Fiouuu, this took a while! I had exams, though.
I'm taking the IGCSE... At least it's writing. And the subjects were fun, yeah.
Is Ravana the Willarv equivalent to a honey bee?

In any case, enjoy! Not much from our mains this chapter... But more plot.

Leez thought that this tournament was pretty awesome. It hadn't even begun yet, but she had gained two friends already- Mirha and the mute Half kid she found in the forest.

She would give him a pen and a notebook once she reached civilization again, if only because writing on the ground seemed like a bother for him. She would also decide on a name for him, because he said his name was a secret, and her name was a secret too, so she could sympathize. She thought hard about an appropriate one. She hadn't met anyone asking her to name them before, and that seemed like a supremely important task.

She wanted to give him a good and fitting name, not just any boring common name anyone could easily come up with.

Well, anyone but Asha, because Asha's sense in naming is...unique.

"But I want to go to school!" said the eight-year-old Kubera Leez. "You're back, now!"

Rao rubbed the back of his head and sighed. "I told you, Kubera," he said, "your name is too special for you to do this now. You'll have to wait eight more years till you can go out."

"But Kaz is teasing me about not going to school!" Kubera complained. "I promise I'll work hard!"

Her voice lowered and she added sulkily, "He says that I will become dumber than everyone else if I don't."

"Well, he's not wrong…"

Kubera turned to the speaker. Twelve-years-old Asha was standing there, clutching a book against her chest. Her hair barely reached her shoulders back then, and she wasn't showing any readable expression.

"Don't say that, Asha… that's really mean."

Asha looked blankly at Rao. "It's the truth, though. But I think you're both kind of dumb. What if she's named Kubera? How does it make going to school impossible?"

Leez remembered Rao looked uneasy at her words, and didn't answer.

"If she wants to go to school and work hard, what are you stopping her for? Aren't you her father?"

Leez had wondered why Asha had taken her defense. Up to this point, she had mainly ignored her new little sister. Well, she also had to learn the local language, so it wasn't that surprising she didn't talk much. After two years, however, her accent was barely discernible. Asha was amazing.

"There. If she can't change her name, we can just use a nickname."

Rao let out a bewildered "Uh?!" as the blue-haired girl lightly tapped the top of Kubera's head with her book.

"From now on, you're Bera Leez and no one will question that one."

She hadn't cried when she realize what that meant. She hadn't. Nope.

She was going to go to school. She was going to go to school. She. Was. Going. To. Go. To. School.

...thanks to the meanie Asha. Maybe she wasn't that bad, she had thought. Maybe she's just shy like dad said.

...Bera was such a weird name though.

Leez truly pitied any nephews and nieces she might be getting, if Asha was the one who would name them.

Speaking of nephews and nieces, she wondered how the situation went after she left the two gender-confusing coffee-lovers with her father, since he shooed her and Mirha to do some scheming of his own. She hung around with Mirha for a while, before Mirha's assistant found them and took Mirha for something priest-y or whatever, leaving her alone to do what she wanted to. Like practicing in the woods.

What was he even thinking of, that father of hers?

Rao Leez observed the two potential love birds, gathering info about them.

Other than their mutual love of coffee, they both had a quiet demeanor and an apparently great intelligence.

The last one he now knew because, after Ran learned Saha was a triple Surya and asked Asha why the rays of bhavati surya look like arcs, Saha tried his best to verbally explain how the light was, in fact, traveling in a straight line, as Asha tried doing the same using mathematical equations. Rao wasn't sure why, but some part of him felt that Saha was used to teaching such things…

After a certain point, the conversation became less of an explanation to Ran, and more of a debate between the two geniuses about the paradox this caused. They became so engrossed in their discussion that they didn't notice Ran retreating toward Asha's father.

"...They could've just said it was magic," Ran muttered, "it literally is magic…"

Rao chuckled. "Both of them are too serious about this," he sighed with amusement.

He patted the baby monkey's head. "Don't worry too much about it, Ran. Rather, you should be proud of yourself: This is the longest conversation I've seen… Saha… hold in a while."

"Hmm?" The younger boy looked surprised at these words. "So you knew Saha from before the tournament?"

Rao uneasily swallowed and shrugged it off with an evasive "Somewhat."

Rao had heard about Saha; from Mirha earlier that day, from fighters who were situated in Aeroplateau and praised their Guild President's skills... although he had only just met the young man today. And he personally thought…

Well.

