Despite Williams’ fiery attitude and Centre’s ominous predictions, Alarion’s exit from the Steel Box was relatively painless.
Williams was still angry, of course, and he took out some of that anger on Alarion for being ‘passive enough to let them take you in the first place’, but his fury died down with each consecutive apology. By the time they reached the outskirts of Ashad-Vitri, the Governor was almost jovial. He’d missed much of his party, true, but being able to brag about how ‘his Orphan’ extracted a confession from Centre was quite the consolation prize.
The party was already in full swing by the time they arrived. The Governor’s ballroom blazed against the darkness, its high arched ceiling lost in shadow above rows of crystal chandeliers that scattered warm gold across polished marble floors. Vitrian banners hung alongside the insignia of the 238th—an intentional display of unity that felt just a little too deliberate—while long tables bowed under the weight of an ungodly feast. Music swelled from a corner dais, strings and horns echoing off carved stone pillars as soldiers, aides, and invited dignitaries mingled in their own cliques of conversation.
Those discussions faltered as criers announced Alarion’s late arrival, with half the room turning to stare up at him, followed by scattered applause. Whispers rippled through the crowd—rumors, curiosity, and relief—and soon dozens of partygoers were making their way toward him. Most moved casually—it would be unseemly to rush the man of the hour as soon as he arrived.
His friends did not.
And judging by the sheer ferocity of his hug, Bergman had missed his calling as a grappler.
“W-We thought you were d-done for,” Ivor told him, slapping Alarion on the back with enough force to trigger two separate damage notifications.
“So did I,” Alarion laughed, returning the embrace with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.
“So, what happened?” Kali asked, his expression slightly sterner than the rest. Alarion’s return was an encouraging sign, but the big man remained on edge.
“A false alarm,” Alarion said. “They needed me to talk to Centre.”
“Centre?” Kali asked, raising an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Well…”
It took the group half an hour of glad-handing to work their way through the crowd and arrive at a secluded corner of the ballroom. Once there, it took Alarion over an hour, with frequent interruptions, to recount the tale—at least as much of it as he was comfortable sharing in a public setting.
He obviously omitted his tantrum.
When he was finished, his friends had… thoughts.
Bergman was impressed with Centre’s preparedness; Kali concerned by the depth of his schemes. Both thought Alarion was insane for agreeing to bring Centre anywhere near Ilvan-Trai, and each had plenty of worries and theories that they were all too happy to share.
Only Lily remained silent.
She’d been chasing Alarion, a confrontation on her lips when the agents arrived to take him. Their interruption—and the very real possibility that she’d never get to speak her mind—had clearly shaken her. She said nothing during Alarion’s retelling, nor during the heated debate that followed. Instead, she stayed tight at Bergman’s side, her fingers interlaced with his remaining hand.
Her quiet returned them to purgatory.
Given Alarion’s upbringing, he could read aggression, fear, humor and even passion easily enough—but he struggled with more complex body language. The subtle difference between a woman who was so angry that she never wanted to speak to him again and a woman who desperately wanted him to reach out fell well outside his expertise.
Fortunately for both of them, he had help.
“You need to talk to her,” Nessa said unprompted as Bergman rambled on about the new layers of security Ilvan-Trai would require to house such a high-value prisoner. “She wants you to say something. You are in the wrong here. You need to apologize while there is still time.”
“You are sure?” Alarion murmured under his breath, so as not to interrupt Bergman’s flow.
“Alarion, you basically called her-“ Alarion’s sharp-eyed glare corrected Nessa’s thinking mid-sentence. “Oh. Yeah. She definitely wants to talk to you.”
“Mm,” Alarion grunted. He’d read through three full books on Thoughtborn, and the more he read, the less he felt he understood. Nessa had been created from his thoughts, his experiences, and his understanding of the world. She was less than half a year old by normal reckoning, and she was not so much a real girl as his subconscious’s best understanding of what Sierra had been like.
So why was she already so much better at understanding women?
“Before we go on,” Alarion said, catching Bergman at the start of a new tangent. “Do you mind if I borrow… I mean, she is not yours, but I was wondering if Lily and I could-“
Bergman smiled knowingly to reassure Alarion. “O-Of course. Assuming it is alright w-with you?”
Pale as a ghost, Lily nodded once and extracted her fingers from Bergman’s grip.
“We should talk somewhere more private,” she said, already moving through the crowd.
“Be nice to her,” Nessa warned.
Alarion followed Lily through the crowd to one of the dozens of small booths that ringed the ballroom. Individually warded for privacy, such booths would not prevent a determined spy from listening in on their conversation, but they’d stop lazy eavesdroppers looking for idle gossip. More important, however, was what they represented. Anyone in a privacy booth wanted privacy, which would keep the Governor’s other guests at bay.
The booth was a bit gaudy for Alarion’s taste. A semicircle of plush, dark red leather surrounding a marble tabletop, it was probably more expensive than the house he grew up in. Definitely worth more if he counted all the magic at play, from intimate faux candlelight cast from above to the arcane ‘curtain’ that let them look out while it prevented others from looking in.
