Chapter 1002: Quiet on the Seventh Peak
Grey folded space like paper and let us through. One step, and the living room’s soft light became knife-clear mountain air. The world smelled like snow and pine and old stone warmed by sun. Wind tugged at Stella’s hair; she squinted into it, grinning the way she does when a problem has an elegant answer.
Mount Hua’s spines rose in ranks to the horizon—hard, blue-white, absolute. Prayer banners flickered along a lower ridge, their colors bright as candy against the rock. The sect had already cleared a corridor for us; I’d pinged them ten minutes earlier, and polite ghosts in white had answered with a clear path and silence.
The grave sat alone on the Seventh Peak, not because there weren’t other heroes, but because this height belonged to one man. The headstone was a single block of diamond, cut in planes that caught the sky and made it look like the world was remembering itself. Someone—Seraphina, of course—had inset veins of pale aetherite that pulsed once every few heartbeats, not bright, just steady. The light didn’t show off. It kept watch.
The carving was plain:
Magnus Draykar, Paragon of Humanity
Martial King and Warden of the East
Slayer of the Vampire Monarch
Under that: a date that still felt like a mistake when I read it. He should have gotten more years, then fewer at the end.
Stella knelt without me telling her to. I went down beside her and the cold bit my knees through my pants, which felt appropriate. Wind tore across the peak and then folded itself up and sat down like it had been reminded to use inside voices.
"Master," I said, and my voice went smaller on its own. "Your unworthy disciple is here."
I hadn’t come since the stone set. I had sent aetherite when we started refining from the first moon haul. I had signed off on plans and asked Seraphina if she needed anything, then kept my head full of work and distance. The truth was simpler and uglier: I didn’t want to stand in front of the last cut he’d made when mine still fell short of it. I owed him better than my pride.
I wasn’t proud today. I was late. There’s a difference.
"I’m sorry it took me so long to greet you like this," I said. "Nyxthar’s still as beautiful as it was in your hands. It sings less often with me than Valeria does, but when it does, it feels like winter knows my name. I’ll bring it next time."
Stella set a small bouquet of blue roses on the stone. She’d chosen them because "blue looks like quiet." They looked like honesty. Wind tried to steal a petal; the aetherite veil hummed, and the petal thought better of it.
I told him the things I should have said sooner. I kept it simple, because he’d always preferred clean lines to impressive speeches. The end of the Eastern War. The duels I won that I had no business winning. The fights I lost that taught me more than winning would have. The second Ancient Undead and the day Erebus laughed at me for naming him something dramatic and then answered anyway. The five women who said yes when I asked badly. Stella, who didn’t wait for me to ask at all. The Immortal Gate. The moon. Elara. The break, the fall, the climb. The day I brought the Second Calamity down and woke up in a city that still had buildings because people I loved had held them upright while I swung.
I didn’t linger on pain. He’d known all along that pain would come with the job. I didn’t waste his time with victories for the sake of the noise they make. I told him what changed my hands.
"Today," I said simply, "I crossed."
The wind chose that moment to calm. Not a sign. Just good timing. I’ll take it.
Stella hadn’t moved. She cradled her hands together in her lap like the air inside them was worth protecting. She looked at the letters on the stone like she was solving something that mattered and would not fit on a page.
I rested my palm against the diamond. Cold went up my arm to the elbow and settled there, not biting, just present. The aetherite under the surface pulsed once, and my Harmony answered without me asking it to. Respect looks like many things. Today it looked like a ward letting a hand through because it had the right voice.
"Thank you," I said. "For giving me a cut I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand. For putting a spine in my stance and a limit over my head I couldn’t see past until it broke."
I bowed. It wasn’t a formal thing. I just let my head hang for a breath and made sure my chest went soft the way he had taught me: don’t bow like you’re still trying to win.
"I didn’t continue your line," I said. "Reika did that better than I would have. You’d like her lectures. They’re terrified of being wrong." I smiled. It felt right to let a smile in here. "She’ll cross. When she does, I think your notes will show her pages I couldn’t read."
I stayed there with my hand on the stone until the cold became background and the quiet grew the right size. The aetherite warmth sat under my palm like a heartbeat that belonged to the mountain, not the man. The mountain keeps the heart when the heart can’t keep itself. That’s how graves work when they’re done right.
I told him one more truth, because if there’s a place to say it, it’s here.
"Master," I said, "even if this generation climbs higher than you, you will always be the Martial King in my head. Not because you killed a monster I couldn’t. Because you walked back down after you did and made sure kids had teachers. If you hadn’t held that front, none of us would have had the years to grow into the people we will be. Including me."
Wind moved the prayer banners in the distance. It sounded like pages turning.
Stella took my free hand and squeezed. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She knows when I’m speaking to one person and she is not meant to be the echo.
When it was time, I stood. My knees complained. The mountain did not apologize. It never had.
"Goodbye for now," I said, and it didn’t feel like a promise I was going to break. I’ll come back. The hardest part had always been returning the first time.
We stayed long enough for Stella to trace every letter with her eyes and get the spacing right in her head. Then I lifted her—she’s getting taller, I’m pretending I don’t notice—and set her on my hip. She looped her arms around my neck and rested her cheek against my collarbone like it was a pillow she’d found in a fort she built herself.
"Ready?" I asked.
"Ready," she said.
Grey opened for us without drama, because I didn’t ask it to do anything complicated. The seam folded the cold away and unfolded the smell of tea and home, and for a second I felt the same stupid relief I felt when I was fifteen and a roof kept rain off me like it was a miracle.
We stepped into the living room. The blue roses on the balcony had turned their faces toward the sunset. The city hummed like a patient machine. Valeria gave a pleased little hiss from the wall where she rested, the sound swords make when a job is finished and no one died.
Stella slid down, dropped her bag on the couch, and looked up at me with eyes that were too serious for twelve and exactly right for twelve.
"Daddy," she said, "tell me about him."
I’d expected questions later—maybe at bedtime, when the dark makes titles softer. The directness hit me in the sternum. I opened my mouth and nothing clever came out.
She waited, hands folded behind her back, trying to look less excited than she was. I could see her deciding where to put the story in her head, what shelf it needed, what label.
"What do you want to know?" I asked, because that’s how you start a problem you respect.
"All of it," she said, as if the word were reasonable. "How he taught you to hold a sword without being mean to your hands. What Nyxthar sounds like when it sings. Why he smiled the way he did in the picture at the Academy. How the air stops feeling sharp when you stand like you’re not pretending. Why people call him King if he didn’t sit on a throne. What he said when you did things wrong. Did he like tea. Did he laugh. Did he ever lose. Did he ever cheat. Did he tell jokes. Did he..."
She ran out of breath and scowled at the injustice of lungs.
I laughed, quiet and surprised by my own voice. "I can answer some of those," I said. "Maybe not all."