The Ring A pulse was small, the specific flicker that meant a member was requesting voice contact. Liam rubbed his thumb across the ring's inner face and connected.
The voice that came through belonged to Camilla.
"Camilla requires your assistance," she said, without preamble.
Liam settled back against the warm rock near the crater's edge. The sulfur smell had become background noise by now. Somewhere in the smoky dark, Linnie was still sitting on the skull.
"Your Highness," he said pleasantly. "It's been months. You're calling because...?"
" Camilla's total aura has tripled since we last spoke." A brief pause, the kind that communicated a point being made. "Laziness is not among Camilla's qualities."
"Tripled is respectable," Liam said. "So you're calling because something happened that tripled aura can't handle."
"Correct." The word had the quality of something being extracted under mild duress. "Camilla does not know the full scope yet. But Camilla can confirm that the situation has become unfavorable, and is likely to continue becoming more unfavorable, and it may threaten Camilla's position in the succession. Tserriednich must be dealt with promptly."
Liam's posture shifted slightly. "Hasn't Suzaku handled him yet?"
The silence on the other end lasted two beats too long.
"Suzaku has been attempting to approach Tserriednich for several months," Camilla said, with the tone of someone reporting a natural disaster. "Without success. Furthermore." She paused again. "Tserriednich is not what he was when we arrived in Kakin."
"He learned Nen."
"He had learned Nen by the time Camilla and Suzaku reached the capital. He had mastered Ten. He had—" A carefully controlled breath. "Suzaku would not ask you for help. Camilla is asking. Your abilities are comprehensive. Come to Kakin."
Liam looked at the stars above the smoke.
The butterfly effect had flapped its wings somewhere in Tserriednich's vicinity and produced a Nen user ahead of any schedule Liam had expected. He had seen the Nen beast manifesting at the end of the Hunter Exam, that dense, insect-winged thing that had emerged from the fourth prince's character like something that had always been waiting for the right conditions. He had hoped the timeline had more play in it.
It apparently did not.
"I can't come in person right now," he said. "I'm in the middle of something. Here's what you do: find a person whose body I can use as a relay. A stranger, ideally someone who won't be missed for a few hours, with no particular Nen ability. Apply your Star Mark to them using the same method I showed you. I'll come through that."
"A relay possession."
"You'll barely notice. I'll handle it from there."
He walked her through the mechanics: how to pass the Star Mark from her own mark to a new host, the contact requirements, the signs that the connection had established properly. Camilla listened and asked one clarifying question, which she phrased in a way that made clear she had been thinking about this problem already and had half-answered it herself.
When she had what she needed, she ended the call without a farewell, which was consistent with her established communication style.
Liam sat with the ring for a moment longer, looking at the moon moving through the smoke above the crater. Three months of Kakin politics developing faster than the script he remembered. Kurapika in Camilla's convoy, unable to get close to a fourth prince who had arrived at Nen before Kurapika could set the board. Tserriednich with a Nen beast already formed, its character written into the shape of it before he had any deliberate control over what it became.
He heard an exclamation from nearby. Short, surprised, not alarmed.
He stood up.
Aria was standing at the crater's edge staring at her hands.
Her hands, specifically, were producing light.
Not fire, not heat, nothing dramatic. A soft aura glow, the kind a new Nen user produces when their nodes first open and the energy has nowhere organized to go yet. It wrapped around her palms, her forearms, her shoulders, the same phenomenon visible on Shizuku and Aoi and Akane who were gathered around her watching with various degrees of interest.
"What is this," Aria said, turning her hands over. "What did you do to me."
Aoi was already sitting beside her, cross-legged, in the manner of someone who had been asked to explain something basic and taken the responsibility seriously. "Your Nen nodes opened. They were sealed before, which is standard for anyone who hasn't been trained. The Star Mark—"
"The what?"
"The mark he put on your ear."
Aria reached up and touched the base of her left ear with one finger, locating the pentagram by feel. Her expression cycled through several positions in quick succession.
