The darkness pressed close around the table where Cel sat. His hands rested flat against wood that still carried the smell of fresh repairs. The hut had gone quiet hours ago. Lior’s family breathed in steady rhythm behind the curtain separating their sleeping space from the main room.

Cel’s eyes tracked across the space without really seeing it. The exhaustion sat in his bones like something physical. Heavy and dense, weighing down thoughts that tried to organize themselves into coherent patterns. His head felt stuffed with wool, reactions coming half a second too slow, the edges of his vision soft in ways that had nothing to do with darkness.

It reminded him of the Ashlands. Those first days when rest never came because stopping meant dying. When his body had run on nothing but desperation and the fear that closing his eyes would mean never opening them again.

He hadn’t slept since his first night under this roof.

Instead, he simply sat at this table each night after Lior’s family retired. Waited for dawn with the patience of someone who’d learned that time passed regardless of whether you acknowledged it.

No one knew he sat here. No one understood that he hadn’t truly slept since that first night.

And he needed to keep it that way.

If they knew he was sitting out here every night, refusing sleep, they’d want to help. To understand. To offer whatever comfort or solution they thought might work.

Cel had no idea how to explain that their concern itself was part of the problem. That he’d already taken more from them than he knew how to hold - gratitude he couldn’t return, warmth he didn’t deserve, the assumption that he was someone worth caring about in the first place.

His head dipped forward. Caught himself. Pulled it back up through sheer will.

The movement sent fresh awareness of his exhaustion radiating outward. His neck felt stiff. His shoulders carried tension that had accumulated over days without release. Even his enhanced body was starting to protest the extended strain.

Footsteps broke the silence.

Cel’s head lifted, body tensing with instinctive wariness before conscious thought caught up.

Lior’s father emerged through the curtain. He moved with the quiet competence of someone accustomed to rising early, his weathered frame carrying itself without the grogginess that marked others fresh from sleep.

Their gazes met. Held for a moment that stretched longer than comfortable.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Cel’s prepared denial died before reaching his mouth. Something about the father’s tone made lying feel more exhausting than just admitting the obvious.

“N-No,” he finally managed.

The father crossed to the table. Pulled out the stool opposite Cel’s position and lowered himself onto it. For a moment he simply sat there, hands folded on the table’s surface, gaze resting on Cel.

“I wanted to talk with you,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

Cel’s uncertainty must have shown because the father’s mouth curved into something close to a smile.

“Nothing bad. Just... something I wanted to say since the beginning.”

The words settled between them. Cel nodded once, granting permission he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to give.

Lior’s father took a breath, as if preparing to announce something grand.

“I wanted to thank you for being Lior’s friend.”

The statement landed with unexpected weight. Cel opened his mouth, closed it again. What response existed for that? Friends didn’t require thanks. The relationship itself was supposed to be its own reward, mutual and balanced. Except nothing about his connection to Lior felt balanced. Lior gave freely - companionship, trust, the assumption that Cel was worth both. And Cel... what did Cel give in return beyond proximity and the occasional help he provided?

“He’s told us a lot about you.” The father continued before Cel could formulate a response. “About how you stood up for him when others wouldn’t. How you’ve been teaching him things at the Academy. How you make him feel less alone.”

Cel shifted on his stool. The praise sat wrong, like clothing cut for someone else’s frame. “I haven’t done that much.”

“You have.” The certainty in the father’s voice left no room for argument. “More than you probably realize.” He paused, fingers drumming once against the table’s surface. “Lior takes after his mother, you know? He always has. That gentleness, that soft heart. It’s a good thing, but...” He trailed off. “It made me worry.”

“When he was younger, other children had... they’d picked on him. Because he’s apologized even when he’d done nothing wrong. Because he couldn’t bring himself to fight back.” His father’s jaw worked. “I thought I could toughen him up. Give him thicker skin through... through being harder on him.”

“It didn’t seem that way to me,” Cel said. “Distant, I mean. You seem like a family.”

The father’s expression softened. “We are. That’s the thing - we’re still family. Lior’s still my son. I’m still his father. That’s why I will always love him. It’s only natural.”

The statement landed with jarring incomprehension.

Natural.

Love as something that simply existed, inherent in the relationship itself rather than earned through obedience or performance.

Cel had never felt that way about his parents.

He tried to map the concept onto his own experience. Lord Aldric’s affection - if it could even be called that - had been measured and transactional. Conditional on Cel fulfilling the role assigned to him. His mother had offered nothing except silence while his father’s “discipline” crossed into abuse.

Whatever Lior’s father was describing, Cel was certain he’d been born without it.

“The bullying stopped after he received the Divine Calling, of course,” the father continued, pulling Cel back from his spiraling thoughts. “Getting the Moon Goddess’s mark changed how the other children saw him. Suddenly he wasn’t just the soft boy who cried too easily. He was someone marked by the divine.”

