A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3k ish chap for better readability, enjoy!
Chapter 789: The Saint Meets Her Savior
The Cerulean Apex sat at the highest point of the academy's mountain range, and even after everything I had seen and done in this world across multiple loops, walking toward it still created a sense of awe in my chest.
The structure was built from the same blue crystal as the Cerulean Spire below, and it seemed to float rather than sit on the rock beneath it. There were no gardens up here, no open courtyards, no clusters of disciples practicing forms on a terrace somewhere, it was totally isolated.
I had been here twice before, and both times had been under circumstances I would rather not repeat.
The first time, I had walked this path as the Saint, wearing robes that didn't belong to me and preparing to meet a dying old man who was about to give me something I hadn't asked for and could not refuse.
The second time had been with Kal, in the most recent loop, after Aric had been confirmed as Saint and we had returned from our trip to find out whether the Blue Sun carried memories across resets or whether we had some measure of safety to work with. That visit had ended with a confirmation that we did, and I had let myself breathe for the first time since arriving back in this world.
This visit was different from both of those.
Beric was standing outside the entrance when I reached the top of the path, and the first thing I noticed was that he wasn't standing how he normally stood. Right now he was standing with his arms crossed and his head slightly down, like he was going through something he couldn’t understand.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps, "Not today, boy," he said. "Whatever servant business brought you up here, leave the linens outside the door and go."
"I'll leave the linens," I said, setting the folded sheets down against the wall, "but I thought I'd check in while I was here."
"I know you mean well," Beric said, and there was something tired in it, which was unusual, because Beric's brand of displeasure with me usually had more energy behind it. "But I'm telling you this isn't the day for it. Come back another time."
I looked at him more carefully, and what I saw made me stop performing the mild, slightly uncertain village boy routine I usually ran with him.
"What's wrong?" I asked, even though I had an idea.
"Nothing that concerns you."
"Beric."
He looked at me sharply, like he was surprised I'd used his name without a title attached to it, and then the sharpness faded into heaviness and he turned to look out over the academy grounds below us instead of at me. I watched him have a small internal argument with himself that lasted about four seconds before he lost it.
"It’s the lady, she's struggling," he said finally, his voice lower than before. "I don't know what it is. She's been up here three days and I've watched her go from fine to not fine and back again, and when I ask her what's happening she smiles and tells me everything is as it should be, and she's never lied to me like that before." He stopped, pressed his jaw together briefly. "Sometimes she looks like she’s in pain. I've seen her stop mid-sentence and go somewhere else, and then come back and act like nothing happened. And she won't tell me what it is."
I listened to all of that and couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy.
Despite being shut out like that, he wasn't angry with her, instead he seemed scared that he wouldn’t be able to protect her from whatever it was that was troubling her. He thought she didn't trust him enough to share this, he thought the distance was about him, that he had done something wrong, something that broke her trust in him, but it wasn't about him at all.
The Saint's Essence had embedded itself into Laelyn's cultivation base the moment the transfer ceremony was complete, and the same restriction that had silenced Icarus for decades was already working itself through her. She couldn't tell Beric what was happening because the moment she tried to articulate it, the words would dissolve, the thought would scatter, her own spiritual energy would turn against the attempt. She still trusted him, but she was trapped behind glass, watching him stand on the other side, and she couldn't make him hear her because the glass itself wouldn't allow it.
"Maybe she'll speak to me," I said.
Beric looked at me like he didn’t know whether to be offended or baffled.
"You," he said, and it carried a considerable amount of meaning for a single word. "You think she'll tell a village boy she's known less than a month something she hasn't told me."
"I think it's worth trying."
"I've been beside that girl through five assassination attempts in the past three years alone," he said, sounding a mix of angry and hurt. "I stood over her grandmother's grave and made a promise I have never broken. I have bled for her family. And you think that she'll open up to you because you handed her tea one evening and said something that made her laugh."
"That's not what I said," I told him. "I said it's worth trying. Not that I'm better suited for this than you are. You're the person she trusts most in this building, and that's obvious to anyone watching. But sometimes people say things to someone who knows them less, because there's less weight to the admission. There's no history to protect, no long relationship to worry about managing."
He was quiet for a moment, chewing on that, and I could see him running through objections and not quite being satisfied with any of them.
