He thought of his status window and it immediately opened.
[STATUS — EMERIC HALDEN]
TIER: 9th (40% → 8th)
STRENGTH: 19
AGILITY: 16
MANA: 9
MANA CORE: Semi-active
It was small. He didn’t mind that it was small. It was proof the system meant what it said — that every real thing he did for her counted, whether it was throwing himself under a collapsing wall or simply making sure she ate something decent at the end of a hard day.
His mind circled back, inevitably, to what she’d told him over dinner. Duskmere. A crown willing to tear a hole in the world rather than let a village keep land it wanted. He turned it over slowly, and the longer he sat with it the more the pieces he already had started arranging themselves into a shape he didn’t like.
A rift collapse could shatter a core by accident. Bad luck, bad timing, the price of holding closed something no one person should have had to hold alone — he could believe that much as an accident of circumstance. But a curse wasn’t an accident. A curse was intent. Someone had made a choice, after the fact, to make certain that what she’d sacrificed stayed sacrificed — that she never regained what she’d spent stopping them.
He didn’t know yet who. He didn’t need to know yet, not tonight. But the anger that had been sitting low and quiet in his chest since he’d first read that blacked-out line on her status window sharpened into something with an actual shape now, something with an actual target, even if the target didn’t have a name yet.
He was going to find out what had been done to her. And he was going to undo it.
[DEVOTION DETECTED][TARGET: ISOLDE ROWAN]
He stayed up long after the fire had gone to embers, the resolve from earlier still sitting steady in his chest, refusing to let him sleep.
He sat alone in a dark study with nothing left to focus on but the thing she kept telling him was there, waiting, if he’d only stop trying so hard to find it.
He let his mind go loose the way she’d taught him. Stopped reaching. Just noticed.
It took longer than it had with the fern, minutes stretching out with nothing but his own heartbeat for company — but somewhere past the point where he’d usually have given up out of frustration, something answered. A warmth, low in his chest, exactly where she’d told him it would be. It didn’t feel like finding something outside himself and holding still around it. It felt like finally noticing something that had been him the entire time.
[MANA CORE: ACTIVE]
[AFFINITY CONFIRMED]
He sat with it a long moment, afraid that moving too quickly, or feeling too much triumph too fast, would scare it back into hiding the way excitement had chased the fern’s rhythm away that first morning. But it held. Steady. His.
He allowed himself, finally, a single quiet laugh in the dark before he drifted into sleep.
***
He woke with an idea he wasn’t entirely sure was a good one, and by the time he’d made it down to the kitchen it had only gotten more complicated in his head rather than less.
Isolde was already up, seated by the window with a book balanced against the arm of her chair. She looked up when he came in, taking in whatever expression he was wearing with the same assessing look she gave most things.
"You found it," she said. Not a question. "Last night."
"How did you know that."
"I can sense it." She said it simply, like it was obvious. "I’m not totally useless," She added. "Besides, most people don’t notice the change in themselves. It shows in how they carry their shoulders before it shows in anything else."
He hadn’t noticed it himself, but he supposed that was exactly the kind of thing a former commander would catch.
"Good," she said, when he confirmed it. "That’s faster than most. We’ll start on actual technique once you’ve had a proper night’s sleep to let it settle. Cores that get pushed the same day they activate tend to—"
"I know. Fracture. You’ve mentioned."
"I have. I’ll keep mentioning it until you stop needing to hear it." But there was no real edge in it.
Something closer to fondness threaded underneath the warning by now, familiar enough that neither of them treated it as an argument anymore.
He hovered by the counter longer than the moment strictly required, turning the idea over one more time before he lost his nerve entirely.
"I wanted to ask you something," he said. "Different topic."
She set the book down, giving him her full attention in that unnerving, total way she had. "Go on."
"The atrophy." He said it plainly, the way he’d learned she preferred things said, though it still felt clumsy leaving his mouth. "I think regular therapy is supposed to slow it, even without a working core to help. Someone working the muscle for you, since you can’t always manage the angles yourself."
Something shuttered slightly behind her eyes, the same guarded look she’d worn the night of the transfer. "I’m aware of what atrophy requires, Emeric. I had aides for it, once."
"I know. I’m not trying to tell you something you don’t already know." He made himself keep going, even though every instinct told him to let the silence swallow the offer before he had to finish it out loud. "I’m saying I could do it. If you wanted. I don’t have training, but you could direct me the same way you did the first night, and I’d rather learn it properly from you than have you go without because there’s no one else in this house to ask."
The kitchen went very quiet. He was abruptly, uncomfortably aware of how the offer sounded out loud compared to how reasonable it had felt in his head at five in the morning.
His hands on her legs, her direction, the particular vulnerability of it laid bare between two people who’d been married eleven days and still hadn’t shared so much as an actual kiss.
"That’s a significant thing to offer," she said slowly.
"I’m aware it’s a lot to ask you to accept, too." He kept his voice even, refusing to backpedal out of it now that he’d said it. "You don’t have to say yes. I just didn’t want to sit here knowing something might help you and not say anything, because it felt awkward to bring up."