*Pai.*
Evander slapped his own thigh hard enough to make Mira flinch.
"I’ve made a decision," he announced.
He sat up straight and looked at Leo with the expression of someone who had just done extensive internal calculations and was committed to the result. "Little brother Leo. This is our first meeting. Normally I don’t make decisions like this on a first meeting. But I trust my instincts, and my instincts are telling me to bet on you."
Leo looked at him. "I told you. I don’t gamble."
"I’m not asking you to gamble. I’m the one gambling. With myself." Evander produced three crystal vials from his storage ring and lined them up on the table. Each one held roughly ten pills, and no two vials were the same color. "These are for you."
Leo looked at the vials. Then at Evander. Then at the vials again.
"I’m not taking those for free," he said.
"They’re not free," Evander said, with the patience of someone who has already explained something and is willing to explain it again exactly once. "All I want is the same promise as before. If you make the top three at the Selection finals, you choose me for your squad."
Liora leaned forward slightly. "What’s in the vials?"
Evander glanced at her. "The things I’m most proud of. Better than the Jade Body Protection Pills in some respects. And unlike those, these have never been sold. Not once." He looked back at Leo. "The production cost is low. Making them isn’t the hard part. Having someone worth giving them to is."
He spread his hands.
"I have alchemy talent. I don’t have combat talent. My supportive magic is strong but my offensive capability is genuinely embarrassing — I have power in abundance and no reliable way to use it in a fight. I can get through the Mage Temple preliminary rounds, I’m confident about that. The cross-temple final is a different question." He paused. "I need a strong squad. If you make the top three, you’ll have the pick of your partners before the roulette. All I’m asking is that you include me in that pick. If you don’t make top three, the promise is void and I lose nothing but some pills."
Mira was watching him with an expression that had moved from skepticism to something more careful.
Liora was watching him the same way.
Leo was watching Veyra.
Veyra had moved quietly to the edge of the sofa and was sitting on her haunches, both heads tilted at Evander’s vials, nose working slowly. She lifted her gaze to Leo, and a thought arrived through the Blood Contract — not words, but the shape of a feeling. Something clean and certain.
*No ill intent. You can trust this one.*
Leo looked at Veyra for a moment. He thought about the two ambushes she had sensed before anyone else. He thought about the Dyke Clan assassin — that had been her as much as him.
Her instincts had a record.
"All right," Leo said. He reached out and picked up the three vials. "You have my word. If I reach the top three, I choose you."
The change in Evander’s expression was immediate and genuine — not the performed satisfaction of someone getting what they wanted, but the specific relief of someone who had taken a real risk and found it had landed. He covered it quickly. His chin came up, his hair went back over one shoulder, and he became casual again.
"Good," he said. "Read the instructions in each vial. They matter."
Leo stored all three vials in the Forget-Me-Not ring.
Mira looked at the space where the vials had been and then looked at Liora. Liora met her gaze and shrugged.
An alchemist who was eighteen years old and carried a Halcyon Union VIP black card. Who had just given away what amounted to roughly a third of his personal savings on an instinct about someone he’d met an hour ago. And who, by his own account, had been right about these kinds of bets before.
Making an enemy of that person would have been the single most wasteful decision Leo could have made today. Making a friend of him might be something else entirely.
---
The auction continued, but no one in booth six was particularly focused on it.
When the last item of the evening was sold and the lights in the hall came back up to full, the four of them filed out into the evening air of Silverrest City.
Evander paused at the exit. He shook his long green hair back from his face, looked at Leo, and smiled — not the performed beauty of it, just the genuine thing.
"We’ll meet again in the Halcyon Capital," he said. "Try not to disappoint me."
"I’ll consider it," Leo said.
Evander laughed — a real one, brief and unguarded — and walked away.
They watched him go until his green hair disappeared around a corner.
Mira crossed her arms. "Little brother. You made that decision very fast. We barely know anything about him."
"Veyra vouched for him," Leo said simply.
Mira looked at Veyra, who was padding along beside Leo with both heads facing forward, utterly unbothered.
"Your two-headed lizard vouched for him," Mira repeated.
"She’s never been wrong."
Mira opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at Liora.
Liora was quietly smiling. She said nothing.
---
Back at the hotel, Leo had barely shut the door before Veyra began.
Both heads up. Body vibrating. The sound coming from Little Flame was something between a whine and a demand.
Leo looked at her. "I know," he said. "Give me one second."
He activated the Divine Light Mantle. Soft golden light spread from his body and wrapped the room, settling over the walls and windows like a second skin. The sound-sealing effect took hold. Whatever happened next, no one outside would hear it.
Then he reached into the Forget-Me-Not ring and took out the stone sphere.
He barely had time to hold it before Little Light’s head shot forward, jaws wide, and the stone sphere disappeared.
Leo stared at the gap where it had been.
The sphere had been roughly the size of a human head. Little Light was not, by any measure, equipped to swallow something that size. Her neck visibly distended as the sphere moved downward in increments, slowly, with considerable effort. Little Flame watched from beside her with an expression that managed to convey both moral support and personal relief that she wasn’t the one doing it.
After a long moment, the sphere was gone.
Little Light sat back on her haunches and blinked.
Leo stared at her.
"You just... swallowed it," he said.
Little Flame pressed against Leo’s leg and made a sound that felt like the beginning of an explanation.
Through the Blood Contract, something arrived — not a clear thought, not a picture, but the shape of a want so deep and so old it didn’t have edges. Something that felt less like a desire and more like a direction. Like a compass needle finding north.
Leo went still.
He looked at Little Flame. He looked at the spot where Little Light was sitting, neck returned to normal, both eyes half-closed with the specific expression of a creature that had just done something enormously satisfying.
"You want to go home," Leo said.
Little Flame’s eyes opened fully. Both heads turned to look at him.
Through the bond, the feeling came again — sharper this time, and layered. Not just the direction. The reason behind it. Something sleeping inside the stone, something that had been sleeping for a very long time, that was now beginning to wake up.
Leo sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.
He thought about the magic crystal from the Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon. He thought about Little Light swallowing it without hesitation. He thought about the changes he’d felt through the bond since then — the increased sleep, the warmth moving through Veyra’s body, the sense of something building.
And now a stone sphere that no appraiser in the Crownhammer could identify, swallowed the moment it was in reach.
Two pieces of something larger.
"Where is home?" Leo asked.
The answer that came back wasn’t a place. It was a feeling. Vast and dark and full of things that didn’t have names yet.
Leo looked at Veyra for a long moment.
Then he lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
Tomorrow they would leave for the Halcyon Capital. The Demon Hunt Selection was four days away. Somewhere in that competition were three Spiritual Stoves and sixty rivals and a roulette that would determine the shape of the next years of his life.
And somewhere inside his partner, something ancient was waking up.
He closed his eyes.
*We’ll figure it out,* he thought. *Together.*
Veyra curled up at the foot of the bed, both heads resting on the blanket near his feet.
The Divine Light Mantle held.
The night was quiet.