At midnight, Sh'leinu quietly opened the hatch in her room's ceiling and climbed out onto the roof. She was startled to find her husband, Ergen, already there stargazing under the soft light of the moons.

“I didn't notice when you left,” she said, carefully making her way over to him. “Scoot for me.”

“I was trying not to wake you. I just—” His brow furrowed. “What's that in your hand?”

Lying beside him in the space he'd made, she showed him a lighter and a pipe stuffed with dried chey leaves. “Relaxation aids.”

“Oh, wow,” Ergen laughed as he snuggled closer and twined tendrils of his spirit around hers. “We haven't done this in years.”

Sh'leinu lit the pipe and took a long pull from it. She passed it to him, and together they watched the night sky in silence for a while, blowing out whiffs of smoke and simply enjoying each other's company. Under the calming influence of chey, Sh'leinu could feel a very small portion of her worries melting away.

“Just so you know,” Ergen said in a quiet voice. “He isn't back yet. I checked. And Zeris is downstairs studying.”

Sh'leinu laughed and swatted at his chest. “Don't say it like that.”

“What? It's perfectly normal for parents to gossip about their children behind their backs. My parents do it all the time.”

“Ergen, I love your parents. I really do. But they’re insufferable rumormongers.”

He chuckled as he blew out a puff of smoke. “Oh, they’re the worst. But my point still stands. We deserve to complain about our troublesome child once in a while.”

“Caen’s a sweetheart,” she said. “There's nothing to complain about. Pass me the pipe.”

She took her longest pull yet. It flared out of her nostrils in a gust. “I can feel my lifespan dwindling every time that son of ours makes me worry. He’s going to kill me long before old age gets a chance to.”

Ergen laughed heartily. “See, whenever he says he has something important to talk to us about, I die a little on the inside, you know, just to brace myself.” Ergen shook his head in amusement. “But he really took it to the moons with this one. Ancestors. I haven't been able to sleep all day.”

“I actually slept easily enough,” Sh'leinu confessed, pausing to take another pull from the pipe. “The nightmares I had, though.”

They sighed in unison. Ergen's tendrils wrapped a bit more firmly around her spirit. The sensation was akin to being physically held. Sh'leinu snuggled closer to him.

“I'm scared for him too,” Ergen said into the silence. “Feels like I'm in my fifties again. Sitting in bed with my suddenly screaming toddler. Couldn't help him then, and I still… I still can't help him now.”

Sh'leinu shivered. Because of how young Caen had been when he'd awoken his spirit, he'd suffered unimaginable pain for several years. Right up to the moment he'd learned to control the movements of his spirit himself, every day for him had been agonizing. Sh'leinu didn't like to think about those initial years very much. Even before his spirit had awakened, Caen had been a very frail and sickly child, but all that had gotten so much worse after his wake day. She'd been so… so useless back then. Her husband, too, despite being a practiced Spirit-healer, hadn't been able to help much.

“Things are not the same now as they were back then,” Sh'leinu said without any conviction.

Ergen replied with an equally unconvinced, “Right, right.”

She quietly handed him the pipe.

They were Caen's parents. It was their duty to guide him, support him. But Sh'leinu knew that she and her husband were woefully unequipped to do that. They neither knew how to aid nor protect their own child. An old fear—not old as in former and forgotten, but old in the sense of long-lived and enduring—surged to the fore of her mind. She voiced it in a whisper.

“We're bad at this. At being parents.”

“Everyone is,” Ergen said through a puff of smoke. He began taking another long draw from the pipe.

“We should build a very tall castle,” Sh'leinu said. “Fill every floor with books and memory crystals, and then lock Caen inside it till he’s forty years old.”

Ergen broke out into a laugh, then started coughing.

Sh'leinu, chuckling, reached around to pat his back.

“Ancestors,” Ergen swore, wheezing slightly. “I think I like this plan a little too much.”

“It's a brilliant plan,” she agreed.

He scrunched up his nose. “You know what this reminds me of?"

"What, the sprite farm?" she asked.

"My, oh my," Ergen said, shaking with laughter. "I completely forgot about that."

She and Ergen had refused to leave Caen's side for even an instant till he understood why it wasn't okay to grow a collection of sprites in his room.

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"I was actually thinking about the time we forbade him from leaving the house for two weeks.”

“Oh, Entity help me," Sh'leinu said, touching her forehead. "Alright, now, that was a horrifying experience."

Caen had gotten into a brutal fight with several older boys. She remembered being shocked speechless when she'd seen their injuries that night. She'd been unable to reconcile the knowledge of her frail son with the person who had done all that. Fractured bones, wounds wrought more from alchemical solutions than from blows. What had really bothered Sh'leinu back then, though, was the fact that her son was being bullied and hadn't told anyone about it. Much earlier in his childhood, he always spoke to his parents about these things. She took another long pull from her pipe.

“I mean, I knew he was taking lessons with Ven, but I'd never have believed he was capable of all that.” Ergen shook his head as if recalling a terrifying dream. “The mother of one of those boys was a patient of mine at the time.”

“Oh, I remember her. The lady who accosted you at the temple, raining down all sorts of curses? She was really scary. Wasn't her son the one with blue skin?”

“Heh. That’s the one. Before that, she stormed into my consultation compartment and kept screaming, ‘What have you done to my child's body?!’ They essentially had to drag the poor woman out of the building.”

