Chapter 16:
Aren found Noctis at the eastern edge of the forest before sunrise.
He hadn't told his brothers he was going. He'd lain awake most of the night thinking about the clone standing in the square, about the fire that had moved over it like water, about the two seconds it had taken Noctis to end something that had stopped everything he and his brothers had thrown at it. At some point in the early hours he'd stopped trying to sleep and started thinking about what needed to happen next, and by the time the sky had gone from black to dark blue he'd already pulled on his coat and walked out.
Noctis was sitting on a fallen tree at the boundary, the same boundary where Kaelen had stood three years ago. He wasn't doing anything. Just sitting, in the way he had of occupying a space without announcing himself in it, present the way old things in a forest are present.
He looked up when Aren approached. He didn't seem surprised.
Aren stopped a few feet away. He'd thought about how to say this on the walk over, and in the end he'd decided that Noctis seemed like someone who preferred directness to approach.
"Train us," Aren said.
Noctis looked at him for a moment. The sky was lightening behind the trees, pale grey coming in at the edges of the dark.
"Sit down," Noctis said.
Aren sat on the frozen ground across from him.
"Call your brothers," Noctis said.
Aren looked at him. "Now?"
"You came here to ask me something on behalf of all of them. They should be here for the answer."
Aren was quiet for a moment. Then he put two fingers to his mouth and made a sound that carried back toward the village -- a specific pattern, short and low, that the four of them had developed years ago as a signal between brothers. He'd used it maybe three times in his life and every time it had worked.
They waited.
Raiden arrived first, which was typical -- he'd probably been awake already, burning off last night's energy. Then Lior, fully dressed and alert in the way that meant he hadn't slept much either. Veyr came last, though last for Veyr still meant before anyone might reasonably have expected him.
They arranged themselves around Noctis without being told to, the way people arrange themselves when the shape of a situation makes the positioning obvious. Noctis looked at each of them in turn.
"Before I agree to anything," he said, "I need something from you."
Raiden crossed his arms. "What?"
"Each of you is going to tell me one thing. Something you've been carrying since your father died that you haven't said out loud to each other." He looked at Raiden's expression and continued before Raiden could respond to it. "I already know what these things are. I've been watching for three years. I'm not asking because I need the information. I'm asking because you need to say it."
The forest was quiet around them.
"Why?" Lior asked.
"Because what I watched last night was four people fighting separately in the same direction. That's not the same as fighting together. The difference between those two things is exactly the gap between where you are and where you need to be." Noctis looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. "What you're each carrying -- the things you haven't said -- they're the weight that's keeping each of you slightly turned away from each other. You can feel it even if you haven't named it."
Nobody argued with this.
The sky was getting lighter. The frost on the ground was starting to show itself properly in the growing grey.
"Who goes first," Raiden said. Not quite a question.
"You," Noctis said.
Raiden's jaw tightened. He looked at the trees for a moment -- the habitual gesture of someone buying themselves a second. Then he looked at his brothers.
"The morning he left," Raiden said. His voice had its usual energy stripped out of it, leaving something underneath that was quieter and harder. "I told him I was coming. He said I wasn't ready. I pushed back. Aren stopped me." He paused. "I've thought about that a thousand times. If I'd pushed harder -- if I'd actually gone -- maybe I'd have been there. Maybe it would have gone differently."
"Or you'd be dead too," Aren said quietly.
"I know that," Raiden said. "Knowing it doesn't stop the thought."
Silence.
"I'm angry at myself," Raiden said. "Not at Darius. Not at the war. At myself, because I was standing right there and I couldn't do anything, and I still can't do anything, and every time I use the lightning it feels like I'm trying to prove something to a man who isn't here to see it."
He stopped talking. He looked at the ground.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Noctis said, "Aren."
Aren had been listening to his brother with an expression that people who didn't know him well might have read as neutral. Lior knew it wasn't. He'd seen that expression on Aren's face before -- it was the look of someone absorbing something they'd suspected but hadn't wanted to confirm.
Aren looked at Noctis. Then at his brothers.
"I'm afraid I'm going to get one of you killed," he said. Simply. No build-up, no qualification. "Every decision I make -- who goes where, when we move, what we do -- I run it through the same calculation. Is this the decision that ends with one of my brothers not coming back. I haven't slept a night in three years without running that calculation at least once." He paused. "Father carried all of us. I watched him do it. I understood it even as a child -- that he held everything together. And when he was gone, I tried to pick that up, and I've been afraid every day since that I'm not big enough to hold what he held."
Raiden was looking at him. Something in his face had shifted.
"You never said anything," Raiden said.
"You needed someone who wasn't afraid," Aren said. "I was the best option available."
Raiden made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. It wasn't funny. It was the sound of something recognizing itself in something else.
Noctis let it sit for a moment. Then he looked at Lior.
Lior had been expecting this. He'd known, from the moment Noctis had outlined what he wanted, that this was coming, and he'd been arranging himself for it the way he arranged himself for most difficult things -- quietly, internally, getting it into the right shape before it needed to come out.
"The scroll," he said.
