Threefold Bond

Aldo came back from the pinhole at the Twisted Grove with his soul left on the other side of it, and putting the two back together was more than one mortal body could carry. The load can be shared, but only by people with a genuine bond between them, and the amount that has to be given is fixed. It cannot be metered out, thinned across more shoulders, or taken back afterward. So Nancáro poured a piece of himself into all three of them at once.

Mikhail agreed before the sentence was finished and Koa agreed after him, and then both of them refused to let it go any further until Aldo had been asked himself, Vëné backing them. Nancáro drew his soul close enough to speak with and he said yes, mouth and soul moving out of time with one another, the word coming in Galden and Peren together. The two gods then argued over whose essence should pay for it, and Aldo settled that as well, getting an arm moving and reaching it toward Nancáro.

The term was Nancáro’s and the correction was his sister’s. He said forever; she told them plainly that he did not mean for as long as they live, but for as long as they exist. The grass around the three of them greened as it took hold.

What they report is a deeper connection to one another than any of them had before, and a general sense of being more than they were. Vëné’s account of what it will cost them is that they will feel one another’s deaths more deeply than perhaps any mortal has, and that they will not be carried along by them, since that journey belongs to each person alone. Nancáro heard her say it and did not agree, and the only reason anyone knows he did not is the sliver of him Mikhail was carrying while he listened. Pressed on it, he turned something cold and briefly painful on Mikhail and closed the subject.

The sliver has already been worth something. When the Grove’s planes came apart around them, what they carry of him shielded all three from the worst of it. Hinta, standing in the same ruin with nothing of the kind, was not shielded at all.