"It opened your pathways," Aoi continued. "The energy is called aura. Most people have it but can't access it without training, or in your case, without something that shortcuts the usual process."
"It feels strange," Aria said.
"It will feel less strange," Shizuku said. She was sitting back slightly, watching the glow around Aria's hands with the assessing quality she brought to most observations. "It becomes normal quickly."
Liam arrived and looked at the group.
"Didn't you used to study alongside your mother-in-law and Netero?" Akane asked Aria. She was crouching nearby, head tilted. "Netero uses Nen. Linnie uses Nen. You never wondered what it was?"
"I assumed they were doing what I do," Aria said. "I didn't know there was a separate system."
A genuine and complete answer from someone who had grown up with innate abilities and no reference class to compare them against. She had watched powerful people do powerful things and concluded they were doing a different version of her own experience.
Aoi appeared to find this philosophically interesting. Akane appeared to find it charming in a slightly disorienting way.
"Try this," Aoi said, and set a cup of water in front of Aria. "Hold your hands around it, not touching, and let the aura flow outward from your palms."
Aria tried. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then too much happened: the water in the cup trembled, overflowed at the edges, ran across the rock in a thin sheet. The leaves floating on the surface spun in a brief spiral and went over the side.
"Enhancer," Liam said.
The Water Divination result was visible without equipment, really. The way the water had overflowed rather than rippling spoke to a particular kind of aura output, the type that strengthens and amplifies rather than constructs or manipulates.
Aria looked at the cup. "What does that mean?"
"It means your Nen type is Enhancement. Your aura strengthens things it touches." He paused. "Including yourself, presumably, which is why your ability works the way it does."
"I thought you said my ability isn't Nen."
"It isn't. But your aura type is still Enhancement, which tells us something about how the rest of you is configured even if the specific ability operates differently." He sat down across from her. "Can you do the merge thing again? I want to examine it from inside."
Aria's ears went back. "From inside?"
"I'll possess you briefly. I want to feel what you feel when you use it."
Her face moved through a rapid sequence of objections before settling on the practical conclusion that she had a pentagram on her ear and objections might not be the load-bearing structure she was hoping for.
She used the ability.
The transition was seamless in the way it was always seamless: Liam's consciousness extending through the Star Mark connection, Aria's body becoming temporarily available. He sat in the possession and did what he'd said he would do: he tried to understand.
He reached toward the sensation of the merge, the way she had described it, the simple directional movement, no different from breathing. He reached for the stone under his feet and tried to become part of it.
Nothing happened.
He tried with more specific intention. He tried with less. He tried the way he'd learned to ride wind aura, not forcing but inviting. He tried the way he'd learned possession itself, by relaxing the boundary between self and not-self.
Nothing happened. The rock remained rock. He remained Liam, in a borrowed body, touching a surface he couldn't become.
It was like trying to understand echolocation by wanting very hard to use it. The mechanism was biological and not transferable by intent.
He released the possession and came back to himself.
"Well?" Aoi asked.
"I have no idea," Liam said, with genuine respect. "I can feel that there's something there and I cannot reach it at all."
Aria looked at him with an expression that might have been satisfaction.
"Can you teach me the control thing?" she said. "The star mark. The possession."
"No," he said. "Mine was automatic. I didn't develop it deliberately and I can't explain the mechanism to anyone else. If I could, I would, but the honest answer is that I don't know how it works."
Aria stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the cup of water, apparently deciding to work with what was available.
She kept demonstrating her ability in between the Nen basics until some time well past midnight, when her head dropped and her breathing went slow and she was asleep between one sentence and the next.
At dawn, Linnie was there.
She appeared at the edge of their camp the way she apparently moved everywhere: without prior announcement, without audible footsteps, the specific quality of someone who existed in a space and then was simply in a slightly different part of it. She looked at the sleeping Aria for a moment, then at Liam.
"The person we're going to find," she said. "You should know before we arrive. He's in a particular state at the moment. Unusual, and dangerous." She looked at the crater. "Once, he was one of the so-called gatekeepers."