"She's doing it again."
Sable's voice came from Hart's shadow. Flat. The kind of flat that meant she was annoyed but wouldn't say she was annoyed because saying it would be admitting something and Sable didn't admit things.
Ember, trotting beside Hart in fox form, flicked one of her four visible tails. The fifth one kept popping out and she kept shoving it back in and the whole process looked like someone trying to stuff a spring into a box that was one spring too small.
"I'm not doing anything," Ember said. Her voice came from the fox but the volume was all wrong for the size. Too loud. Like someone had put a speaker inside a cat.
"You're humming."
"I'm not humming."
"You are humming a fire song from before the sealing and it is making my shadow itch."
Hart walked between them. The Greymarch was thinning around them, trees getting shorter, the fog pulling back. Two hours down. Two more to Graveston.
His back was a situation. The wound had stopped bleeding about an hour ago which was either good or bad depending on whether it stopped because it was healing or because he'd run out of blood to spare. His left arm worked now. Mostly. It tingled at the elbow like he'd slept on it wrong except he hadn't slept at all.
"I might be humming a little," Ember said.
"Stop."
"Make me."
Sable's shadow got darker around Hart's boots. Ember's fourth tail popped out and became a fifth. She shoved it back.
Hart kept walking. His boots were muddy. Everything was muddy. The Bronze card was still in the pocket with the hole and he could feel it against his hip with every step and he didn't know why that mattered but it did. The card was cheap and the jacket was ruined and he had two ancient beings arguing about humming six inches from his feet and somehow this was his life now.
A week ago his biggest problem was being invisible.
"Can you two," Hart started, and then didn't finish because he didn't know how to finish. Can you two what. Get along. Be quiet. Stop making him feel like a parent who'd accidentally adopted a wolf and a fox that were both older than civilization.
"Can we what," Ember said.
"Nothing. Just. Walk."
They walked. For about three minutes. Then Ember started humming again. Quiet this time. Under her breath. Hart could barely hear it but Sable's shadow twitched at his ankle.
Hart almost smiled. Didn't. His face was too tired for it.
The Grid pulsed. First time in hours. He'd almost forgotten it was there which was a weird thing to think about a screen that lived in his peripheral vision permanently.
Dual Bond Synergy: Active
Essence Recovery: +12%
Current recovery rate: 0.8% per hour (base 0.7%)
Estimated full recovery: 14h
The synergy was already working. His Essence Core was recovering faster with two bonds than with one. Not a lot faster. Twelve percent of not much was still not much. But the number was going up instead of staying flat and that was something.
Fire Sense (Tier I) was sitting in his skill list too. He'd gotten it when the Ember bond confirmed but he hadn't tested it. Hadn't had time. Hadn't had the energy. He could feel it though. A warmth at the edges of his awareness that wasn't Ember and wasn't Sable. More like a sense he'd always had but never turned on. The quarry had been too hot and too loud for it to matter. Out here in the cool fog it was. He didn't know. Different. Like the world had a temperature layer he could almost see if he squinted the right way.
He'd figure it out later. Add it to the list. The list was getting long.
They reached the east gate at dusk.
Still unmanned. Shift change didn't happen for another twenty minutes. Hart slipped through with Sable in his shadow and Ember trotting beside him in fox form. Four tails. She'd held it for the full walk back which was apparently a significant accomplishment because she'd mentioned it nine times.
"Four tails for four hours," she'd said. "That's a record. My record. For hiding tails. Which is a thing I have records for now because of you."
Hart hadn't responded. His back hurt too much for responses.
The hallway in the east wing was quiet. Evening. Most students were at dinner in the main hall. Hart's room was at the end of the corridor and he made it there without seeing anyone which was good because he looked like he'd been in a fight with a quarry and lost. Singed jacket. Blood. Dust. Blistered hands. The kind of appearance that generates questions he didn't have answers for.
The lock. The broken one that only he could open. He jiggled the handle the specific way and the door opened and he stepped inside and Ember followed and Sable rose from his shadow and the room had three beings in it that were supposed to be one.
Gerald the water stain was still on the ceiling. The note he'd left on the desk was still there. Nobody had come looking.
Of course nobody had come looking. Six days ago he'd been nobody. The Bronze card didn't change that overnight. It changed the clipboard. It didn't change three years of being invisible to every person in this building.
He sat on the bed. The springs screamed. His back. He leaned forward to take pressure off the wound and his elbows went to his knees and his head went to his hands and he just. Sat there. For a minute.
The room was small and it smelled like damp plaster and now also like sulfur and smoke because that's what he smelled like.
Sable was in the corner. Her spot. She'd claimed it the first night and apparently it was still hers. Beast form. Mercury eyes open. Watching the door.
Ember was. Hart looked up.
Ember was in human form. Standing in the middle of his dorm room. Copper hair. Amber eyes. Fox ears UP because apparently she'd given up trying to hide them in private.
She was looking at the room with an expression that was hard to read. Not disgust exactly. More like the face you make when someone shows you a shoebox and says they live there.
"This is where you sleep," Ember said.
"Yeah."
"It's small."
"It's what I have."
"It smells like wet chalk."
"That's Graveston. Everything smells like wet chalk."
Ember looked at the desk. The note. The Bronze card sitting next to it. She picked up the card and turned it over in her fingers. Her hands were warm enough that the cheap card stock curled slightly at the edges.
"Bronze," she said. Reading it.
"Got it four days ago."
"And before that?"
"Nothing. For three years. Iron tier. Unawakened."
