Chương 40: The Ghost in the Family Tree

The Patriarch received us in the same study where he'd once handed a ten-year-old boy a map to a desert that nearly killed him, and something in the careful, unhurried way he studied both of us before speaking told me this conversation was going to cost considerably more than the last one had.

"Alfredo Van," he said, once Ellia had finished explaining, in the flat, deliberate tone of a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying quietly for a very long time.

"I wondered how long it would take before that name found its way back into my house."

"You know him," I said.

"Know him." The Patriarch let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.

"He is my grandfather, Len Fan. The man who founded the branch of this family that eventually became powerful enough to matter to kingdoms." He rose, crossing to the room's single window, robes settling around him with none of their usual commanding ease.

"He withdrew from the world four centuries ago, not long after reaching Supreme Realm, and left instructions that no descendant was to seek him out for any reason he hadn't personally sanctioned first." Ellia's expression shifted, something between shock and old, unspoken hurt.

"Grandfather. You never—""I never told you," the Patriarch agreed, quiet.

"Because there was nothing kind to tell. A man who reaches that height of power and chooses isolation over his own bloodline isn't a story I particularly enjoyed explaining to a daughter young enough to still believe family meant something unconditional." The room held its silence a moment, heavy with a grief that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a family I'd only just started to understand the full shape of.

"Why did he withdraw?" I asked, carefully.

"I don't know the full truth of it. He never explained himself to anyone still living who'd admit to hearing it." The Patriarch's jaw tightened.

"What I know is this in the years before his withdrawal, he grew obsessed with relics that answered to no Court's authority. Fragments of old, forgotten sanctuaries. Keys to doors most of the world had long since stopped believing existed at all." His eyes found mine, sharp despite the weight sitting behind them.

"I begin to understand, now, exactly what he was actually looking for all those years, and exactly why Onbu sent you to my doorstep instead of anyone else's."

"You think he has a fragment."

"I think it's the only explanation that makes four centuries of a Supreme Realm elder's disappearance make any sense at all." The Patriarch turned back to face us fully.

"I can arrange contact. I cannot promise he'll answer it, and I cannot promise, if he does, that the conversation will go the way either of you is hoping."

"But you'll try," Ellia said. Not a question.

"For Xuan's son," the Patriarch said, "and for a granddaughter who deserves better answers than the ones I've given her until now yes. I'll try." Something almost gentle crossed his commanding features as he looked at his daughter.

"I'm sorry, Ellia. That's a longer conversation than tonight allows, and it belongs to you and me alone when this is finished. But it's owed, and I intend to pay it properly once there's room to." He returned to his seat, though the weight in his shoulders didn't fully leave with the movement.

"There is one more thing you should understand, before either of you decides how much hope to place in this," he said.

"My grandfather did not withdraw quietly out of grief, or exhaustion, or any of the gentler reasons a man reaches for when he wants his family to stop asking questions. He withdrew because something he was searching for finally found him first, and whatever it showed him changed the shape of the man considerably more than four centuries of solitude ever could have on its own." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"You think he was afraid," I said.

"I think fear is too small a word for what I saw in the last letter he ever sent this family, forty years ago, the only one that ever answered anything at all." The Patriarch's hands folded together, tight.

"He wrote a single line. Some doors are locked for the world's sake, not the key's. Do not go looking for what I found. I have spent forty years assuming he meant that as a warning against ambition." His eyes lifted to mine, heavy with something that hadn't fully settled into words yet.

"I begin to suspect, now, that he meant it rather more literally than any of us ever gave him credit for." Ellia's hand found mine without either of us quite deciding it should, and I let it stay there, grateful for the small, steady warmth of it against everything else sitting cold in the room.

The letter went out that same night, carried by a messenger hawk marked with a seal I didn't recognize old, worn smooth by however many decades it had sat unused in a drawer somewhere, waiting for a reason significant enough to justify breaking it back out.

"Three days," the Patriarch said, watching the hawk vanish into the dark.

"If he answers at all, it will be within three days. Longer than that, and I'd advise assuming the answer is silence, the same silence he's given every letter I've sent him across forty years of trying." Three days.

Another small, precise countdown stacked on top of every other one I was already carrying, and I found myself, standing in that courtyard with Ellia close beside me and a hawk disappearing into a sky gone the color of old bruises, almost grateful for the company this particular wait didn't have to be spent enduring alone.

"He'll answer," Ellia said, quiet, more to herself than to either of us.

"He has to."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then we find another way." She said it simply, without hesitation, the same steady certainty she'd offered me over dinner two nights before.

"You didn't get this far by waiting patiently for every door to open on the first knock, Len Fan. I don't see why this one should be any different." The three days passed slower than any three days had any right to. I spent the mornings training with Dororo, Cosmic-Wave folding deeper into instinct with every session, Dragon Slayer's Second Slash finally beginning to answer without the same violent backlash that had once cost me an arm to summon it the first time.

Dororo watched every session with the particular sharp attention of a man cataloguing exactly how much further I still had to go before whatever waited past Alfredo Van's silence stopped being able to simply overwhelm me on arrival.

"He's not going to test you the way Onbu did," Dororo said, on the second afternoon, wiping sweat from his brow with considerably less dignity than he usually allowed himself in front of me.

"If he even agrees to see you at all. A man who's spent four centuries deciding the world doesn't deserve his attention isn't going to bother staging a proper trial for a boy he's never met. He'll simply decide, in the first five minutes, whether you're worth the effort of continuing the conversation."

"Comforting."

"I specialize in comfort," Dororo said dryly.

"Ask anyone." Ellia trained beside us more often than not, her family's sword art sharpening alongside my own two-lifetimes' worth of borrowed forms, and something in the quiet, steady rhythm of those mornings sweat and effort and the particular closeness that only grows between people testing their limits side by side did more to settle the knot in my chest than any amount of careful planning managed on its own.

Ember spent those same three days growing restless in a way that had nothing to do with impatience and everything to do with something it clearly sensed coming pacing the windowsill each evening, wings flaring at shadows that weren't actually there, refusing to settle until I finally gave up trying to work and simply sat with it until the restlessness passed.

I found myself wondering, more than once, whether a creature born from a technique meant to end its own kind carried some quiet, inherited instinct for exactly this kind of waiting the specific, wordless dread of watching a door you can't yet see finally begin to open.

I let myself lean into that certainty, just slightly, whenever the weight of the wait threatened to become too heavy to carry gracefully, and turned my thoughts back toward the dark where the hawk had disappeared, carrying a four-centuries-old silence one small, uncertain step closer to finally being broken. On the evening of the third day, the hawk returned.

I intended to spend whatever answer it carried exactly the way I'd spent everything else this past year carefully, deliberately, and without wasting a single hour it cost me to earn.