Chapter 254: Second Evening

POV: Rune

She was at the window before he even came into view, and she caught herself doing it, sitting there with her book forgotten on her lap and her eyes fixed on the tree line, and decided there was no point pretending otherwise. Pretending she hadn't been watching for him would have been inaccurate, and she'd promised herself, somewhere in the last few weeks, to stop lying to herself about things that were plainly true.

He appeared right around the same time the light started turning gold, moving through the last stretch of trees with the same unhurried patience she'd come to expect from him.

"You're early," she called down.

"You're watching for me." He tipped his head back to look at her properly. "Which one of us is more obvious about it, do you think?"

"I'll let you have that one."

He settled at the base of the tower the way he had the evening before, close enough to talk without raising his voice too much, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the silence comfortable in a way that surprised her a little.

"I have questions," she admitted eventually. "A lot of them. Fair warning."

"I'd be more concerned if you didn't."

She studied him a moment, deciding where to start, and settled on something that had been sitting in the back of her mind since their first exchange the day before. "Tell me about your commission. All of it. Not the version you'd give the council."

He didn't hesitate the way she half expected him to. He told her plainly, laying it out with the same directness she was starting to recognize as simply how he talked about everything, the neutral council's mandate, the geological event three months back that had sent phantom energy readings spiking on instruments that rarely picked up anything at all, the assumption his briefing had handed him about an uncontrolled dangerous phenomenon somewhere inside this Wood.

He didn't leave out the parts that made his own assumptions look foolish now. He told her about the three pack destructions that had shaped his whole framework, the reasoning behind why he did this work at all, unhurried and complete, the way you'd describe something you'd already made peace with instead of something you were trying to justify.

Rune listened with the specific attention of someone who had spent a lifetime reading about people and was only now getting the chance to study one in real conditions.

"You're very honest," she said, once he'd finished.

"Would you rather I wasn't?"

"No." She said it quickly, more honestly than she meant to. "I've had enough of the other kind."

Something in his expression shifted, curiosity maybe, or the beginning of a question he didn't ask yet, and she decided this was as good a time as any to test the thing she'd actually been wanting to ask since the moment she first saw him standing in her Wood.

"What do people think happened to Phantom Wolves?" she asked.

He looked up at her with an expression she hadn't seen on him yet, something careful, like he was deciding how honestly he could answer a question he hadn't expected. "Most people think they never existed. Not really. The records from about forty years back are incomplete, and there's never been a confirmed sighting since. There are theories, if you want them."

Forty years, she thought, and something in her chest went very still.

She did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way she'd trained herself to do with any new piece of information. Vael's age, her manner, the specific texture of everything she'd never once explained about her own past. Forty years ago put Vael somewhere in her late teens, young enough for it to matter, old enough to remember it clearly.

"What are the theories?" she asked, keeping her voice level.

He told her. All of them, patiently, without trimming any of it down to something more comfortable, the way she was already starting to understand he simply didn't operate any other way. Some people believed the gift had been a myth from the start, an old story that got mistaken for history somewhere along the way. Others believed something had happened to the last confirmed Phantom Wolf, something violent enough to end the bloodline entirely, though nobody agreed on what.

She sat with all of it, filing it carefully next to everything else she'd been quietly gathering for weeks, and didn't let a single piece of what she was thinking show on her face.

"You're very good at listening," he observed, after a moment.

"I've had a lot of practice." She offered him a small, dry smile. "Not much else to do up here besides listen and read."

"That sounds lonely."

"It was." She said it plainly, the same way he'd said everything all evening, and found she meant it more than she expected to. "I'm working on that part."

He didn't say anything to that, but he didn't look away either, and the silence that followed felt different than the earlier one had, something warmer sitting underneath it that she wasn't quite ready to name.

They talked a while longer, trading questions back and forth, and by the time the light had gone properly amber through the canopy, Rune realized she'd learned more about the actual state of the world in one evening than she'd learned in the last several years combined.