Chapter 19
Selena
I’d been dreading this conversation for two days.
Every time one of them had opened their mouth in the last fifty-two hours—a question starting to form, a pause before words—I’d redirected.
Changed the subject. Found something that needed doing in another room.
I was good at it. I’d had a lot of practice keeping people in the dark for their own protection—to prevent any hurt feelings—and the skills translated, even if using them on my own children felt being sliced by a psydagger all over again.
But the terrace had been my idea. I’d suggested it when Neazzos had asked, again, if they could please go somewhere they weren’t being watched by the household staff and the security drones, somewhere they could just sit and be without someone hovering.
Unfortunately for them, they would always be watched. Just like me. Not only by curious bystanders, but from their clanfather Kaede’s security to make sure we were safe and protected.
The training yard had started a new session below. The light was good. The shade here was real and deep, and the low stone railing gave them something to grip.
Practical reasons. Good ones. I’d stacked them up in my head like a wall.
None of them were why I’d said yes.
The real reason was that I couldn’t avoid this conversation much longer, and I’d rather have it out here, in the open air, where the training below gave us something to look at when the silence got too heavy. Where the amber afternoon light made everything feel less like a closed room.
Where I could pretend, for a few more minutes, that I hadn’t already mapped out every version of how this went.
Neazzos had both forearms hooked over the railing, body pitched forward so far he was basically horizontal, tail flicking behind him in tight, rapid arcs that betrayed excitement he didn’t bother hiding.
Every collision in the yard below—every time blade caught blade or a body shifted hard to cover a gap—he made a sound.
Small, involuntary. A sharp inhale, or a soft chirp lodged somewhere between approval and delight.
He’d been practically vibrating since we sat down.
Tracking every movement with the fixed focus of a predator assessing something it wanted to understand completely so it could eventually imitate it.
Nocrez had both arms wrapped around mine from the moment we settled on the bench, and he hadn’t moved.
He was pressed to my side—warm and solid and quietly radiating the kind of tension that had nowhere obvious to go—enormous deep blue-green eyes wide and blinking at every strike.
He watched like someone bracing for impact that hadn’t arrived yet.
Every time the blades connected with a sound that was too real, too sharp, I felt his grip tighten.
Not fear, exactly. Something adjacent. An awareness that the people he loved were doing something that could go wrong, and no one had told him what to do with that.
And Meti—
Meti had simply folded herself into my lap.
No preamble. No asking. She’d climbed up with the practiced ease of a cub who’d been doing this since she was small enough to be carried in one arm, pressed her back to my chest, and gone still.
Not restless still. Not the frozen quality of someone trying very hard not to react.
The other kind—the kind I’d never quite found words for, the kind that made the back of my neck prickle every time I saw it, because Meti went still the way deep water went still.
Nothing absent. Everything happening underneath.
She’d been like that for forty minutes.
Below, the three males moved through another drill.
Kaede anchored the center—psydagger cutting clean, controlled arcs, his drones repositioning in tight formation overhead with that precise whisper of sound.
His neon-green bond-thread in my web was warm with the particular quality of a mind fully occupied, entirely in its element.
Kaede in combat—even training—read differently than Kaede anywhere else.
The constant hum of calculation that usually lived just under the surface went quiet, replaced by something cleaner.
Simpler. He was built for this, and some part of him knew it and relaxed into the knowing.
Ryzen held the far flank. His spirit daggers cycled in that slow, steady emerald orbit—eight of them, unhurried, maintaining equidistance the way planets held their lines.
The runes mapped across his skin pulsed with each shift of weight, each controlled breath.
He moved with a gracefulness I was learning to recognize: nothing wasted, nothing performed.
Whatever had driven him onto that landing pad two days ago with a wound in his chest and grief riding him like a second skin—he’d found somewhere to put it today.
Not buried. Redirected. Shaped into something that could be aimed.
And then there was the third.
Long black hair damp at the temples where the Destima heat had done its work.
Warm brown skin catching the amber of the afternoon.
The curved black horns sweeping back from his crown catching light like polished obsidian.
