Interlude: A Hero’s Vigil.

The cloth came away slightly pink. Ash wrung it into the basin, watched the water darken, and dipped the cloth again.

She’d been at this for some time now. Long enough that the basin had been changed twice. Long enough that the lantern had guttered out and been replaced. Lysanthia lay on the bed, and she was small. That was the wrong word. Lysanthia had never been small, not even stripped of her power, not even kneeling before the Inker with her jaw so tight Ash thought her teeth might crack. But the woman who lay before her now had been burned down to something Ash didn’t know how to reconcile with the Demon Queen.

Most of her skin was raw. Red and blistered across her back, cracked and weeping across her arms. One of her horns was chipped, the tip sheared clean away. Her hair was largely gone now.

The egg sat beside her, cradled in the curve of her body. Gold, with veins of black that drank in the light. Lysanthia’s arms had curled around it in sleep, or unconsciousness. Ash could not tell which. Any attempts to pry the egg away had made the woman groan and pull back hard, and so Ash had not tried again.

Ash knew how to take care of the injured. She had done it dozens if not hundreds of times before. She insisted she do it now -be the only one to do it, in fact. She worked the cloth along Lysanthia’s shoulder, following the edge of a burn that curved down toward her collarbone. Her hands were steady. They always were when there was work that needed doing. Ash’s mind did what it always did when her hands were busy. It wandered.

All the villagers called her dear now. It was a small thing. Martha had first said it while handing Ash a cup of water and she had almost dropped it. For years Ash had lived as a man. Five as the Hero, five more training to become one. There were no female Heroes, and yet that’s the path Ash had been set on. Ash could not twist the expectations of an entire world. All she could do was twist herself to meet them. So she had twisted and twisted and hidden herself.

A Veil, before the one on her arm. Ronan had never known. Elowen had never known. Even she hadn’t, and Ash had so badly wanted to tell her. Ten years of brotherhood, and not one of them had ever known or even suspected.

Here, everybody knew and nobody questioned it. Tom asked her to lift crates because she was strong, not because she was supposed to be a man who was strong. The children climbed on her and called her miss. Marsh -before he’d left- had spoken to her the way men spoke to women they were slightly nervous around. It was so ordinary to everyone.

She wrung the cloth out again, catching sight of the Veil Spark on her arm. The System had looked into her soul and given her this -more than something to mark her great deeds or her greater sacrifice. It had given her something to mark who she had always been: one who hid. Perhaps the System had always known her better than she’d wanted to be known.

She wrung the cloth, dipped it and returned to the wound. The quiet let it in. It always did.

Orvyn’s face. Not the blade -Ash had replayed the blade a thousand times, and the edge of it had long since grown dull. What had not gone dull was the before. Orvyn’s hand, reaching down. Wiping the blood from Ash’s cheek, gentle, as she always was.

You will live.

She’d just said three words, and Ash had been so relieved. Even without the Hero’s Requiem, Ash had somehow always known the confrontation would be her end. She had been relieved that it might not be. For the first time in so very long, Ash’s restraint had slipped, and she had talked, not as she tried to be, but as she was. Not as the stoic hero, but as the scared woman underneath. And then the dagger had come.

Ash set the cloth down. Her hands were still steady for she willed them to be. Lysanthia’s words came back. They always came back, in the quiet. Now that makes perfect sense. I could see how a Saint might turn their blade against the Hero.

It was said so matter of factly, like it was the absolute truth of the world any fool should be able to see. Ash had wanted to cut her throat for that. She remembered the feel of the sword against Lysanthia’s neck, the thin line of blood. She had wanted to hurt her, not for saying it, but for making it sound so simple. Instead, she’d sat down with Lysanthia. Ash still did not know why. Now that Ash had had some time to think, she thought she understood. A Saint’s Class must have been to preserve the divine order. If the Hero surviving disrupted that order, then a Saint would correct it. Not out of malice or cruelty but simply out of function.

The Class would have pulled Orvyn forward the way it had pulled Ash to end up in that throne room, and Orvyn might have wept the entire way, because her heart did not want to go where her chain pulled. But was it truly that simple? That was the crack that Ash kept falling through.

If it had been compulsion, then Orvyn’s tears were real. The love was real. The murder was an injustice as much unto her as it was onto Ash. If the Class had not compelled it -if Orvyn had chosen, freely- then everything Ash had believed about the years they’d shared would have been a lie. Everything about the love Ash had kept in her chest would have been built on a lie.

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Could the Class compel tears? Ash didn’t know. The not knowing was sharper than any dagger.

She lifted Lysanthia’s arm, gently, to reach a burn along her ribs. The Demon Queen did not stir. The white Line on Lysanthia’s left arm pulsed faintly, had been pulsing for a while now.

It occurred to Ash, with the quiet clarity that only came at the bottom of a long night, that she understood what she had been doing since she had first woken up in this world. Every log she’d split. Every stone she’d hauled. Every roof she’d patched, every crate she’d carried, every hand she’d offered to every stranger who’d needed one.

She had been testing herself. Proving to herself that goodness existed outside her Class. That selflessness was not a symptom of a Role but a thing that lived in the person beneath it. If Ash could be kind without the System, then Ronan’s courage had been his own. Then Elowen’s generosity had been real. Then Orvyn’s gentleness hadn’t been fake. None of it was a puppet show performed for an audience of Gods who would never clap.