The two-day journey north was, by the standards of Su's recent life, almost peaceful.

  The first complication arrived four hours into the walk when Storm-Plume, who had been marching in dignified silence behind Su, stopped abruptly and said: "I owe you an apology."

  Su kept walking. "You threatened to throw me off a mountain."

  "Yes."

  "You called me mad and delusional."

  "Also yes."

  "You were going to have me executed for trespassing."

  "That is correct." A pause. "I apologize for all of those things."

  "Great." Su didn't slow down. "Noted."

  Storm-Plume matched her pace, which for an elder Sky-Dancer of immense dignity required some undignified hustling. "You were telling the truth. I should have—"

  "You had no reason to believe me. I showed up with no proof, made extraordinary claims, and got your home invaded by a shadow-corrupted peacock and his merchant accountant." Su glanced at him sideways. "Honestly your threat assessment was reasonable. Your execution timeline was a bit hasty."

  Storm-Plume was quiet for a moment. "You are a very strange creature."

  "I keep hearing that."

  Resplendent Feather was walking on her other side, which Su was pointedly not acknowledging. He had been there since the Aerie, keeping a precise distance that suggested he wanted to say something and kept deciding against it. She let him decide against it for another hour. Then she said, without looking at him: "Just say it."

  "I don't know what to say. I didn't—I wouldn't have—" He stopped. Started again. "I didn't know what I was doing. The curse was in me like—like something I'd inherited without being told what it was. When I was angry enough, it came out." A pause. "That isn't an excuse."

  "No," Su agreed. "It isn't."

  "I know." They walked in silence for a while. Above, through the gaps in the forest canopy, she could occasionally see a flash of gold or deep purple. The two dragons keeping pace through the sky, not talking as far as she could tell. Just moving in the same direction.

  "For what it's worth," Resplendent Feather said finally, "the three of us—myself, Vermilion, the others—we've been having the same argument for a hundred years about whether the curse was ours or just in us. Whether we chose it or carried it." He paused. "I think I chose it. But every time I used it after, that was a choice."

  "Yes," Su said. "It was."

  "I'll spend a long time with that."

  "Good."

  Fernando, from his bucket under Su's arm, said: "This is either very healthy or extremely uncomfortable for everyone."

  "Both," Su said.

  "Both," Resplendent Feather agreed.

  The first night they camped in a valley where the trees were old enough that their canopy blocked most of the sky. The Sky-Dancers built a fire without being asked. Storm-Plume organized watch rotations. People ate whatever they'd managed to bring.

  Obsidrax descended at some point in the evening and sat at the edge of the camp in his human form. Nobody spoke to him for a long time. Su eventually walked over and sat near him. "You could have just asked," she said. "Instead of the three-century architecture."

  "You wouldn't have agreed."

  "Probably not. But you could have tried."

  Obsidrax looked at the fire. "I'm not good at asking. I'm good at designing systems that produce the outcome I need." A pause. "Liliana used to say that was my worst quality."

  Su felt it land somewhere in her chest in a way that had nothing to do with the curse. Like hearing a word in a language you didn't know you spoke.

  "What was she like?" Su asked. The question came out quieter than she intended.

  Obsidrax was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Su thought he wasn't going to answer. "Exhausting," he said finally. "She had opinions about everything. She would argue with anyone regardless of whether they were a king or a drunk in a tavern or a three-thousand-year-old dragon who was clearly correct." The ghost of something moved across his face. "She was kind in the way that people are kind when they've decided to be, not because it comes naturally. She had to work at it. And she worked at it constantly."

  "What did she look like?"

  "Why?"

  Su shrugged. "Curious."

  Obsidrax looked at her for a moment with those deep-water eyes. Then, carefully: "She was shorter than she thought she was. She had dark hair. She wore these terrible practical clothes she'd stolen from her brother's wardrobe because she said dresses were a conspiracy against mobility." He paused. "She had this way of looking at things. Like she was calculating exactly how much trouble they were going to cause her and deciding to proceed anyway."

  A long pause. "Why are you asking me this?" Obsidrax said.

  "Just curious," Su said again. She got up and went back to the fire.

  Fernando was waiting, his fronds very still.

  "Don't," Su said quietly.

  "I wasn't going to say anything."

  "Good."

  She sat down next to him and stared into the fire for a long time.

  The second day was harder going. The terrain shifted into the kind of landscape that had clearly been shaped by the cult's presence—trees growing wrong, ground that felt hollow underfoot, occasional patches where the air itself tasted like the inside of the Chancellor's tower.

  Yvan descended mid-morning and walked with them for a while, which was both impressive and slightly inconvenient given that he was enormous and the forest path was not.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  He solved this by simply being wherever he needed to be, and the forest adjusted around him in the way that landscapes do around things that are old enough to be considered geological features.

  He fell into step beside Su without preamble. "How are you?" he asked.

  "Tired," Su said. "My wing still hurts even though I don't have a wing anymore, phantom pain. Very annoying."

  "That will pass."

  "Thanks, very helpful." She glanced up at him. "How are you?"

  Yvan seemed briefly surprised by the question. "Complicated," he said, after a moment.

  "Because of Obsidrax?"

  "Because of everything." He was quiet for a bit. "I have been managing my grief about Liliana for three thousand years by being productive. It is a technique that works until it doesn't."

  "What made it stop working?"

