Ranvir came to slowly, feeling the heavy warm lump lying on across his chest. He blinked twice, purple light tinting the unfamiliar dark room as his eye opened. Looking down, he found a mound of thick red hair splaying across his chest, the silhouette of a much smaller creature stirring as he began moving.

A pair of small eyes opened, reflecting the light cast from his. Brown kitten eyes met his, before Menace slumped back into the mess of Frija’s hair. Sighing, Ranvir gently rested a hand on his daughter’s back before levering himself up with the other.

Or he tried to lift himself, but the shock of pain sent him down onto his back again, his eyes watering from the sudden onslaught. Blinking the tears out, he lifted his hand, feeling the bandages that covered it tighten and shift as it bend.

Ranvir gasped at the sight before him. The cloth covered him from the middle of his upper arm and down to his fingers, revealing bruised and marked digits poking through the wrap.

They were splotched with raw skin marks, the splotches of dark blue, purple, and yellow bruises and were covered in some sort of clear lotion. He gingerly flexed the digits. They were swollen and sensitive, leaving them feeling bloated and clumsy.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Latresekt grumped from within him.

Ranvir sighed but elected to ignore the mind-spirit for another sensation he’d just registered. He examined the room. He thought he recognized it as one of the guest rooms of the Sentinel house in Legea, since he’d once borrowed one to get Frija a place to play out of the sun.

These rooms were featureless, with a single window, a bed, and a bedside table. It was this table that caught his attention. Or rather, the insect sitting on it. It was big, at least for Ranvir’s standards. It might’ve been average on Korfyi, not that this made it any better. About the size of Ranvir’s pointer finger from end-to-end, he couldn’t quite determine its color in the dark, but leaned towards pale since it seemed only slightly off from the purple emanating from his eyes.

The insect, grasshopper, rubbed its hind legs together, producing a sound of rustling sand, rather than the regular noise from such a creature. Ranvir felt a shiver run down his back as he made out more details the longer he stared at it. The segmentation of its carapace, the twitchy way it moved its legs, the way it observed him with uncanny awareness.

It looked like an insect, but Ranvir knew it wasn’t.

Then a sense pressed in upon him. It was gentle, coming from a deft-hand at using the tether-sense, far better than he was if not nearly as strong. The impression was simple, far simpler than any he’d ever felt from another person. It signaled to him recognition and awareness, a sense of togetherness and unity.

Ranvir’s breath hitched before he gingerly extended his own sense to reciprocate the feeling. He was even more stunned when he felt the impact of his own sense on himself, like his own being was mitigating some of the impact of his less capable use of the same power.

“What was that?” he muttered to himself, stirring the beneath the blankets. It was hot in the room, judging from the light slipping through the blinds. It was a day outside which partly explained the heat. The other part could be explained by the heat emanating from the girl lying on top of him.

“You’re bonded,” Latresekt’s voice filled with scorn. “You’re part of each other now.”

Ranvir swallowed once, feeling how dry his throat was. He noted the glass sitting next to the insect. He reached for it carefully. The grasshopper—or perhaps storm locust—didn’t react to him getting close.

After drinking his fill, Ranvir asked the spirit of war. “What does that mean? In actual terms?”

Latresekt hissed through its teeth in a barely restrained snarl. “Its means the dung crawler has bound itself to you. Hidden its true form away inside you.”

“So sort of like you?” Ranvir jested.

“Nothing like me! That creature is nothing like me!” Latresekt howled. “We were not, and have never been, some bottom scrounging weakling. We understood the true worth of the mind. We stepped into Second Order with our mind and not our spirit! Do you see that holding a conversation with you? Huh? It cannot. It has lost what made it strong in the first place. And you have rewarded it!”

Ranvir blinked, taken aback by the raw wrath emanating from Latresekt. It had previously always done a decent job at curbing its primitive nature, but after his experience when the spirit had invaded tether-space, Ranvir had been aware of it. Somehow, it still felt jarring to be so suddenly exposed to its true nature.

He hesitated, unsure of what to say, or how to even begin a reply to the creature’s frothing madness. Latresekt went crazy, battering at the floor, flailing impotently at the surrounding space.

Ranvir watched in mute horror as the spirit completely surrendered to its base instincts, then as time went on, it became less frightening as he saw how impotent its rage was against his spirit.

It was like Latresekt had said. Its mind was of the Second Order, but not its spirit, and it didn’t appear to even have a physical form any longer, if it ever did. Tether-space was made of not just stronger stuff, but better stuff than the gorilla-like spirit.

Ranvir sighed and fell back onto the bed. “Well, I’m sorry that you feel that way,” Latresekt had calmed down enough to simply start pacing the space. Its only acknowledgment of his statement was the brief pause in its path. “Why don’t you tell me why the insect makes you so mad?”

Latresekt, unsurprisingly, refused to answer. However, someone else reacted.

“Daddy?” Ranvir looked down to see the pile of red hair moving before a small arm swiped it out of the way.

“Hey Fireheart,” Ranvir muttered, helping her get the hair out of her face with his good hand. She had sleep lines from the blanket on her face, which was also swollen from said sleep. She sniffed once. “Are you okay?”

