Vows To The Void Moon

Chapter 6: Six Hours

Saoirse P.O.V

I went back in when I was ready and not a moment before.

He was sitting up when I entered. Fully spine straight, feet on the floor, the wound he wasn't supposed to stress apparently having been overruled by whatever internal mandate required him to be vertical. He had found a clean shirt from somewhere, which meant he'd been up long enough to look for one, which meant he'd been awake and mobile while I was outside having the most disorienting conversation of my adult life.

'You talked to the Sage,' he said.

'You were listening.'

'I was nearby.' He looked at me directly. No apology. No pretense that this was anything other than what it was. 'How much did he tell you?'

'Enough.' I pulled the chair to a position that was neither too close nor too distant and sat down. 'He told me about my mother. He told me she came to you.'

Cadryn was quiet. Whatever he'd been expecting me to lead with, it wasn't that. He absorbed it, and in the way his jaw set I could feel the pressure, that atmospheric read — something that registered as grief. Not current grief. Old grief, the compressed kind. The kind that has been living in a fixed location for a long time.

He knew my mother. The grief was not abstract.

'Tell me what happened,' I said. 'All of it.

The version you would tell me if you had decided to trust me.'

'I haven't decided that yet,' he said.

'I know. Tell me anyway.'

He looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at his hands. And then slowly, like a man dismantling something he'd built specifically to stay up, he began.

'Your mother's name was Lyren Vael,' he said.

'She found me in Duskfen eighteen months ago. She had been following Soveth Draal's financial and legal movements for four years; she had documentation of seventeen decisions across three pack territories that, individually, look like administrative choices.

Together they form the architecture of a consolidation plan that has been running quietly for two decades. His intent is to collapse the three-pack system into a single centralized structure under Hollow Courts authority. His authority.'

I kept my face still. 'That's a long play.'

'He is a patient man.' Something in Cadryn's voice, not bitterness, exactly. Respect that had curdled. 'Your mother calculated that the Void Moon would be his trigger point. That whatever final mechanism his plan required would need the Void Moon's political cover to execute — the window when pack authority is most destabilized and the Courts can move fastest.'

'She was right,' I said. The Sage had said as much.

'She was right about most things.' Cadryn's jaw moved. 'She gave me the documentation. She asked me to hold it, not to act on it, not yet. To keep it out of pack political hands until the Void Moon cycle, when she believed she would have the final piece that would make it irrefutable.'

'The treaty envoy you killed,' I said.

His eyes came to mine. No flinch. 'Was carrying a message to Soveth. He had identified that someone in Virenmoor's orbit had the documentation. The message named me. If it had reached Draal—

'He would have moved to retrieve it immediately.’

'And everyone connected to it.'

My mother. 'So you killed the envoy to buy her time.'

'I bought her time,' he said. 'I gave the trial a confession that didn't explain itself. And I have spent eleven months waiting for her to surface with the final piece, which she has not done, because…’

He stopped.

'Because Draal found her first,' I said. My voice was very level. I had built that levelness over years and I needed all of it right now.

'I believe so.' He said it quietly. 'I don't know what that means for her current—'

'I know what it means.' I stood up. I needed to be standing. 'The Sage said eight months ago she was alive. That's eight months without contact. That's Draal's timeline.' I moved to the window. The Riftlands was golden now, morning fully committed. 'What's the documentation?'

'A blood-sealed archive. Locked to your bloodline. It's in the Hollow Courts legal vault — she filed it under a Veilborn sovereignty clause that makes it legally invisible to Courts administration unless someone with Vael blood requests access.'

I turned around.

He looked at me. I looked at him. The thing between us — that chest-deep, persistent current — had changed quality again. Not louder. More specific. Like a signal resolving into clarity.

'You need me,' I said.

'Yes,' Cadryn Voss said. 'And I am sorry for it.’