Chapter 139 The Cost
She made it twenty steps down the corridor before her knees gave out.
She went down without warning, one moment walking and the next on the floor, and she stayed there because getting up immediately was not something her body was willing to discuss.
The corridor was empty and cool and the noise from the arena was muffled behind the stone walls and she sat with her back against the wall and looked at her hands and waited for the world to stop doing what it was doing.
Her hands were shaking, properly, visibly, the kind of shaking that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with a body that had just been asked to produce something it had never produced before and had done it and was now presenting the bill.
Her chest felt hollowed out.
Scraped clean.
The way a room felt after everything had been moved out of it, all the furniture gone and the walls bare and the air different, thinner somehow, less substantial
Whatever had come out of her on that floor had taken everything with it when it left and what remained was just her, nothing left over, barely enough to keep her sitting upright against the wall.
She thought about the binding ceremony.
Two days.
She pushed the thought away because thinking about it right now was not useful and she had learned, over the past months, the difference between thinking that moved you forward and thinking that just used up energy she needed for other things.
She heard Sera before she saw her.
Running footsteps, the particular rhythm of someone who had decided speed mattered more than looking composed, and Sera came around the corner and stopped when she found Lilith on the floor and the expression that crossed her face lasted only a second before she got it under control and dropped down in front of her.
Both hands on Lilith’s face.
Looking at her the way she looked at things that frightened her, thoroughly and without pretending she wasn’t frightened.
“The crowd didn’t see,” Lilith said. Her voice came out thinner than she intended.
“I know. That’s why I ran the moment you went through the entrance.”
Sera’s eyes moved over her face, her hands, the shaking.
“What do you need.”
“A minute,” Lilith said. “Just a minute.”
Sera sat down on the floor beside her without a word and without being asked, pulling her knees up and settling in the way she settled into things she understood were going to take whatever time they needed, and Lilith let her head fall back against the wall and closed her eyes and breathed.
The minute passed and became several and the shaking in her hands eased slightly and her chest began to feel marginally less like an empty room, like something small had moved back in at the edges, not enough yet but the beginning of enough.
She heard more footsteps.
Different from Sera’s.
Measured and deliberate in a way she would have known anywhere by now, and she didn’t open her eyes until she heard him stop and then she did.
Azrael stood in the corridor looking at her on the floor and his face was doing the thing it did when he had stopped performing anything at all, every layer of composure gone, just him looking at her with everything he felt sitting plainly on the surface of it.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re on the floor.”
“I used everything I had,” she said. “I just needed to not be in front of the crowd when it caught up with me.”
He crouched down in front of her and looked at her face the way Sera had looked at it, thoroughly, and she let him look because there was no point in pretending and she was too tired for pretending anyway.
“The floor cracked,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
“In two directions.”
“I was there, Azrael.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I felt it when it came out of you. Before I saw it. It was.”
He stopped and started again.
“I have never felt anything like that. Not in centuries of fighting. Not from anything.”
He paused.
“It was older than me, older than this palace, than anything in the demon realm.”
“It’s Seraph,” she said simply.
“I know what it is,” he said. “I’m telling you what it felt like to be on the other side of it.”
She looked at him.
He sat down on the floor on her other side, between her and the wall, and she felt the warmth of him settle against her shoulder and she let it.
The three of them sat in the corridor with the arena noise filtering through the stone walls around them, distant and muffled, and nobody said anything for a while and the corridor held them in its cool quiet and Lilith sat between the two people she trusted most and let her body do what it needed to do without fighting it.
Sera took her left hand.
Azrael took her right.
She closed her eyes.
“How bad is it,” Sera said eventually, quiet enough that it felt like it was just for Lilith.
“Bad enough that I couldn’t have done it again,” Lilith said. “Whatever came out of me on that floor, it’s gone. All of it. Right now there’s nothing.”
She paused.
“It’s come back before. It came back after the throne room, after the truth serum vision. It always comes back."
“But you don’t know when,” Sera said.
“No.”
“And the ceremony is in two days.”
“I know.”
Sera was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “Is there anything that helps it come back faster.”
Lilith thought about the throne room and the candles and the vision and every time the Seraph power had moved through her, what had preceded it, what had called it.
It had never been effort.
It had never been training or discipline or anything she had done deliberately.
It had always come when something needed it, when she was present enough to receive it, when she was not forcing anything.
“Rest,” she said.
Azrael made a quiet sound beside her that might have been agreement or might have been something else.
“Then that’s what you’re doing for two days,” Sera said, in the voice she used when she had made a decision and was not entertaining counter arguments.
“You’re not going to training rooms or council meetings or anywhere else. You’re sleeping and eating and being still and letting it come back.”
“There are things I need to—”
“Lilith.”
She stopped.
“Two days,” Sera said. “Everything else can wait two days. You just cracked the arena floor with your body and then walked off the floor on your own legs so that nobody would see you collapse. You have earned two days of doing nothing.”
Lilith sat with that for a moment.
Then she nodded.
Azrael squeezed her hand once, just once, and she felt it move through her the way small certain things moved through her when everything large had been spent.
She sat on the corridor floor between the two of them and let the quiet of the corridor hold her and felt the hollowness in her chest beginning, slowly and without being asked, to fill.