"Excuse me, sir," one of the guards approached Ryan, and the young god sensed his servant turning to face the guard as he continued eating. "There are a couple of Novarax here who wishes to speak with you."

Ryan swallowed his mouthful of steak, then picked up his napkin and dabbed the juice off his lips. He set the napkin down, then spoke.

"Is it Emma again?"

For the week following the trip into the Heisar, Emma Novarax had approached Ryan several times, and he was beginning to grow annoyed. She had an issue with the way he was treating the Novarax, and she had no issues making it clear to the Family Heir.

In her mind, there was nothing worse than she already suffered, so it mattered little if Ryan decided to exact a punishment upon her for harassing him. She wanted him to view the Novarax as people rather than tools.

Then there was Kendra, who wished to earn the favor of the Family Heir in an effort to escape her life as a Novarax and be instated back into the family, even if as a servant for a branch family. She knew how dangerous Emma's actions were for all of the Novarax, and so had taken to accompanying Emma to apologize for her and to keep the younger woman's words in check.

"No, sir," the guard responded. "It is a young woman named Alexa and her younger brother, Tristan. They are eighteen and ten, born into the Novarax. According to Alexa, her brother, Tristan has been begging to meet you."

Ryan's lips curved downward for a moment as he wondered why any Novarax child would beg to meet him. Chances were high she was lying and her brother did not wish to meet him, but instead was dragged there by Alexa, who did want to meet him, likely for the same reason as either Emma or Kendra.

Deciding to check first, Ryan stretched out his empathy and sensed into the minds of all those around, pushing his radius far enough to read the minds in front of the mansion. The pair of Novarax had been made to wait outside for a response, to avoid them entering the mansion only to leave again if he declined to meet them.

In the older mind, who he took to be Alexa based both on it being older and it being female, Ryan sensed both trepidation and agitation. There was a small hint of hope as well. In the younger mind, who he took to be Tristan based on it being beside Alexa, younger, and male, Ryan sensed eagerness and excitement.

Over the past week, Ryan had subjected several random Novarax to surprise invasions of the mind without physical contact, and he knew he could access their thoughts without revealing his presence or making it obvious someone was rummaging through. Delving deeper required more thought and focus, so he kept to just reading the thoughts of the pair of Novarax outside.

Alexa was hoping her brother would calm down and that they would not be punished for the request. There was also a touch of hope that one of his guards or servants would find her desirable and somehow found a way to whisk her and her brother out of Volnal with her as their lover. He wanted to push further, but knew that even without being a Jewel, she'd notice him looking at the reason behind that.

Tristan, on the other hand, was as excited in his thoughts as he was in his emotions. The boy wanted to meet the Novar Family Heir simply because he was important and supposedly powerful. The child wanted to know if Ryan could teach him how he killed the turtle-bear beast in the lower levels of the Heisar.

Ryan found himself frowning again. The way Tristan thought it was genuine – the boy wanted to learn how to do a spell. That made little sense to Ryan, until he realized that it was possible Tristan had awakened at a young age.

While rare, it was not unheard of. The chances were less than one in a million to awaken younger than fifteen, and nearly everyone awakened at sixteen to eighteen with some at nineteen.

"Let them in," Ryan instructed his guard, and he felt the confusion in the minds of the nearby servants and guards. "It seems we have an interesting case here. They're not here for hostile reasons."

"Yes, sir," the guard responded, then left, and Ryan pulled his empathy back to a comfortable range.

Ryan resumed eating, watching through the elements as the guard returned to the siblings, then brought them to him in the dining room. The boy was buzzing with excitement, bouncing nonstop, and Alexa was attempting to keep him calm without saying anything.

"Sit," Ryan said, and the guard led the siblings to the other side of the table. "I was told you wanted to see me."

"Alexa says it's rude not to look at someone when you're talking to them," the boy admonished.

"Tristan!" Alexa hastily whispered, panic in both her mind and voice. "Don't be rude to Ryan!"

"Tristan, right?" Ryan asked, raising a hand so that Alexa would know to stop.

"Yes!" Tristan answered. "I'm Tristan."

"Ordinarily," Ryan said. "It would be rude to not look at someone while you're talking to them. Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to look at someone, as I lack sight entirely."

