Vadh
The seal is stronger than it has been in my lifetime.
I put my hand on the wall of the lowest chamber.
The vibration has changed. The irregular pulse I have lived with for twenty years has gone still.
Even. The containment is doing what it was built to do, and the thing beneath has settled into a sleep that feels like sleep for the first time.
The crack in the containment glyph is narrowing. The stone remembers what it was.
I go back up through the levels. At each corridor I press my palm to the stone and listen. The flow is there. Constant. Distributed. Every branch, every junction, every section she cleared and I struck. The architecture is carrying.
She is at the pool. Washing the dust from her arms. The calcification dust clouds the surface.
I say the word.
The word in my mother’s language. The old word, the one the wardens used for the person who completed the bond.
My mother used it for my father. I heard her say it once, when I was young enough that I did not know what it meant.
She was at the collection points in the lower hall, her hand on the empty groove beside her, and she said the word to the air above the stone.
It is not a word you say to someone. It is a word you carry until you can set it down.
I say the word.
She listens. She does not try to repeat it. She listens to the shape of it in my mouth. The vowels that a human throat cannot make. The length of it. The weight.
“I love you too,” she says. “In my language it’s shorter.”
I look at her. She is kneeling where the glow reaches the floor. Dust still in her hair. She is looking at me the way she looked at me on the auction block. No flinch. No performance. Her eyes on mine as though what she sees is enough.
My coils move. The nearest loop slides across the stone and circles her, settles at her waist, rests there. The same motion my tail makes in sleep, reaching for her in the dark. But she is here.
“Say it again,” she says.
I say it again. She closes her eyes and listens. The pool light moves across her face.
She opens her eyes.
“I’ll get it,” she says.
The last time she said that, she was holding a leaf in the anteroom and grinning at a word for an herb.
I believe her.