Chapter 128 I was there Too
ARYA
The forty-seven returned people needed three weeks of medical care before any of them were ready to talk.
This was expected. Bardon had prepared for it. He’d assembled a team of healers who specialized in magical trauma, practitioners who understood that what the void did wasn’t injury in the conventional sense but something more fundamental, a disruption of the relationship between self and reality that required time and patience rather than treatment.
Some of them recovered quickly. The ones who’d been displaced more recently, who’d spent less time adapting to the absence they came back to themselves within days. Disoriented, shaken, but essentially intact.
Others took longer.
Mira was somewhere in the middle.
I visited the medical wing on the fifth day, which was as soon as Bardon’s team had indicated visitors were welcome. She was sitting up in bed with a cup of tea that she held in both hands, looking at it with the attention of someone who was still remembering what warmth felt like.
She looked like her photograph. Older, but not thirty years older. The void’s preservation had been thorough. She looked like she was in her late twenties, maybe. Hair that had been cropped short at some point and grown out unevenly. She had Elara’s eyes.
“Luna Arya,” she said.
“Just Arya. You don’t need to—” I stopped. “Actually, you can call me whatever feels right. None of this needs to be formal.”
She looked at me. “You’re the one who came in after us.”
“Yes.”
“I felt you before I heard you.” She looked back at the tea. “There’s no sound. But there's an impression. Your presence was what I felt when you were moving through the pocket before you called to me.” A pause. “It was the first impression I’d felt from outside in thirty years.”
I sat in the chair beside her bed. “What was it like? If you want to talk about it.”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve been trying to find language for it and mostly failing.” She turned the cup in her hands. “The void doesn’t hurt. That’s the first thing. It’s not painful. It’s just quiet. And permanent. And after a while the quiet starts to feel like the right state and the noise of real space feels like the wrong one.”
“How did you hold on?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “I thought about the problem,” she said finally. “The asymmetry problem. The one I’d been working on when I was displaced.” She looked at me. “My mother told me about that. I’d figured out the beginning of it and then I was just gone. And in there I kept working on it. Just thinking.” A pause. “I think I solved it. I’m not sure. It’s hard to know if the void-thoughts hold up in real space.”
“Tell Elara. Or Bardon. They’ll want to know.”
“I know.” She almost smiled. “My mother has been very careful with me. She keeps looking at me like she’s checking that I’m still here.”
“You understand why.”
“I do.” The almost-smile settled into something real and complicated. “She built thirty years of herself around getting me back. I don’t know what she does now.”
I thought about that. About what it was like to have a purpose that consumed everything for decades and then arrive at its completion. “She’ll find something,” I said. “She’s not someone who stops having problems to solve.”
“No.” Mira looked at her tea. “Are you going to use her? For the council? She has knowledge that’s important.”
“We’re going to figure out what her situation looks like going forward, yes. She cooperated with us. She gave us information that prevented significant harm.” I looked at Mira. “What she did with the Reclaimed, she made choices that caused harm. That’s also true and it doesn’t go away.”
“She did it for me.”
“I know. That doesn’t make it not true.” I met her eyes. “But it’s a complicated true. The tribunal will reflect that.”
Mira nodded slowly. “She told me about the tribunal. About Mordecai.” A pause. “What’s he like?”
I thought about how to answer that. “Like looking at a version of my family that went wrong in a specific direction for a very long time.” I paused. “Intelligent. Cold. Genuinely reduced by the void. But there’s still something in there that’s capable of strategic choices and occasional moments of — not kindness. Something that resembles it.”
“Is he going to be executed?”
“The tribunal will decide that. I don’t control it.”
“But you have influence.”
“Yes,” I said honestly. “I have influence. And I’ll use it to give them the most complete picture I can of who he is and what he did and what he did for us in the void.” I looked at her. “The decision about what justice looks like is theirs to make. That’s important.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Thank you,” she said. “For coming in.”
“People needed to get out.” I shrugged.
“You didn’t know us.”
“No. But you were real.” I stood. “Get some rest. Eat the food they bring you even when it’s not quite right. The taste comes back fully after a few weeks.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was in the void too.” I looked at her. “And it does come back.”