His brothers already knew about the scroll. But knowing about it and hearing him say it were different things, and he understood the difference.
"I told myself it was practical," Lior said. "That I was doing it for the family. That the situation was urgent enough to justify it." He looked at his hands. "Part of that was true. But the part I haven't said is that I was terrified of being the one who never woke up. Raiden's lightning. Aren's fire. Even Veyr with whatever Veyr is becoming. And me -- the one who calculates everything and feels nothing in his blood." He paused. "The scroll wasn't just a shortcut. It was proof that I was afraid of being left behind. Of being the brother who wasn't enough."
The forest was very still.
"You've never been behind," Aren said after a moment. His voice was quiet and certain. "Not once."
Lior looked at him. He didn't argue. He also didn't entirely believe it yet. But he filed it -- the way he filed everything -- in a place where it could work on him over time.
Noctis looked at Veyr.
Veyr had been sitting completely still through all of this, the way he sat still through most things -- not disengaged, intensely present, processing. Now he felt the weight of Noctis's attention and his brothers' attention together.
He looked at his hands.
"I knew," he said. "Before the war horn. Before anyone said anything. I was sitting at the table watching Father laugh at something Raiden said, and I knew he wasn't coming back." He paused. "I've known things like that my whole life. Small things, mostly. The shape of how situations are moving, where they're going. But that was the first time I knew something that large."
His brothers were very still.
"I didn't say anything," Veyr continued. "Because there was nothing to say that would have changed it. That's true. But it's not the whole truth." He looked up. "The whole truth is that I've been carrying the weight of knowing things I can't change for as long as I can remember, and I've been carrying it alone because I didn't know how to explain it. I still don't know how to explain it. But I've let the not-explaining become a wall, and the wall has been between me and all of you, and I've told myself it was protection." He paused. "I don't know what it actually is anymore."
The silence that followed was different from the silences before it. Fuller, somehow. The kind of silence that comes after something has been said that needed saying, that had been waiting a long time to be said.
Raiden was looking at Veyr with an expression nobody had ever seen on Raiden's face before. It took a moment to identify because it was so unlike his usual range. It was the expression of someone who had just understood something about a person they'd known their whole life that they'd been missing.
"You've known things this whole time," Raiden said slowly. "And you just carried it."
"Yes," Veyr said.
"That sounds terrible," Raiden said. With complete sincerity.
Something crossed Veyr's face. Not quite a smile. Close enough.
Noctis stood up from the fallen tree.
He looked at the four brothers sitting in the frost in the early morning light -- at the things that were visible in their faces now that hadn't been visible before. The particular quality of people who have just set something down that they've been carrying so long they'd forgotten they were carrying it.
"Now you're ready to train," he said.
Raiden looked up at him. "That's it? We say the thing and now we're ready?"
"No," Noctis said. "You were already capable fighters. You've been capable fighters for months. What you weren't was unified." He looked at each of them. "What you just did -- that's not a small thing. Most people never do it. Most people carry what you were carrying until it becomes the reason they fail at the moment that matters most." He paused. "Your father was unified. Every part of him pointed the same direction. I watched you last night and I saw four people who were almost that -- close enough that the gap was visible. What you just did closed some of that gap."
"Some," Aren said.
"The rest closes in training," Noctis said. "And in time." He looked east -- toward the fortress that wasn't visible from here but that all of them knew the direction of now. "Darius will send more than a clone next time. The construct last night was a message and a test. He learned what he needed to learn."
"What did he learn?" Lior asked.
"That you're not ready yet," Noctis said. "Which buys us some time. He won't come until he believes you're close -- he wants to end this when the ending means something, not before." A pause. "That's his flaw. He needs it to matter. We use that."
He started walking back toward the village.
"Tomorrow," he said without turning around. "Before sunrise. All four of you. East clearing."
He walked into the trees and was gone the way he usually went -- one moment present, the next simply not there, the forest closing back around the space he'd occupied as if it had never been disturbed.
The four brothers sat in the frost for a while after he left.
Nobody spoke for a bit. The sky had gone from grey to something warmer at the edges, the first real color of the day coming in low over the treeline.
Then Raiden said, to no one in particular, "I didn't know you were afraid."
He was looking at Aren.
Aren looked back at him. "I know."
"You should have said something."
"Probably."
Raiden was quiet for a moment. Then he stood up and offered Aren his hand -- not to help him up, just the gesture itself. Aren looked at it for a second, then took it, and Raiden pulled him to his feet with the easy physical confidence he brought to everything.
They walked back to the village together, the four of them, through the frost and the early morning light.
Behind them the forest was quiet.
And at the eastern boundary, somewhere in the old trees, something that had been alone for a very long time watched them go and felt something it hadn't felt in years.
It didn't have a clean name, the feeling.
But it was close to what people mean when they say they are not quite as alone as they were yesterday.
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If Chapter 16 hit different today, you already know why. Power Stones take two seconds and they mean everything for this story reaching the readers it deserves. Drop your thoughts in the comments. What do you think Noctis is carrying? See you in Chapter 17.