"One chance," he said. "You have one chance to make something useful of this. And if you go in there and do anything that makes me regret opening that door, you will find out that my goodwill has a hard limit."
"You won’t regret this."
He shook his head like he couldn’t believe he was agreeing to this, and then he turned and pushed the door open.
***
The central chamber of the Cerulean Apex was the same room I remembered from my time as Saint. It was large and austere with a vaulted ceiling and four tall windows looking outward in the cardinal directions. There was meditation platform along the eastern wall. The altar against the southern face was where Saint Icarus had stood in those last hours with blood-flecked spittle on his robes and a body burning itself apart from within.
And along the northern wall the mural depicting the lineage of saints stretching back to the founding of the Order, a long procession of faces painted at their prime, each portrait showing the pride of someone who believed they stood at the beginning of something magnificent.
I knew what most of those faces had gone on to look like by the time they were finished with this room, so it wasn’t a surprise that the portraits didn't tell that part of the story.
Lady Laelyn had her eyes closed when I entered, her hands resting on her knees with her palms turned upward, and even from across the room I could see the faint blue luminescence moving under her skin. The Saint's Essence was always working, threading itself deeper into whatever it could reach.
She opened her eyes when she heard my footsteps, and she smiled. The smile was warm and genuine and exactly what she wanted it to look like, but I could see the hints of pain behind it.
"Tomas," she said. "I wasn't expecting a visitor today."
"I heard you'd been up here for three days," I said, settling down on the floor beside her without asking permission, because that was the village boy thing to do and also the thing that would make this feel like less of an official check-in and more like two people sitting together. "I thought someone should come and make sure you were still eating."
She made a small sound that was almost a laugh. "Beric mentioned something similar this morning."
"He’s worried about you," I said, glancing back at the old soldier who was staring at us.
"Beric worries about everything," she said with a fond smile. "It's his job."
"This is different,” I replied. “He’s really worried about you right now, he even let me call him by his name slide" The last part made her smile widen but as I continued her smile tightened. "He said you seem like you're carrying something heavy."
“The position comes with its own particular demands,” she whispered, looking at the floor. “I knew that going in. There are adjustments to be made."
"What do you mean, adjustments?"
"The Blue Sun requires a lot from its Saint," she said. "There are moments when its presence is very strong. When what it wants is very present. And there are other moments when I find myself wondering whether what it wants aligns with..."
A look of fear flashed through her eyes, and she stopped before she could finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter, I already had an idea on what she was trying to say, that the Blue Sun wasn’t what everyone thought it to be.
"That sounds like a difficult thing to deal with," I said.
"It is," she agreed. "Because to question it is to feel as though you're questioning the sun itself. And that feels like ingratitude, or worse. But I keep thinking about my grandmother, and the things she wrote, and I keep thinking that maybe the most reverent relationship with something powerful isn't the one that asks no questions."
Her grandmother was a wise woman, it was nice to see that the granddaughter had inherited the same instinct. I was just glad that she wasn’t like Aric had been, she hadn’t reached the point that was beyond saving.
"I think your grandmother sounds like someone who understood that genuine reverence and blind obedience aren't the same thing," I said.
Her eyes widened slightly at that, but it immediately pulled back from looking too much like relief, as though even the expression needed to be managed. Feeling that I’m close, I decided to be a bit more direct, but in a way that could be shrugged off as a curious question by an ignorant villager.
“Is Sainthood everything you wanted it to be?”
That made her go silent for a while.
I could tell from the scrunched eyebrows that she was trying her best to figure out how to answer that with the limits imposed on her by the Saint’s Essence.
"The Blue Sun’s power is extraordinary, and I understand now how it produces the reverence people describe. There's nothing false about the power of it. That’s for sure." She said finally, looking down at her hands resting flat in her lap. "And it’s very generous, more generous than even a mother is to her child. It always offers things all the time, more clarity, more power, more connection to the light."
“That sounds like a very lucky position to be in,” I said.
“Lucky,” she almost laughed at that before nodding. “Yes, I guess you could say that some would feel very fortunate to be sitting where I am right now.”
“But you don’t feel like that?”
"I guess there are moments I do," she said, quietly, "when I feel as though I'm being guided somewhere where I can help people. But there are other moments where I wonder if I’m doing more..."
