Night, Eighth of One, Harvest, 236 CR

“I didn’t mean to make a habit out of this,” I said softly, staring up into the sky. “It’s cliche. Beautiful, but overdone, and to have it happen usually means a moment too long delayed.”

Kelly’s arm came around my waist as she stepped up beside me, her hand sliding down to the hem of my shirt before stopping as she caught herself and brought it back up. “How did you guess I was there?”

“How do you know I haven’t been murmuring stuff like that every half hour, waiting for you to show up?”

“Have you?”

“I’ll never tell.” I let my smirk bleed into my voice, still staring at the incomprehensible vastness of the stars. “Except under very narrow conditions.”

“Sophie,” Kelly began impishly, “my friend, my teacher, my charge, my fascination and guide to marvels unseen…”

“I may in fact be all of those things, yes.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in gently, savoring the way she reciprocated. I spent two weeks not taking advantage of being able to hug this woman, I thought to myself, and I regret that.

“I don’t actually have a follow-up,” she admitted with a smile in her voice.

“I absolutely have been murmuring things out loud instead of just to myself whenever they would have been a narratively appropriate line for when you walked up behind me,” I admitted in turn.

“I know.” The smile in her voice grew into a definite smirk. “That was the second one that I was here for.”

I shook my head, flushing a bit in good-humored embarrassment. “I guess the first one must not have been any good.”

“Maybe I just didn’t want to disturb the contemplation.”

“Not much of one,” I said vaguely. “No thoughts of any particular value.”

“I didn’t say the contemplation in question was yours.”

That startled me out of my reverie, hitting me like a clue-bat broadside. I turned to her, the sight of her taking my breath away, and she preened at my expression.

“You,” she said brightly, “are a very validating person to be around, you should know. I appreciate that! Thank you.”

“I am literally incapable of not giving you your due,” I reminded her, “by divine oath. You don’t need to thank me for it—it’s not like I could avoid doing it.”

“The divine oath that was your idea.” She smirked at me, draping herself over the railing that ran around the edge of the roof. The motion drew her nightgown further up her thighs and drew my eye across every curve of her that was being hugged indecorously by the silken fabric.

My breath caught in my throat, my hand flexing on the railing I’d been leaning on. Because of course it did; even before I’d been sworn to truth, I’d never been subtle.

“Also,” she murmured, voice husky and body language making her delight unsubtle, “that doesn’t make this any less validating.”

“Yeah, well.” I dragged my eyes off of her, studying instead the way that the canopies of the towering trees spread over the village. “The trees have both needles and broad leaves. Do they stick around all year? And how do the quints get a view of the stars? From here, it looks like the canopy covers the roof of them, but Ketka’s roof has a clear shot to the sky.”

“Night’s slumber, Sophie, I don’t know how you’d expect me to know that.”

I glanced over at her with narrowed eyes and a transparently false scowl. “But you do, otherwise you wouldn’t sound so smug and airy.”

“There’s some sort of fungus that grows on them—actually, there’s a whole domain, there’s beetles and worms and birds and everything, like a little ecosystem based on each tree. But um! The one fungus… fixes some sort of nutrient, I can’t remember what, and the trees store it in their needles. So they’ll drop needles when they’re low, because for some reason they can’t reabsorb the needles directly, only after they decompose? And they’ll grow more when they’ve got plenty. And if it’s a dry year, the leaves will get brittle and the stems’ll snap in the wind.”

“You protest about it,” I murmured, “but you’ve never failed to provide an answer where one existed. What an odd double adaptation. Was it bred into them?”

“I guess that’s the first question I don’t have an answer for.” She giggled as she stepped up next to me at the railing, bumping my hips with hers. “I’d do a lookup, but you’re not the only one under orders to keep the heat off and the vents open, and the coolant non-alcoholic.”

“You mentioned that. I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ve thanked—”

“Sophie,” Kelly said with an almost heated firmness, “you’ve spent almost every minute since then either asleep or shoveling fuel into your furnace. I’ve been asleep most of the times you’ve been awake, too. I am not going to hear an apology from you for having focused on recovering.”

