He thought, briefly, about a middle path, finding someone else willing to build a clan, someone with the ambition he didn't have, and simply joining what they built rather than carrying the weight of founding it himself. All the structure, none of the responsibility.
He shook the thought off almost as quickly as it arrived. Worrying about what might happen five, ten, twenty years from now felt like an indulgence he had no business affording, not sitting in a burned-out room with the day's exhaustion sitting heavy on him and his head still ringing faintly from a fight that had nearly gone very differently. A great deal could happen between now and then. None of it was his problem yet.
"Whatever you think will happen, or won't," he said, more tired than sharp now, the earlier frustration bleeding out of him along with whatever adrenaline had been keeping it up, "and whether starting a clan is the right move eventually, none of that's really the priority right now. What matters is levelling, training, both of us." He looked at her properly. "Which reminds me. I have no idea what level you actually are."
Maren didn't answer straight away. Something crossed her face first, quick embarrassment, there and gone before it fully settled.
"Nine," she said.
Ant blinked. "Nine."
"I know how that sounds." Her voice had lost some of its usual brightness, but the words still came quickly, tumbling a little. She glanced toward her Kithren, still waiting patiently by the door. "He hasn't evolved either, not once, five years and he's still first stage, and I know how that looks."
Ant did the arithmetic without meaning to, and felt something uncharitable rise in him before he could stop it, sharper than he wanted to admit, and he was almost ashamed of the reaction. Five years. He'd have killed for five years with a Kithren, any Kithren, at any level. She'd had one the whole time and barely used it.
He didn't say that. He was fairly sure his face said some of it anyway.
"I spend most of my time in a lab," she said, catching his reaction, some of her energy dropping away all at once. "Research doesn't level you. And my parents, they've always been protective. Overprotective, honestly. Every time I wanted to actually go do drills somewhere, properly, there was always a reason it could wait, or someone else could do the field work and I could just analyse the results instead. So that's what happened. Five years of getting very good at understanding Kithren from a distance and not much time actually using one."
Her defensiveness was uncomfortably familiar. He recognised it, the tone of someone explaining a failure they'd rehearsed defending long before anyone actually asked. He'd used that tone himself more times than he could count.
"That's not an accusation," he said, quieter than before. "I wasn't judging you for it."
"You looked like you were."
"Maybe for a second." He didn't apologise for it, but he let the honesty sit there instead of smoothing it over. "It passed."
She studied him for a moment, and something in her shoulders eased slightly.
"So neither of us actually knows how to fight," she said, some of the lightness returning to her voice.
"Broadly, no." A short, tired laugh escaped him, surprising them both. "Which is a fairly bleak place to be starting from."
"I already have an idea."
"Go on."
"Back when I was at the academy, one of the instructors took a liking to me. Guess he figured I was a work in progress. He was quite a grumpy old guy, really. He retired about a year ago. He just decided to walk away from everything related to the institutions, from what my parents said, he'd grown properly disillusioned with everything, the academy and especially the clan politics beneath it. Eventually he just cut ties completely, left any clans he was loosely tied to, and stopped seeing students."
"And you think he'd agree to it."
"Absolutely not." She said it without missing a beat, clearly amused by her own bluntness. "That's kind of the whole point of him retiring, getting away from people wanting exactly this from him. So two strangers turning up asking him to train them is probably his actual nightmare."
Ant frowned. "So why are we going."
"Because we should try anyway." She said it simply, but her tone had turned more serious. "He wasn't just theory. Before the academy he was an arena champion, properly, the kind of name people still bring up when they talk about who used to be dangerous. Most instructors teach what they've read about. He taught what he'd actually done. If there's any chance at all of getting someone like that to help us, even briefly, it's worth the risk of him slamming the door in our faces. The difference between training with him and training with anyone else isn't small."
It was hard not to admire that, the willingness to walk toward a near-certain rejection just to be sure. Ant wasn't sure he had that kind of courage in him. He'd spent too many years avoiding exactly this sort of exposure, the vulnerability of asking for something and being told no to your face.
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He didn't say that either. It wasn't important enough right now to give any more attention to.
He hadn't said yes to any of this. He hadn't said no either, and somewhere in all that not-saying-no, the whole thing had quietly become something close to settled.
You'll need training, Mahkir said, rousing himself from where he'd been dozing through most of the conversation, amber eyes opening halfway. I've already proven myself. There isn't much a retired human has to teach someone at my level.
Ant almost laughed, the sound catching somewhere between exhaustion and genuine amusement. "You think this is just for me?"
Isn't it? The tail flicked once, more curious than dismissive. I defeated a level ten opponent today.
"Humility, apparently," Ant muttered, too tired to argue the point properly.
Still, if there was combat on offer, Mahkir would show up for it regardless of what he thought he needed. That much, at least, Ant had learned to count on.
"You might learn something anyway," he said. "Even if you don't need to."
Unlikely. But I won't object to watching you attempt it.
