She glared at Northern with something close to hatred, though it burned hotter than hatred. Pure, incandescent anger.

"Why bring me to somewhere like this? Why is he even here in the first place?"

Northern, despite seeing that anger plain as day, didn’t match it. He was almost offensively casual.

"Why did I bring you here? Fairly, I’ve forgotten."

He squinted, struggling to remember. Things really had gone too blurry after that gruesome evolution.

"I do remember though that I made a promise to you... wait, did I not?"

He shrugged it off.

"Oh well, who cares. He crossed me and messed with my family. I messed with him, quite easily, but I couldn’t bring myself to kill him, knowing you have scores you want to settle."

Raven was silent for a moment, staring at the man propped against a small rock.

The Kageyama Patriarch stared back. His lean face had been consumed by cruel scars that twisted his features into something barely recognizable. He chuckled and giggled, looking into Raven’s eyes with the intensity of someone who had lost every thread of reason and found the loss amusing.

And Raven, standing before the presence of this man, could not move.

Not a single finger. Not a single step. She trembled, and no matter how much she tried to suppress it, the trembling only deepened. A Paragon... someone of her caliber. Facing the source of her childhood trauma and still finding herself unable to hold still.

Northern watched it happen and couldn’t make sense of it.

He’d seen Raven cut through battlefields without flinching. He’d seen the cold precision she wielded like a second blade. But here, in front of a scarred and broken man sitting against a rock, that precision had dissolved into something Northern had never associated with her.

Fear.

A Paragon’s mind was reinforced and restructured. The ascension burned away so many of the frailties that plagued ordinary people, and most Paragons found old wounds, old traumas, simply couldn’t grip them the way they once had. The architecture of their consciousness had been rebuilt too thoroughly for those cracks to persist.

But Raven’s cracks had persisted. Whatever the Kageyama Patriarch had carved into her as a child had gone deeper than the ascension could reach.

’I see why she got so angry.’

Northern studied her for a moment longer. The trembling she couldn’t stop. The jaw locked so tight the muscles in her neck were cording.

Or maybe she was as strong as she painted herself to be. And this was simply her weakness. Everyone had one.

The Patriarch was still laughing. His slender shoulders shook with it, wet hair falling around his face. In a few weeks, the man had shed every shred of the authority he once carried. He looked like a pitiful thing now, broken and amused by his own ruin.

"I brought you here because you also deserve to heal."

Northern’s voice cut through whatever dark place Raven had sunk into. She flinched, then slowly turned her gaze toward him. Her brows, carved from steel, furrowed so darkly they could have torn through stone.

Northern paused, only for a moment.

"I know what it feels like to run away from a wound that cuts deep inside of you. Ever since I came to this world, that has been the only thing I did."

He chuckled, though the sound carried no humor.

"Of course, your injury is far more grave than mine and harder to ever heal from. I don’t know if I can ever heal from having to be killed by my own brothers several times, chopped to pieces and then forced to watch myself come back together piece by piece."

He gestured loosely. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"The Kageyama clan is always open for you to go back and completely destroy them if you ever decide to. But right now, right here, there’s something you need to settle."

Northern fell silent, scratching his head.

This was the hard part. He’d been turning it over since he found out, and he still didn’t have a clean way to say it. How Shin entered all of this. How there was a possibility that Shin was her father.

There was no clean way.

He inhaled and spoke anyway.

"Recently, I happened to find some rather disgusting truths. Keeping them hidden will drive a wedge between us. Far as I’m concerned, they might very well drive a wedge between us right now."

Raven turned away from the Patriarch and faced Northern fully, waiting for him to speak.

"Did you ever know anything about your birth? About your mother?"

Raven was silent. Her expression fought to hold its shape, that cold mask she wore like armor, but it was fracturing. She bit her lip, and the effort to keep her face still only made the cracks more visible.

"I—"

She stopped and didn’t speak for a couple of seconds.

"My mother was a noble of a small kingdom who birthed me out of spite. She hated me and treated me worse than the Kageyama ever could have... before the Patriarch retrieved me from her."

Her voice went low.

"And killed her."

She lowered her head.

"He called me... his daughter... and bought me all sorts of candies. And they were the best thing I’d ever had since being born. It was all like that... until I awakened."

She trembled. No matter how hard she tried to cement herself in place, it didn’t work. The effort only made the failure more visible.

"My awakening caused my father to lose himself... and brought the worst out of my brothers... it... was all my fault."

She couldn’t lift her eyes. Not to Northern or to the Kageyama Patriarch, who sat against the rock and chuckled, low and eerie, as though her pain were a song he recognized.

Northern sighed.

’How do I even start with her... this really is not my strong suit.’

He stood there, at odds with the situation in a way that no amount of power or talent could solve.