“That’s… true,” I said, torn between begrudging it and laughing. “Thank you. It was you who kept me upright to even get to Adei, wasn’t it? And I bet I had your support in doing as much as I did to… do what I could, what we could.”

“She won’t thank you or acknowledge it in any way, you know. If she did, she’d owe you a debt, you and Veil, and she wouldn’t be able to go back home and do… whatever she’s going to do.”

“You don’t sound like you approve,” I observed.

“You sound like you do.”

“Yeah.” I stared out into the sky, thinking about that feeling. “I get why someone would want to reach for power in order to wield it against the folks who hurt her. I felt that way for a long time. If pursuing that means we can’t talk before she leaves, well, good on her for living her dream.”

“But why? It doesn’t…” Kelly trailed off, and I waited patiently. “It doesn’t help,” she said eventually. “It doesn’t fix anything, returning the harm. Historically, it just makes things worse!”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Sometimes we tell ourselves and each other that this time it’ll be different, but I think deep down I already knew that was a lie.” I smiled at the trees, at the brilliant stars, at the clarity of the air and sky. “Ultimately, I just wanted to hurt them for the sake of the pain I’d felt. There wasn’t any fixing, any helping, any making things better. It was just… closure, I guess.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to try to change things? To have your vengeance be living better, making a future that, I dunno, refutes them?”

“That’s for people who believe that change is possible, I guess. And I’m not surprised that you can’t relate—that’s not really a thing in Shem, right? You probably grew up with this bedrock certainty that if someone points out a way that the world should be a better place, you just need to make the argument well enough, understand the opponents so you can flip them to your side; you can win, you can win just with facts and logic.”

“The way you say it, it sounds unreasonable. But it’s how it should be!”

“And so it should,” I said. “But I didn’t have the ability to make it be that way, and there was nothing I could ever do to change that. Not me, not anyone who felt the same way.”

“Not alone, not any one. But the world is what we make of it, and if all of you couldn’t change it together… I mean, you said that things did change, sometimes?”

“Usually it involves a huge number of people dying, and even then, we were…” Too comfortable, too divided, too focused on purity of intent, unwilling to engage in things that would actually make a difference, too hungry for performative nonsense… I shook my head as if that could clear the old, angry thoughts from it. Never anything so painful as striving, when you fail; hope is vulnerability, and to act is to hope. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said instead of any of those things. “I’m never going back, so it doesn’t matter.”

“It might be—”

“—something that I should talk about with Mera and James, each for their own reasons?”

Kelly was quiet for a moment, and I glanced over with a bit of worry about whether my interrupting her had caused offense. There was a quiet, thoughtful smile playing on her lips, so I didn’t worry too much about that; I just gave her some time instead, content to wait. The breeze was pleasant and the view was beautiful, after all.

And yeah, the sky and trees were nice, too.

“I did sometimes feel that way, like the truth didn’t matter and nobody was listening anyway,” she said eventually, turning back outwards and leaning into me. “I’m glad I live somewhere where it’s not true, where the reason why things weren’t the way I wanted is that I was wrong, or at least everyone thought I was wrong.”

“Oh?” I wrapped an arm around her belly, carefully not giving into the urge to slide it higher but holding her that little bit closer regardless. “Do tell.”

“I don’t like to think I’m special,” she said in tones of deep confession. “It’s not proper, and everyone has something that makes them special, in their own way. I know it’s true, I even believe it’s true.”

“But not everyone is a gorgeous genius,” I hazarded, “and you didn’t realize that at first?”

“Not a genius,” she corrected me. “A prodigy.”

There was an odd inflection to her words, and I tilted my head to the side, thinking. “Like, lowercase prodigy, as in the word? Or capitalized prodigy, a Class?”

“Not everyone gets Worker. Just… almost everyone.”

“So the System itself told you that you were a Prodigy, which is by definition unusual, and you formed your opinions about how the world should be on the assumption that everyone could do the things you did?”

