Chapter 28: The Tower's Judgment
The path to the Crimson Watchtower was a blur of agony and stumbling steps. My left side was a constellation of sharp, bright pains—the deep throb of my shoulder, the fiery ache in my ribs, the pulse of damage in my face that seemed to sync with my heartbeat. The world began to tilt and narrow. My right eye was still clear, swimming with tears of pain, but my left eye began to feel tight, hot, the vision blurring as the skin around it swelled.
By the time the tower’s jagged silhouette cut into the sky, I could only see out of one eye. The left was a slit of pressure, a swollen mass of flesh that sealed itself shut with every throb. I tripped on a root, a jolt of nausea rolling through me.
Xenon’s arm tightened around my waist, holding me upright. “Stop,” he murmured. He turned me gently to face him, his expression unreadable in the fading light. His gaze tracked over the ruin of my face.
He tentatively placed a hand on my cheek. His touch was startlingly gentle, his thumb carefully avoiding the worst of the bruising to cradle the swollen arch of my cheekbone. He began to stroke my skin softly, a slow, deliberate motion.
A warmth seeped into me. It wasn’t the harsh, invasive heat of my own heavenly fire. This was a deep, resonant flow, like sunlight penetrating cold earth. It coiled under my skin, a soothing current that lapped at the edges of the pain. The unbearable pressure in my left eye lessened, just a fraction. The swelling seemed to recede, not gone, but pulled back from the brink. The sharp, splintering agony in my nose and cheeks melted into a duller, more manageable ache.
He had once told me, during a that time he was healing me after that tense session with Ren, that true cellular healing was impossible for Protectors. ‘We can set bones, stem bleeding, but we cannot command flesh to regenerate. That is a myth,’ he’d said, his tone allowing no argument. But in this moment, with this impossible comfort flowing from his palm, I thought for a second—a wild, distrustful second—that he had lied.
He pulled his hand away, the warmth lingering like a phantom imprint. His violet eyes held mine for a heartbeat too long before his hands curled protectively around my shaking form once more, guiding me the final distance.
The Crimson Watchtower loomed, a monolith of black stone weeping crimson light from its high windows. And there, framed in the arched entryway, was Ren.
He stood perfectly still, a statue carved from tension. The eerie light painted one side of his face in bloody hues. His obsidian eyes found me immediately, scanning my blood-smeared hoodie, the makeshift sling, the battered landscape of my face. A flash of something primal and dark moved through his gaze, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it. Then his eyes dropped to Xenon’s arm, secured firmly around my waist, holding me up. That stillness in him sharpened, became dangerous.
He descended the short stone steps in two strides, closing the distance. “What happened?”
His voice was low, a controlled vibration that promised violence. I opened my mouth, my split lip protesting. “They—”
“Garreth and Leo decided to gang up on her,” Xenon cut in, his tone flat and authoritative. He didn’t remove his arm. “A short way back on the path. One pinned her arms from behind. The other brutalized her. Face. Body. It was a coordinated beating, not a duel.”
Ren’s attention snapped back to me, his eyes tracing the evidence on my skin.
Xenon continued, a note of what might have been respect coloring his clinical report. “She fought back. Managed to headbutt the one holding her and kick the other off her. Dislocated her own shoulder in the process of breaking the hold. That’s when I arrived.”
He had meticulously left out the cause. Not a word about their taunts, about Nanami, about the filthy gossip that had been the true catalyst. The omission felt intentional, a gap in the story that hummed between the three of us.
Boots scuffed on stone from the tower entrance. Aria emerged, her light brown hair flying loose from its braid. She’d been pacing. Her violet eyes took me in, and her kind face hardened into a mask of pure, cold fury. “Those cowardly pieces of shit,” she hissed, coming to my other side, her hands fluttering as if wanting to touch but afraid to cause more pain. “Where are they? I’ll string their intestines on the battlements.”
Alex and Hannah crowded out behind her. Alex’s usual joking demeanor was gone, her face pale under her beanie. “Holy hell, Arisa.” Hannah’s hands flew to her mouth, her caramel-colored eyes wide with horror.
Xenon ignored them, his focus on Ren. “Send her home. The patrol is compromised. She should heal in a couple of days. I did the best I could out here.” He finally released me, transferring my weight carefully toward Ren’s space. “She looks a lot better than she did.”
It was true. The magical—or whatever it was—easing of the swelling had taken me from monstrous back to merely badly beaten. But the statement hung in the air, another unexplained thing.
Ren’s eyes narrowed, a subtle movement, but I saw the calculation in them. He was mapping the inconsistencies. He said nothing to Xenon. He simply stepped forward and slid his own arm around me, his grip impersonal, solid, an efficient support beam. His leather jacket was cool against my side.
