Chapter 17: Second Meeting.
Elian genuinely couldn’t manage to keep his eyes open for longer than one minute at a time when Bellamy figured that he had enough talking for one evening.
He didn’t stay awake for long after that, staring at the dark ceiling of a room that still smelled like someone else’s, not Bellamy’s, unfamiliar cologne before exhaustion finally won out over everything his body had been through that day.
The abyss was waiting for him the moment his eyes closed, same as the first time. Cold, endless, motes of light scattered like something had shattered a sky and never bothered cleaning it up.
"You fell into me," the Everbloom said, without preamble, its voice arriving from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"On purpose, apparently, you’d like me to believe." It added.
"I didn’t fall into you. I fell towards you. There’s a difference."
"There’s really not."
The staff drifted closer, that same restless, legless motion from the first time he had met it.
"...But it worked, so I’ll allow the framing."
Elian let himself drift, no longer bothering to brace for a floor that wasn’t coming.
"Rowan Vale... she’s my teacher, said I don’t think when I don’t have time to. Called it my only good instinct."
"Vale’s not wrong. Vale’s rarely wrong, from what I remember of her."
Something in the staff’s tone shifted, thoughtful.
"Old habit of hers, if i remember correctly. She was like that with a blade too, before she put it down."
"You know Rowan Vale?"
"I know of her, everyone knows of her. Two centuries asleep doesn’t mean deaf."
A pause, almost fond.
"She’s the reason anyone still remembers what a Resonance-bond is supposed to look like. Everyone else who could’ve taught it properly died believing it was superstition."
Elian turned that over slowly.
"So there’s more of you. Other artifacts like you."
"Were. Are. Depends which ones you mean, and I’m not in a hurry to explain family history to someone who still flinches every time a teacher raises a hand at him."
The staff’s crystal head caught a mote of light, held it a moment.
"One thing at a time, Elian. Remember that." It said, voice surprisingly soft.
"You cracked one petal. You have four more to go before any of this is worth explaining properly."
"That’s not ominous...at all."
"It’s accurate." A beat. "You want advice or you want comfort? Pick one, I don’t have patience for both tonight."
Elian huffed something close to a laugh, still weightless, still cold, somehow less unsettled by all of it than he probably should have been.
"Advice."
"Stop deciding in advance what version of yourself is allowed in a room."
The staff said it flatly, no dramatics attached, the way it seemed to say everything, bizarrely reminding him of Milena.
"You did it at breakfast then, with your father. You did it in that vault. You did it again today, the second Vale came at you—some part of you sat down and decided this is the acceptable amount of yourself to show before you’d even seen what the moment needed. And every single time, it’s cost you something, it was embarrassment this time, we don’t know what it’ll be next."
"That’s not exactly new information."
"No. But you keep needing to hear it, so I keep saying it."
A pause, quieter.
"The fall worked because you didn’t have time to negotiate with yourself first. That’s not a fluke you should feel embarrassed about. That’s the actual mechanism. My power don’t respond to control, Elian. I respond to whatever’s left when the flawed, naive control finally slips."
Elian sat with that a moment, the abyss patient around him, unbothered by his silence the way it never seemed to be bothered by anything.
"My father looked at you like he recognized you," he said eventually, looking for a subject change.
"The day of the Attempt. Like he’d seen this before."
Something in the staff went very still—not literally, it had no way to go more or less still than it already was, but the quality of the silence changed, sharpened.
"Ask him," it said finally.
"That’s not an answer."
"It’s the only one that’s mine to give right now."
The staff drifted back slightly, putting a small, deliberate distance between them.
"Some things aren’t mine to hand you in the dark, Elian. Some things you’re going to have to go dig up yourself, in the light, from people who actually owe you the truth of it."
"That’s very cryptic for someone who claims to be a magic stick and not a person."
"I contain multitudes," the staff said, dry, and Elian got the distinct sense it was deflecting on purpose now, closing a door it had opened by accident.
"Go back to sleep. You’ve a whole school full of people about to make your life complicated, and you’re going to need the rest more than you need my secrets tonight."
The abyss was already thinning by the time Elian thought to argue, motes of light smearing into brightness, the cold receding the way it always did—and the last thing he heard, faint at the very edge of waking, was the staff’s voice again, quieter than before.
"Five petals, Elian. There’s a reason it’s five, and a reason your entire family lineage only ever managed one. You’ll want to be ready before you find out why."
"My ancestors only managed one petal?"
The staff paused, taken aback by it’s own blunder.
"Just... go to sleep for today."
Elian opened his mouth to argue that "just go to sleep" was possibly the least reassuring thing anyone had said to him all day—staff included—but the abyss was already thinning around him, the cold receding, motes of light bleeding into the pale grey of early morning light behind his own eyelids.