Little Blue, curled up sleeping on the console, lifted her head and gave Yerin a wide-eyed stare.
Lindon felt much the same.
He leaned back so he could study her face more clearly. “Apologies, but I thought that was a talk I’d have to have with you.”
She avoided his gaze. “Can’t imagine what you mean,” she muttered.
Little Blue let out the ringing of a bell, and through their newfound bond, Lindon felt her astonishment.
“You don’t use a Monarch sword to swat flies,” Yerin continued. “Not even when they bite you.”
She stared off into the distance, and her hand gripped his so tight that he could feel the weight of her strength warping reality ever so subtly.
He matched it, mentally thanking Crusher for the donation.
“Are you sure?” he asked quietly.
“I hate them,” Yerin whispered, and there were tears in her eyes. “He never touched them. Never cut them with so much as a word, but they hated him so much. They threw their own bodies at him. Didn’t care if they lived, so long as he died. And there wasn’t…I couldn’t…”
She breathed deeply and wiped her eyes with a thumb. “But they’re not worth half a glance from me, and I’ll be dead and buried before I give them more than they deserve.”
He had thought much the same about killing Jades, but it warmed him to hear that coming from Yerin. She had been thinking ahead, and had decided to treat the weak with compassion. Even considering what they’d done to her.
Lindon wasn’t sure he’d be able to do the same.
It wasn’t as though he had any attachment to the Heaven’s Glory School himself, but he still put his free hand around her, pulling her close. “Thank you,” he whispered into the top of her head.
She tilted her head up to him, cheeks tinged pink.
“He’s watching,” Lindon said.
“We’ll be old and gray before he stops.”
Lindon kissed her.
From the corner of the room, where they had both sensed him, Eithan sighed. “It was more fun when I could sneak up on you. I’ll have to step up my veils.”
Lindon separated from Yerin, focusing on his breathing technique to slow his heartbeat. “Have you heard from Ziel?”
Ziel owned the cloud fortress next to theirs, a blocky castle sitting on a plain blue cloud. He was supposedly traveling with them, but Lindon had heard nothing from him in the day since he’d joined them.
“He’s fine.” Eithan buffed his fingernails on the hem of his pink-and-purple outer robe. “You may have noticed, but I significantly helped his spiritual recovery. It cost me quite a bit, you know. Time. Materials. Expertise. When did I perform this costly task, you ask?”
“Stone-certain we didn’t,” Yerin said.
“To begin this story, we have to go all the way back to Tiberian Arelius’ creation of—” Eithan’s head snapped to the front, where a ship on a deep purple cloud was slowly looping around to join the procession behind them.
Eithan pointed. “That ship! Watch that ship.”
Alerted by his tone, Lindon and Yerin both focused on the cloudship. Yerin extended her perception, which crashed over her target like a storm-tossed wave. He doubted there was any spiritual power that could escape her notice.
By contrast, Lindon’s own perception was a trickling creek. His perception was better-trained than the average Underlord, but it wasn’t necessarily any more powerful.
However, he could sense things she couldn’t.
He did not feel the strong will from the ship that suggested a Sage or Herald was involved. Instead, he felt the faint, flickering willpower of the ordinary Golds crewing the cloudship. Their will was diffuse, unfocused, barely there.
Between Yerin’s overwhelming scan and his own, which could see into a different spectrum, he doubted they missed anything. They still couldn’t sense the physical, only the spiritual, but something that had no power of madra or will wouldn’t be a threat.
“Harder,” Eithan insisted. “Look harder.”
Lindon did, trying to pierce a veil he had missed the first time. Yerin pushed down with her scan so much that the Golds stopped in place, cycling their madra in resistance, spirits filling with fear.
A scan could be uncomfortable, but it wasn’t threatening. But Yerin’s power was an entire dimension higher than a normal Lord’s, much less these Golds.
Only when he was sure there was nothing on the ship did Lindon become certain that Eithan was just distracting them.
“What happened to no secrets?” Lindon asked in a dry tone.
Eithan gave him a white, beaming smile. “A surprise, Lindon. A surprise. I assure you, you’ll be glad I distracted you very soon.”
Yerin started to extend her perception to the rest of their own cloudship, to find whatever Eithan had tried to hide from them, but Eithan leaped in front of her. “Don’t you want your surprise?”
Yerin slowly let her scan fade. “…I do,” she admitted, in a tone of heavy reluctance. “Got a creeping fear you’re about to teach us a lesson.”
“In a sense, can’t you learn a lesson from anything?”
Lindon reached out with his own perception.
“It’s not a lesson!” Eithan hurriedly added. “This is a fun surprise. Just relax, all right? Be casual.”
In Lindon’s mind, Dross began to whistle.
Lindon returned his attention to Charity, who had expanded the Sky’s Edge gate into a broad screen of darkness. He didn’t fully understand the impressions he was getting from his new senses, but the portal felt like it was almost complete.
“We can still make it, right?” Lindon asked.
For the sixth time since Fury’s ascension ceremony the night before.
Eithan patted him on the shoulder. “The Wandering Titan is known for its inevitability. Not its speed.”
Out the front windows, Charity lowered her hands.
Shadows covered the doorway to Sky’s Edge, stretching up through the clouds in a pillar of darkness. It was a miniature version of the column that had taken them from the Blackflame Empire to the Night Wheel Valley.
The portal to Sky’s Edge was complete.
Charity lifted from the cloudship dock, hovering in the air. She reached into another pool of shadow on her left: her void key.
A weapon flew out, slapping into her open hand. It looked like a short one-handed sword with a curving blade, but a closer inspection showed that it was a silver sickle. It buzzed and blurred to both Lindon’s eyes and senses. This weapon operated on many levels, its powers interacting in a complex web that he couldn’t begin to unravel.
Charity gestured to their ship, and Lindon activated a script-circle that lifted some of their protections.
A purple-and-silver owl appeared on the scripted wooden panels in front of Lindon.
Little Blue gave a loud peep and scurried up Lindon’s arm.
“This portal cannot convey the Titan,” Charity’s voice said from the owl. “I will travel through first. If I do not return or contact you in five minutes, this way is closed to you.”
A steel shield drifted out from her void key, and she snagged it from the air with her left hand. The shield was a heavy slab of metal half the size of her body, worked into the image of a twisted, grinning, monstrous face. The steel face twisted in place, alive and snarling.