Ember put the card down. Looked at him. Her ears did something. Not a twitch. More like they flattened halfway and then came back up like they couldn't decide.
"You were nothing for three years," she said. "And now you have two Primals and a system nobody can see and a wound that needs stitches and you're sitting in a room that smells like chalk."
"That about covers it."
"Listen." The word. Her word. She sat on the floor. Cross-legged. Tails. Hart could see them now. In private she let them out. All nine. Copper-red, fanning across the floor of his dorm room like they owned the space. "Listen, I don't know you. Sable trusts you and Sable doesn't trust anything so that means something but I don't know what it means yet. You pulled me out of a hole. That was stupid and it worked and I owe you for that. I don't like owing people."
"You don't owe me anything."
"I do. And I'll pay it back. But right now you need to do something about your back because it looks wrong and I can feel the heat coming off it which means it's getting worse not better."
Hart's back. Right. The wound. Open. Dusty. He'd been ignoring it for two hours because the walk back took everything he had and pain was something he could table if he focused on not falling down.
Sable spoke from her corner. "She's right."
"Don't start."
"Your wound needs cleaning. Fire-Essence residue in the dust. If it settles it will rot."
Hart looked at his hands. Blistered. Scabbed from the Oak. Burned from hot rock. Bleeding from sharp rock. His hands were a map of the last five days and none of the destinations had been pleasant.
"I don't have medical supplies," he said. "The medic treated it two days ago but that bandage is gone. Left it in the tunnel."
Ember stood up. Her tails gathered behind her. All nine.
"I can burn it clean," she said.
Hart stared at her.
"Fire cauterizes. Kills everything in the wound. Dust. Residue. Infection. It hurts. A lot. But it works."
"You want to set my back on fire."
"A small fire. Controlled. Targeted. I'm not an amateur." Her ears flattened. "I've been doing this for longer than your species has had writing."
Hart looked at Sable. Sable looked at Hart. Neither of them said anything for a second.
"Do it," Hart said.
He took off what was left of his jacket. Then his shirt. The air was cold on his skin. He sat facing the wall with his back to Ember and his hands on his knees and he tried to breathe.
His right hand went to his left wrist. This time he let it. Pressed the tendon. Held it. His grandmother's ghost.
"Ready," he said.
"This is going to hurt."
"I figured."
Ember's hand touched his back. Hot. Not fire yet. Just her hand. Warm the way the fox had been warm when he'd held her. Like sunlight trapped in skin.
Then the fire came.
Small. She was right about that. Targeted. A line of heat that traced the wound from shoulder blade to spine. Not the kind of heat you get from a stove or a match. Deeper. The kind that goes under the skin and finds the things that shouldn't be there and burns them out.
Hart's vision went white. His jaw locked. His fingers pressed his left wrist hard enough that the bones creaked. The sound he made wasn't a scream. It was the absence of one. The kind of silence that happens when the pain is too complete for noise.
Three seconds. Maybe four.
Then it was done.
Hart sat there. Breathing. Not well. His back was. Different. The constant pull was gone. The heat was gone. What was left was a clean pain. Sharp. Clear. Like a fresh cut instead of a rotting one.
"Done," Ember said. Her voice was different. Quiet. No speed. "The dust is gone. The residue is gone. It'll scar. Can't help that."
Hart's hands were shaking. Not from cold. His left wrist had marks from his own fingers.
Sable moved from her corner. The wolf crossed the small room and pressed her head against Hart's shoulder. The one that wasn't wounded. Cold. Her fur was always cold. Shadow-cold. It helped.
The three of them stayed like that for a while. Hart on the bed. Sable's head on his shoulder.
Ember standing behind him with her hands at her sides and all nine tails still and the room smelling like chalk and smoke and something cauterized.
The Grid pulsed. Soft.
Warden physical state: Stabilizing.
Wound status: Cauterized. Clean. Healing initiated.
Dual Bond proximity effect: Active.
Recommend: Sleep.
Sleep. Right. When was the last time he'd actually slept. Really slept. Not the two-hour crashes between training and crisis. He couldn't remember.
"Sleep," Sable said. Reading his face or reading the Grid through the bond or just knowing him well enough after five days which was a weird thought because five days wasn't long enough to know someone but five days of combat and bleeding and training and bonding was apparently worth more than normal time.
Ember moved to the opposite corner from Sable. Not the same corner. Her own corner. She sat down with her back against the wall and her tails curled around her body like a copper blanket.
"I don't sleep," Ember said. "Fire doesn't sleep. But I'll. Be here."
Sable was in her corner. Ember was in hers. Two Primals. Two corners. Hart in the middle on a thin mattress with screaming springs and a water stain on the ceiling named Gerald.
He lay down. His back touched the mattress and the cauterized wound sent a clean bright line of pain through his body and then it settled into something bearable. The springs didn't scream this time. Or maybe they did and he was too tired to hear them.
His right hand drifted toward his left wrist. Stopped in the air.
Not because he caught it. Not because Sable was watching. It just. Stopped. On its own. Like the reflex couldn't decide if it was still needed.
Two beings in the corners of his room. Cold and warm. Shadow and fire. Both watching the door. Both not sleeping.
Guarding.
Hart closed his eyes. Gerald disappeared. The Grid dimmed to almost nothing. The room was dark and small and it smelled like wet chalk and smoke and whatever cauterized tissue smells like.
He slept.
For the first time in six days he actually slept and the nothing in his chest was quiet and the hand that had been reaching for his wrist for three years was still.
In the morning the Grid would have something to say. It always did.
But that was the morning.