His instincts told him that Saha was a good person. Oh, he was certainly dangerous; there was a intelligence in both his words and his actions that reminded him of how still waters run deep. He could see the resemblance between him and Mirha, in this point. And like Mirha, he seemed to be using his slyness and gifts for good, not for evil.

Rao also noticed the furtive glances he shot to Asha's direction. The way they were filled with nervousness, and the way he jumped when she approached him…

Rao realized the truth… Of course! How could he not see it before?

Saha had a crush on Asha.

It was so obvious! Why else would such a quiet boy go along with a prank?

...Asha probably took a liking to him as well. There was no way she'd go along with it, either, otherwise…

Rao harrumphed. It was his duty, as a father, to see this love bloom!

...which seemed to be a challenging task, as both of them had yet to tire from their argument.

"Can't you just, I don't know, bout it out it out or something?" Ran suddenly yelled out of the blue, startling Rao.

They did stop arguing. Perfectly synchronized, they whipped their heads towards him. Asha looked at him with a raised eyebrow while Saha just seemed surprised.

Rao, on the other hand, squinted his eyes at him. "Why should they physically fight it out…?" He asked, wondering why the young man suggested such a thing... that could ruin the matchmaking plan.

Slurping what remained of his parfait, Ran said, "Because they're either both right or both wrong seeing that they've been at it for half an hour?"

Silence.

Silence as they considered the words of rare monkey wisdom.

"Well… Why not?" he tried again. "It's not like sparring will do you two any wrong a week before a fighter tournament."

As Teo lost Gandharva and Elwin in the crowd, she thought, not for the first time, that she had an extremely bad luck.

Oh, she knew that she was lucky to be born despite her attributes, but still, wouldn't her train of thought be understandable when, for example, one meets a seemingly insane, extremely strong individual on one's rare vacation trips?

Good thing he hadn't minded her sword piercing his side. Really good thing. Not that he was actually hurt…

She still remembered the odd atmosphere in the water channels, the one that made her and Elwin curious. She remembered her first time meeting with Gandharva.

How when she had asked about how long he had spent there, he had said that he honestly hadn't cared to count anymore after a "while".

Teo had seen the neatly lined up small scratches on the walls that had trapped him in. Teo had to redefine the word "while" when she saw how numerous they were.

If a scratch equaled a day, it seemed to her that he must have spent well over a millennium here… They scratches sprawled over walls upon walls, in messy columns stretching from the high translucent cellar until she couldn't see them anymore, wounding rows and corridors of glacial walls… And she was sure there were more she hadn't seen.

But that wasn't possible.

The Gandharva King had only disappeared in N5.

So, to a being who had lived millions, no, countless millions of years… Would the solitude of seven years feel that long...?

And thus she humored him, because she knew just how strong he actually was, and because she decided that if this Half spent so long in solitude that he started to think he was a Nastika King, then he obviously needed some help.

When she did finally try to talk to the misguided being about getting this help, he laughed and declined. It took some trickery to convince him to see a psychologist, but all that turned up was a knocked-out doctor and a slightly annoyed green-haired man.

She felt true terror run through her as he (privately) executed a partial transformation- something no Half could ever do, except maybe a dragon Half. She had honestly thought it was the eyepatch that rendered his dubious guise possible, something similar to Mr. Kasak's earrings, but now… Now…

She had let a Nastika inside the city. Uh-oh.

She allowed him to remain in the city, with her, not out of kindness... but to keep a watchful eye on him. She couldn't let him go back to the wild so easily; at least while he was with her, he didn't hurt or kill anyone.

He turned out to be good company, though. Not only helping her with cooking and with whatever else he could do, but he was also nice to Elwin whenever they went to visit her. He even took up to teaching her sura speech, although she was still having trouble with speaking as of now.

He was much, much nicer than she would expect of any King, much less a sura one. He wasn't disagreeable to look at, either, and she knew she was slowly growing attached to him.

He was no longer one of the Halfs she sponsored, or even an endearing, if slightly deranged, man to be looked after carefully. She opened her heart to him and, with the little hesitance born of forced solitude, he opened his to her. When he told her the stories she'd thought to be mere legends, each glimpse of his life she caught in his sorrowful eye made her heart ache in sympathy, and she too found herself mourning comrades she had never known. The Gandharva he described from within was a ruthless stranger similar to the feared King she'd heard about, and indeed her new companion admitted he had done terrible things; but the present Gandharva, the nice storyteller of old, the smiling man losing himself in ancient thoughts was another person entirely. Someone she could relate to. Someone who talked to her, smiled to her, made her heart flutter.

