Elias found her waiting for him at dawn the next morning, exactly as unimpressed and exactly as immovable as the day they'd first met — and, if he was being fully honest with himself over a cup of tea he wasn't technically old enough to be drinking, exactly as much his as he was hers by now, however neither of them planned to say a word of that out loud, possibly ever.
He thought about the year behind him while she set up the morning's drills: dying twice, technically, once by drowning and once by an entirely self-inflicted rosebush incident involving a snapped neck; discovering an ocean where his soul should reasonably have had a modest pond; acquiring an uncle who communicated primarily in thunderclaps, unsolicited telepathy, and deeply questionable life choices; and a cousin-slash-drill-sergeant currently glaring at him over her own cup of tea like he personally owed her money and interest.
Somewhere far above the world, he suspected, a smug, silver-haired god was still watching, still waiting patiently for the exact moment all of this — the family, the almost-friend, the fragile, stubborn thing that might one day, against every reasonable expectation, actually resemble happiness — got taken away again, right on cue, the way Deus had promised Mors it eventually would.
Not today, Elias thought, and meant it with more conviction than he'd expected to summon on a Tuesday. Today I'm just going to be annoyed at my cousin, like a normal, extremely abnormal person.
"You're late," Aina said, not looking up from the sand she was already raising off the ground in lazy, warning coils.
"I'm seven. I have a body clock issue."
"Excuses," she said, and threw a training dummy at him without any further warning whatsoever — which, all things considered, felt like exactly the kind of morning he was going to spend the rest of his very, very long life getting used to.
Somewhere beyond Blackwood's borders, in the cold dark of a forest that had gone conspicuously, unnaturally quiet, something patient waited, having tasted one small boy's Flow and found it, against all odds, interesting.
It would be back.
But that — like most of the worst things currently queued up in Elias's life — was, for now, a problem for another day.