Chapter 343: The Meeting XI
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Mihos watched all this with unmistakable entertainment now. The lower one refused the Grandfather. Seraphiel trying and failing to move him. Elena openly confirmed where her loyalty sat. For all the insults of the night, some bitter part of him enjoyed the chaos.
Stephen chose that moment to step in.
He had let the emotional lines run as far as they usefully could. ’Good. Enough.’ The road did not need more argument around theory when there was still one thing that might cut through refusal more effectively than some old family pressure.
"Young Master Sekhmet."
Sekhmet’s eyes moved to him.
Stephen reached into his inner sleeve and withdrew a dark polished stone about the size of a man’s palm. It held faint internal light, dormant but alive. Not a common message stone. Not a simple voice imprint. Something more expensive. More personal.
"I carry a record stone from your father."
That stopped the road.
Bat Bat leaned forward so hard one maid had to catch the back of her sleeve.
Stephen continued.
"He gave it to me personally. He told me to place it only in your hands."
Seraphiel’s eyes sharpened at once. She had not known that part. The head butler told her about it.
Mihos’s expression changed too, though only slightly. He thought, "So. Grandfather had arranged more directly than he had been told, or Eyra had made his own move beneath the broader order. Interesting. Yet Irritating. Also dangerous. But I am enjoying all of it."
Sekhmet looked at the stone.
Stephen explained because he was Stephen and that was what old head butlers did when the thing in their hand could alter a night.
"A record stone carries a moving image and voice. It can only be opened properly by the one it was meant for. Others may force it open if they are stronger than the one who recorded it, but the quality degrades and sometimes the truth does too."
Sekhmet held out his hand.
Stephen placed the stone in it.
The moment Sekhmet’s skin met the stone surface, something in the stone’s internal light changed.
It was recognition. Good for him. The message is real.
Elena spoke then, and her voice, unlike Seraphiel’s earlier persuasion, held no argument. Only practical certainty.
"I can feel Master Eyra’s Chaos energy signature from it." She looked at Sekhmet directly. "Young Master, you should look at what is inside first."
That mattered.
More than family pressure. More than old men summoning. More than Mihos’s entertainment.
Eyra’s own hand. Eyra’s own will. A heart to heart talk / message from his father. He hasn’t seen him for five years. He got a lot of questions he wanted to ask him.
Sekhmet closed his fingers around the stone. Then he looked around the road and said, "I want some privacy."
Reasonable demand. No one argued.
Elena stepped forward immediately. She lifted one hand and spread her Chaos energy outward in a thin invisible field. It did not flare brightly. It folded. Quietly. Precisely. The air around a section of road thickened, and sound itself seemed to draw back from them.
A Barrier. Not to block sight. To block others from listening to the message.
Elena lowered her hand after shaping it and said, "It is safe. No one can hear you now."
Sekhmet gave one short nod and stepped slightly away from the center of the group, though still inside Elena’s protection. He looked once at the record stone in his hand, and for the first time that night, every other source of tension briefly ceased to matter.
Then he activated it. No one outside the barrier heard what Eyra said.
No one inside the road circle saw more than shifting light against Sekhmet’s face and the hard stillness of a son listening to a father who had been absent too long and was now suddenly present through captured image and voice.
Minutes passed. Not many. But enough.
Outside the barrier, the others were left with themselves.
Mihos looked toward Seraphiel. "So this was the hidden card."
Seraphiel answered coolly. "No. This was a sensible card. Hidden cards are usually less polite."
Mihos almost smiled. "That sounds like something my Father would say."
"Your father says many things," she replied. "Understanding them remains your challenge."
Stephen, standing with his hands folded, spoke to Elena in a lower tone than before.
"He has almost the same face when the master... was young."
Elena knew which face he meant.
"Yes."
"The one Eyra had when he was done listening."
"Yes."
Stephen’s mouth moved faintly. "Then perhaps the road remains interesting."
Bat Bat, unable to endure adult mystery forever, whispered to one of the maids, "I hate barriers. They are privacy shaped like oppression."
The maid did not answer because she preferred survival. At last, the barrier thinned.
Sekhmet stepped back toward them. His face had changed. Not wildly.
There were no tears. There was no loss of control. Also there was no public display that Mihos could enjoy or Stephen could pity.
But it changed. Into something like excitement with worrying and a lot of questions too.
Whatever Eyra had said in that record stone had reached the part of him that family words, old titles, and Seraphiel’s persuasion could not reach.
That meant the father still understood the son, even at a distance. The son was satisfied with the answer for now. Until he met him face to face.
Everyone on the road felt the shift.
Seraphiel watched him closely.
Elena did too.
Mihos’s eyes sharpened with fresh curiosity.
And Sekhmet, now standing in the western road at night with his father’s record stone still in hand, looked at them and asked one quiet, final question.
"When is the meeting time?"
The question settled over the western road like a blade placed carefully on a table.
Everyone there understood at once that the answer mattered more than all the insults that had come before it. The record stone still rested in Sekhmet’s hand. Its warmth had faded, but not fully. Eyra’s message remained too close under his skin for any of the old Dawn house politics to feel entirely abstract now.
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