Luna held her breath when she heard that negotiating for the crystal was genuinely on the table.

She had hoped the crystal was somewhere in the possible outcomes of this session since Orion always liked to "negotiate" it with her...

But knowing something is possible in the future and hearing Orion actually confirm it now that she had stuff to offer were two different things, and the confirmation landed somewhere deeper than the strategic part of her mind.

Julius didn’t change his expression. Yet something in him went still, the specific stillness of a person who has heard something unexpected and is recalibrating before they show any of it.

"Truly, not joking... But that alone isn’t enough for me." Orion looked at Luna directly. Not the way he’d been looking at her during arguments, scanning for weak points in the position. The way he looked at something he’d already decided was his and was simply determining the terms of collection.

"I want you married to Seiya, the attractive young man son of one of my finest allied families. And subordinate to my management for at least ten years."

And then he showed a smile that had nothing warm in it.

"The white crystal will be yours to carry the rest of your life. I won’t force you to use it beyond what’s absolutely needed... But you’ll follow my instructions and open every door I need opened without protest."

He turned toward the hall. The gesture of someone who wanted what he was saying to reach everyone, not just the persons in front of him.

"If this is what you all want... I won’t back down the way you think I will."

He took out the white crystal for the room to see.

It pulsed in his hand pushing a light that was visible to everyone in the room now, those with mana vision and those without. Not quite a threat, since it had the shape of a barrier. The kind of display that communicated something without having to name it, that asked the room to do the work of understanding what it meant to see this object in this person’s hand in this context.

"I don’t need this to handle anyone who comes at me here," he said. "But if you want me to accept your terms of ditching my defense, I want everything we’re negotiating put in writing and sealed."

His gaze returned to Luna.

"Including the allegiance from the most "meek" yet ambitious young Starweaver in the room."

Luna didn’t react to the insult. She moved forward instead, offering more, not from desperation but to make clear the covetousness he was trying to attribute to her had no footing. That she was dropping everything just because she saw that kind of clarity that comes when you’ve already decided what actually matters and everything else is just noise.

"I’ll give you my crystals budget as well." The voice was flat, without the temperature Orion had been searching for throughout the session. "And I’ll renounce the name... I have no interest in being a Starweaver. No interest in recovering the lineage or carrying what it requires. Give me the crystal, and I will dissolve my side of the faction and the name completely. I leave the road clear for you to lead the entire family without contest."

The hall processed that differently from everything before it.

Several of those present looked at Orion, waiting to see whether the ground they believed was firm beneath his proposal had been firm and not just sand. Was he really going to let go of his barrier?

Everyone held their breath.

Orion shook his head slowly, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious to someone who should already understand it.

"The ’small’ crystals in the bag of a young lady don’t interest me. I’ll have more than enough from the third vault." No hardness in it, just a fact, delivered simply the way you might note the weather.

"But I want you with our name... I want you carrying it high."

His eyes settled on her with a quality that had nothing to do with negotiation. The quality of someone looking at something that belongs to them for reasons that exist entirely outside the opinion of the person in question.

"Destiny chose her, and the family with her. The genetic key she carries doesn’t separate from the lineage that bears it. A lineage isn’t abandoned because a girl decides she’s no longer interested!"

He addressed the people and raised his hand.

"If she wants the crystal, the conditions I offered are the conditions she needs to fulfil."

Luna didn’t respond.

The offer turned over and over in her mind, in the silence, three seconds, four, the weight of it pressing in from every angle at once.

Not any argument. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Not any political maneuver.

At that moment, swirling in his mind for those few tense seconds, was the most difficult thing she had ever had to look at without being able to touch during the entire session.

The one thing that had to do with whom she had the least armor against.

Her mother.

The crystal was right there. In Orion’s hand, pulsing with a light she had been looking for her entire life. It was an object and an important person simultaneously, and it was the last living thread back to the years when the world had been simple and safe and full of a voice that loved with an intensity that was almost unreasonable in how it felt to receive.

Every time Orion used that crystal in combat, in demonstrations, in moments exactly like this one, a little more of that light spent itself and didn’t come back.

She could end that.

She could recover it.

Right now.

With the conditions he had placed on the table.

Ten years. Subordination. Marria...

’Ren!’

She turned and looked at him without meaning to. For a fraction of a second she thought she felt something, a small, strange pulse from his direction, faint enough that she couldn’t be certain she hadn’t imagined it.

When she looked, he was still where he had been. Still at the back of the podium, head down, having said nothing for the entire time they had been in this hall. Present in the technical sense and not quite present in any other.

But looking at him, something resolved itself clearly in the part of her that had been refusing to look at it directly.

’I can’t choose between them.’

’I love them both too much and I can’t...’

Orion read the silence.

He had spent years developing that particular skill, reading the silences of people who couldn’t afford to show what their silence meant, learning to distinguish the silence of rejection from the silence of genuine internal conflict. Luna’s silence was the second kind.

The crystal changed the math in a way nothing else in this session had, and he could see that it did.

He fed his energy into the crystal and let it do what it was born to do.

The white barrier expanded, not aggressively, technically defensive in its shape, but it bloomed bright enough that every person in the hall could see it without trying. The light pulsing at its center was visible from every angle, from every position.

Nobody needed to imagine what they were negotiating over. The source of everything was right there, above his palm, radiating with an intensity that wasn’t natural, that was forced, deliberated to be seen.

"The essence will exhaust faster in my hands. Your decision can’t take too long, or there will be nothing left to negotiate," said Orion, with the surface pleasantness of someone slowly twisting something inside you while smiling about it. "Every moment you take to decide is another moment that..."

Luna’s eyes stayed still.

Her cheeks stayed still.

Her lower lip didn’t.

It gave under her teeth without her having decided to press them, the specific kind of loss of control that happens not in the mind but in the body, below the threshold where conscious management reaches. The blood arrived before she could stop it. A small line at the corner of her mouth, bright against her skin.

Liora saw it.

Larissa saw it.

Arturo saw it and closed his jaw so hard it cracked audibly. His hands, which had been still at his sides, moved fractionally toward a position they hadn’t been in before.

Even Julius, but... No one could do anything about it, not against that barrier.

Several people in the hall who had no particular stake in either faction looked at Orion with a temperature they hadn’t had two minutes ago. Not anger exactly. The specific discomfort of people watching something they hadn’t come here to watch.

Orion opened his mouth to continue.

Someone interrupted him before he could.

"Forget the marriage."

The voice came from the back.

Not loud, but with the specific texture of something coming from a person who is containing themselves, slightly dulled at the edges, without the projection it normally carried... Coming from a person operating on the minimum necessary to function.

Ren had his hand raised.

He wasn’t looking up.

His head was still down, his eyes still toward the floor, his posture still carrying that careful economy of movement that didn’t match the person the hall had expected when the door opened.

But the hand was up...

And in the hand was a scroll.

"Give her the crystal without taking her freedom," said Ren, in the same dulled voice, without lifting his eyes. "In exchange, I’ll give you all my rewards too."