A look of pain crossed her face before she could finish.
It was a reminder from the Saint’s Essence for her to remember her place.
But I knew what she was saying, she was describing the visions.
The Blue Sun's instructions, the rituals, the locations, the things it dressed in the language of sacred duty and presented to its saints as their purpose but was in fact just a way to get them to cause the destruction of their own world.
"That sounds like the difference between following a path because you understand where it leads," I said, "and following a path because you were told it leads somewhere good."
"Yes," she said, and there was something almost startled in it, like she was surprised that I caught what she was trying to say. "That's exactly what it feels like."
She looked at me for a moment, this careful measuring look that I recognised from the road and from the academy in the previous loop, the look she used when she was suspecting that there was more to me than what met the eye.
"You phrase things in interesting ways for a village boy," she said.
"I read a lot," I said, which had the benefit of being true, but from the exhausted look in her eyes, that wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
"Tomas," she said, meeting my eyes properly for the first time. "Why are you here?"
"Because I think you're fighting something," I said, deciding to drop the façade, "and I think you're fighting it alone, and I think you shouldn't have to."
That made her freeze. It was clear that wasn’t the answer she had expected to hear.
"I'm fine," she smiled.
I didn’t believe her for one second. It was the same fake smile that Beric had described.
"You will be soon," I said. "I can help you, but only if you'll let me."
Even though I knew what I was doing was going to break the simple villager identity that I was wearing, I still put out my hand, palm up, between us. Without saving Lady Laelyn from the corruption, there was no way I’d be able to save the Eldest Tree by myself.
She looked at it, and I watched the conflict cross her face openly, which told me that whatever the Saint's Essence had done to her in three days, it hadn't finished the work of making her manageable.
There was a part of her that wanted to take my hand because something in her recognised, even if she couldn't name it and it went against common sense, that I was telling her the truth. And there was another part of her, the part that had watched me walk into her life as a cowardly villager on a random road, that didn't want whatever this was to reach me. That was very kind of her, but I couldn’t let her kindness be the reason she decided to bear this by herself.
"It'll be alright," I whispered. "Trust me."
With a sigh, she took my hand.
Behind me I heard Beric's boots hit the floor as he stormed over.
"Boy! What are you doing? Let go of the lady’s hand!"
"I'm helping her," I said. "Like I promised I would."
"That wasn't part of any arrangement I agreed to," Beric said, reaching his arm out to grab hold of my neck.
"Beric." Laelyn called out. "Stand down."
The old soldier didn't look happy about it, but he didn’t argue. He stepped back, arms once again crossed, watching us with a look that said that was the last time he was trusting me and that we were going to have a serious ‘chat’ about this later.
I couldn’t think about that right now so I turned my attention back to what mattered.
The one thing I didn't need to worry about here was the Genesis Seed complicating this. Lightweavers cultivated through the Cerulean Vein, through external connection to the Blue Sun's energy, and they had no inner world for the Genesis Seed to attempt to annex or consume. Which meant there was nothing here that would trigger the seed's territorial instincts.
"Channel the Saint's Essence," I said.
She looked at me for a moment, like she couldn’t believe I just said that, then she closed her eyes and did it.
The blue luminescence that had been moving under her skin brightened, gathered, and spread outward from both our joined hands. It was beautiful, it really was. It was the same beautiful that all of the Blue Sun's work was, the beauty that had convinced generations of practitioners that what they were walking toward was sacred. I could feel it moving across my skin, looking for something to latch onto, looking for the Cerulean Vein that should have been there for it to use and abuse.
When it didn't find one, it turned its attention somewhere else entirely, my soul.
The Saint's Essence, or whatever intelligence resided within it, understood something about relationships and leverage. The plan was obvious, it was going to make me a point of control to use against the lady, so it reached for my soul.
I didn’t even try to resist. Why would I? This was perfect for me. It was basically delivering itself to me in a silver platter.
The moment it crossed the threshold, it stopped moving as it realised that whatever it had just entered was not what it had expected it to be. Pure panic exuded off it as it scrambled to get away, but it was too late, the Genesis Seed had noticed it. I had watched this happen once before, so I knew what came next, which was why I kept my expression composed for Beric's sake and my grip steady for Laelyn's.