I stayed quiet, the weight of everything—the pain, the unsaid words, the look in Ren’s eyes—pressing down on my tongue.
“Aria. Alex. Hannah,” Ren said, his voice cracking through the tension like a whip. “You will finish the patrol route with Commander Xenon’s squad. Xenon, you have field command.”
Aria’s protest was immediate. “Ren, she needs—”
“What she needs is a medic and rest, not an audience,” Ren interrupted, his tone leaving no room. “The perimeter still needs watching. Go.”
Aria met my one good eye, her own filled with a frustrated, protective fire. She gave a sharp, reluctant nod. Alex muttered, “Kick some more ass for us, okay? But, like, from a bed.” Hannah just looked worried.
Ren didn’t wait for further farewells. He guided me, half-carrying me, away from the tower and toward a small, flat clearing used for supply drops. He pulled a compact comm unit from his belt, his movements brusque.
“This is Squad Lead Kurogane. Code Amber. One severe injury, non-combat related. Require immediate extraction at my coordinates for transport to Academy infirmary.”
A crackle of static, then a dispatcher’s confirming voice. Ren clipped the unit back, his jaw a hard line.
The silence that fell between us was dense, charged with everything unsaid. I could feel the coiled energy in the arm supporting me, a live wire of contained fury. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, shame now mixing with the pain. I had caused this. This disruption, this use of resources.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, the words garbled by my swollen jaw.
He didn’t look at me. “For what?”
“The shuttle. They’re only for…”
“Emergencies,” he finished, his gaze fixed on the darkening horizon where a small, sleek shuttle was now descending, its engines a whisper against the wind. It was a rare sight, a reserved vehicle for critical personnel movement. I felt a fresh wave of guilt at the expense, the attention.
The shuttle touched down, its hatch sighing open. Ren helped me inside the sterile, grey interior and strapped me into a seat with a clinical efficiency that felt like a rejection. He took the seat opposite, buckling himself in as the craft lifted off with a lurch.
The hum of the engines filled the cabin. He was tense and silent, his profile etched against the window showing the rapidly-shrinking watchtower. He stared out, seeing nothing, everything in him pulled tight.
I finally broke, the words tumbling out in a pained, messy heap. “They were talking about you. About Nanami. They called you… they said awful things. I couldn’t just stand there.”
He turned his head slowly. His dark eyes found mine in the dim cabin light. The anger was still there, but it had banked, transformed into something more complex, more weary. He studied my battered face, the sling, my one good eye pleading for some kind of understanding.
A long moment passed, filled only by the drone of flight.
Then, quietly, he said, “I’d say severe injuries are an emergency.”
He looked back out the window, leaving me to the roar of the engines and the echo of his words, which felt less like an absolution and more like a sentence.
The shuttle bay was a cavern of echoing metallic sounds and antiseptic light. Ren’s grip on my arm was firm, impersonal, as he guided me past silent, staring ground crews toward the infirmary's glaring white corridor. His silence was a wall I lacked the strength to climb.
A medic with tired eyes and efficient hands poked at my face, manipulated my shoulder, and scanned my ribs with a handheld device that hummed. “Commander Xenon’s field dressing was exemplary,” he remarked, almost to himself. “Reduced the inflammation significantly. Dislocation is reduced, ligaments strained but intact. The fractures are hairline. Two days of rest. You’ll be cleared for duty.”
He handed me a small bottle of pale green liquid. “For the pain. Angelic blood does the heavy lifting, but it still hurts like hell while it works.”
Two days. I stared at the bottle, the timeframe feeling both impossibly short and like a prison sentence. The sheer, freakish speed of our healing still unsettled me. Human bones took months. Ours knitted in days. It was a fact I knew, but facing it in my own flesh felt alien.
Ren escorted me back to the empty squad barracks, a hollow shell without the others' noise. “Stay down. Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, his voice low at the threshold. He hesitated, as if words were gathering behind his teeth, but then he just left. The door clicked shut with a sound of finality.
The crew returned near dawn, their exhaustion a palpable cloud. Aria fussed, Alex made a weak joke about my face matching my hair, Hannah brought broth. Their concern was a warm blanket, but I saw the shadow in Aria’s violet eyes, a shared, unspoken understanding of the violence simmering under the Academy’s surface. They slept like the dead, and were gone again for the next patrol before first light.
The following day stretched before me, vast and empty. The silence in the common room was a physical weight. I removed the sling. My arm was sore, a deep muscular complaint, but functional. The bruises on my face had faded to yellows and greens, a rapid, sickening bloom of time-lapsed decay.
