Mother had improved to a terrifying degree.

Despite throwing most of the work to her, she wrote like a demon. In the two years that we hadn’t seen each other, she’d somehow gotten even better. She worked without stopping over the week we spent in the lab. As an immortal, I didn’t need sleep. But her?

She chose to power through.

I watched her work, deep bags set under her eyes. And yet, underneath the exhaustion, there was a light in her gaze that burned as brightly as the day we started experimenting. Even after a week of work, it never faltered. Her drive didn’t wane or weaken or fade.

That was just how she was, I supposed. Mother thrived under pressure. She was always the one who sunk into work and forgot how to swim back up. In her element, she didn’t need to breathe. She didn’t even seem to need rest.

Over the week we spent testing, she barely ate. She didn’t sleep. Energy tonics littered the space around her. Halcyn dropped by to check on us several times, only for mother to glare at him until he left us alone. Seeing me work without pause, it seemed to have lit something inside of her—a feeling of competitiveness. A show of pride to a fellow craftsman. I didn’t bother to tell her to slow down. No, she wouldn't listen even if I did.

Under the guise of Ashran, the Master, I felt no farther away from her than when I was child. It was simply how things were around us. We were more colleagues than mother and son.

And now, working together like this, that fact only made itself clearer to me.

“This one doesn’t work,” she said, muttering as she turned her bloodshot eyes to me. She passed me the paper she was working on. “The potential volatility of this mixture is too risky to handle. Revise the formula. Natrel isn’t enough to dampen the positive energy build-up on activation.”

I took it, crossing out an entire section of a massive hypothesis. I passed mother a stack of papers, each one handling rarer alloys and metals. Iridesce. Bluesteel. Firegold.

“These are the strongest stimulants I’ve figured out so far.”

“How high on the scale?”

“A mean of thirteen times the effectiveness of diamond dust. Mutative, reinforcing, and explosive respectively.”

Mother nodded and took the sheets, “If we focus on a mutative property, we might be able to create a poison that the blight can’t adapt to. Focus on iridesce and find a way to focus its effects when turned into a solution.”

At her words, I blinked. My pen stopped scratching formulae onto the page and I stood, heading straight for the materials arranged in rows along the shelves. Mother frowned and turned, watching me.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “We aren’t done preparing for another round of work yet. It’s too soon to experiment with this batch.”

I ignored her question as I gathered materials into my hands. Three vials of quicksilver, a crystal of positively charged mana, and thin sheets of gold leaf. Alongside several activation components, I made my way back to the table, arranging them along an iron plate. I passed the components to mother.

“Prepare a mixture to activate quicksilver’s tertiary property. I have an idea.”

Mother frowned at the materials, but acquiesced. She turned to work and I began pouring quicksilver onto the iron plate. The liquid metal pooled, gathering at the center. I crushed the tiny mana crystal to dust with a pestle as mother returned with a vial full of dense, white vapor.

I motioned to the plate, “Activate it.”

With a nod, she poured the gas onto the mercury and the silver fluid immediately lost color. It turned a startling, bone-white. I watched the quicksilver begin to harden from the bottom up, as if it were about to turn into a solid block of metal. But I wasn’t done. I sprinkled the dust over it—changing it, countering the negative charge with a stimulant. The quicksilver absorbed the dust and began to move. It was a slow, jerking motion at first. Just a few twitches along its liquid frame. But soon, those twitches turned into languid vibrations, undulating out from the center. With a pair of tweezers, I ripped pieces out from the gold sheets and dropped it along the edges of the iron plate.

The animated metal slime flowed towards them, eating the gold. Assimilating it and turning it into amalgam plates that flowed over the slime’s frame.

As soon as she saw this, mother’s eyes widened.

“A sentient weapon…” she muttered, her eyes shining as she stared at the mercury. “If we can imbue these effects onto a mutating assimilator, then give it a way to multiply and spread—that’s it. We’ve got it.”

She turned to me and her tired, wrinkled face lit up into a grin.

“Excellent work,” she said, but I could only stare at her, stunned. Not once in my life had I ever seen mother smile. Not until today. She raised her hand to me, offering it, “This might be the break that we need. You’ve been an invaluable help, master Ashran. Can I count on your expertise to help me refine this further?”

I stared at her hand. She was offering it to me, acknowledging me. Asking me to shake it.

Silence filled the air between us.

Mother held it there awkwardly, leaving her hand hanging. She hesitated. Began to pull it away.

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Until my hand moved by itself.

I shook mother’s hand and her smile returned.

And for a moment, I found myself wanting to smile as well.

“I’m glad to have been of help,” I said, my heart beating against my chest in a strange sense of exhilaration. The sensation was new. Strange. I stared at mother’s grin, and the child in me felt validated at last. Like I’d been approved of for the first time in my life. I looked at her now—truly looked at her. For the first time in almost three years.

And the smile I wore faltered as I understood.

Mother was different now.

She was thinner.

The mother in my memories was a small woman, but she was healthy. Slim, but never thin. That wasn’t true anymore. Right now, she seemed so brittle compared to before. So fragile. Wrinkles on her forehead, deep bags under her eyes, shriveled leaf-hairs—she looked like she’d aged decades in the time she was gone. If this was what her lifestyle was like for two whole years, then it was no wonder that she looked as old as she did.

What was it like, working away from us? Finding a cure for father’s cancer, working under the Summersky House, facing the pressure of saving the region from an uncontrolled rift…

I could only imagine what that would do to a person.