Moving with a deliberate, forward-committed drive that looked more constructed than instinctive—like someone who’d spent hours today teaching his body a geometry it hadn’t been born knowing.
My chest pulled tight. The crimson thread hummed low—new enough that the strangeness of it still hit me sometimes, that moment of awareness: this is real, this is his, this is permanent.
Through it I could feel him. The particular quality of Zyxel’s presence: exhausted.
Genuinely, thoroughly wrung out in the way that only happened when you’d pushed a body past what it wanted to do.
But underneath the e1xhaustion, something warmer.
Something that tasted, in the language of the bond, like satisfaction edged with the faintest trace of stubborn pride.
He’d worked hard today. The demi-human form had cooperated more than he’d expected, probably, and less than he wanted.
He’d also told me to act like everything was normal.
I was trying.
“Mama.”
Neazzos called out to me without turning from the railing.
I’d been waiting for it. Still wasn’t ready. “Yes?”
“Who are those three?” He tilted his chin toward the yard.
I breathed in slow. The warm mineral air of the terrace. The faint sweetness of whatever flowered in the lower gardens. The specific clean-spice smell of my children pressed around me like the most important thing in the universe, which was exactly what they were.
“You know Clanfather Kaede and Ryzen.”
“Obviously,” Neazzos said, with the mild exasperation of someone being told something he’d already known. His tail flicked once. “I mean the other one. The one with the horns.”
“He looks like Clanfather Kaede,” Nocrez said against my arm, frowning at the yard. “But not.”
There it was.
I’d wondered which of them would catch it first. Nocrez, as it turned out—soft and attentive, noticing the shape of things the way he noticed the shape of everything.
He was right. Zyxel’s demi-human form shared enough with Kaede’s silhouette to create that particular wrongness of almost-recognition: the similar height, the lean fighter’s build, the black horns sweeping back from his crown.
But the coloring was different. Warmer. And the way he moved was different.
And if you knew Kaede—really knew him, had watched him train for months—the difference was obvious enough to nag at you.
“He does look a little like Clanfather Kaede,” I said carefully.
“Is he related?” Neazzos had turned from the railing fully now, studying me with that direct Neazzos attention that meant he’d decided the yard was less interesting than my face for the moment.
“No. He’s—” I paused. Found the clearest version of it.
“When Clanfather Zyxel took this form, he shaped it to blend in. To look like someone who belongs in the same spaces as Clanfather Kaede, who moves the same way, who reads as the same kind of person. Similar enough to pass. Different enough that anyone looking closely would know they aren’t the same. ”
Silence. Neazzos’s ears went very still.
“That is Clanfather Zyxel,” he said slowly. Not a question. Testing the shape of it.
“Yes.”
Both boys looked at the yard. Looked at me. Looked at the yard again—at the figure with the long black hair and the curved horns and the chartreuse eyes tracking Kaede’s movements with complete, scholar’s attention.
“He doesn’t have scales,” Nocrez said.
“No.”
“Or a tail.”
“No.”
“How—” Neazzos started. Stopped. His curious mind was already running it, I could see it in the slight crease of his brow, the way his tail went still when he was processing something that didn’t immediately fit a framework.
“How does he do that? He’s a serpent. You can’t just—become someone with legs. ”
“Clanfather Zyxel has a gift that’s rare.
It’s a natural biological trait of his people—the Rkekh.
” I kept my voice steady, matter-of-fact, because the most extraordinary things landed best when you didn’t dress them up.
“He can transform. Change his form completely. The serpent form you know—the coils, the scales, the spines—that’s called his Ezzaska form.
But he has another form. A demi-human form.
” I looked at the figure below, at the long black hair damp at the temples, at the horns catching amber light like polished stone.
“That’s it. He’s been practicing holding it longer.
It costs him—it’s uncomfortable for him, the way holding an awkward position for hours is uncomfortable.
But he needs to do it. For where we’re going. ”
Neazzos was quiet for a full five seconds. That was unusual enough to mean something.
“It’s a disguise,” he said finally. Working it out.