Ryo peers from between the rose bushes in the garden. A lady in a poofy green dress and hair vivid like fire has just stepped out of the carriage parked by the fountain. 

Could that be Edward’s stepmother…?

He’s never seen her before at the estate and the last time he’d been here, Edward had never spoken much of her. 

The other boy is in piano class and the notes fly out of the window, surrounding Ryo together with the summer breeze.

Ryo walks closer with silent steps, watching the woman give instructions to the carriage driver.

“—next week, same time. I cannot afford to miss a visit with the street children. You never when they’ll be…” she trails off.

“Of course, Lady Blackwood,” the driver responds with a respectful dip of his head.

“And do make sure the children at the orphanage get their gifts,” Lady Blackwood adds. She smiles, folding a handkerchief neatly into her bag. “I’m sure the matrons mean well, but it is of utmost importance to me that you confirm with your own eyes that the children are getting their just desserts. You do have my seal, and that should speak volumes.”

“Indeed it does, Lady Blackwood. I assure you I will confirm things with my own eyes so that your charitable efforts are not in vain.” With that, the carriage driver snaps the reins and steers the white horses away from Blackwood Manor.

Ryo, now near the fountain, quickly crouches behind the rim. Lady Blackwood is making her way up the stairs and into the manor. It would seem that Edward’s stepmother is often away from the property.

How kind of her to help the poor children, he muses. Edward is lucky to have such a nice mom.

Not that his own mom isn’t nice, but well…his family has a unique dynamic.

From the open windows above, the sound of the piano stops. Noting that Lady Blackwood is nowhere to be seen, Ryo carefully stands and brushes the dirt off his clothes. 

No sooner does he finish than Edward’s bright voice screams, “Ryo! Ryo! I’m done for today!”

He looks up to see Edward taking the stairs down two steps at a time. He sighs and braces himself for more of the boy’s antics, reluctantly making his own way over.

“So, so, so! What did you do today?” Edward exclaims, dragging him towards the garden.

“Not much.” He’d been rummaging in the library earlier to see if he could find a map to Astrum Academy, but Edward doesn’t need to know that. And definitely not his very-probably-real-could-be-Lucifer-a-Fallen imaginary friend who apparently tells Edward how to use Aeon without telling him about anything else. “Just looking at the flowers here.”

They pass the gardener, who smiles briefly at them before returning to trim the bushes.

“Listen, Edward, I think we need to talk about the other night.”

Edward hums. “You mean when I showed you my powers. I knew it, you’re going to think I’m weird—”

“You were already weird.”

“Thanks.” Edward stops walking. “Wait a minute!”

Ryo whistles, looking the other way.

“What do you mean I’m already weird?” Edward huffs. “You’re the weird one in my opinion. You keep running away from me.”

“Hey, I didn’t run away from you! You were shoving worms in my face!” Ryo facepalms. “Wait, that’s not the point.”

“Then what?”

“I think you should tell your father that you can use Aeon.”

Edward’s eyes widen. “No. Absolutely not.”

Ryo frowns. “It’s dangerous. There’s…” He trails off. He’s not allowed to talk about this with Edward, so he can’t tell him about the Fallen going after the Artifacts. Or what an Artifact is. Or the fact that his “imaginary friend” might actually not be a friend. And yet Edward knows of Esse, even if not in detail about what it is and how it works…

“There’s what? How is it dangerous? I’ve never hurt anybody.”

Ryo sighs. He’s not eager to break one of his father’s rules and face his wrath back home. “Just…I don’t know. I just think that your father should know.”

“You’re not going to tell him, are you?” Edward asks suddenly, his face eerily blank and devoid of emotion. The silence had always been unbearable, but the way Edward is eyeing him up makes Ryo feel like small prey in the face of a predator.

But that’s ridiculous. Edward wouldn’t hurt me.

“Are you going to tell him?” Edward asks again.

Ryo swallows, reminded of the wrongness he felt on the ship when Lucifer looked straight at him. The pit of despair in his chest opens up like a gaping lion’s maw. So before it gets any worse, he blurts the first thing to come to his mind. “I-I think your mother— your stepmom is home.”

Edward’s eyes widen in surprise and the ominous feeling instantly disappears. “O-Oh, she is?”

Ryo’s own eyes narrow at the millisecond break in Edward’s composure. “Yeah, didn’t you see her on your way down?”

