~ KAEL ~
Senna Brask's house was small, neat, and — Kael noticed immediately — had exactly one room that was kept locked. Tomlin had warned them about this on the walk over, with the particular awkwardness of a grown man admitting something about his mother that he'd never quite examined.
"She doesn't go in there much," he'd said. "But she dusts it. Every week. I used to think that was just… how she was. Tidy. It wasn't until I was older that I realised — you don't dust a room you've forgotten about."
Senna herself was small and sharp-featured, with the particular wariness of someone who had spent a lifetime being polite to officials without ever quite trusting them. She looked at Kael, at Tomlin, and — longer, and with more suspicion — at the empty space beside Kael that her son had apparently already, somewhat apologetically, tried to explain on the way over.
"Tomlin says you want to talk about the strongbox," she said, before anyone else could speak. "I'll tell you what I told the last person who asked, thirty years ago. It's family business. It stays in the family."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Nyxara felt it immediately — the same quality she'd felt from Tomlin, but older, denser, the particular pressure of something held for decades rather than discovered an hour ago.
Senna Brask had not forgotten what was in that strongbox. She had built her entire life around making sure no one else ever asked about it — including, Nyxara suspected, herself.
"Mrs. Brask," Kael said carefully, "I understand this is private. I'm not here to take anything, or report anything to anyone. I just — I think the terms of that contract might be different than anyone in your family has ever realised. And I think that might matter. To Tomlin. To his children, if he has them."
Senna's jaw tightened. "The terms are the terms. That's what 'the Covenant keeps its word' means. My mother told me that. Her mother told her."
"Did any of them ever actually read it?" Kael asked gently. "All the way through? The interest clause, specifically?"
Senna opened her mouth to answer — and stopped.
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
It was a small stop. Half a second, no more. But Kael had spent two months learning to notice exactly this kind of pause — the pause of someone who had built an answer so long ago they'd forgotten it was a choice, and had just, for the first time, felt the foundation shift slightly underneath it.
"No," Senna said finally, quieter than before. "No one read it all the way through. Not in three generations. My grandmother said reading it too closely was… bad luck. Like it might notice you looking."
"That's rather the point, I think," Nyxara said — and this time, neither Kael nor Nyxara was surprised when the words simply arrived in the room. "A contract no one reads is a contract no one questions. And a contract no one questions… lasts forever. Quite literally, in this case."
Senna went very still — the same stillness Tomlin had shown on the ship, the recalibration of someone hearing a second voice in a room with no one else in it.
"That's—" she started, and then, unexpectedly, sat down, hard, in the chair nearest the door. "That's Her. Isn't it. The Void Mother. The new one. The one from the Conclave."
"You know about that?" Kael asked, surprised.
"Everyone knows about that," Senna said, with the air of a woman pointing out something obvious to someone who clearly didn't get out much. "It was the talk of the docks for a month. A god who actually…" she gestured, helplessly, "…answers. Stays. I didn't believe half of it." She looked at the empty air with something that wasn't quite hostility — closer to the wary respect of someone encountering a force of nature they'd previously assumed was a rumour. "I suppose I believe it now."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
"Mrs. Brask," Nyxara said — gently, the words settling into the small room the way they had settled into Brask's crew quarters, present without being loud. "I'm not going to pretend I know what's in that strongbox, or what it would mean to open it. But I think you've been carrying something for a very long time that was never meant to be carried alone. And I think… some part of you has wanted someone to ask. For longer than today."
Senna was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge entirely — just tired, and old, and finally, after decades, willing to be tired out loud.
"My grandmother used to cry," she said slowly. "When she dusted that room. Not every time. Just sometimes. I asked her once why, and she said—" Senna's voice caught. "She said, 'because somewhere, someone is still paying for a winter that ended a long time ago, and no one ever told them they could stop.' I didn't understand what she meant. I think I do now."
She stood, slowly, and walked toward the locked room — and for the first time since they'd arrived, she didn't look like a woman protecting a secret. She looked like a woman about to put something down.
"Come on, then," she said, fishing a small key from a chain around her neck — worn smooth, Kael noticed, from decades of being touched and never used. "Let's see what we've all been so afraid of."