He moved the cannonblade, lifting it, swinging it out to point at the titan. At the Simurgh.

The Endbringer took off, flying skyward.

The Titan ceased moving. After a long pause, it lowered its spear.

Chevalier reported in, saying something over the comms. His voice was almost entirely static, and only the cadence of that static suggested it was speech.

Almost understandable, in the same way an abstract painting could be understandable if one fuzzed their vision enough.

Cinereal straightened. Adjusting a few key pieces of her costume, hand touching her hair, she made her way to the door.

Which would make the people who were present and who I knew in any capacity just Jessica and Darnall.

Cinereal stopped as she saw me.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Stay put. Don’t contact your team for now,” she said. “Be patient. If what you did yesterday was dangerous, we don’t want to chase that danger. If it was useful, it’s going to be more useful after things break down than before.”

I wanted to respond to that, to counter that those weren’t mutually exclusive.

But where Narwhal was the kind of militant, no-nonsense, all-business leader who I was pretty sure would bow to better arguments, I wasn’t positive Cinereal was anything like that. Cinereal was allegedly unfair, unreasonable, in training, expectations, her lack of patience, and her propensity to hold grudges.

I kept my mouth shut, nodding instead.

She wasn’t necessarily wrong, even if I could help with both this current situation and the one that we might be dealing with later tonight.

“Pulling together a meeting with everyone in one place seems difficult,” Cinereal said. “Eric!”

Death and rebirth were on my mind so much that I felt a sudden emotional twinge at the notion that it might be my kid cousin. A bit of pain at the realization it wasn’t.

‘Eric’ was a suit, roughly my age, jacket already removed and sitting on one of the nearby chairs. Good looking, in the way that the features that weren’t classically good looking added rather than distracted. In his case, it was a pronounced roman nose that was maybe one half-size too big, with a flat bit across the bridge suggesting it had been broken once and never set right. Tan skin, brown hair with blond highlights, a light purple dress shirt, black tie with a pin, black slacks, and nice black wingtips with a bit of scuffing at the toe, like he’d kicked something or nudged a dirty door open with his foot at one point.