Alarion slid into the left side of the booth while Lily took the right. Suitable for up to sixteen guests, the cavernous space felt empty with only two, an effect made worse by the massive table that separated them.
Once she’d settled, Lily reached back to adjust a set of wall-mounted sliders. The light of the party outside dimmed to mere shadows, the cry of strings and the beat of drums now muted and indistinct. When she was done, she looked toward him, then looked away just as quickly.
Neither of them knew where to start, and it was a long time before one of them built up the courage.
“Lily, I am sorry-“
“I lied to you!”
The two abrupt statements collided in the quiet booth, leaving the speakers just as conflicted as before. Hurt and worry hung in the air until finally their eyes met and came to an accord.
“I did not mean what I said,” Alarion said at last. “Not the way you took it.”
“I know,” Lily whispered. “You meant that Ivor had a loose tongue, not that I loosened it.”
“But I did think it,” he admitted. “I am not proud of where my mind went. Or the spark of jealousy that I worry inspired it.”
Lily’s laugh cracked halfway into a sob.
“You are an incredible man, Alarion,” she replied, smiling softly even as she wiped away a tear. “Just not at all my type. Even if you were not my client.”
“I know. And I said a spark, not a wildfire.”
“Mm, a large spark, I should hope. But that is fair. More than fair. And I would be lying if I said…” Lily let the thought die with a shake of her head as she refocused on what was important. “I lied to you, Alarion. Back at Ilvan-Trai. I was angry that you kept me out of the discussion, and I wanted to look smarter than I was, so I lied to you.”
Coming from a Vitrian, the admission carried far more weight than what the mere words suggested. Lily had just admitted to a crime. It was a minor offense—one he could hardly report, given the substance of the lie—but the severity hardly mattered. To most Vitrians, it was better to be a thief, or a thug, or even a whore than a known liar.
She wasn’t just upset with him. She was furious with herself.
“I knew something was up,” Lily continued, carefully skirting around the details of their previous argument so as not to leak his secrets if someone bypassed the wards. “But I only made the last connection when… when it happened.”
At first, Alarion didn’t understand. It wasn’t until Lily dug into her bag and pushed a manila folder across the table that it finally clicked. He’d seen dozens of such dossiers, but never one with a frankly terrible photo of Lily glaring up at him pinned next to a Status sheet.
General Information
Name – Lilith HartSpecies – HumanSex – FemaleAge – Nineteen YearsHP – 134/134 [+0.0046/sec]MP – 170/170 [+0.023/sec]Stamina – 74/74 [+0.123/sec]Aptitude – 2% (52%)UCL – 7
Attributes
STR – 24AGI – 20VIT – 20INT – 58PER – 60WIL – 54
Classes Known
Novice Politician – Level 7 – Progress – 17%
General Skills Known
Skilled Orator – Level 3 – Progress – 9%
Novice Politician Skills Known
Sense Motive – Level 4 – Progress – 92%
Traits and Feats of Strength
Meteoric Rise – Rank I
Flaws
Unknown – Minor
There wasn’t much to it, especially when compared to Alarion’s utterly monstrous Status, but that didn’t matter. The fact that she had a Status at all, especially with such a pitifully low Aptitude, was a minor miracle.
One he was responsible for.
“I-It happened when we were dining with Counselor Feln,” she told him. “Right before the bell rang. I think trying to find a compromise was what pushed me over the edge.”
“At the dinner?” After the chaos of the last few days, the meal with Syrus Feln felt like a lifetime ago, but Alarion soon made the connection. “The blank stares… you did not figure out some plan of his-“
“I was reading my Status,” she confirmed.
“And you gained six levels in a week?”
“Cleaning up after one of your messes?” Lily scoffed. “I should have gained twice as many, especially with the benefits Meteoric Rise is giving me. Though the evaluation is two days old. I’ve gained eight.”
Alarion glanced down at the dossier and skimmed the Feat of Strength in question.
Meteoric Rise [Rank I]
Description: Through tremendous dedication, you have reached heights once thought unattainable. But knowing that this peak is merely the first step on a larger climb, you must now redouble your efforts.
Requirements: Gain any Class Level with an Aptitude of 2% or lower before the natural age of Twenty.
Effects: Permanently add 50 points to your aptitude. For the next year, treat all XP gains and Attribute Growths as if your aptitude were an additional 100 points higher.
Note: You have been automatically assigned the quest, [Continue the Climb], as a result of this Feat of Strength.
The quest in question was exactly what Alarion expected. Lily had six months to reach Rank II. If she did, her [Meteoric Rise] would continue, growing to rank II, presumably giving her further boosts and a new quest.
Depending on how [Meteoric Rise] interacted with [Shared Burden], eight levels in a week was indeed on the extremely low end. It was closer to his own growth than anything he’d ever seen.