  "You," he said simply. "You named me. Nobody had said that name since she died." A pause. "I want you to know that I didn't engineer that. I didn't know, when I first heard you speaking in my canyon, that you would say that particular word. It was—" He seemed to search for the right description. "It was like hearing something I had given up expecting to hear again."

  Su was quiet for a moment. "She gave you that name?"

  "She said I needed one that was actually mine and not just a title. She gave me two options and Yvan was the better one." Something moved through his voice that wasn't quite amusement but lived next to it. "The other option was Gerald."

  Su actually laughed. It surprised her. "Gerald."

  "She thought it was very dignified."

  "It is absolutely not dignified."

  "I told her that. She said dignity was overrated and I should try being more approachable." A pause. "She was frequently right about things in ways that were deeply inconvenient."

  Fernando, who had been listening from his bucket, said: "She sounds like someone I'd get along with."

  "She would have liked you," Yvan said."She had a soft spot for things that were stubborn and small and refused to be impressed by things that were large and old."

  "I'm not small. I'm compact."

  "Of course."

  They reached the Weeping Stone at midday on the second day. It sat in a valley where nothing grew. It was smaller than Su expected. Eight feet tall, black, perfectly smooth. The same stone she'd seen in the warehouse. But this was the original. And looking at it felt like looking at something that had been crying for three hundred years and was very tired.

  The dark fluid that seeped from its surface moved slowly, following channels in the stone toward the ground, disappearing into the earth. It just stood there. Weeping.

  The surviving Sky-Dancers spread out around the valley's edge. Storm-Plume said nothing, but his lightning flickered in a way that suggested he was holding himself very carefully in check.

  Obsidrax landed and shifted to his human form in one motion. He walked to the Stone and stopped a few feet from it, and for a moment he didn't look like a three-hundred-year-old architect or a scheming dragon or any of the things he'd been presenting himself as.

  He just looked like someone who had been a very long time without someone. "She'll be disoriented," he said, without turning around. "Three centuries in a sealed space without full consciousness. She may not—she might not be—" He stopped.

  "She'll be herself," Yvan said. He'd landed on the valley's edge, his bulk lowering to the ground slowly, the Rosette on his chest pulsing steady. "Whatever else, she'll be herself. That was never the part in question."

  "You don't know that."

  "No. But I know her."

  Obsidrax put his hand on the Stone.

  The weeping stopped. The fluid just ceased. Like something had been holding its breath for three hundred years and had just, finally, been given permission to stop.

  Then, from somewhere inside the black surface, or maybe from inside the air, or from inside the particular silence that opens up when something that has been waiting a very long time recognizes that the wait is over:

  A voice of someone who has been alone for a long time and is calibrating how to speak to other people again.

  "Well," it said. "It's about time."

  A pause. "Obsidian, are you crying. Don't cry. I told you not to cry. It gives me that terrible guilty feeling and I've had three centuries to work through my emotional processing and I'm not starting over because you're making that face."

  Another pause. "Yvan, stop smiling. I can feel you smiling from in here. You're the worst."

  Obsidrax made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite the opposite.

  Yvan said: "Hello, Lili."

  "Hello, you massive, chronically overprotective nightmare." A beat. "You're going to have to explain the last three hundred years to me eventually. I have questions. They're not kind questions."

  "I know."

  "But not yet." Another pause, and her voice shifted slightly.More careful. "There's someone else there. I can feel—" She stopped. "That's strange."

  Su hadn't moved. She was standing behind Obsidrax and Yvan, Fernando's bucket in her hands, watching.

  "There's someone," Liliana's voice said, "who feels like—" She stopped again. Then, very quietly: "Oh."

  Nobody said anything. "Yvan," Liliana said. "What did you do."

  "Nothing intentional," Yvan said.

  "That's your answer for everything." Her voice was very careful now. Precise. Like she was handling something she wasn't sure of the edges of yet. "Can she—does she—"

  "She's standing right there," Yvan said. "You can ask her directly."

  A long silence from inside the Stone.

  Then: "I don't know what to say to her."

  Which was, Su thought, probably the most honest thing anyone had said in this entire valley. Su took a step forward. Then another. She stopped in front of the Stone and looked at her own reflection in its surface. The spectacles. The borrowed fur. The void-energy that had always fit her like something that knew her shape.

  "Hi," Su said. "I'm Su. I've been having a very strange few months."

  From inside the Stone, a sound that might have been a laugh. Might have been a sob. The two were hard to distinguish after three hundred years.

  "Hi, Su," Liliana said. "I've been having a very strange few centuries."

  A pause. Then, quieter: "Do you know?"

  "I'm starting to," Su said. "I'm not—I haven't decided what to do with it yet."

  "That's fair." Another pause. "Are you all right?"

  The question landed simply. Su thought about three lifetimes. About the orphanage and the zoo and the jungle and the king and the hammer and the loop and the fern and the dragon's canyon and the chess game and the card game and the terrible impractical spectacles and the guild of angry gnomes and the accidental folk religion and the system finally saying she/her like it was something it should have known from the start.

  "Getting there," Su said.

  "Good," Liliana said. And her voice had something in it that Su couldn't name but recognized. Something like: I know exactly what you mean.

  "Okay," Su said, and turned back to face the two dragons. "What are the actual terms here. Let's finish this properly."

  Fernando, from his bucket, said: "There she is."

  SYSTEM UPDATE:

  CURRENT LEVEL: 16

  THE TRIUMPHANT SPIRIT: ? PENDING

  NOTE: The trial isn't about what you do next.

  It's about knowing who you are when you do it.

  Take your time.