Boredom became a sharper agony than the injuries. I paced. I stared at the wall. The need to do something, to understand the chaotic thing inside me, itched under my skin.
I dug out my sketchbook from the bottom of my pack. The cheap, grainy paper felt familiar, a tether to a self I was losing. I sat on the worn couch, the leather cool against my legs, and stared at the first blank page. The pencil felt alien in my hand.
“Come on, future,” I whispered to the empty room. My voice sounded too loud. “Appear on the page.”
Nothing. No pull, no trance, no whispering compulsion. Just my own conscious will, and a blank sheet. I felt ridiculous. The drawings that had haunted me for years—the tower, the fires, the woman with the strange laughter—they came unbidden, a psychic seizure. Trying to summon one felt like trying to sneeze on command.
I sighed, a long, frustrated sound, and let my head fall back against the couch. The ache in my jaw pulsed softly. My good eye drifted shut.
I didn’t mean to sleep. The slide into it was seamless, a dropping away of the quiet barracks into a deeper, colder silence.
Then, the snow.
It was a sudden, total immersion. I felt the cold sear my lungs, a dry, cutting agony. It piled in deep drifts around my knees, a stark, blinding white under a bruised purple sky. This was the Second Winter. The air was so still it vibrated.
That laugh again. A woman’s laugh, rich and familiar, dancing on the frozen air. I turned, the movement sluggish in the dream-thick atmosphere.
She stood ten paces away, a vivid rip in the monochrome world. Her hair was the color of a deep bruise, a dark, vibrant purple, swept up in an elegant twist. She wore a kimono of shimmering grey silk patterned with silver cranes in flight. Her beauty was severe, cutting. And she was staring directly at me.
Her gaze held an intensity that pinned me in place. It wasn't hostile. It was analytical, profound, as if she were reading the fine print of my soul. I tried to speak, to ask who she was, why I kept seeing her. My mouth refused to open. My body was frozen, a statue in the snow.
I fought the paralysis, pouring all my will into memorizing her. The sharp angle of her cheekbones, the slight upturn of her eyes, the full, unsmiling mouth. She was older, timeless, power radiating from her stillness.
My eyes, against my will, were dragged downward.
At my feet, half-buried in a crimson-spattered drift, was Ren.
His face was contorted in silent agony, his lips tinged blue. A deep, gut-wound wept life into the snow, a shocking red flower against the white. His dark eyes found mine, wide with a confusion that carved into my chest.
The dream-logic shattered. This was real. He was dying right now.
I forgot it was a vision. With a raw cry that made no sound, I crumpled into the snow beside him. My hands, clumsy and desperate, pressed against the fatal wound. The warmth of his blood coated my fingers, instantly stolen by the vicious cold. I could feel his heartbeat stuttering under my palms, a frantic, dying bird.
“No, no, no,” I chanted, the words misting in the air. I pressed harder, as if I could physically hold his life inside. The light in his eyes, that fierce, stubborn intelligence, was guttering. Fading.
It went out.
The dark swallowed his gaze, leaving only empty, frozen glass.
A desolation opened inside me, a void so total it felt like my own soul had been excised. The weeping was internal, a silent convulsion of the spirit. I threw myself backward, out of the snow, out of the cold, out of the unbearable sight of him—
I jerked upright on the common room couch, a gasping, ragged sound tearing from my throat. I was drenched in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the barracks’ temperature. Sobs wracked my body, violent and uncontrollable. Tears streamed down my face, hot and fast, dripping from my chin onto my leggings.
I clutched my chest, trying to quell the phantom agony. My breathing hitched. I blinked, wiping my eyes frantically, trying to clear the horrific image.
That’s when I saw the papers.
They were everywhere.
Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Sheets of sketching paper littered the floor, the coffee table, the other chairs, drifted against the far wall. Each one bore the same image, drawn in swift, desperate strokes of my graphite pencil.
The woman. The beautiful woman with the dark purple hair and the severe, knowing eyes. Her face stared up from every angle, a silent, multiplied jury.
My hands were smudged black. My sketchbook lay splayed on the floor by my feet, its spine cracked. I leaned over, trembling, and picked it up.
Every single page had been used. Filled with her. Her face from different angles, her kimono, the silver cranes. Page after page after page, a frenzied, unconscious replication.
Except the very last page.
There, in careful, detailed strokes, was a different scene. A figure crouched in deep snow, their orange-red hair whipping in a fierce wind. Their head was bowed in grief. Cradled in their lap, stained by a dark, spreading red, was Ren’s lifeless body.
I was drawing myself. Crying over him in the snow.
A single, fat teardrop fell from my cheek and landed on the page, blurring the graphite of my own drawn, weeping face.