“This is great news,” Alarion said at last.
Lily smiled, but it was nothing like her usual, self-assured grin. “I should have been honest-“
“And I should not have kept you out,” Alarion interjected. Even if it had been the correct decision at the time, hindsight had proven he could have trusted her all along. “We both made mistakes.”
“I lied to you,” she said, emphasizing the syllables of her sin as her eyes glistened. “And you…” Lily’s voice faltered as she got too close to the edge. There was so much she wanted to say, but this wasn’t the place for that level of honesty. “None of this would have been possible without you.”
“I just kept you close,” he told her. “Ashad did the rest.”
She laughed at that. There might be some questions as to why she was the first Vitrian to benefit from the Grand Awakening, but they both had ideas on how to spin it. Plenty of Vitrians already thought she’d gone native. Now it looked like there were advantages to doing so.
“You do not know what this means to me.” Lily shook her head to stop him mid-protest and reiterated, “You do not. You cannot.”
“It means you can stay,” he said. The file she’d given him wasn’t just an appraisal. It was her induction paperwork. She was a Vitrian of legal age who had gained a class level, which meant she had had to volunteer or be drafted. With her skillset, that didn’t necessarily mean the military. She could have still taken the prestigious post Syrus Feln had prepared for her, but Alarion hadn’t missed the signed volunteer application among her papers.
She wanted to be a martyr instead.
“It means I can h-have children,” she whispered as the tears started to flow. “I-It means I can v-vote and that I can own p-property. It means my mother won’t b-be ashamed of me anymore. She w-will not h-have to talk about her useless-“
Strong as she was, that last thought was the breaking point. Lily’s breath caught in her throat and came out as a tremendous, ugly sob. She buried her face in her hands as emotions overcame her and all pretense of composure evaporated.
“I-It m-means I am n-not broken!” Lily stammered out between heaving cries.
“Lily, you were never-“
“I w-was to them,” she whimpered. “T-The way t-they looked at m-me…”
Again, the tears took over when words failed her. These were desperate, shameless tears, the kind that a person could only share with those they trusted. Those tears left him feeling impotent and somehow guilty. The wounds weren’t his fault, but he couldn’t make them better. He couldn’t even reach out to hold her hand with that monster of a table between them.
Instead, he found his mind wandering to what Centre had said hours earlier.
The Numbered Empire makes victims of everyone, themselves included.
Of all the things the seditionist had said, that one was the hardest to argue against, because Alarion had seen the truth of it firsthand. He watched obligation murder Sierra, and he remembered all too well the wounds ambition had left in Elena’s shattered body. Even Syrus Feln—the great man of the empire that he was—had been devoured by the beast he thought tamed.
Centre’s methods were abhorrent, but he’d identified many of the same problems as Alarion—and something had to change. The system they lived under was broken. Rotten. Distorted. Alarion needed to find out why and learn how to fix it, even if it meant breaking rules. Or things.
But lofty ambitions would have to wait. He was unhappy with the state of the world, in this case, the stupidly enormous table keeping him from being able to reassure his friend in her time of need. So he followed Centre’s advice.
He struck it.
The table flew nearly twenty feet, spinning end over end until it crashed into a nearby pillar and broke in half against it. It would be impossible to repair and expensive to replace, but the empire could afford it.
And the violence had served its function.
Lily stared at him wide-eyed, momentarily stunned out of her sorrow as he crossed the booth and took a seat beside her. He cradled one of her hands with his own, then tapped one shoulder of his dress uniform until she got the message.
“I will ruin it,” Lily protested.
“I do not-“ Alarion paused, smiling down at the girl. She was a complete mess, with a runny, bright-red nose, bloodshot eyes, and streaked cheeks from running mascara. “I don’t care.”
That was enough. She leaned into him and let the moment take her, mumbling the words thank you into his sleeve more than once over the minutes that followed. And though there were many ways to interpret those words, Alarion knew what she meant.
He doubted she could say the same when he returned them.
“Thank you, Lily.”
‘Thank you for being my friend’ was a logical deduction. So was ‘Thank you for keeping my secrets’, or even ‘thank you for letting me help you’. She probably had plenty of guesses, but the gift she’d given him was far more abstract than the one he’d given her.
Over two years in the Auxilia, Alarion had saved thousands of lives. Some had been direct; fellow soldiers he’d saved from the claws of a rampaging fiend. Most had been distant, such as the lives saved in Ashad-Veldi when he’d killed the True Heart. Some small handful were friends, men like Bergman who risked their lives alongside them.
But Lily had given him something new, something he’d craved without realizing it.
He’d helped someone he cared about.
Even if by accident, he finally gave her what so many others had given him. He hadn’t just kept her alive, he’d made her life better. And he’d done it without so much as a swing of his mace.
It didn’t matter that Williams was bearing down on the booth with fury in his eyes. Alarion had done something good.
Good enough that it allowed Lily to finally admit the truth.
"Alarion... I lied to you about something else.”