Actually, he had no idea. He blinked, momentarily nonplussed— it was just one of those matters he’d not thought about in a long, long time. There’d been a great deal of academic debate about it in the Heavenly Realm— debate that he’d been roped into every now and again by eccentric divines with more wealth than good sense and the impulse that they absolutely needed to offer lavish rewards to one of the youngest ascendant divines it the entire realm to learn more about where he’d come from. Good money, though, whenever it did happen.

In the Celestial Realm, nobody cared. Funny, too, given how if they just turned the Astrological Orrery around, they’d probably be able to find out more in a day than those divines had over the course of their entire existences…

He sighed, brushing off the memories as he stood, because he was a mortal, in a lesser realm, and the intricacies of the Celestial Realm were very much unimportant to him at the moment. A few seconds later, Aimi shot down the stairs and leapt straight at Janus, who resigned himself to catching the human cannonball— because he couldn’t very well just let her crash into the wall behind him. “What am I going to do with you… anyways, are you ready to go outside?”

“Mhm! Can we make snow angels?”

“Are you dressed to make snow angels?” She’d only just managed to throw on a jacket, and her gloves were backwards. Obviously not. “We can make a snowman, if Mingtian feels like it, ok? But you have to be on your best behavior.”

They made it all the way to the front door before Aimi gasped, looking up at Janus with a look of utter betrayal. “But what about my gummy?”

“Have you checked your pocket?”

“I—” she frowned, then shoved her hand into her coat pocket, only to come back out with the little plastic-wrapped gummy in her hand. Her eyes widened to saucers as she held it up to the light, almost comically

awed. “Woah… magic.”

Then she ate the gummy.

Janus rolled his eyes, then pulled open the door, shivering slightly against the rush of cold air that crashed over them as they stepped out into winter.

Aimi hid behind her brother’s leg, hugging tight to him— still chewing on her gummy. “It’s kinda cold outside…”

“I gave you the gummy, so you’re coming on the walk. Plus, it’s not that cold,” he lied, shivering as he said it. “I mean, look at Mingtian! He isn’t even wearing a jacket!” Another, more dramatic shiver. “How are you not wearing a jacket? Aren’t you freezing?”

Mingtian just shrugged. The real answer was ‘because I’m an Immortal Sovereign and this cold is laughably balmy, but he couldn’t very well say that. A shrug and “I’m not cold,” worked fine too. Before Janus could pick at that too much, he stepped out, resolving to go buy a jacket sometime soon.

“Alright, alright, keep your secrets.” Janus stepped out after him, and together the three of them relished the cold at the end of winter, where the darkest nights resided and they came together, as one… a whiteness that had settled down over the world and clung to East Saffron even after days. “Have you heard? I know you’re not as connected to the usual flow of information as I am, so…”

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He cocked his head in confusion. “Heard what?”

“That something is stirring. They’re keeping it quiet, for the moment, but…” he was silent for a long time. “I was too young to know the taste of it from when it last came, but Lexi was a librarian back when the last great war happened. There’s a… how would you say it, a paring down of the nonessential that happens before a conflict. She’s been trying to get funding to promote you to senior librarian—”

“Still?” He raised an eyebrow. “I thought she’d have stopped with that once I got my job at the Academy.”

Janus laughed, and grinned, the shine of his smile rivaling the snow for brightness. “Well, it certainly makes it harder, convincing a commit to fork over funds when you’re already getting the resources from the academy commission— and trust me, the rivalry between those two can be legendary at times, but no, if you thought that Lexi would let a simple thing like a rivalry almost as old as East Saffron stop her from helping her subordinates, then you’re a fool.”

“I would be glad to get a proper librarian's salary.” Less because it meant that he’d get more money— he didn’t really need the currency that the mortals of East Saffron used, in all honesty— and more because it’d give him the excuse to stop being a teacher. It was… bearable, so long as he had Lily and Avyr in his class, but he could not truly imagine himself teaching in any true capacity for years upon years until… what? He wasn’t sure, but he’d have to think about what he was going to do with his mortal persona sooner than later. “You say she’s been unable, though?”

Some slight bit of warmth fled from Janus’s face, hard to grasp in its subtlety, that emotion— his aura so slightly shifting into something of wariness. Of quiet and long-buried tragedy. “I hope she’s wrong but…” his voice dropped to a whisper, gaze glancing over to where Aimi was playing happily in the snow. “I’ve heard that everyone is having difficulty securing funding. Even Guxi and the administrative branches… from what I hear, it’s something from far higher up the chain. Perhaps even from the Bloody Saffron Sect itself, and they rarely involve themselves in matters of mortal conduct like this. Unless…”

“Unless,” Mingtian repeated, understanding, only appearing untroubled by virtue of all the eternities spent living so far above such petty concerns. Except, those concerns had a way of entangling those who sank down into them once more… he sighed. “It’ll probably be fine.”

“That’s what Beixian Port said,” what bitterness, what a terrible and vast sorrow— tainted by a child’s faded memories, or perhaps made all the more cruel because of them— “and look where that got them.”

“We’ll be safe. The Bloody Saffron Sect is strong. Is not their patriarch all but Pinnacle Sundering?” Well, he’d felt it, so he knew it was true, but… that was powerful. Very powerful, for this realm. Only two steps stood above it, and those were the realms of myth and legend and those two pretentiously overblown annoyances who’d ambushed him when he’d first fallen into reality.

Janus grimaced, but nodded. “Yeah. They… you’re right. East Saffron has never fallen, not even when the whole empire focused their might on Ca Cao. It won’t fall now.” He didn’t really sound like he believed his own words. “We can only hope.”

How wonderfully, how terrifyingly mortal a concept.

Mingtian said nothing.