Anastasia looked at him for a long moment. She was not quite moved, but not entirely unmoved either. She gave a light, almost reluctant nod. "If there is ever a day when I am proved wrong," she said, "I will walk personally into your office and offer the exchange myself."
Aurelius heard that, and he nodded once, slowly. "Take care of yourself; I will be waiting for that day," he said simply, and then he turned and left.
Anastasia watched his departing figure until the door had closed behind him, and then she exhaled deeply. Her mind, almost against her will, drifted back to the meeting that had taken place a few days before.
Aurelius’s first wife, the Empress Gloria, had come to see her. She had arrived quietly and without ceremony, and she had made one request: that Anasthsia refuse Aurelius’s proposal for the return of the territory of Aurelia.
Apparently, he had been thinking about this for days now, and one evening, he had shared it with Gloria, and Gloria—for reasons that were quite valid in Anne’s opinion—had decided to come and ask Anastasía to hold firm against it.
What Anasthsia had ultimately told Aurelius, however, was something that she needed to say to herself far more than she had needed to say it to him.
She exhaled again, drawing herself back into the room, into the work waiting on her desk. Had it not been for Gloria, whose own circumstances had forced Anasthsia to look inward and sit with her own reflection for a while, she would have done the simpler and perhaps more sensible thing: maybe accepted Aurelius’s proposal and quietly exchanged the Aurelius Province for a more strategically valuable and prosperous territory elsewhere. It would have been easy, and it would have made the most sense.
And yet strangely, she had not done that.
Now, as she had heard Aurelius speak, she found herself almost wishing that she were wrong about all of it—that things could somehow be restored to what she had always wanted them to be.
But Rudra was not coming back.
Or so she believed.
***
Meanwhile, far away in the Sylvaris Empire, something was tearing the stillness of the great ceremonial hall completely apart.
"What is happening?" Kathrine’s voice came out sharp and frightened, cutting through the noise as she spun around looking for something solid to hold onto under the massive waves of white energy being released from the center of the hall.
"Oh my god, Sera!" Selena’s scream was raw with panic, and she had already broken into a sprint toward Sera, toward the massive cocoon that had begun to split and shudder at the heart of the hall, from within which Seraphine’s screams were pouring out in waves, unrelenting and agonized.
The priests who had been stationed along the perimeter of the ritual space had been hurled bodily backward by forces none of them had been prepared for, slamming into the far walls and collapsing against them.
A number of them were coughing up blood as they had crumpled to the floor. The walls around were beginning to fracture; thin cracks were spreading outward from the epicenter of the disturbance like veins across stone, and the air in the hall had become almost solid with the raw, churning currents of nature’s elemental energy being expelled outward in every direction.
Selena drove herself forward against the massive current and found herself struggling to move ahead; she was pushing headlong into a wall made of pressure.
The energy storm wouldn’t let her through. She pushed against it, and it held, unyielding, and the desperation in her face was complete and helpless.
Then suddenly a hand settled on her shoulder, and the effect was almost inexplicable as a wave of calm energy moved through her heart, not enough to erase the panic but enough to pull her back from the edge of blind panic and let her think.
She turned, and the hall had gone strangely quiet around her. She watched as William walked into the storm.
He moved through it the way a person walks through a warm afternoon. He crossed the hall without hesitation and came to stand directly in front of the cocoon, the epicenter of everything, where the waves of power were being flung outward with the most violence.
What he found in front of him was Seraphine; her upper half had clawed its way free of the cocoon’s shell, the membrane split open and peeling back.
Her body was coated in a transparent green gel that clung to every surface of her skin. Whatever she had been wearing when the process began was long since dissolved. She was screaming with everything she had; her voice told William that she was terrified of something, something that had also caused this phenomenon.
William raised his hand and, without urgency, brought it to her face and touched her cheek.
The energy that covered her reared up instantly against that contact, a reflexive and violent resistance, pressing outward to repel him with everything it had.
William did not move. He absorbed the push without budging a fraction and held his hand against her face, steady and still.
Lunar energy began to pour outward; it was cold and silver and vast, wrapping itself around both of them and constructing a barrier between the destruction that was happening in the center of the hall and isolating it from the rest of the hall.
Then, slowly, with the full and deliberate depth of his lunar ability brought to bear, he worked against the panic and unrestful emotions inside Sera.
And gradually, almost imperceptibly, Seraphine’s screaming softened, and the energy that had been thrashing outward from her began to settle and to fold inward until it came to a still.
The hall breathed again.
William pulled her free of what remained of the cocoon, lifting her clear of it, and he used the shadow element to form a veil of shadow that covered her gel-stricken, bare body. She was limp and soft against him as her body finally surrendered the last of the struggle, and she slid down into his arms with her eyes closed and her breathing shallow.
William examined her condition carefully. Seraphine clenched onto William’s cloth as if holding a log of wood in the middle of a cold ocean.
Selena and others approached the center of the hall immediately; they were filled with questions.
"William!!" Selena spoke, appearing beside William, only to be shushed by him.
William had gently laid Seraphine against his lap on the ground and held her hand before closing his eyes.