Chapter 210: Seeds From Home
The letter ran three pages, and his mother’s voice never left it once.
Ren. My baby, My champion, My completely unreasonable child.
I started this letter the day your transport left — which your father says makes me dramatic. He’s one to talk; he held his face together for all three hours like a soldier, then sat in the cart like a dropped puppet. He’ll deny it. He’s reading that line right now and denying it.
Three hours. They give us months of worrying then three hours, and I spent half of it crying into your shoulder, forgetting every story I’d been saving. So: a letter. Sit still, I’m telling you everything I forgot.
I never told you about the final. The village where we’re staying — and no, I won’t write where that is because the polite young men read my letters before they go, and I enjoy giving them nothing to cut — watched it in the little hall like the whole plane did. So your mother sat in a crowd of strangers, watching her own son win everything, pretending my tears were just about the broadcast. Old Maro from two doors down cried into his cup and swears he didn’t. Your father has rewatched it eleven times since, sound low, and swears he hasn’t. I am surrounded by liars and I love them all.
Then your first note arrived through the Guild, and I am quoting the entire thing: "Arrived safe. School is big." Ren. My son lives in a manor, on a hill, on a world where the sun doesn’t set — the forwarding slip told us more than you did. You write like your father. I raised you better. The next letter will have DETAILS, or I am coming to deliver my questions in person, and you know I would enjoy the trip. The polite young men who rent the house across the lane and are definitely not watching over us just shivered, and they don’t know why.
The village is small and kind and believes we are retired herb farmers, which is nearly true. Your father built growing beds behind the house and talks to the rows like they’re you, which the neighbors have politely stopped mentioning. Mrs. Petta’s goat broke into our shed twice; your father negotiated with it for an hour and lost both times. And word reached us through friends that your old school wants your name on its training yard. I said yes so fast the message barely landed.
Now the mother part, so sit still: eat real food, not tonics. Sleep like a person. Do not fight anything bigger than our house — I said this to your face and I felt how you smiled, so I’m saying it again in writing where you can’t smile at me. Make friends and let them feed you. And — your father told me not to ask, which is exactly why I’m asking — is there someone? You paused just now. I felt it from here.
We heard your principal is being moved somewhere quiet to heal. When he wakes, you tell him the Valis family owes him a seat at harvest dinner for the rest of his life. We are not a family that forgets debts.
There’s a paper twist in the packet — south-field seed, the last of what we carried from home. Wherever you are, put a little of home in the ground. It helps. I don’t know why. It just always helps.
Grow tall. Come home when the stars allow it.
All my love, and most of your father’s — he keeps some back for the fields — Mom
P.S. — Your mother wrote three pages and still didn’t say the plain thing, so I will. In those three hours I kept looking for the boy we raised, and he was there, whole, under all of it. Whatever that school makes of you, that part is finished — we already grew the best of it. When all this is over, the left field gets reseeded first. Hold that thought with me. — Dad
— • —
Ren sat on the Terrace steps with the last page in his hand and tears on his face, and he didn’t bother arguing with either of them. He could deny it to anyone who asked — he’d gotten good at denying things — but he missed them. He missed them the way you miss a whole life: the warm little house on its narrow city street, his mother’s cooking drifting out over the evening noise, the years when the biggest problem in the world was getting home before the lamps came on. He had friends now, real ones, the kind who filled a too-big house with noise. He had teachers worth trusting. He had — maybe, possibly, in a way he wasn’t ready to put words on — even love. It was a better life than the boy in that little house ever dreamed of. And none of it touched the simple fact that the peaceful one was gone; no amount of winning bought it back.
So he let the tears come — there was nobody on his hill to hide them from — and while they came, he unwrapped the paper twist. A handful of small brown seeds, dry and ordinary, the kind you wouldn’t look at twice in any market in the plane. The most valuable thing anyone had ever mailed across a galaxy.
He stepped into his world and carried them to the Worldroot.
He planted them the way his father taught him — slow, spaced, thumb-deep, a wide circle in the rich ground where the great roots broke the surface. Home soil meeting his soil. And Kaia, who had been feeling every part of the last hour with him without saying a word, gathered herself and poured. Life ran through the ground like warm water, and the seeds answered the way seeds answer a whole spring at once: green threads, then stems, then buds climbing over each other — and then, around the base of the tree that carried his entire world, a field of his mother’s flowers stood up and bloomed under a sky she’d never seen.
Ren knelt in the middle of it for a long moment, breathing that smell, thirteen years old in the back of his throat.
Put a little of home in the ground. It helps. I don’t know why. It just always helps.
"You were right," he said thickly, to a woman two galaxies away. Then he took one deep breath, slapped both his cheeks hard enough to sting, and stood up. "Okay. Enough for now."
The emotions were too big to sit with, and he’d never once in two lives been good at sitting. What he needed was a good fight or a good death — and the nice thing about the sunken world was that it usually offered both.
— • —
That night’s shift, he pushed somewhere new.