For all that I despised her choice to leave us, a part of me began to ache at the sight of her. She wasn’t a galewind anymore, free as the breeze. She was a whisper of wind. Slowly fading. Flowing downhill over grass instead of soaring over the clouds—languid, weakening.

Mother was old. Just like father was.

That fact was only really starting to sink in now.

But unlike me, mother didn’t seem to realize her age. She didn’t seem to want to acknowledge how fragile she now was. The old woman in front of me reached for a pen and a fresh sheet of paper, but I didn’t miss the slight falter in her step as she sat down.

She was barely staying awake.

It was a wonder she hadn't collapsed yet.

I stood beside her and frowned at the materials she began listing down over the parchment. “You haven’t slept in three days. Shouldn’t you take a break now that we’ve made progress? Your family will worry if you work yourself to death like this, miss Kindlebright.”

Mother shook her head and waved my concerns aside, “We have the initiative. Shouldn’t we take advantage of it as soon as possible? The whole realm will suffer for it if I rest. Every second we lose is another mile of blight on the soil.”

“Working with a mind addled by fatigue is dangerous.”

She raised an eyebrow, “I don’t make mistakes.”

I shook my head, “As alchemists, we both know how very little it takes to change that. Rest. Your husband must worry about you constantly if you live this way. How can your family possibly be happy when you're like this?”

At the mention of father, I saw mother tense. She set her pen down with a sharp tak and glared, “Discussing my personal life at work is unbecoming of you, Ashran. Who are you to judge my marriage? My family? I expected more professionalism from a man of your skill. Enough talk. I won't entertain this any further.”

The question almost made me want to laugh, if it didn't piss me off so much. Who was I?

Ancestors, I was her son. And I knew that she was unaware of that. But that did little to change the lifetime of frustration I’d lived through—it did nothing to lessen the indignance I felt for father and myself, who constantly gave her ground to do as she wished. And for what? For her to kill herself with a mountain of work?

I placed a hand down on top of the desk, blocking her pen from writing any more. It was wrong of me to do—it was against the character I was playing. Against the purpose of my weave. But still, I did it. Mother raised her head and glowered.

“What are you doing?”

“That’s what I should be asking you,” I replied, staring her down even as I struggled to maintain my guise. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put him through?”

“Who in the Ancestors’ Names are you talking about?”

“Your husband, you insensitive old woman,” I growled, and I felt an invisible thread snap. My weave distorted, but still, I pressed on. “Who else would I be talking about? Do you know what he looks like when you aren’t there? How much he sits by the door, waiting and hoping you’ll come home for dinner?”

“You speak as if you know him.”

“And you act like you don’t.”

Mother’s scowl turned confused, like she was staring at a puzzle she couldn’t piece together. One with a stray, misshaped piece. She stared at me, her mouth opening. Closing. Mother shook her head and frowned, “Who are you, Ashran? Who am I speaking to?”

Her doubt only made things worse. My weave began unraveling, even despite its unnatural strength. Even the freedom it allowed me couldn’t stand in front of this level of scrutiny. So while it remained, I was going to speak my mind. Just like I did with Vivian. I clenched my fists, and the paper underneath my hand crumpled. Tore. I looked mother in the eye and spoke.

“You’re talking to the person who sees him stay up to wait for a wife that isn’t coming back. You want to know who I am? I’m the person that kept him alive while you played physician with the nobles—you're looking at the kid who ate the serving of dinner he always cooked for you, just so he wouldn’t get sad looking at the leftovers.”

At my words, half of my face peeled away. My guise tore, splitting my face in two. One side Rowan, one side Ashran. Halfway between disguise and reality. Mother stared, frozen. She turned pale as she watched the weave unravel.

“You don’t know it, but you didn’t save his life on time,” I said, and each word tore at my weave until there was nothing left. And yet, I stood in front of mother, barely clinging to my mortality. All because of a small piece in the center of my being—the fraction of a Name, the shadow of a mortal life. I stepped away from her and glared, “Do you understand that? You were too late, mother. The only reason he’s alive is me, and you don’t even know who I am.”

“No,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “That isn't true. I know you. But why can’t I see your face? Why can’t I remember your name?”

I shook my head, “Because I gave it away to save a man that you still haven’t learned to treasure.”

And that was all that needed to be said. Even after all this time, it was still the same problem. I simply realized too late that I didn’t want to bother with fixing it anymore. I was just so very tired, and I remembered once again why I didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. I stepped past mother and I tucked my Name inside, down into the darkness, hidden away where she couldn’t see it.

I stepped out of the mortal plane, and the world turned gray once more. Elanah spun to reach for me, but she clutched at nothing but empty air. I watched her search for me. I watched her fail.

Invisible, I turned away and stepped out the door. It closed behind me with a click.

I sighed and stopped just a few steps down the hall outside, suddenly drained. Tired. I felt my legs wobble beneath me and I released a shaky breath, sinking down to sit against the wall. My hands were trembling, I realized. I was nauseous and numb and empty of all energy.

“Ancestor's rot, I just wanted to go home,” I muttered, closing my tired eyes. “Why does that have to be so hard?”

I sat there by myself, feeling so very tired. So very alone.

But that didn't last long.

From down the hall, I heard a pair of footsteps approach. They stopped, and someone sat next to me, staring. A warm hand placed itself over my head. It smoothed my disheveled hair, giving it long, gentle strokes. The sensation was comforting. Familiar, yet different in many ways.

I opened my eyes to the sight of a girl I didn’t recognize. But one look into her eyes was all it took for me to realize who she was.

There was only one person that looked at me the way she did. Aami smiled.

"Want a hug?"