Edward scratches his head. “I must have missed her… She’s almost never home.” 

“It sounded like she came back from an orphanage.”

Edward smiles, puffing his chest out again. “Father says it’s good to give to the poor.” From the sparkle in the brunette’s eyes, it would seem that Edward adores his father quite a bit. “And Adelle takes care of that while Father works.”

First name basis, Ryo notes.

“Thanks for the bow, by the way,” Edward says suddenly. “I have no clue how to use it though.”

“You’re welcome. It was actually my sister’s idea though. She’s great at archery and said you should practice if you don’t want to lose to her,” he softens, a nervous chuckle slipping from his lips. Edward doesn’t need to know that Satori wants to ‘kick his ass’.

“Oh, maybe you should bring her next time,” Edward starts, eyes lighting up with fire at the thought of a match. “So I can beat her.”

Yeah, I think they’ll get along, Ryo deadpans. “I’ll try to talk Dad into it, but she’s actually really good. I don’t think you’ll beat her.” 

Edward turns to the air beside him. “You know lots of things, right?” he asks his imaginary friend. “Will I beat her?” A pause. Edward rolls his eyes. “I know you’re not a fortune teller! Ugh, whatever.”

“…Um,” Ryo hesitantly croaks. “Is your friend always with you?”

“No, sometimes they disappear for a bit. I mean, they have to sleep too, right? But that’s besides the point,” Edward huffs. 

The brunette raises his hand towards the direction of the manor and uses Aeon, if Ryo had to guess. Because the next moment, the bow Satori helped him pick out for Edward materializes in front of them. 

“D-Did you just create a copy?”

“No you dummy, I just told the bow to come here and it did.”

Ryo blinks. The vague desire to scream in frustration wells up in him. From what he knows of the Esse Arts and the people in his life who use them, it’s nowhere near that simple.

“You’re going to teach me how to use this,” Edward says, shoving the bow in Ryo’s face. “And then I’ll beat Satori for sure.”

“No way!” Ryo crosses his arm, a smirk upon his lips. “My sister’s still going to beat you.” 

Oh Kami-sama, I should’ve paid more attention in class.

“Race you there!” Edward cries, sprinting like a madman to the forest. 

“Wait, you cheated!” Ryo yells, running to try and catch up.

It’s unnerving how casually, quickly, and silently the bow materialized. Even when Hao used his Esse Art on the ship, it took great concentration and some time before the waters molded into a tiny floating goldfish. Ryo had seen the way the man had to coax the water up and how it wobbled when it was floating above his hand. As he and Edward arrive in the Blackwood estate’s woods, he can’t help but feel the tiniest bit of fear.

“So how do I hold it?” Edward grips the bow with one hand, the other trying to pull the string back.

“Posture straight, use your dominant hand to draw the string.” Ryo moves to correct the brunette. The words spill out, though he does not know how he knows. He’d never paid much attention in class, but perhaps hearing Satori’s mistakes get corrected so many times left an impression. “Also, we don’t have any arrows.”

Edward winks. The next moment, an arrow appears in his hand, drawn at exactly the right angle and place to shoot. “Luckily I remember what the squiggles for an arrow look like. I was studying it during maths when the governess was blabbing about question eight.”

This time, Ryo sees Edward’s eyes flash gold for a brief moment when the boy uses the lost power. The fear is back. Esse manipulates what is already there, but it never seeks to create anything from scratch. Aeon, however, seems limitless.

What if somebody like Ryo’s father had access to Aeon? What hell would Satori face then? What could he do if—

WHOOSH!

Edward’s arrow lands in the ground. The brunette frowns, looking equally disappointed at the sad little arrow standing firmly in the dirt.

“Edward, how long have you known your…friend?” Ryo blurts.

“I’ve known them for as long as I can remember,” Edward tells him. “But at first I thought they were just a part of my own thoughts.”

“So you’ve been able to use Aeon since you were a baby?” Ryo asks, peeling a piece of bark off from a tree trunk nearby. He inspects the groves, noting where hints of moss remain.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve managed to keep it a secret for that long?”

“Yep!”

Ryo glances at Edward from the corner of his eyes. “So your mother doesn’t know either. Or any of the servants? Not even William?”

“Nope-ity nope.”

“What else can you do?”

