Nawick's hand came down.
Moto's arms locked around him from behind.
It wasn't graceful — it was everything he had left, hauled up from the ground on sheer stubbornness, and he drove Nawick forward and down into the scorched earth with a suplex that rattled both of them. He lay there a second, winded, before Nawick peeled himself off the ground, grabbed him, and threw him down next to Najo.
"I don't know why you're so eager to die, too," Nawick said. "But fine. Have it your way."
Najo stared at Moto.
Moto pushed himself up onto one elbow. His breathing was ragged. His eyes were not.
"If you're scared of potential," he said, "you should be terrified of me. You're looking at the strongest right now."
Najo turned his head. Something in his expression shifted — competitive, almost involuntary. "You'll have to beat me first, pipsqueak."
"I hit your dad more."
"I hit him harder."
"Stop—" Nawick's voice cracked up an octave. "Stop ignoring me! You're about to die, and you're making jokes?!"
"Not hard enough," Moto muttered to Najo.
Nawick's hands came up, lightning coiling thick and violent around both arms. The air pressure dropped. The ground darkened under the charge.
Then the thunder came.
Not from the sky — from somewhere older than that. A single, resonant peal that didn't roll so much as announce, and it hit Nawick like a hand on the shoulder. He stopped moving. His arms lowered slowly, without his seeming to decide to lower them. The colour left his face.
Through the dust, an old man walked.
Impeccably dressed. Unhurried. The kind of bearing that doesn't need to announce itself because it never had to. The thunder still echoed faintly behind him like it was following at a respectful distance.
"You dare keep my heir from me, Nawick?"
Nawick turned with the stiffness of a man who had just heard something he'd been dreading for years.
Among the retinue behind Ginimbi, Drake stepped forward. His face was grim, tired, and relieved all at once.
Najo looked at Drake. Then at Sheu, still on the ground a few feet away. She met his eyes, and the pieces arranged themselves — Najo bolting ahead, leaving them behind, Sheu taking one look at what they were running toward and making a different calculation entirely. She'd known. They couldn't beat an adult lightning user of this rank. Nobody could. But Ginimbi would want to know his grandson was alive. That was a certainty worth betting on.
All of Moto's jokes. The relentless, maddening refusal to take any of it seriously. He'd been watching the entrance to the clearing the entire time.
A second later, and it would have gone differently.
Nawick stood cornered, his expression cycling through things he couldn't say. Ginimbi gave him no time to find the words.
"Answer me!"
"Why are you so opposed to giving me your empire?!" The desperation in Nawick's voice made it ugly, too loud, younger than his age. "Why?!"
Ginimbi's expression didn't change. "You're still on about that. I told you — you're weak. Seventeen generations of wealth would be taken from you before the year was out."
"How could I be strong when you never trained me?" Nawick's voice cracked on the word trained, and the crack was full of something that had been waiting a long time to come out. "You only ever paid attention to Nigel—"
"Do not speak his name." The temperature of Ginimbi's voice dropped entirely. "I know what you did. I kept you anyway. And this is what you do with it."
"Defending your favourite even after death. You treat me like one of your guards—"
"You don't possess the Storm." Ginimbi said it like closing a door. "You never had the birthright to begin with. I still gave you everything. Your own men. Your own freedom — I didn't track you like I do the others. And you used it to hunt your own child." He turned his face away slightly, as though Nawick had become something too small to look at directly. "You are not only an ungrateful fool. You are a danger to this family. And I will die before I let this name come to nothing."
The banishment came after that, quiet and absolute.
Nawick's mouth opened. "Where am I supposed to go?" Something in his voice had given up trying to be powerful. "To the cultists in Zen? The hellscapes of Gehen?"
"You're a man," Ginimbi said, already turning away. "Figure it out."
Najo watched his father stand there in the settling dust. The rage was still in Nawick's face, but under it was something else — something broken and very old, a grief that had probably been there so long neither of them had ever named it. It lasted only a moment. Najo filed it away without knowing why.
Ginimbi came to stand before him. He introduced himself the way people do when they've been waiting to, with a formality that carried genuine feeling underneath it.
"Show me," he said simply.
Najo was exhausted down to something deeper than muscle. He raised his forearm and pushed, and what came out was barely a spark — a faint, pale flicker against his skin.
Ginimbi's face broke into a smile. Not the polished, composed expression he'd worn since arriving. A real one — bright and surprised and entirely unguarded.
"Yes. This is it."
The medical team came first. Then the offer — the Lightning Village, a proper house, elite school enrollment, all of it moving at the pace of a man who had been waiting for this and was not inclined to waste more time.
Najo didn't hesitate before asking for his friends. All of them.
Ginimbi agreed without negotiating. Houses for each of them, large enough that nobody had to share. Naomi accepted gratefully and then, quietly, arranged to stay somewhere separate — close, but not inside a place that carried too much of Nawick in its walls. Nobody pushed back on it.
Moto stood outside the gates of the Lightning Village as the sun came down and turned everything gold. He looked at the school behind those gates and didn't say much. Sheu sat beside him and didn't need him to.
Miles from there, Nawick sat alone on a rock at the edge of Nyika's border. The country was behind him and not coming back.
He heard footsteps and didn't look up.
"I know that look," a voice said — easy, unhurried, faintly amused. "Having a bad day, are we?"
"Who cares," Nawick said.
The man sat down nearby, or didn't sit, or stood — Nawick wasn't paying attention. Then something entered his field of vision. A hand, extended. An emblem resting in the palm — two letters, M and D, intertwined.
Nawick looked up for the first time.
The man was tall, lean, dressed in white and yellow that had no business being that clean out here. Blond hair, short. An expression that suggested he found most things gently entertaining and this was no exception.
"Who are you?" Nawick asked.
The man smiled.