There was such tenderness and fear in her voice that Ranvir’s heart felt like rupturing. He hadn’t thought about how she would react when she woke up. He presumed it must be the next day, which meant she’d likely been pulled to Legea by Amalia only to find her dad passed out with his arm all wrapped up. And if she was sleeping in the middle of the day on her own, she’d likely been waiting by his side into the night.

Ranvir cleared a throat suddenly so thick he struggled to speak. “Yeah, baby. I’m okay.” She sat up slowly, scooping Menace into her arms. Ranvir could clearly see what a terrible and mindless idiot he’d been in the vulnerability on his daughter’s face, the fear and hesitation. He couldn’t stop himself and wasn’t sure he should as he scooped her up in his arms, wrapping both daughter and kitten into a firm embrace that sent knives of icy pain through his palm and up into his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry that I made you worry, Fireheart,” he said into her shoulders. “I forgot myself and let the excitement overcome me. I should—“

Someone knocked on the door, but didn’t wait to be acknowledged. “I wouldn’t say you made a mistake,” Kyriake said. “I certainly did, but I don’t know that you did.”

Both Frija and Ranvir looked up from their embrace. Only Menace, who appeared to love being squished between them, didn’t react other than let out a single high-pitched meow.

“Can I come in?” she asked, standing in the doorway.

Hesitantly, Ranvir nodded. The older woman smiled, stepping in and closing the door behind her. “You’re barely more than a child yourself, Ranvir. Between the two of us, I am the grown up. I was supposed to be the teacher. It was my mistake. I’m terribly sorry for the damage my lapse in judgement has caused to your family, in both fear and worry.”

Ranvir, feeling like his stomach had knotted into a mass of convulsing muscles, nodded slowly. “I— thank you.”

Kyriake smiled. “How old are you?” then thinking better of it, she turned to Frija. “Is he old?”

Frija glanced at her dad for a moment before nodding slowly.

“Do you wanna know a secret?”

This caused Frija to perk up slightly, causing the kitten to fall from the family’s collective grasp and into Ranvir’s lap. It complained once before it rolled onto its stomach and began licking its feet. “What?” Frija asked.

“I’m more than twice as old as your dad,” Kyriake said. “If you think your dad is old, then you don’t want to hear what I celebrate for my next birthday.”

“What?” Frija asked, halfway rising to her feet. “How old?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you,” Kyriake narrowed her eyes and withdrew slightly. “You might think I’m like really old. Or maybe even boring.”

“No!” Frija exclaimed, one hand clenching and withdrawing to her chest. “I wouldn’t!”

Ranvir smiled at seeing his daughter’s mood lifted. Kyriake and Frija talked for a while longer before the older woman asked to speak with Ranvir alone, offering to let Frija and Menace play in the courtyard.

Frija hesitated, some of the worry he’d seen when she woke up returning. Ranvir forced a smile to his lips and stroked her hair. “Go, I can tell you want to.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, bending down to kiss her on the forehead. “Now go, before Menace pees himself.”

Frija giggled, “Eww, Daddy!” and hurried out of the room, her kitten following clumsily behind her.

Once she left, the mood in the small room sobered up significantly. “Care if I raise the blinds?” Kyriake asked. Ranvir gave her the go ahead. With the room lit by natural—or as natural as it got in Korfyi—light, Ranvir felt his heart lift slightly. “I really am sorry that I let it get that out of hand. I should’ve taken more care that your family was involved and understood what was going on.”

Ranvir nodded, not really feeling up to discussing it with her. Kyriake seemed to take his silence for assent as he moved over to the nightstand and the storm locust still standing there, never once budging from looking directly at Ranvir.

“This is curious,” she said. “Usually, storm locusts appear in the dozens if not hundreds on after they hatch, only growing more numerous the further along their Ability develops.”

“About that. How come it’s a storm locust and not a twister like the elemental that gave me the egg?”

“Elemental offspring are mostly determined by the intent of the parent, rather than form,” Kyriake explained. “Something about their First Order nature, I believe.”

Ranvir nodded. “So what do you think will happen? Will it grow bigger or become more numerous?”

Kyriake shrugged, “There’s no real way to tell without simply advancing the Ability.”

“What about this?” Ranvir asked, lifting his hand. “What happened here?”

“When you bond with an elemental, you have to bring it into our reality. As a First Order creature, Korfyi would slowly break it down without Second Order physicality. There are scholars that go into greater depths, but that’s the basics.”

Ranvir couldn’t help a little quirk to his lips as his thoughts turned to the furious spirit of war within his tether-space. A creature who also lacked a Second Order physicality.

“Ranvir,” Kyriake said, turning away from the locust and looking at him directly. “As your hand is going to take a week or two to heal, I wanted to offer my help with training your Abilities. It’s my understanding that you’ve made quite the effort in picking out combinations and theorizing on potential synergies, so I probably won’t be much help in that department, but I’d like to believe my many years of experience could still assist you in raising the scores. What do you say?”

Ranvir licked his lips, meeting her eyes despite the prickling it caused on the back of his neck. He really didn’t want the help. But did he not want the help because he was afraid she’d turn into Saleema, or did he not want the help because he wanted to do it all himself? Was he afraid or prideful? Were any of those reasons good enough to eschew help?

“One week. Afterwards I’ll reassess.”