Edward grins. Bow arm lowered, he comes over to where Ryo stands and touches the tree trunk. A beat of silence and a gold flares in Edward’s eyes for a second.

And then the wood from where Edward’s touched twists and turns out of the trunk, separating from it entirely before settling into the form of a wooden sword. Before Ryo’s disbelieving eyes, the brown seeps into a silver, becoming a small iron sword.

“Ta-da!” Edward beams, holding it proudly.

“Kuso,” Ryo curses in his native tongue, staring at the area of the tree trunk Edward had touched. A dent remains, the wood grain stretched unnaturally like wet clay.

“I’m not done,” Edward says and snickers. Before Ryo’s eyes, the small iron sword is now a long gold sword. The boy nearly drops it but simply mutters, “Whoops, forgot to lighten it.” The next instant it looks like Edward no longer strains to lift its weight. The boy babbles on and on about what else he could do, that his imaginary friend taught him how to do all of this. “I can change the weather right now too—”

“Okay, that’s enough!” Ryo shouts, breathing heavily. 

He won’t be learning how to use Esse himself until he starts Astrum Academy, so he won’t know what’s normal for Esse till then, but he’s quite convinced that Edward’s use of Aeon truly is that: Aeon. It’s too free to be the same thing as Esse and it is far, far, far too dangerous a power in the wrong hands.

Aeon really must be the power of the divine.

Edward is unusual at best and downright sadistic, maybe even a bit of a sociopath, at worst. Aeon combined with his personality traits spell only misfortune. But at least his friend leans more towards unaware: unaware of his own concerning tendencies as much as he is unaware of the power he holds.

Edward, looking miffed at being ignored for so long, purses his lips and turns the golden longsword into a pile of snow in his hand. He blows it into Ryo’s face.

“Hey!” Ryo shouts, wiping it off. “I said stop…” 

Trailing off, he realizes something: Edward says he can see squiggles. That must mean symbols. Like the rounded hiragana characters of the Japanese language, could the squiggles— could Aeon —be a language?

“You said you see squiggles, Edward,” he starts. At the other boy’s nod, he continues, “Can you tell me what they look like?”

Edward taps a finger on his chin. “I suppose they’re kind of like letters. Not English letters, though. Fancier?”

“And how many different squiggles are there?”

“Four,” Edward says. The boy’s expression suddenly freezes, panic alight in his eyes for a brief second. “I mean three. Three different squiggles.”

“You said there’s four different squiggles?” Ryo asks, watching as Edward picks up the fallen arrow in the dirt.

“Three.”

“…No, I heard you say four at first.”

“It’s three.”

Ryo frowns. There’s definitely four.

Edward’s bottom lip trembles so lightly that Ryo would have missed it if he wasn’t looking for a reaction.

“What did your friend say?” Ryo asks.

Edward’s eyes dart to the space beside him before returning his gaze on Ryo. “They’re sleeping,” he replies, answer unusually clipped.

“Who’s sleeping?” a woman’s voice comes from the path into the forest.

They look back to see Adelle, Lady Blackwood approaching from afar, wearing a less formal but no less vibrant green dress.

“Your father sent me to find you, Edward,” she calls, her voice softened by the wind. “It’s almost time for your next class.”

“Okay,” Edward shouts towards her. 

In the moment it takes Ryo to blink, the bow and arrow in Edward’s hands has disappeared into thin air, as if they were never there to begin with. He turns to look at the tree trunk, the warped grain of the wood smoothed over as if the last few minutes were just a dream. Ryo’s fists clench at his sides.

The trek back to the main yard is silent. Edward makes no conversation, something that Ryo has never seen happen before.

“What were you two talking about?” Adelle asks, breaking the silence. “Who else was there?”

“Ryo was there. Ryo, me, and the trees!” Ryo sees the way Edward’s smile strains, the way the boy’s body stiffens even as he holds his stepmother’s hand and without faltering in his voice. It’s the same tension Satori has when she is bracing herself for a beating or scolding from their father.

But Adelle does not hold the same aura of violence Ryo’s father does. From her, Ryo feels there is something that doesn’t quite align, but nothing like the feeling of a dam about to burst that his own father has. Perhaps Edward feels it too, and maybe that is what causes the distance between stepmother and child.

After today, Ryo’s convinced of at least one thing: Edward can probably figure out what the missing ingredient to make the Blood of Asphodel is.

Edward is the key his father desperately needs but does not know about.