to let it.

But Ren had nothing to do with her situation. He had his own weight, the corruption, the battles, the things he was trying to protect everyone from simultaneously, his own exhaustion that nobody except her and her two most beloved allies had seen close enough to understand.

The image of him coming apart in the embrace after the most intense fight of his life, the honest face of someone who had been carrying too much for too long and had finally reached a place where they could stop... that image again made her feel something she didn’t have a clean word for. Not quite only guilt... And heavier than guilt.

’Don’t wake him. You don’t need him for this... This one is yours.’

What Orion had in his possession was her mother’s light crystal, among six others.

That was what mattered. That was the first thing to secure, not Ren’s lands, not Ren’s titles, not Ren’s prizes, which Julius and Arturo were defending well enough without her input.

The crystal was something else...

If she recovered it, Orion lost the most powerful element of his barrier. If she recovered it, her mother stopped being consumed every time her uncle decided to use her as a weapon.

No, not uncle...

’Orion is not my family!’

Even thinking the word uncle felt wrong now. It had always felt slightly uncomfortable somehow, but she had carried the framework because it was the framework available to her, because dismantling it required knowing things she hadn’t been aware of.

She was very aware now.