The year settled into the village like it had always belonged there.
Euryale turned fourteen in the quietest way possible: Ma burned the bread, Pa pretended he hadn't forgotten, Silas announced it was technically his birthday too "because I helped you be born emotionally," and Lyra gifted him a shell she swore whispered secrets if you listened hard enough.
(It did not. But Euryale kept it anyway.)
There were no omens.No strange skies.No visitors stepping out of light.
Just days.
Good, ordinary days.
Training became routine.
Not heroic. Not dramatic.
Routine.
Euryale trained early, always alone, before the sun climbed high enough to watch him properly. He no longer tried to do much. Instead, he listened.
To the water curling around his ankles.To the way waves leaned toward him when he was calm—and pulled away when he wasn't.To the difference between asking and expecting.
Some mornings, nothing happened at all.
Those were the hardest.
"You're allowed to rest," Ma told him once, handing him a cup of warm milk after catching him staring at the sea for too long.
"I wasn't training," he said.
He rested then. Truly.
And the water came back on its own later.
Silas grew louder.
This was less a choice and more a law of nature.
He invented games that required shouting. Competitive shouting. Strategic shouting.
"I WIN BECAUSE I YELLED FIRST," he declared after losing a race.
"That's not how—" Euryale began.
Lyra cut in. "It is now."
Lyra, meanwhile, grew sharper.
Quieter.
She asked questions that didn't have easy answers and stared at the sea the way Euryale used to—like it might blink if watched closely enough.
One evening, she asked him, very casually, "Do you ever feel like the water knows when you're lying?"
Euryale nearly dropped his bowl.
"…No," he said carefully. "Why?"
She shrugged. "Just wondering."
That worried him more than if she'd insisted.
Comfort deepened.
Pa laughed more easily. He taught Silas to fish properly, then patiently untangled every knot Silas created in the process.
Ma painted again.
She hadn't done that since before Euryale could remember.
The first painting was terrible. The second wasn't much better. By the third, something softened in her expression while she worked, like a door opening that had been closed too long.
Euryale watched her from the doorway once.
"You don't have to be good at it," he said.
Ma smiled without looking up. "I know. That's why I like it."
That stayed with him.
The village accepted them fully now.
Not as something unusual.
Just… them.
Euryale helped repair boats. He carried crates. He got scolded for tracking sand inside and praised for fixing a broken dock plank without being asked.
No one mentioned Mana Cores anymore.
No one whispered.
He liked that.
Sometimes, at night, he still thought about the Academy. About leaving. About fifteen looming like a tide that would not be ignored forever.
But it no longer felt like a threat.
Just… a question waiting its turn.
One afternoon, the sea was unusually still.
No wind. No waves. Just a flat mirror stretching to the horizon.
Euryale waded in up to his knees, curious.
"Are you alright?" he asked quietly—not commanding, not expecting.
The water cooled around his legs, then warmed again.
A single ripple brushed his hand.
Not approval.
Not warning.
Acknowledgment.
He smiled.
"Okay," he said. "Just checking."
He left without trying to do anything else.
And the sea did not follow him.
That night, they ate together under lantern light.
Silas told a story that made no sense but involved a heroic goose. Lyra corrected him aggressively. Pa pretended to referee. Ma laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
Euryale leaned back in his chair, watching them.