True God In Another World (Tensura x Tbate)

Chapter 115 - Unfinished Feelings

Tessia Eralith POV

"Hold still," my mother said, for what had to be the fourth time, as one of the attendants pinned back a lock of hair that kept insisting on falling loose no matter how many times it was tucked away.

I held still. It didn't help.

The dress they'd chosen was deep forest green, embroidered along the hem with a pattern of pale gold leaves that caught the light whenever I moved — beautiful, and also entirely unsuited to a woman who'd spent the better part of the last several years in armor instead of silk. I kept catching myself reaching for a sword that wasn't there.

"You look lovely," my mother said, catching my expression in the mirror. She had a way of saying things so gently they didn't sound like corrections, even when they were. "You also look like you're bracing for an ambush."

"Old habits."

"Good ones, usually. Just not tonight." She smoothed a hand over my shoulder, and for a moment the queen fell away and it was only my mother standing behind me, looking at the two of us in the glass. "Your grandfather wouldn't tell me what this evening is really about either, you know. Only that it mattered enough to gather everyone under one roof."

"That's reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be." She smiled anyway.

By the time I made it out into the hall, Kathyln, Curtis, and Feyrith were already waiting, dressed for the occasion in a way that made all three of them look faintly uncomfortable in their own skin — Curtis tugging at a high collar like it had personally wronged him, Feyrith resplendent in blue formal robes that suited an elf far better than they suited him, and Kathyln standing perfectly composed in white, the only one of us who looked like she did this sort of thing for breakfast.

"You look like you're going to a funeral," Curtis told me, by way of greeting.

"You look like that collar is trying to end yours."

"It's fashion. It's supposed to be suffering."

"Theodore's already downstairs sulking about the string quartet," Feyrith said. "Something about how a proper battlefield doesn't need violins."

"Theodore thinks everything should be settled with a battlefield."

"To be fair," Kathyln said, "he's not wrong very often."

We made our way down through the castle together, the four of us falling into the easy, worn-in rhythm of years spent shoulder to shoulder — first at the Academy, now on rosters and reports instead of homework, but the banter hadn't changed even if everything underneath it had. By the time we reached the base of the tower where the gathering was being held, the corridor was already thick with nobles from all three races, dressed in their finest, none of them quite managing to hide how tense they all were underneath the small talk.

Nobody had been told what tonight was for. That alone was enough to put a room full of powerful people on edge.

The venue itself, when we finally stepped out onto the open floor at the top, still managed to steal the breath out of me even though I'd seen the space a hundred times before. The high hall had been given over entirely to the gathering — its living canopy of interwoven branches lit from below by hundreds of drifting lightstones, the barrier overhead keeping out the cold while letting the actual sky show through, stars just beginning to prick through deepening blue. An orchestra played somewhere near the far end, string and woodwind threading in and out of the low hum of conversation.

"There they are," Curtis muttered, nodding toward a knot of people near one of the refreshment tables. "Brace yourselves."

Ellie spotted us before we'd made it three steps, breaking away from a cluster of her own friends with an enthusiasm that made several nearby nobles startle at the sudden movement. She barreled into me with a hug so sudden that I had to plant my feet just to stay upright.