"You can't see?" Tristan asked.

"I cannot," Ryan answered. "I was born without something necessary to sight, and only a god could grant it to me."

"A god?" Tristan asked. "Oh! I was told that if I met you, I'd get to meet a god."

"Really?" Ryan was surprised by that news. "Who told you that?"

"The voices."

"What voices?"

"Sorry," Alexa said as Ryan watched her cover her brother's mouth. "He tends to talk a lot. The voices aren't quite real. I had been expecting you to turn us away, or for the guards to not even give us a thought and send us away. He's been pestering me ever since hearing about the Heisar, which is when he found out you'd be here. I'm so sorry, sir, we're wasting your time."

"Let him speak," Ryan commanded. "I asked him a question, Alexa, and it is rude to prevent him from answering."

He felt the unease and fear flood her mind, and sensed Tristan shrink back a little. His sister pulled her hand away from his mouth, and Ryan cut into his steak once more, then lifted the piece to his mouth.

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"What voices?" He asked, then bit the piece of steak off his fork.

"They've been in my head," Tristan answered quietly as Ryan chewed. "A few weeks ago, I got all these pains in my head, and it hurt really badly. Now, I hear these voices in my head. Sometimes they're stronger, sometimes they're quiet, sometimes they aren't there. Then about a week ago, they said that the message was delivered and the Blind God would be coming soon, and that if I met the descendant of the Blessed Ones, I'd get to meet him. Then after the turtle-bear was killed, they talked about the killer and something about the Blind God."

Ryan finished chewing and swallowed, frowning. Only one group of beings he knew of called him that.

"What," he said. "Did they say exactly?"

"Um," Tristan answered, and Ryan sensed the boy's effort at recalling the exact words. "They said… they said… um… well, I only got bits of it. But they said 'the Blind God received our message and will be here soon'. And then after the beast, they said 'killed the bear' and something about 'meeting with the Blind God'. I'm sorry, the voices weren't very clear."

"So you assumed," Ryan said. "That if you met me, you'd get to meet the Blind God because of these voices?"

"Yes," Tristan answered, and Ryan could feel the fear in his mind that he had screwed up, after actually thinking about the words. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it," Ryan said. "You didn't tell your sister you awakened your magic, did you?"

He felt surprise in Alexa's mind and in Tristan's, though different veins of it. Surprise that her brother had awakened magic in Alexa's, and surprise that Ryan knew in Tristan's.

"No," Tristan answered quietly, and Ryan noticed his eyes move, as if looking at his sister.

With how much effort he put into learning and mastering his sense of water, Ryan was growing more able to tell such differences in a person's body, making it easier to tell where they are looking. He assumed based on that movement and the boy's emotions that Tristan was scared of both Ryan and his sister in that moment.

"You are a Specialist," Ryan told Tristan. "A Jewel, specifically. That's special. What's more, it seems you have a telepathy ability."

"Telepathy?" Tristan asked in confusion. "But I'm not reading minds."

"You are," Ryan said. "What I'm about to say next is classified information, which means you are not allowed to tell anyone. If you've seen me needing Tyler to guide me, that's an act we've been putting on for the Novarax. I still can't see, but I can tell where objects are, allowing me to avoid walking into them. If I reduce the scale of the spell down…"

He cut into the steak once more and stabbed into it with his fork.

"I can eat without assistance," he said. "Or without making a mess. Because of this navigational ability, the elementals call me 'Blind God' as a joke. What you are hearing are not random voices, but the thoughts of the elementals. I know you've heard that they are mindless masses of elements, but that's not true. They're actually mischievous creatures."

"So… there's no god?" Tristan asked.

"Correct," Ryan smiled. "There's no god, just me."

He put the piece of steak in his mouth and started chewing.

"How did you kill the beast?" Tristan asked. "They said that you just… killed it. If you can't see, how did you do that? I saw it, you didn't hurt it."

"I did hurt it," Ryan said after swallowing. "However, I didn't need to see it. Even before I acquired the spell to know where objects are, I learned to know where people and beasts were by sound. I determined the location of the beast, guessed where its heart was, and used water magic to stop its heart. It's not something I can teach you, sorry."