"Fine," Ant said, and meant it this time, the fight gone out of the argument along with most of his remaining energy. "Let's go find your teacher."
"Not today." Maren looked around at the ruined room, the scale of it visibly catching up with her for the first time since the fire had gone out. "I need to deal with this. And you need to sleep. You've been through a chip insertion operation today and watched your Kithren set half my house on fire. Travelling is always better after a full night's rest."
Ant hadn't let himself add it up like that until she said it out loud. His body agreed with her before his mind finished the thought, the dried blood along his forearm, a tiredness that had worked its way into his bones.
He scooped Mahkir up without much ceremony, tucking him back into the coat where he'd apparently decided he lived now. Mahkir didn't object, resettling against his ribs with a small, familiar shift of weight.
Ant made his way back toward the same room he'd slept in before, the same wide bed, the same heavy curtains, and found himself oddly glad of it. He didn't know when he'd next get the chance to sleep somewhere this comfortable, not once they were out on the road looking for Kalsar. He intended to make the most of it while it lasted.
Ant closed the door and stood in the quiet for a long moment before finally sitting on the edge of the bed. Mahkir climbed free of the coat and settled onto the pillow with the confidence of something claiming territory, curling into a tight red circle and closing his eyes almost immediately.
Ant didn't lie down straight away. He sat with his elbows on his knees and let the day finally catch up to him properly, now that there was nothing left demanding his attention.
He thought about Maren.
Not in any complicated way, just an honest accounting of what she actually represented, set against everything he'd have to weigh if he genuinely let her come with him. She knew things. That was obvious, and it had been obvious since the moment she'd started explaining chip mechanics on a public path to a stranger who'd just watched his Kithren defeat two academy students. Knowledge that useful didn't come free anywhere else he could think of, and having her beside him instead of locked inside a Cerlan research wing felt like an advantage he'd be foolish to dismiss purely on principle.
There was money too, if he was being fully honest with himself. He'd spent three years calculating every single coin, every stolen loaf, every risk against every possible gain, and a woman from a wealthy clan with genuine resources behind her wasn't nothing. He didn't like thinking about her that way, reducing her to what she could provide rather than who she actually was, but pretending the practical value wasn't part of the calculation would have been its own kind of dishonesty.
He thought about his old clan, briefly, same as he always eventually did when he had a quiet moment and nothing to fill it with.
Was this the right direction. Walking further from Silverwing rather than toward it, building something with a stranger instead of trying, one more time, to find his way back to the only family he'd ever technically had. He turned the question over and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that it didn't sting the way it usually did. The clan had made its decision about him a long time ago, publicly and completely, and nothing that had happened today changed that fact. If anything, today had made the distance feel more permanent. He wasn't the same person who'd stood in that ceremony hall five years ago. He wasn't sure that person would even recognise what he'd become in the last week alone.
The other thought took longer to surface, but once it arrived, it stayed.
The story. The Wraithkin, the mages, the first emperor, three hundred years of institutional memory built entirely around a threat most of the population had apparently reduced to a bedtime story told to frighten children into staying in bed.
None of it made any real sense to him, laid out plainly as his mind kept trying to piece it all together. A species losing every trace of magic in a single afternoon. Creatures born out of nothing in the same breath that magic disappeared. An emperor who somehow bonded with the very first of them and used that bond to push back something ancient and unstoppable. It read like exactly the kind of story a frightened, grieving population might have built to explain a catastrophe too large and too senseless to otherwise live with. He'd grown up around enough half-believed folklore to recognise it for what it was.
And yet.
He hadn't watched Maren tell a lie today. Not once, not even the small, forgivable kind people told to smooth over an awkward moment. When she didn't know something she said so, plainly, without dressing it up. When she'd been wrong, about his level, about what he was capable of, she'd said that too, out loud, without trying to save face. He was good at reading people. It was one of the only skills three years living alone had actually given him, learning quickly who could be trusted with what and who couldn't be trusted with anything at all. Nothing about how she'd told that story had felt performed. She believed it, completely, the same total certainty she brought to everything else.
That didn't make the story true. It just meant she believed it, completely, without question.
And if she believed it that completely, if her whole clan had organised three hundred years of research and record-keeping around it, then maybe the question wasn't really whether the details held together the way he wanted them to. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe the only thing that actually mattered right now was that someone who'd never once lied to him took it seriously enough to build a life around it.
He didn't know what to do with that yet. He let the thought move around his head for awhile.
He lay back finally, careful not to disturb Mahkir, and stared at a ceiling considerably higher and considerably cleaner than any he'd fallen asleep beneath in longer than he cared to count.
Whatever tomorrow brought, the instructor, the training, Maren's insistence on a future he hadn't asked for but somehow hadn't refused either, none of it felt as urgent as it probably should have. His body had run out of capacity for urgency hours ago.
Sleep found him before he'd finished deciding whether that was a problem.