Chương 248: 46. Ancestral Lands 1

When I woke up, the first thing I registered wasn't the light. It was someone playing with my hair. The touch was feather-light—the kind you'd give some idle little trinket out of pure boredom, or perhaps the deliberate kind, dancing precisely on the line between sleep and waking, determined not to let me stay comfortably on either side.

I frowned, and when I finally forced my eyes open, I found Ignicia lying on her side beside me, one hand propping up her cheek, the other lazily winding a lock of my hair around her finger. Morning light slanted through the gap in the curtains and fell across her red hair like a thin, translucent sheet of fire. The moment she saw my eyes open, the corner of her mouth curled—a smile with absolutely no good intentions behind it.

"Oh my." She blinked.

"Did I wake you?" I was silent for two full seconds.

"Ignicia…"

"Mm?"

"Is tormenting people really the first thing you do every morning?"

"Wrong." She looped a strand of my hair around her fingertip with great precision, her tone so deadpan it deserved a punch.

"The first thing I do is confirm you're still alive. Tormenting you is the second."

"…How very thoughtful of you."

"You're welcome." She answered so smoothly that, for a moment, I genuinely didn't know where to begin my counterattack. To make matters worse, she was clearly in an excellent mood—radiating that lazy, mean sort of cheerfulness, like someone who'd spent the previous night thoroughly tormenting some unfortunate human being and was now leisurely surveying the aftermath. That unfortunate human being was, obviously, me. I'd just opened my mouth to say something when a soft knock came from the door. Knock, knock.

My body went rigid. Then came Alvira's voice from outside.

"Um… Cedric?" Her tone was painfully unnatural, like she'd had to brace her entire body just to force the sentence out.

"Could… we go get breakfast together?" I was doomed. If it were Jessi standing out there, I'd have at least a hundred flavors of nonsense ready to bluff my way through—play dead, fake illness, claim I'd trained so hard riding dragons last night that I was one strong breeze from ascending to a better plane of existence. With Jessi, the guiltier you looked, the more she enjoyed the show; commit hard enough to a lie, and she might even help you sell it. But Alvira was different.

She wasn't the type who could lie beside you with a straight face. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. She was more the type who, before you even finished your first fabricated sentence, would already be furious with you on some deep, fundamental level. I was busy calculating whether "I overdid training last night, it's not really a good time" — a line that sounded technically true and was catastrophically easy to misinterpret — might work, when Ignicia moved.

And she moved with absolute decisiveness. So decisively that before I could even lift a hand to stop her, she was already sitting up.

"Wait, you—" My protest died halfway out of my mouth, because outside, Alvira—apparently unable to survive the prolonged silence without her imagination filling in the blanks—had already begun to spiral. Her carefully maintained composure cracked audibly.

"I—I'm not trying to rush you! If you're not up yet, it's fine, I just—I only wanted to ask! You two, you wouldn't possibly—" The second half of that sentence scalded her on its way out and died somewhere in the hallway. My eye twitched. Wonderful. She was detonating. And right as Alvira's brain hit critical mass, Ignicia slipped out of bed without a shred of hesitation, walked straight to the door, and pulled it open. I closed my eyes. … Fine. If it's going to blow up anyway, might as well make it spectacular.

The moment the door opened, Alvira froze solid. She'd clearly walked over maintaining some fragile "I'm just here about breakfast, everything is perfectly normal" expression. That expression shattered the instant she saw what was inside. Ignicia stood in the doorway wearing a thin, long robe—if "wearing" was even the right word. It was closer to something draped over her as an afterthought.

The collar hung open at an angle that suggested modesty had not been consulted; her shoulders and collarbone lay almost entirely bare in the morning light, her red hair spilling loose down her neck, radiating the unhurried ease of someone who'd just rolled out of bed and found the very concept of "presentable" a quaint inconvenience. As for me, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, having only managed to yank one corner of the blanket across my lap.

In a situation like this, that level of coverage was statistically equivalent to nothing. Alvira's face ignited—not in patches, but all at once, a single burning flush climbing from her throat to the tips of her ears. Her lips parted, closed, parted again. Not one word came out. I could practically hear the click of her brain shutting down. Ignicia looked at her, her expression terrifyingly placid, as though nothing about this entire tableau warranted a second glance.

Then, perfectly natural:"We'll head over ourselves in a bit." She didn't wait for a response. One hand rose, and the door shut in Alvira's face, clean and final. Click. The room fell silent. I sat there, one hand still clutching the sheet, frozen for two full seconds. Then I slowly turned to look at the culprit. Ignicia walked back without a flicker of guilt, as if she'd simply dismissed a courier at the door.

"What?" she asked. I stared at her for a long moment before I managed a full sentence.

"Are you aware of how completely unbothered you are right now?"

"About what?"

"Everything." She tilted her head, genuinely seeming not to understand my objection.

"She knocked. I answered. What's the problem?"

"The problem is enormous." I pressed two fingers to my temple.

"After that, Alvira is never going to hear the word 'breakfast' again without thinking of something else entirely."

"Oh." A light, unbothered hum.

"Isn't that normal?"

"…" This dragon was terrifying sometimes. Not because she could breathe fire. Not because one flick of her wing could send me tumbling through the sky questioning every choice I'd ever made. It was because, on certain matters, her sense of shame existed in an entirely different dimension from the rest of humanity. She looked at me, then smiled, slow and unhurried.

"Besides," she said, stepping closer, leaning down to meet my eyes, "that expression on your face just now was rather nice."

"What expression?"

"The one where you wanted to stop me but already knew you couldn't." Mischief glinted openly in her eyes.

"Very entertaining." I drew a long breath.

"Ignicia."

"Mm?"

"I'm now seriously reconsidering whether last night's whole 'stabilizing the bond' business was ever anything more than a convenient excuse to torment me." She actually laughed—soft, but real.

"You're only questioning that now?"

"…So you admit it?"

"I admit nothing." She lifted her chin, utterly unapologetic.

"I simply think it's encouraging that you're finally catching up." I stared at her for two more seconds before accepting my fate and getting dressed—because if we didn't show up soon, Alvira was going to convince herself we'd decided to eat breakfast straight through till noon.