At the end of the day, she came to wonder what it was that made her mind and soul a human being's.

Most humans considered it was their capacity to feel empathy, or love, or sorrow, as opposed to the ruthless beasts they saw the sura as, and the mindless creatures they thought animals to be.

That was, by all means, wrong.

The more documented folks talked about biology, social norms, etc. They probably were more in the right, but she didn't see how it set her less apart from inhabitants of other human-inhabited planets on the other side of the galaxy, forever unreachable, than the Sura who spent his evening watching the stars with her and recalling -retelling- adventures he'd had while he visited them.

Thus, without noticing, she stopped regarding him as a being fundamentally different from herself, an aloof King too high for her to reach- and as she came to know his heart's memories, she wondered if he would dare look at the human at his feet.

Her musing were interrupted when she saw a familiar figure. Behind a pillar, the Priest of Death was talking with someone whom she recognized to be his assistant. They seemed engrossed in a serious conversation. She had never spoken with the black haired man, but she was relatively familiar with Claude, so she called out to him.

"Good day, Claude," Teo said as she approached them. "What brings you to the fighters' tournament? Shouldn't you be in Rindhallow?"

It had been two hours since Sagara had begun searching for Clophe, and she was starting to get tired of it. She started to really, really hate human architecture. With a passion.

Mistyshore's fighter guild wasn't even that complex. It was composed of a circular main building that was surrounded by a similarly circular frame of strikingly tall beige pillars, which were about fifteen meters tall. Both the pillars and the building supported a giant dome, which had been entirely painted white so it would deflect the sun rays and subsequent heat the city received during the hot season and create a pool of cool air in the shaded area underneath. The tournament was to be held in a plaza reserved for special events such as competitions and festivals, right in front of the domed construction. Solar panels shaded the whole area as well.

She was pissed.

However, Clophe was still lost, the target's location was unknown, and her goal as far out of her reach as it had always been. She couldn't even indulge herself in property destruction to vent her frustration.

She grit her teeth. Her goal might be deemed impossible by anyone else, but she would reach it. She couldn't afford not to; she couldn't afford never seeing Ananta ever again. It would kill her... The broken pieces of her heart would rot away in her chest until she disappeared into dust.

Her ability to retrieve Ananta depended solely on catching the target. For all intents and purposes, Ananta was the target. They just had to free him back into his body, somehow.

But first of all, she had to calm down.

She breathed deeply. In and out, in and out; 'he' had said she had until the end of the tournament to find the target- after which he could vanish to who-knows-where. Right now, he was in this city, somewhere, of that she could be certain.

Precarious calm recovered, she examined her surroundings, thinking that she needn't be so tense-

-until she spotted Ananta talking with a taller boy whose back was facing her. This way of reacting with small gestures, the expressions of his face, the way he moved, the way he was… losing at rock-papers-scissors against his companion…

Oh, screw being calm!

Without even turning to mention anything to Cloche she went straight for Ananta, jumping from the rooftop she had been standing on. She lost sight of him from her lower point of view, but hopefully, he wouldn't start moving until she reached him, and then they would finally gain some progress in this unending day-

She was there. Where she had last seen him. There was no mistake possible.

...he was gone. Again.

No, no, no. She felt herself start panicking. Why did she keep losing him? Why-

She repressed her wild thoughts and pressed on. He couldn't be that far away, right...? He had no reason to run. He must have continued onto wherever he was headed. She was almost there.

Five hundred years of painfully enduring his absence were finally coming to an end. He couldn't be far, he couldn't be far, she chanted this mantra in her head to reassure herself. There was no crowd to lose him into. He was there, just around the corner.

She was right.

He was standing there, laughing, and while she had been watching from far away when he was alive, she wouldn't just watch now that she had found him again.

She was never going to lose him again.

...which was why, when Cloche caught up to her, she was delightfully hugging "the target" in a death grip, having zero intentions of letting go at all.

I'll give a metaphorical cookie to whoever draws that last scene. Or maybe I'll do a short commission, if you give me a prompt.