"Happy birthday," Markus said, taking the seat beside his student for the family breakfast — a rare appearance at this particular table, since most of his interactions with the imperial family happened through reports rather than meals.
The grand celebration was scheduled for the afternoon. The morning belonged to the family, which was a distinction the palace's protocol office had been careful to preserve.
The servants laid out a spread of mana-fruit and pastry that would have qualified as a feast at the academy and registered here as a modest birthday breakfast. He sat through the formalities with the patience the occasion required, his attention periodically checking Rosalind's mana signature out of habit more than necessity — she was stable, settled, the seven months of work holding without strain.
One year remained before her Awakening ceremony and her enrolment at the Valerian Royal Academy. He noted the timing's coincidence without making more of it than it was: she would arrive as a first-year the same semester he began his third. They would, for one year, be at the same institution again, though in very different roles.
"Your Imperial Majesties," he said, with the formal bow the morning's setting warranted. "Thank you for the invitation."
"Indeed it has been an invitation, young Markus," Valerian said, settling back with the specific dry humour he reserved for occasions when he had decided to needle someone he respected. "You've made a ghost of yourself in that annex. I've sent for you more times than I care to admit, and every reply has been some variation of currently engaged in essential work. I begin to suspect the laws of space are better company than I am."
"I wouldn't put it that way, Your Majesty," Markus said. "It's a matter of priority rather than preference. With the resources available here, every hour not spent cultivating or training Rosalind is an hour I won't get back. The border reports aren't encouraging — Tier 3 and 4 beasts are appearing in places that used to see vermin. If I'm going to be useful in my final year at the academy and beyond it, I don't have the margin for a social calendar right now."
Valerian's nod was dry but genuine. "You've always had a gift for dressing your obsessions in the language of duty," he said. "Unfortunately, your assessment of the border situation is also accurate, which makes the obsession harder to argue with."
The conversation was drifting toward the kind of subject that, while real, did not belong at a birthday breakfast.
Rosalind tapped her spoon against her water glass — once, with the specific clarity of someone who intended to be heard.
"It's my birthday," she said, looking at her father with an expression that combined genuine affection and zero tolerance for the direction the conversation had taken. "Enough strategy talk, please."
Valerian raised both hands in surrender, his laugh filling the room with the kind of warmth that the formal setting rarely permitted. "As you command," he said.
The conversation shifted, and the room settled into the easier rhythm of a family who had decided, for one morning, that the empire's problems could wait.
"BIG BROTHER."
The cry arrived before Rosanne did, which gave him approximately half a second of warning before she crossed the Annex's entrance hall at her usual velocity and collided with him in the embrace that had been, by this point, entirely predictable and entirely welcome.
He caught her with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this for ten years.
"Seven months," she said, into his shoulder. "Seven months and you send maybe one message a week."
"I send more than that," he said.
"Barely."
He held on for the appropriate duration and then released her to actually look at her — the specific check his Perception ran automatically on anyone he cared about, confirming what he already suspected from her mana signature: she was close to the Tier 3 threshold, the seven months of Ghost Sense Stage 1 and 2 training and continued mission work having compounded into real measurable growth.
"You're close," he said.
"We all are," she said, gesturing at Mika, Jessica, and Donna, who were following at a more dignified pace, and at the fifth figure beside them who had clearly become a permanent fixture of the group in his absence.
Shiela Cahill looked considerably more settled than she had at the tournament. Less the periphery presence who sat alone watching out windows, more someone who belonged in the configuration she was currently standing in.
"Hello," she said.
"Good to see you again," Markus said, and meant it.
"We finally have a balanced composition," Rosanne said, with the specific enthusiasm she brought to tactical assessments she was proud of. "Shiela's blood affinity gives us a sensory network none of us had access to before — she can read the pulse of every living thing in a space, which means she finds the ambushes before they happen instead of after. We've been clearing the lower portal dungeons for a month and her mapping has kept us three steps ahead every time. She doesn't just fight with us. She manages the whole engagement."
"Hemographic mapping," Shiela said, when he looked at her. "It's a refinement of the technique I showed you for the finals. I extended the range and the resolution."
"Show me the data sometime," he said.
"I have logs from every dungeon run," she said, with the specific quiet satisfaction of someone who had assumed no one outside her own team would be interested and was glad to be wrong.
He had arranged, weeks earlier, for the imperial staff to deliver a private spread to the Annex once the team arrived — tiers of smoked meat and pastry that matched the formal banquet's quality without the formal banquet's atmosphere. The training hall, austere for seven months, had been temporarily reconfigured into something closer to a proper celebration space.
The team settled into it with the specific ease of people who had spent the morning anticipating a stiff diplomatic affair and had discovered they'd been given something better instead.
He had sent a separate, quiet instruction to the security office days earlier: route the families of his team's members to the Annex rather than the main mansion's reception. He had not framed it as a request to the families directly, knowing they would have politely declined out of a sense that they didn't belong at the main event. He had simply made the decision and arranged the logistics.
They're my guests, not the court's entertainment, he had thought, when he made the call. He had seen what it looked like when families like his team's were paraded through a formal noble gathering as social texture for the people who actually mattered to the gathering's hosts. He had decided he wasn't interested in producing that experience for people he respected.
The families began arriving through the Annex's side entrance over the following hour — Mika's parents, composed and quietly proud; Donna's older brother, who had apparently come on her behalf because her parents were managing a border posting; Jessica's father Jay, who greeted Markus with the specific warmth of a man whose daughter had, over the past year, become someone he was visibly delighted by.
"Grandpa!"
Rosanne's trajectory shifted the moment Alistair appeared at the entrance, and the impact he absorbed without moving was, as always, an impressive demonstration of a Level 76 practitioner's structural stability.
He laughed — the dry, gravelled sound that carried more warmth than his usual register suggested — and held her with the specific gentleness reserved for exactly one person in his life.
Over her shoulder, his eyes found Markus.
He gave a single, deliberate nod — the specific acknowledgment of someone confirming, at a glance, that the young man across the room had grown into something the past year and a half had clearly shaped for the better.
Markus returned the nod.
The Annex, for one afternoon, was full — not with the careful performance of an imperial gathering, but with the specific unguarded warmth of people who actually wanted to be in the same room together.
He sat with his team, and Rosalind found her way over within the hour, and the celebration ran the way celebrations were supposed to run: without an agenda, without a schedule, simply present.