His other sister had changed a great many things about this estate since taking over, and Valen had been glad for it. When they’d first arrived, they’d torn through the halls of Averia together, ordering servants and droids to remove everything that reminded them of the Cortas family. Later that night, they stood together in the wide, green courtyard, watching Valen’s past burn to ashes in a towering pile. So high, they’d stacked those mementos, that those who looked up from below on the city streets could see the trail of smoke spiraling into the cloudless sky.

It was a reminder that everything old was now made new. That the ways of General Cortas, and the old Mirabel, were now behind them.

He’d loved seeing the changes. Loved seeing the past melt away.

But Valen hadn’t been able to bear the thought of anyone touching Kalee’s things. She had been the one bright spot in his otherwise lonely childhood, and her memory had given him the strength he’d needed to survive in Lunamere. Knowing that she would have wanted him to live, to walk in the sunlight again, had been what kept him going in that constant darkness.

“Stop here,” Valen said to the droid guiding his chair along. He was still too weak to walk, even after spending most of the evening in the medical wing of the estate, being assessed.

His body was failing him, in ways that utterly mystified the doctors and med droids.

But Valen knew the truth.

It was his power, and the strain it placed on him, that was doing this to him. He’d felt that strain ever since the minds in his fortress had grown three layers of cells thick. As it expanded, day by day, the strain only got worse.

Now he could scarcely think, scarcely keep himself together unless he was in that very fortress. The world beyond his mind was a place of pain and exhaustion, but inside, the fortress walls were like a safe harbor. Or a drug that kept pulling him back for more. Sometimes Valen wasn’t entirely sure which was more accurate.

Back in the med wing, he’d been pumped with fluids and given a decent meal, most of which Valen could hardly keep down. And now here he sat, in this wheeled chair, on the threshold of one of the two places in Averia that he had never allowed Nor to touch.

“I have been instructed to stay by your side,” the med droid said in its robotic voice.

“Instructed by who?”

“Master Darai,” the droid told him.

Valen sighed. “Of course.” The old man was inescapable, even when he placed someone else in his stead. “I’ll just be a few moments.”

The droid’s expressionless face did not move. It simply stood there, waiting patiently like an obnoxiously loyal dog.