“But I worried it would start again at the Academy. Where everyone was Chosen. Where his blessing wouldn’t set him apart anymore. And if the bullying returned...” He shook his head. “I wasn’t sure he could endure it.”

Cel’s chest tightened. The assessment was accurate in ways that made him uncomfortable. Lior had barely survived the Academy’s social hierarchy even with Cel’s intervention. Without it, Kyros and his followers would have ground him down.

“So when you all entered our village, I was so relieved to see he’d found a friend like you.” The gratitude returned to Lior’s father’s tone, deeper now. “Someone who wouldn’t... who’d stand by him even when things got difficult. Someone reliable.”

Reliable…

The word sat in Cel’s mind with unsettling weight. It didn’t fit. Didn’t match what he knew about himself - the failures, the incompetence, the constant awareness that he was playing at being capable while barely holding himself together. He hadn’t protected ten students during the attack. Hadn’t stopped the village from being destroyed. Hadn’t even managed to kill the Skullcharger that nearly murdered Lior’s entire family.

The bitter irony would have been funny if it didn’t make his chest tighten with something that felt dangerously close to grief.

He wasn’t reliable. Wasn’t even competent most of the time. Just someone with advantages he didn’t know how to use properly, who survived through luck and other people’s intervention more than genuine capability.

But sitting here - looking at the man sitting before him, seeing the honest gratitude there - Cel couldn’t find words to explain that. Couldn’t shatter whatever image the man had constructed about who Cel was or what his friendship meant to Lior.

So instead he offered something else. Something that felt more dangerous precisely because… because it was the truth.

“I’m thankful too.” The words came hesitant, each one requiring conscious effort to push past defenses that wanted to keep everything locked away. “For having a friend like Lior.”

Lior’s father’s expression shifted. Surprise flickering across his features, followed by something warmer.

“I never really had...” He paused, searching for phrasing that wouldn’t reveal too much while still being honest. “I never had a friend before. Or anyone like Lior.”

The admission felt raw. Exposed in ways that made him want to take it back immediately.

“And it’s not a bad feeling,” Cel finished quietly. “Having a friend.”

The understatement of the century, maybe. Having Lior felt like discovering that humans could be safe. That closeness didn’t automatically mean vulnerability to exploitation. That someone could know pieces of who he was and not use that knowledge as weapons.

Lior’s father studied him for a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression - understanding maybe, or recognition of the cost those simple words had required. He smiled, small and genuine.

“I’m glad.”

Silence settled between them. Comfortable this time rather than weighted with expectation. The kind of quiet that existed between people who’d said what needed saying and felt no pressure to fill the remaining space with unnecessary words.

Then the father’s expression shifted again. Took on a quality Cel couldn’t quite identify. Something between curiosity and amusement, with an edge of knowing that made Cel’s uncertainty spike.

“There’s one more thing I wanted to ask you about.” He leaned back slightly on his stool. “That noble girl - with black hair and red eyes. The one who came to get you during the attack.”

Cel’s mind went blank for a heartbeat before catching up. Hestia. He was asking about Hestia.

“If I may ask...” He paused, choosing words carefully. “Isn’t she also your friend? You two seem rather close.”

“She’s not my friend.” The response came immediate.

Though it was the truth. He didn’t think of Hestia as a friend the way Lior was his friend.

But if she wasn’t a friend… what was she?

Actually, she knew more about him than Lior did - even though he’d never wanted her to know. She’d seen through his lies with uncomfortable accuracy, called him out on deflections, refused to let him maintain the careful distance he preserved with everyone else.

So what did that make her? Not a friend. Not an enemy. Not exactly an ally, though she’d helped him multiple times. She existed in some undefined space that had no name, that maybe didn’t need one.

Or maybe—

“Well.” Lior’s father’s voice cut through Cel’s spiraling thoughts with gentle amusement. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts.”

He stood from the stool with the same careful movement he’d used sitting down. Stretched slightly, joints audibly protesting the shift in position.

“Goodnight, Celvian. Try to get some sleep too.”

Then he turned and moved back toward the sleeping area. The curtain fell closed behind him, leaving Cel alone in the darkness.

Dumbfounded.

That was the only word that fit. Sitting at the table with his thoughts in complete disarray, unable to process what had just happened or what conclusions Lior’s father had apparently drawn from his answer.

Around him the hut settled back into nighttime quiet. Lior’s breathing continued its steady rhythm. His parents’ presence marked by the occasional creak of pallets adjusting to weight.

Cel remained at the table. Exhausted. Confused. Carrying questions he had no idea how to answer about relationships that defied simple categorization, about a father’s love that existed independent of worthiness, about being called reliable when he knew he wasn’t.

The questions remained unanswered. The exhaustion remained unrelieved.

But something had shifted anyway. Something small and uncertain, planted in soil he hadn’t known existed inside him.

Whether it would grow into anything or wither from neglect remained to be seen.