She looked down at the table, not at him, which told him more than the words did. "I don’t want anyone becoming what I am, Emeric. Not through carelessness, not through bad luck, not through anything. When I imagined you not coming back from that rift, or coming back broken the way I’m broken, it wasn’t caution talking. It was fear. I should have said that instead of scolding you like a recruit."
"I’d take the scolding over losing you to something I could have avoided," he said, quiet, meaning it. "For what it’s worth."
Something moved across her face, there and gone too fast to name.
"There’s something else," she said. "About how this happened to me. I told you, when we met, that it was a rift collapse. That’s true, as far as it goes. It isn’t the whole truth, and I think you’ve earned more of it than what I’ve given you."
He set his own spoon down and waited.
"House Rowan. My father holds the Viscountcy of Ashwell, out toward the eastern border." She said it plainly, the way a person recites facts they’ve long since stopped feeling anything about. "Small, compared to your father’s holdings. Duke Halden governs half the western provinces. Viscount is a fraction of that — enough land to matter, not enough to matter to the crown beyond what taxes we owe it." A faint, humorless twist of her mouth. "Which is, in its own way, part of why what happened, happened.
She was quiet a moment, as if deciding, even now, how much of it to hand him.
"Two years ago I was stationed near the eastern border, not far from my father’s own lands," she said. "There’s a village out that way called Duskmere."
"It’s small and unremarkable, on the surface." She said, her eyes narrowing in the dark. "Small houses don’t get listened to, Emeric. Not even when they’re right. I imagine you’ve learned that much yourself, growing up the way you did."
"I’ve had some practice with it," he said. "Go on."
"Duskmere sat on land the crown wanted. Not the village itself — what was under it. A mana vein, dense enough to be worth more than the entire viscountcy that governed it."
"It was discovered by survey teams that never went through the local lords at all. Duskmere’s people refused to relocate when the offers came quietly." Her face was getting more serious as she went on.
"They came through intermediaries who never gave their names. The offers stopped being quiet." Her jaw tightened. "I found irregular Ministry orders while I was stationed there — requisitions for rift-adjacent equipment that made no sense unless someone intended to open one deliberately, somewhere a natural one wouldn’t occur on its own. I didn’t believe it until I saw the tear happen with my own eyes, conveniently in the middle of the village."
Emeric sat very still. "They opened a rift on their own people."
"On people who were inconveniently still alive and still saying no." Her voice had gone flat again, controlled the way it went when the alternative was something worse. "I got there in time to hold the breach shut long enough to evacuate most of them. Not all. And a rift that size was never meant to be held closed by one person acting alone, without support, without the resources the Ministry would have provided if the Ministry hadn’t been the one who opened it." She looked down at her hands, resting useless in her lap. "My core wasn’t damaged by an accident. It was damaged holding a door shut that my own kingdom paid to have opened."
The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.
"And the official story," he said slowly, "is that it was a containment failure. An accident."
"The official story is whatever protects the crown. Duskmere’s survivors were relocated, quietly, with settlements generous enough to buy their silence. My family was told I’d suffered an unfortunate accident in the line of duty, and encouraged, firmly, not to inquire further if we valued the Viscountcy’s continued good standing."
A bitter edge crept into her voice for the first time since she’d started. "I’ve had two years to decide what to do with what I know, and so far, I have nothing. I’m useless like this." She said, gesturing to herself in the chair.
"I have no one." The words escaped her lips in a whisper.
"You have me now," he said.
She looked up at him, a sharp expression gracing her face, like she was checking whether he understood the actual weight of what he’d just offered.
"That’s a dangerous thing to say to me," she said quietly.
"I’m aware." He held her gaze. "Say it’s a dangerous thing to mean, instead. See if it changes my answer."
She didn’t have a response.
The system chose that time to surface.
[DEVOTION LOGGED: SUSTAINED CARE — MEAL PREPARATION]
[DP AWARDED: +4]
He blinked, thrown for a half-second out of the conversation entirely.
He could gain points by cooking for her?
The why didn’t he get points the previous time.
[PROPER MEAL REQUIRED FOR DEVOTION POINTS TO BE EARNED]
The system responded as if reading his mind.
Wait, did it just call his cooking trash?
It totally did, he thought, a visible frown creasing his brow.
Isolde caught the flicker of distraction crossing his face. "What."
"Nothing," he said, which was becoming something of a habit between them by now. "I just got distracted for a second."
She let it go, the way she had before, and the rest of the evening passed quieter.
He sat up later that night in the study, the fire down to embers, and let himself actually look at what the system had handed him.
[DEVOTION LEDGER — POINTS AVAILABLE: 4 DP]
[ALLOCATE TO: STRENGTH / AGILITY / MANA ]
Four points. Not much but he could understand it as return for an act as unremarkable as cooking a meal. But the pattern in it wasn’t lost on him. Small devotion, small return. Real risk, real growth. He filed the shape of that away for later and put two points into strength, one into agility, the last into mana.