Chapter 40: The Branch
Oathran and Arkai stood before the tent, two of the most formidable beings on the continent, looking at each other with the shared awkwardness of schoolboys who had just been tossed out of the library by a very strict, very small librarian.
Ah... mutual defeat. Only Cecilia Araceli could shoo them away like they were a scolded puppy and a sunning lizard.
Arkai cleared his throat, the ’formal lord’ in him reasserting itself over ’the eavesdropper’. He placed a hand over his chest and bowed. "Your Majesty... again, thank you for saving ."
Oathran waved a hand, his smile kind. "As you know now, I would’ve died if not for her too. So, all that gratitude should solely be for her."
Arkai nodded, accepting the truth of it, but still thankful to him nonetheless. Then, his brow furrowed as he rembered a specific mory. "Could it be... at that ti...?"
Oathran raised his eyebrows. He gave a solemn nod. "Yes. At that ti."
The morning Arkai had led his pack across the river and seen Cecilia alone by her fire. He had sensed the powerful, complex scent clinging to her. Oathran’s scent. The pieces clicked.
She hadn’t been on a leisurely camping trip. She had been in the aftermath of a catastrophe, her heart freshly torn from her chest, and the Dragon Lord had been there, in the dirt beside her.
"I was laying close by when Saintess Cecilia had her heart ripped out," Oathran confird, his voice low. "It was... quite the destiny."
"I see," Arkai murmured. "Which snowballed into my rescue too." His survival was a direct byproduct of that.
Both n stood in agreent with the conclusion, that Ruby’s prophecy of his death would have been true in a world where that particular snowball had never begun to roll.
"Ah!" Oathran suddenly flinched, a spark of intellectual lightning striking him. His grey eyes widened. "Wait, if my eting with Saintess Cecilia was snowballed from an earlier event, then—"
A new branch of the temporal mystery! He turned on his heel, intent on bursting back into the tent to share this revolutionary thought, to add his piece to the grand deduction.
His hand had barely hovered over the tent flap when a voice from within stopped him dead, freezing him in a posture of awkward mid-intrusion.
"Yes, Oathran, I’m already there. Don’t co in."
Her voice was... perhaps the verbal equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper. Firm... flat... a bit... threatening...
Oathran’s hand hung in the air. His whole body was locked in an awkward, eager lunge. Behind him, Arkai’s tail, which had begun to wag in excitent, froze mid-swish.
"Ahem..."
Oathran slowly straightened his posture, smoothing the front of his tunic, fooling the universe that he had ant to strike that pose all along. Arkai mimicked the movent, attempting to look as if they were simply two lords engaged in a stately discussion about the weather.
Not at all two overeager geniuses who had just been scolded by a higher tier genius! Nope!
"I still don’t get it. Is there sothing I must know...?" Arkai blinked.
"I was thinking about our eting seventeen years ago, Lord Dawnoro," Oathran sighed. He gestured with his head, inviting Arkai to follow him on a walk away from the tent. At least... a safe distance where their chaotic brainwaves wouldn’t risk another interruption.
She was surely already a dozen steps ahead of them, after all, while they were still fumbling at the entrance.
Oathran knew his presence needed to be hidden. The newly arrived "rescuers
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