100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 374 - 373- Celestia’s Arrival at Manor

The Millbrook’s manor sat at the north end of the main road, where the cobblestones gave way to a gravel path lined with flowers that had no business blooming this vigorously in early spring.

Celestia noticed the flowers first.

Not because they were extraordinary — they were ordinary enough, a tumbling border of pale yellow and white along either side of the walk — but because of the ’care’ in them. Someone had planted these deliberately, maintained them, watered them when the border soil gave nothing freely.

The same hands that had planted them had probably weeded them too, which meant whoever did the gardening here had time and intent and found the work worth doing.

Her eyes moved up.

The manor itself was— old. That was the honest word for it. The stone of the outer walls had the weathered grey of decades, the kind of color that stone earned slowly through frost cycles and hard summers.

The window frames were original wood, darkened with age.

The roof had been patched in three places with slightly different-colored slate, the repair visible if you knew what to look for — functional, unhidden, the work of someone who needed the rain out and didn’t particularly care whether it looked seamless.

But.

Someone had opened all the windows. The curtains — new, pale linen — moved in the morning breeze, giving the building a quality of breath. The front entry had been swept clean, the steps scrubbed. Climbing roses, recently trained, had been fixed to the left wall of the facade with iron brackets, their tendrils reaching for the second-floor ledge with the optimism of things that had been placed there on purpose.

Not rebuilt. ’Reclaimed.’

"He lives here?" Ren said, from beside her.

Celestia looked at the building for another moment.

"Apparently," she said.

One of her lieutenants — Mard, older, an opinion on everything — pulled his horse up on her left. "Perhaps he lacked the coin for something better? A young man sent to a dying border settlement—"

"He has the coin," Celestia said. The cobblestone streets she’d ridden in on had cost coin. The fountain in the square had cost coin. The glass in those shop windows had cost more than most border-town residents saw in a year. "He chose this."

Mard processed that.

"Perhaps," he said, carefully, "he simply prefers humble surroundings."

Celestia thought of her sister. Selene — Viktor’s mother, born the softest Ktorian in three generations, who had decorated her apartments in gold thread and never once dressed in fewer than four layers regardless of the season, who had married into the Redwood family and spent the next fifteen years quietly appalled by the county’s rustic aesthetic.

Her son had apparently come here and scrubbed the front steps himself.

She made a sound that was not quite a scoff. Short. Through her nose.

"Move up," she said. "Formation, relaxed. We’re guests."

The column moved through the gate.

’’’

They heard it before they saw it.

A murmur — not the fearful quiet of a crowd watching power arrive, but the concentrated breath-holding of people witnessing something that required absolute attention. Low. Collective. The sound of many lungs deciding independently to slow down.

The manor’s front garden opened onto a wide courtyard, and the courtyard held people. Two dozen of them, maybe more, pressed into a loose semicircle at the far end. The morning light hit them from the left, casting long shadows across the gravel, and between those shadows and the center of the crowd’s attention stood a figure.

Dark-haired. Still.

His back was mostly to the gate as Celestia rode through.

His arm was extended, palm down, over a man on the ground. The man on the ground was sitting with one leg stretched before him — one ’leg,’ singular. The other was absent below the knee, the stump an old injury, the scar tissue visible even at this distance, grey-white against sun-browned skin.

Celestia pulled her horse to a stop.

She watched.

The light that came from Viktor’s palm was green. Not glowing-lantern green, not magic-green in the theatrical sense she was used to seeing from court casters with their dramatic demonstrations. This green was the green of sunlight through a forest canopy — diffuse, moving slightly, carrying warmth the way real light did rather than the cold quality of most conjured illumination.

It touched the man’s stump.

Nothing visible happened for three, four seconds.

Then the man looked down.

Then he made a sound.

It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes before words arrive, when the body understands something the mind has not yet found language for — raw and private and the kind of thing that happens in the throat before thought catches up.

Skin was growing.

Celestia had been a knight for sixteen years. She had been to battle, to field hospitals, to the kinds of places where healers worked through the night and still lost people by morning. She knew what restoration magic looked like — the gold of high-church healing, the silver of military battle medics, the brief hot blue of alchemical compounds applied to wounds.

She had never, in sixteen years, seen a severed limb ’grow back.’

The tissue extended from the stump by degrees, not fast — not dramatic, not a single spectacle — but ’relentlessly’. Like watching a plant growing on fast-forward. The new flesh was pale at first, then gained color as blood reached it. The shape defined itself: ankle, then heel, then the arch of a foot, toes emerging one at a time with a specificity that was somehow more extraordinary than any single burst of magic could have been. Because it was ’precise.’ The third toe slightly longer than the second. The callous pattern of a man who had walked barefoot more than shod, preserved in the new growth.

The man began to cry.

He didn’t say anything. He just sat there with both hands pressed over his mouth and both eyes streaming and stared at his new foot.

Viktor lowered his arm.

He straightened.

And he turned around.

’’’

Celestia had not prepared for his face.

She had a memory of Viktor Redwood at nineteen, which was the last time she’d seen him: round-faced, soft, carrying weight that hadn’t settled well on a frame that hadn’t decided what to do with itself. He’d had the expression of a boy who’d gotten used to disappointing people and had made his peace with it through a particular sullen defiance. Dark eyes, heavy. Not meeting hers when they were introduced. She’d thought: ’unlucky boy, that one.’

The man who turned around now.

He had the same dark hair. The same dark eyes. But the weight was gone, replaced by something clean and sharply defined — cheekbones, jaw, the kind of face that happened when the excess was removed and only the structure remained. He stood with the ease of someone entirely aware of their own proportions, which was not vanity, it was the body language of a person who had stopped fighting themselves.

He looked at her.

No recognition performed. No surprise. No widening of the eyes or rearrangement of expression.

He looked at her the way someone looks at a thing they’ve been expecting.

Just — ’there she is.’

A small smile. The real kind, the one that lived at one corner of the mouth before it decided to commit.

Celestia found, involuntarily, that she’d stopped breathing for a beat. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

She exhaled.