“Rude,” she muttered. “So rude! You said what I was going to say, but in fewer words and more accurately. Totally rude.”

“That’s me,” I agreed amiably. “Very rude. So rude that it took four whole Gods intervening to make things work out between us.”

“Sophie!”

For all that Kelly sounded utterly scandalized, she was shaking with laughter. Feeling entirely too pleased with myself, I smirked out into the distance and I held her until she stopped.

When she started talking again, it was in that odd tone of voice, that mixture of whimsy and reflection.

“When I was a kid, I told everyone I didn’t care about Classes or Skills. I wanted to be able to do everything myself, without the System’s help. I think that’s why I always got along so well with Meredith—and why you do, a little bit. But it was different for me; I was telling everyone that, and also myself, because it let me be better than everyone else, I think.”

“It also probably let you not be better than everyone else,” I guessed, “depending on the context. But also, yeah, mood and relatable.”

“See, you get it.” She sighed, relaxing into me. “It’s why I haven’t been as pushy with you on System stuff as the books say I should be. I mean, who cares? You’re doing great, better than great, just the way you’re going. I don’t need to inculcate a general curiosity. It would just get in the way.”

“It might not,” I admitted. “I haven’t been taking that stuff seriously at all.”

“You take Spark and the Gods and the Flame more seriously than anyone else I’ve met.”

“Sure. But the System? The interface, the mechanism? Structured progression and invokable Skills-with-a-capital-S? Classes and levels and Tiers and all that… I care about my Path, yeah, but I’m really glad that Spark can help deal with the rest. Come to think of it, I don’t even know your Class—am I being a bad friend by not asking about it, avoiding a taboo subject, or neither?”

“Neither,” she said firmly. “It’s a taboo subject here where there’s such a high percentage of herder folk, or if you’re in Traditionalist circles even in the cities, but between friends and people who work together like us? But I’d never consider you a bad friend for not asking about it.”

“Other people might, though,” I suggested based on her wording, and her minute stiffening showed that I was on point. “So spill the beans. Give in to your innermost desires and brag!”

I could hear the eyeroll in her voice, but also the mixture of hesitancy and self-satisfaction. “From Prodigy, at nineteen I went Journeyman as an Integration Prodigy, and picked up Assistant, which is actually pretty traditional. I wound up Refining after I got Hitz settled, and now I’m almost to double-apex again as a Worldfriend and Opener of Paths, both Expert.”

“Those are some crunchy-ass names,” I said approvingly. “You settled Tayir and Hitz here, right? And both of them are from way-the-hell-away?”

“Tayir was back in Hayir, actually, when I was still a student. He was a textbook case—knew exactly what he wanted, just needed someone to take care of the paperwork.”

“So the name wasn’t a coincidence. I know he told me once that he’d chosen it, that back where he was from he had a different one, but I didn’t know the pun was an accident. One phoneme off of the old word for tourist, one phoneme off of the city’s name.” I sighed, about sixty-five percent performative displeasure and thirty-five percent approval. “What was it like?”

“Hayir? Tayir?”

“All of it. Hayir, Tayir.” I closed my eyes, basking in the smell of her and the proximity both physical and social. “Vocational school and being a student, everything.”

“I’d love to tell you,” she murmured, “but maybe not tonight. This is nice, and you’re warm, and I think I’m falling asleep.”

“Now that you mention it,” I yawned, “going to sleep sounds like a good idea. We’re still healing, or whatever.”

“Mmm. Let’s…”

“Yeah?”

“We could make a habit out of this,” she murmured. “We don’t actually know that much about each other’s pasts, or everything that isn’t…”

“Everything that isn’t right in front of us. A habit of this sounds nice.”

“Mmhm.”

We stood there for a bit longer, despite the mounting sleepiness, despite the brisk breeze and the chill prickling the hairs along my arms, until a loud gurgle of my stomach broke the moment. Giggling, we made our way down to our rooms and to the latest round of stealthily-appearing recovery meals—and eventually to sleep.