Sh'leinu scoffed softly even though she'd heard this story many times before.

Ergen took a tentative pull from the pipe and blew out a squiggly ring of smoke. “Blue skin,” he mumbled. “Nabik couldn't get it off, no matter how hard he tried. How, by all the ancestors, did Caen even manage to do that?”

They both looked at each other. “Chymistry experiment,” they said in unison and burst out laughing.

Caen used to say this a lot as a child, back when he’d started learning chymistry. He would go over to his older cousin's apothecary in the commune, play with potions all day, and come back home with missing eyebrows. Sh’leinu had been seriously alarmed the first time, but Caen's consistent reply had become a running joke between her and her husband.

“I nearly had a heart attack when he took up scripting,” she said, smiling.

Chuckling, Ergen drew from the pipe and passed it back to her.

She set it down. She'd had enough for tonight. “He said he wanted to, and I quote, ‘construct a gathering array’.”

“Wasn't that after he damaged our cooling wards in the house while trying to replicate them separately in his room?” Ergen asked as he put an arm around Sh'leinu.

She laughed through her nose and snuggled into his side. “Actually, he tried to replicate them in Zeris's room as well.” Caen had been thirteen at the time. Sh'leinu had needed to make up a lie on the spot about how the new cooling box she'd purchased had interacted poorly with the house's central ward scheme. She'd been so terrified that he would try fixing it otherwise and end up hurting himself.

“I remember Grena giving both of them a scolding that evening,” Ergen said, then let out what sounded to her like a pleased sigh. “Though I can't lie. I felt so proud of him.”

Sh'leinu placed a hand on Ergen's chest. “Feels like it was only yesterday I started bringing him to the tri-clinic with me. He'd tail me, your parents, naMoon, anyone really. He wanted so badly to help out everywhere that it made my heart bleed. Your dad even started calling him the little tri-healer.”

Ergen chuckled. “Yeah, he’d knock on our door by 4 o'clock every morning, urging us to get ready so we didn't miss the train. That level of diligence was so hard to stay mad at.”

“He's always been such a hardworking boy.”

“Not really a boy anymore, I'm afraid.”

“He’ll always be our little boy,” Sh'leinu insisted, clutching Ergen's shirt in her fist.

“Our little boy with four bloodlines,” Ergen muttered, shaking his head in the same incredulity she'd been battling with all day.

“It’s just… all so strange,” she said.

Ergen made a reverberant “Mm” sound in agreement.

Having four bloodlines by itself was bad enough, but now her son could… copy other people's magic. It didn't make any sense to her. But if she was being honest with herself, that boy had stopped making sense many years ago.

“When his spirit awoke, I kept telling myself that it was okay to be completely out of my depth,” Sh'leinu said quietly. “And I suppose I'd been hoping I'd feel less and less inadequate as time went by, but…”

“Yeah,” Ergen said. “At this point, I don't believe there's much about Spirit-healing that I could teach him. The materials he reads. Some of the things he talks about with Zeris. Most of it just… just goes over my head, but I nod thoughtfully and make ponderous sounds just so I don't seem utterly inept.”

Sh'leinu chuckled. He sounded like his twin sister, Grena, did when she was reminiscing longingly about the days when she could still teach Zeris math.

Sh'leinu was constantly worried for Caen because he couldn't protect himself like other people could. The memories she'd seen from Odaton alone were nightmare fuel. Vensha often insisted that Caen could handle himself, but Sh'leinu wasn't concerned about the Planes alone. They lived in a dangerous world. The whims of wandering mages could upturn the lives of just about anyone. Ortril in fact was a war-torn continent, rife with monsters, fiends, and calamities. And she'd always known, in that way that mothers know things, that if trouble didn't promptly find Caen, he'd go looking for it. That boy. Months ago, he'd told her and Ergen that after the festival this year, he wouldn't be coming back from Ser-go Island with them. He planned to ‘find his path’.

But today, he'd amended that plan to a significant degree.

Despite having gotten himself an ability of some kind that could potentially protect him better, Sh'leinu found that her worry for Caen had only intensified.

“What are these Patronage tournaments like?” Sh'leinu asked Ergen. She'd never attended them before.

“Brutal,” he said grimly. “I've never taken an interest in them myself, but the last one I sat through was about a decade ago. A nephew of mine—Dagner’s kid—needed sponsorship for an Institute in Vedulan. They subjected them to all sorts of tests and ordeals.” He sighed. “High bar of entry, affinity-wise. Competition was fierce, vicious, and—ancestors… lots of scheming. There weren't any deaths, but, well…”

Sh'leinu suddenly felt the need to pick up her pipe once more.

Sensing her dismay, Ergen began rubbing her back in circles. “He'll be fine, my love.”

It was a lie, but she appreciated it nonetheless. “Since his speculon is active now,” Sh'leinu said, “I'll throw him into the mirror-room tonight and see what happens.”

“You’re referring to the… coming age of ritual? Isn't he too old for that?”

“He is,” she confirmed. It was typically conducted for young children of Edict heritage once they'd activated their bloodline. Caen was an outlier in terms of age, but spurred by her helplessness, this was all Sh'leinu could think to do.

“Well, you never know,” Ergen said thoughtfully. “It might actually help him.”

They lay there, quietly watching the moons and stars till she heard the approaching footsteps of her son on the ground below.