Free Web NovelChapter 1018: Chapter 1018 - Taming Impossible Puzzles - 2
Moments before...
Ren lay down with the stillness of someone who has had a long day in the truest sense of the word, and whose body is at peace with it.
He touched his lips for a moment.
Then he thought of Liora.
Of the promise he had made to her first. Of the time that had passed since that promise, and of the things that had happened in that time, and of how all those things had shifted the landscape in ways that the promise of the past hadn’t been able to anticipate.
He mentally cursed the past version of himself who had made the promise and left him with problems now.
Affectionately, because it was him, but with the specific frustration of someone inheriting a problem that another Ren had created with the best of intentions and without enough information.
But...
Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow I’ll think about it and decide what to do.
He apologized briefly to the future Ren who would have to deal with it.
He closed his eyes.
The other side of the bed shifted.
Ren opened his eyes.
Min was sitting up from the other side of the bed, out of invisibility and with what had been a too good, when useless, stealth to hide his mana.
He looked at him.
"Tell me everything," Min said. With the same energy as Liora. With the same complete lack of preamble.
♢♢♢♢
The girls had almost finished listening to today’s date...
Liora listened to Luna more closely than Larissa did.
She had listened to every word with the attention she gave to things that mattered most to her, complete attention, without the courtesy filters that reduced what she showed on her face to something more dissimulated.
Luna had talked about the lake, the bubbles, the rain, the slow kiss that wasn’t like the first one. She had said it with that specific Luna way of being serious about what she shared and careful about what she didn’t, but enough had arrived for Liora to have a complete picture. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
And the complete picture was not something she liked.
Not because it was unfair, and not because Luna didn’t deserve it. Not the thing itself, not what had happened, not the space that had been given.
Liora knew all that... She had agreed to it herself, had been one of the people who cleared the path, and that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was something else and it was harder to name without it sounding like the wrong thing when it was, in fact, exactly the right thing. Because it was what it was.
What she felt wasn’t anger.
It was simply jealousy.
Despite everything, she still felt the specific discomfort that arrived when something you had been tolerating provisionally, something you had been holding at arm’s length and telling yourself you were managing, suddenly had a huge weight and took up too much space that had previously been theoretical and way smaller. freeweɓnøvel.com
The moment you realized you couldn’t keep treating it as abstract. The moment thinking about it made you want to cry not even from anger but from the simple fact of it.
Larissa was watching Liora from the other side of the room with the attention she had when she was evaluating something and wanted to understand it before it became something else.
What she could see in Liora was visible to someone with her sensitivity and her years of practice reading people... And mostly because she felt something similar, and even if she was processing it differently, she still was aware of both things at the same time.
She processed it first from empathy.
It was natural, human, to always want more, or better conditions, especially for the things we wanted most strongly. That was simply what people were.
And then she processed it from a different angle, because the natural feeling didn’t carry the same weight when you were a Dravenholm, and what was natural had never been the only consideration she was allowed to have.
The political angle.
Someone like Ren, who had demonstrated that his ceiling wasn’t the kind other people had, who changed the understanding of what was possible just by existing in the same world as the people around him, was the kind of figure that didn’t appear in history without leaving a mark that reorganized what came after.
That was simply how important that kind of person was.
And the three of them: three powerful tamers with ties to three of the most relevant families of power in the city. Luna with the genetic key and the Starweaver lineage and everything that lineage implied going forward. Larissa herself with the Dravenholm name and what that name represented in terms of structure and succession. Liora with the Ashenway line.
A binding alliance between all of those pieces wasn’t only a romantic indulgence. It was the architecture of something that would make more sense than any individual combination, something that if built properly would give stability to hundreds of thousands of people for a very long time.
Something that, handled badly or not built at all, could fracture exactly the stability it was supposed to secure.
Victor had asked her for it too, after being treated. He already had in several ways and at several moments before, but much more seriously now that he had been healed from what had seemed unfixable to everyone who had witnessed it.
Selphira had reinforced it as well, asking her for it not with Victor’s lack of subtlety, but with enough overlap in the conclusions she arrived at that the pattern was unmistakable.
The question wasn’t whether the destination made sense.
The question was how to reach it with Luna and Liora together without the journey destroying that multivectorial union she needed to arrive intact.
Larissa looked at Liora.
Liora was looking at the floor.
’It’s not going to be easy,’ Larissa thought. ’And it shouldn’t be easy... If it were easy it would mean they don’t love him enough.’
But Liora already looked this dim, and Luna was somewhere in the sky right now, raining on that celebration to talk about something like ’sharing’ felt like exactly the wrong timing and exactly the wrong approach.
Larissa was still searching for the correct angle to begin when Luna spoke first to Liora.
"I understand how you feel."
Liora looked up.
Luna was looking directly at her with the calm she had when she had made a decision completely, without the common doubt that made difficult conversations take longer than they needed to reach where they needed to go.
"You had already told me what happened on your date with Ren... The promises that were made." Luna said it as the premise, not the point. "So you stepping back today to let me go first, and then me taking advantage of this moment right after everything that happened, when Ren’s guard was lower than usual and he had barely had room to breathe..."
"...That wasn’t fair to you."
Liora didn’t answer immediately. The expression on her face was complicated like she was processing more than one thing at a time and not having sorted them into an order yet.
"So what I’m proposing," Luna continued, "is dividing the time... Something like Luna’s week and Liora’s week. Also not talking about what we do with too much detail between us. Giving each of us enough space to exist in our own place without..."
Larissa was surprised.
Not by the content exactly, but by the ease of it. Luna was being precisely as practical as Larissa had hoped to be, and she was arriving at a conclusion on her own that Larissa had calculated would require at least two difficult conversations before anyone could raise it without it sounding like either, insane, a betrayal or a fantasy.
But it was happening...
So she watched the path open and looked at Liora, expecting her to take the most obvious available route and let the tension come down.
And Liora said:
"No!"
Larissa blinked.
"What you’re doing is wrong," said Liora, with the voice of someone who has listened to enough to know what they need to say and who says it because not saying it would be worse than saying it, even though saying it was hard.
"And you can’t fool me!" Her eyes moved between Luna and Larissa and back. "Ren wouldn’t want you to sacrifice yourself like this... No matter how grateful you are!"
Larissa understood now what Liora had understood.
And Liora was kind of right.
Luna was doing this from the enormous debt of gratitude she carried toward Ren. As though it were a favor she was doing for him. As though she owed him enough that generosity had stopped being generosity and had become the most indirect form of continuing to pay a debt that the other person had never asked her to pay.
If they built this relationship on that foundation, if Luna conceded from that place instead of from one that was genuinely fair... then every moment of that dynamic would carry the shadow of that origin above it.
Luna as the martyr.
And beyond that: Ren, who thought too much about everyone else, would notice.
He would see it eventually.
And then he would have another weight to carry.
"Be honest," said Liora, looking at Luna directly. "It doesn’t matter if we fight. If you’re not honest then things can’t keep going like this indefinitely... when it eventually breaks open it will be worse, and it won’t be healthy while it lasts either. If it’s this kind of arrangement then I’d rather..."
