Liora brought her horse up next to Rick’s so they could talk without the others hearing.
"How’s the socket, dear?"
"It feels warm, and at least it’s not burning... the ward is also working."
"Good." She was quiet for a second. "So... about Fredrich..."
"I know."
"Thirty-one years of believing in sothing. The oath, the transition plan, and the words he spoke about the entity were all significant."
"What is he?" Rick asked.
Liora thought about it the way she thought about things that needed a lot of thought. "Soone who believed in a goal and followed it faithfully required accepting costs he shouldn’t have accepted, and by the ti he noticed how far he’d moved, he was already too far in to step out cleanly."
She paused. "I’ve seen it in the Temple."
"They’re not bad people, just people who thought the goal was worth changing what ’acceptable’ ant."
"They kept doing it in small steps so they never had to face the whole distance they’d traveled at once."
Rick thought about the thing, where two hundred years and sadness that had turned into a source of strength.
He said, "The thing began with grief."
"Yes."
"And Fredrich began with faith."
"Yes."
"And the two of them have been feeding each other for thirty-one years... it seems like they have both co a long way since they first t."
For a mont, Liora looked at the road ahead.
"That’s exactly right," she said. "And when we get to the Golden Temple and sort the socket, which we will, that understanding will matter."
She looked at him. "Because the thing didn’t just put sothing in your socket."
"Where else was it put?"
"A window, and it’s two-way... You can see it, and it can see you, but you’re the first person who might be able to talk to it." She let that sit. "You think it wants to talk."
"I think it has been waiting two hundred years for soone who could see it clearly enough to be worth talking to."
"And I think it is really scared that it may have finally found one." She stopped. "Grief is what gives it strength."
"This ans that only resolution, not destruction, can end it. And resolution needs a conversation."
"You need to have a conversation with sothing that has nearly taken control of your body."
"A conversation with sothing that has been in pain for two hundred years and has been hiding for so long until it no longer knows how to be seen without using a socket that wasn’t supposed to exist."
She was quiet for a mont. "It fears you because you might be able to understand it, and that’s not nothing, Rick."
He considered the shape in the socket’s view-large, patient, and cautious, concealed behind the na of a deceased man, constructing, observing, and anticipating. It began with sadness.
For two hundred years, it has been building toward sothing.
And fearful.
...
Two hours outside of Valdris, they stopped at a roadside post with a stone trough, a pump, and a small shelter that was there just for this purpose on roads that were used for longer trips.
The night was clear, and the stars were the kind that you can only see when you’re far enough away from a city that the light doesn’t compete with them.
Rick got off his horse and stood still for a mont, feeling the ground solid beneath his feet.
He took Natasha’s crystal out and looked at it, and he saw that it was eighty-three percent left.
The decline was steady. They had a satisfactory amount of ti before the secondary seal needed to be fixed.
He knew, like a socket that worked as a receiver even when it was damp, that sothing far behind him in Valdris knew which way he was going.
It’s not the thing itself, a signal, or a ssage, just the fact that it is being noticed, like being in a dark room and knowing that sothing in the corner can see you even though you can’t see it.
Zephyra ca up next to him. She wasn’t holding her folio.
She had Sophia on her hip, and she was awake now, looking at the stars with the sa intense interest she gave everything else she looked at.
"The crystal," Zephyra said. "What does it say?"
"Eighty-three percent."
"Sufficient margin."
"Yup."
Without warning, Sophia reached for Rick’s shoulder and grabbed a fistful of his coat. She made a small noise that, for her, was very satisfying.
Rick looked down at her. She looked at him with her mother’s eyes and held on.
Rick giggles and starts teasingly playing with her for a bit. "What’s wrong, Sophia...? Are you interested in sothing like this?"
Zephyra didn’t get involved. She looked at Sophia for a second, then at the road ahead, and finally at the stars.
"The Golden Temple." She said, "I’ve heard of it but never been there."
"You’re so cute," Rick said while pinching Sophia’s cheeks. "Oh, about the Golden Teple..."
"I have visited the Golden Temple, and it’s a rather cool place; however, I didn’t know anything about the Severance Rite."
"There are three academic sources that talk about the Severance Rite before the coalition."
"The sacred architecture at the Golden Temple is three centuries older than the current Temple order, which ans that the ritual infrastructure is built on ideas that ca before the post-coalition divine frawork."
"There isn’t much information about how pre-coalition magical theory and post-coalition divine practice co together in a single working ritual space."
"Are you asking this because you have a personal interest in the topic?"
He thought she might not answer because she was quiet for so long.
"The theoretical implications go beyond this one use." She said, "The preservation thod alone would be a big discovery in pre-coalition architectural studies if the ritual infrastructure were still there and worked after three hundred years."
"That’s your way of saying yes."
Another pause.
"Yes," she said.
’What the fuck is this MILF yapping about...’
She said it in the sa flat, precise way she said everything else, with no inflection to make it stand out from the rest of what she said.
Rick had learned that when Zephyra gave a direct answer without any conditions, it ant that she had really thought about it and made a decision about what it ant.
Heinz was quietly talking to Liora about horses behind them. He was wondering if the horse he had been riding was really as long-suffering as it looked or if horses just looked that way in general.
Liora said sothing that made him laugh quietly, the kind of laugh that cos from a man who finds most things mildly funny and is thankful for it.
The stars were shining. There were two more days of road ahead.
The socket was warm but not on fire, and the crystal read eighty-three percent. Sowhere in Valdris, behind them, the entity that had been hiding for two hundred years knew which way Rick was going. It was patient, scared, and old.
Rick breathed in the night air that tasted like wide open spaces and distance.
"Let’s keep going," he said.
He put the crystal back in his coat pocket, and Sophia held on to his coat sleeve as he got back on. He adjusted his grip to allow her to remain there for a brief mont, while Zephyra silently observed from the edge of her vision.
The group remounted their horses after the horses had finished drinking.
The road to the Golden Temple stretched out ahead of them under the stars.
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