Chapter 252: Almost there
"You don’t think it’s foolish? Delaying something this important?"
"I think," Renna said carefully, "that the people who matter to you deserve to hear the truth from you directly, rather than piecing it together secondhand after you’ve already vanished for good. I’d rather you take the weeks it costs than regret the alternative for however long you end up living on the other side of that fracture." She studied him a moment longer, something gentler than her usual careful professionalism settling into her sharp features. "Besides. I’d like the chance to properly say goodbye myself, if it comes to that. You’re not the only one this search has mattered to, whatever you might assume."
Rohan felt something warm and unexpected settle alongside the grief already building in his chest at the thought of everything the coming weeks — and the eventual crossing beyond them — would ultimately cost.
"I’ll make sure you get that chance," he said. "Whatever else happens."
Ashcombe, it turned out, was between circuits when word reached her through Renna’s network, and arranged, on short notice, to meet them one final time at the Anchorage before the Ember Drift departed on her next scheduled run. She listened to the full account of the crossing attempt with her usual flat, controlled focus, saying little until Rohan had finished.
"You made the right call," she said finally. "Delaying, I mean. I’ve known people who ran from goodbyes their whole lives, chasing the next thing before they’d properly closed the last one. Never seemed to make them any happier for the running." She studied him a long moment. "Dessa and Pike will want to hear how this turns out, whenever it finally does. Torvin too, probably, in his own quiet way. Route word through Renna when you know something concrete. I’ll make sure it reaches us, wherever the circuit’s carried us by then."
"I will," Rohan promised. "Thank you. For everything, from that first berth at the Anchorage onward."
"Don’t thank me," Ashcombe said, her usual brisk economy softened, just slightly, by something that looked almost like genuine affection. "Just make it back to tell the story properly, whichever way it ends up going."
The long transit back toward Cael Athis stretched across nearly three weeks, the Rustwake’s cramped quarters growing steadily more familiar with every shared meal, every quiet watch shift, every long evening spent in the particular companionable silence that had come to define their small, unlikely crew.
Rohan spent much of that transit turning over everything the Guardian had told him, weighing the enormity of the choice still waiting for him at the end of this long, winding detour, and found, gradually, that the exercise grew less paralysing the longer he sat with it — not resolved, not settled, but at least familiar enough that he could function around its edges rather than being constantly overwhelmed by its centre.
He drilled with the spear each day, the familiar rhythm of Maerin’s forms offering the same grounding comfort it always had, and found himself, more than once, imagining her reaction to everything that had happened since he’d left Veyrhold’s buried corridors — the stowaway escape, the raiders, the fracture, the Guardian’s impossible revelation.
She’d tell me I did the right thing, delaying. She’d also tell me not to let the delay become an excuse to avoid the choice entirely. Both things at once. That’s just how she always was.
Dr. Farr spent the transit refining her research notes into something considerably more formal than her earlier scattered fragments — a genuine, careful record of everything they’d learned, written, she explained, partly for her own scientific satisfaction and partly as a legacy she intended to leave behind regardless of how Rohan’s eventual choice unfolded.
"If you cross, eventually, and the boundary seals for good," she said, during one of their evening working sessions, "I want a complete, honest record to exist of everything that happened here. Not sanitised for Meridian’s commercial interests. Not diminished the way my original research was dismissed six years ago. The genuine truth, as thoroughly documented as I’m capable of making it."
"Who would you even share it with?" Rohan asked. "The consortium already tried to bury your work once."
"Perhaps no one, for now," Dr. Farr admitted. "Perhaps I simply keep it, complete and honest, until circumstances change enough that someone’s finally willing to listen properly. Some truths are worth preserving even when nobody’s ready to hear them yet." She glanced toward him, something warm beneath her usual careful composure. "You taught me that, in a way, without either of us quite realising it. Seven months of searching, and you never once stopped believing your search mattered, however many people told you otherwise, implicitly or directly."
Corven, for his part, spent long hours during that final transit teaching Rohan the basics of the Rustwake’s own systems in earnest — navigation, basic repair, the practical mechanics of independent fringe travel — knowledge that Rohan suspected, though neither of them said it aloud, Corven intended as a quiet, practical gift, insurance against whatever uncertain future waited once this particular Chapter of their shared journey finally concluded.
"Never know when you’ll need to fly yourself somewhere without waiting on someone else’s schedule," Corven said, by way of explanation, on one of their final evenings before Cael Athis’s dying star finally became visible on the Rustwake’s approach display. "Man should know how to get himself home, one way or another, whatever home ends up actually meaning for him."
They sat together in comfortable silence a while after that lesson concluded, the cockpit’s ambient hum settling around them, before Corven spoke again, his voice carrying an unusual, careful weight.
"You know," he said, "watching you turn yourself around for the sake of a proper goodbye — it’s made me think about my own girl more than I have in years. I never got that chance. Never got to explain, to make sure she understood why I was gone as much as I was, why I loved her anyway despite all of it." He was quiet a moment, jaw tight with old, familiar grief. "You’re doing something I never got to do, kid. Doesn’t matter that it’s not the same circumstances. Watching you choose it properly, when it would’ve been so easy to just cross and be done with it — that means something to me. More than I probably know how to say clearly."
Rohan felt the weight of that admission settle over him with genuine, humbled gratitude. "I’m glad I could give you that, even secondhand. You’ve given me more than I think you realise, this whole journey."
"We’re square, then," Corven said, something warm cutting through his usual gruff composure.
"More than square, honestly. But I won’t argue if you want to keep believing you owe me."
Rohan practiced, in the quiet hours before sleep, the words he intended to say to Liora once he finally stood in front of her again — turning them over, revising them, discarding versions that felt too formal or too rehearsed, searching for something that carried the genuine weight of everything the past several weeks had taught him without collapsing entirely into the grief he knew the conversation would eventually demand.
I found it. I found the way home. And I came back first, because you asked me to, and because some promises matter more than any door ever could.
It wasn’t perfect. He doubted any version of it ever would be. But it was honest, and after everything this search had cost and taught him, honest felt like the only thing actually worth carrying back to Veyrhold’s buried, familiar corridors.
The Rustwake dropped out of transit into Cael Athis’s dim, ash-choked system on the twentieth day of their journey, and Rohan stood at the cockpit’s viewport, watching the familiar, violet-tinged world grow larger on the display, feeling the strange, aching mixture of homecoming and impending loss settle over him in equal, overwhelming measure.
Almost there. Almost time to keep my promise properly, whatever comes after.