He was interested in Tristan, though. The boy could hear the thoughts of elementals, and it sounded like he had undergone a POAMA session before that started. It was something Ryan was still attempting to learn how to do. The boy acted as confirmation it was possible, and so he wanted to get to know him.

The young god turned his focus to Alexa.

"Alex," he said. "While you are scared of the Novar main family because of your status as the inferior Novarax, you still desire to leave here. You even have a desire to hope that one of my staff will take an interest in you while you are here right now, then does their best to somehow manipulate the rules so that they may take you with them when we leave. You and your brother. Why?"

He felt shock and fear in her mind, something which delighted him, even as her brother's mind filled with confusion.

"I-I'm sorry, sir," she began.

"I'd rather you answered my question than apologize," he stated. "Tristan is a Jewel, so there is a chance already my father will want to take him out of here, especially as he is only a child."

In the final run of things, Ryan would ensure that Tristan was removed from Volnal after the boy awakened his magic. He would ensure it was no later than the end of the year for the arrangement to occur. The boy was valuable to the Family, and it would be a shame to waste him as a Novarax.

When Ryan told Alexa that her brother would likely be removed from the valley, he felt the relief in her mind. She wanted him out of the Novarax more than herself, but still wished to leave as well. Without delving further, he couldn't determine the exact reason, but he could still tell that her reason was not as self-serving as Kendra's.

"Why do you want to leave?" Ryan asked, and he felt both hesitation and fear rise in her mind. "You should answer me, Novarax."

At his tone, she flinched, and Ryan noticed her brother growing scared again.

"The Novarax are planning on freeing themselves from the Novar," Alexa told him. "They've been working on several projects in secret, using resources harvested from the Heisar that the Family is unaware it began producing a few years ago. Once they free themselves, they are planning on taking down the Family. I'd rather not be here when that happens, I've heard stories of what happens when the main Family is enraged. Your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather… there is a reason the Novars are among the most powerful beings in the world. I'd rather be serving the Novars somewhere than being a Novarax here when it goes down, and I want to make sure Tristan is safe."

"Their plans will fail," Ryan said. "They might be using manalirate and other such materials to create weapons and explosives, but it isn't as if we Novars are unaware. We know about the warehouse meant for storing emergency rations has more than one hundred guns, two hundred crates of bullets, and more than fifty grenade launchers. We know about the apartment complex that is being used to create the weapons, and the bombs hidden in a bank vault. We know about the tech facility's secret tech projects meant to be used during the attack on the Novar Family."

He smiled at the fear in her mind over knowing what he knew.

"Your brother hears the thoughts of the elementals," Ryan told her. "But I speak with them. Anyone here who thinks my visit was not, in fact, to assess the situation is an idiot. The elementals themselves are the ones who summoned me. My visit to the Heisar was an inspection. I might not be able to see, but Tyler knew everything which was supposed to be in it and its supposed layout and made copious mental notes on what was different."

The last part was a lie, but what he said about the plans were true – the elementals had described the items to him, and the Family Heir recognized the meaning immediately. Over the past week, the light elementals, and occasionally the lightning elementals, passed through the town, looking at everything in order to know what was wrong or strange and relay it back to Ryan.

"Now," he told her, turning his expression strict once more. "Your brother has use to the Family as a Jewel, so when my Father arrives shortly, I'll inform him of this. You, on the other hand, are a Novarax without this status. If you had it, you'd have already made that clear. Therefore, you are worth nothing but being a Novarax. Your fear of our wrath is greater than your disgust for us, but you are, in the end, a Novarax. I know you do not like the rest of the Family because of your status from birth."

He had sensed it in her mind when she said she would be willing to serve the Family – the disgust and hated had read plain as day, only overruled by the fear towards their wrath. It wasn't something she could hide, and his father would notice it as well.

"And thinking one of my staff would fall for you?" He scoffed. "You are a Novarax, Alexa. As if any of us would ever fall for you."

He smiled as he sensed a vehicle pulling up outside, the forms within familiar. A stretch of his empathy confirmed to him that it was exactly who he thought it was.

"Now," he said. "If you don't mind, my father has arrived, even if an hour earlier than I had expected. Please move to a different seat so that he may take it. He'll be very interested to know about the plans of the Novarax, and he'll be the one to decide your fate."