Past the mapped shallows, down a drowned avenue that kept going after the sunbeams gave up, the city closed over his head — fallen towers leaning into each other, streets roofed in stone — until he came out into a covered district that broke two rules at once. There was no surface anywhere above, no telling how deep he’d come, his sense of depth quietly refusing to file a report. And there was light anyway — a pale, even glow soaked into the water itself, light with no lamp, coming from nowhere and everywhere like the district had decided on its own not to be dark. Broken civilization stood everywhere in it: collapsed arcades, doorways, the shapes of old streets. The ruins didn’t explain the light, either.
Then the second rule broke, and this one was about him. Out of habit he reached for his awareness — the sense the fragments always strangled down to his skin — and it WORKED. Fifty meters of it, a bubble of knowing in every direction, thin but real. In the shallows the sunken world had smothered his senses like the warring land had; down here, fifty meters breathed free. Which meant something was different down here, which meant—
Which meant nothing for the next half-second, because the moment his awareness touched its fifty-meter edge, something at that edge fired.
A jet of water came at him — thin as a spear, fast as a falling star, razor-edged with pressure. He read it the whole way and still couldn’t dodge; it was aimed too well and moving too fast, and it hit him dead center. Black petals exploded against it. The jet drilled, and the blooms stacked — petal-burst after petal-burst, flower over flower, Gravebloom spending the attack as fast as it arrived until the water broke apart into harmless spray. Ren stood in the drifting petal-dust with his heart hammering and realized, with real embarrassment, that he had completely forgotten he was wearing armor. Harrun would have hit him with a hammer on principle.
The shooter came off a rooftop to look at its work — and Ren looked back, and gave up, permanently, on judging this world’s designs. It was a streamlined fish half his size, built like a thrown spear, with two bulging eyes, a mouth like a hose ringed inside with razor teeth — and instead of fins, two wings, actual wings, rowing the water in slow strokes. A blade-shaped fin lay folded along its spine like a knife waiting in a sleeve.
[SCAN: JETMAW. RANGED ATTACKER.
DANGER TO HOST: HIGH.]
Ranged. That was the word that mattered. In all his days in the shallows, nothing had used an element — teeth, mass, ambush, disguise, yes, every flavor of them, but never once a wielded attack. Down here, the fish had artillery. He filed that next to the sourceless light and the breathing senses — the deep city was a different country — and then he stopped filing, because the jetmaw’s mouth was opening again.
He closed the distance in a burst, Heavenpiercer leading — and for the first time he layered a third law under the edge, Earth running beneath the grey, hardness stacked on sharpness. The blade met the fish’s flank and struck SPARKS, actual sparks, off scales like wet iron. He leaned in; the jetmaw twisted and shoved back with a pressure-wave of its own; and the clash blew them both apart, a ripple of force that shredded the strange pale plants growing along the street — plants with no light and no soil and no business existing, one more question this district refused to answer.
It came again the moment he steadied — jet, then body, then the spine-blade whipping out of its back mid-pass to open him from the blind side. The armor caught the jet in flowers. The armor caught the blade in flowers. And Ren, done trading, waited the extra half-breath for the hose-mouth to open for its next shot — and put everything he had straight down the barrel.
The jetmaw came apart from the inside, and the covered district went quiet again.
Ren stood over the drifting kill, breathing hard, grinning like an idiot for the second time in one night — because it had worked. All of it. The letter-weight, the homesick ache, the too-big feelings he couldn’t sit with — the fight had burned through them like morning fog. A good life-or-death battle took away almost everything. Usually your life, admittedly. But sadness, it turned out, was also on the list.
"Cheaper than crying," he told Kaia, storing the body. She radiated the patient warmth of someone declining to comment.
The fish was half his size and had been stronger than anything the shallows ever showed him, whales not included. He checked Gravebloom over while his breathing settled and found it perfect — not a seed out of place — and noticed for the first time the fine inscription-lines flashing gently as the lattice drank the water’s ambient energy. Self-sustaining, then, in ordinary work. The fine print wrote itself: in a faster fight, a longer fight, a worse fight, the armor would start billing him for energy instead. Good to know before the bill arrived. And one more note, filed with a wince — he had never once used the armor’s own law-attacks tonight. A weapon built into his skin, and he’d been too busy fighting with his hands to remember it. Next hunt, the flowers fought too.
Then he went hunting, because the night was long and the district was rich. Kills stacked into storage — jetmaws, shell-things, a blind eel the length of a street — who knew how many; he stopped counting and just farmed. And somewhere past the middle of the night, reaching past a crevice for a shelled kill, he felt the water twitch —
A claw snapped, from range, the way a claw had snapped at him once before in a different dead world. Pressure arrived like a decision already made.
Grass.
[CAUSE OF DEATH: SEAFOOD.]
[AGAIN.]
[REVIVALS REMAINING TODAY: 4]
Ren lay flat on his back at the revival mark, staring at his own sky, and started to laugh — winded, stupid, unstoppable laughter, because two dead worlds had now produced exactly one repeat killer, and it was shrimp. Thirteen deaths, and seafood had two of them. The System’s [AGAIN.] sat in his vision like a raised eyebrow.
The laughter wound down slowly, and when it did, he realized where he was lying: at the edge of the new field, his mother’s flowers nodding over him in the warm night air of his own world, smelling exactly like being small.
’Put a little of home in the ground,’ he thought, not moving, letting the flowers lean over his face. ’It helps; I don’t know why. It just does.’