Gilded Ashes-Chapter 307: Pay Me Later

Raizen blinked.

Blinked again.

The girl standing in the doorway was unmistakably Enya. Same face. Same bright eyes. Same energy - even while carrying a box that looked like it weighed half as much as she did, there was something fundamentally alive about the way she moved. She crossed the threshold sideways, angling the box through the frame, and set it on the counter with a loud thud that rattled the tools beside it.

She looked up. Saw Raizen. Grinned. In that order.

"Oh! Hi!"

Raizen stared at her. His mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again.

Enya. Here. In a flower shop. At eight in the morning. After breaking into his room in the middle of the night, force-feeding him bitter fruit and dragging him out a window.

He sighed. Long, slow, from somewhere deep in his chest.

He just couldn’t get rid of her.

It wasn’t even frustration anymore. It had passed through frustration, out the other side, and now felt closer to something like resigned acceptance. Like discovering that rain was wet, or that gravity pulled downward. Enya was simply going to be wherever he went. This was a law of nature now.

He decided to act normal.

"Enya" he said. Smiled. It was mostly genuine. "I’m... surprised to see you here."

"Oh!" She straightened up, one hand still on the box. "This is my gramps! From my father’s side." She jerked her thumb toward the vendor, who was watching the exchange with the quiet amusement of someone who’d seen this kind of reaction before.

"I see you have already met each other" his facial expression remained the same.

Then Enya turned fully toward her grandfather, and her whole posture changed - shoulders back, chin up, the unmistakable energy of a granddaughter about to show off.

"Gramps, he’s the guy I went on the Nyx hunt with! He saved me that time!"

The vendor’s eyes shifted to Raizen. Something moved behind them - something really small but meaningful, the careful reevaluation of a man who’d been treating Raizen as a customer and was now looking at him as something else.

His expression softened. Just slightly. The smile stayed, but it deepened - less professional, more personal. He inclined his head. A small bow.

"Thank you for taking care of my granddaughter."

The words were simple. The feeling behind them wasn’t.

Raizen waved a hand. "It’s nothing. Really."

He couldn’t say that Kenzo was actually the one that saved Enya, and that he was hopeless.

The vendor held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then he nodded, satisfied, and stepped aside.

Enya had already turned back to the box. She nudged it on the counter so it would face her, and began opening the drawers - small, sliding trays arranged in thin rows, each one lined with soft fabric. She reached into the top drawer and pulled out two shapes that Raizen recognized immediately.

The black lotuses. His black lotuses.

They sat in Enya’s palms like they’d been waiting for him. Just as beautiful as he remembered - the dark petals layered in precise, impossible symmetry. But now, each one was coated in a thin shell of transparent resin. Glassy. Smooth. It caught the shop’s warm light and reflected it, giving the flowers a faint luminescence that hadn’t been there before.

Enya held them out with a wide smile. Raizen took the smaller one first.

He lifted it toward the ceiling. The round window above let in a line of pale morning light - diffused by clouds, softened by rain, but bright enough to illuminate the lotus from behind. The resin turned translucent. And through it, Raizen could see the flower’s center - a small, concentrated point of gold. Not yellow. Not amber either. Gold. The kind of gold that looked like it was generating its own light rather than reflecting something else’s.

And at the edges of the outermost petals, so faint he might have imagined it - the slightest shade of dark purple. Something between black and violet.

He lowered the lotus. Looked at it in his hand. The resin was cool against his palm.

Then he reached for the second one. Enya passed it over, and he held them both - one in each hand. Different sizes. Same impossible beauty.

He reached into his pocket with one hand, balancing both lotuses in the other, and pulled out a small fold of bills. Ukaian currency - thin, textured paper with patterns pressed into it. Strange stuff, he thought.

In Neoshima, everything was either virtual, paid through your Slate, or handled with simple coins. Paper money felt like holding a piece of a book, and Raizen didn’t like that feeling at all.

He held the bills toward the vendor.

The old man looked at the money. Then at Raizen.

"You don’t owe me anything" he said. "Enya insisted to do the resin work herself. You should ask her about payment."

Raizen turned to Enya.

She was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, wearing the specific expression of someone who knows they have leverage and is enjoying the moment before they use it.

Raizen braced himself. With Enya, the response could go anywhere. "Oh, it’s nothing" was... Possible, hopefully. But so was a demand for something completely unhinged - delivered with total sincerity and zero awareness that it was unreasonable.

She waved a hand. Cheeky grin.

"Eh, you’ll pay me later" she said. "I can’t think about anything right now, I’ll figure something out later."

The words should have been casual. They were casual. But something about the way she said them - the lightness, the promise tucked inside the joke - made Raizen file it away in the part of his brain that tracked things he’d probably regret agreeing to.

"Thanks, Enya" he said, pucking his lips.

He tucked the lotuses carefully into his chest pockets - one on each side, cushioned by the fabric. Then his eye drifted to the box on the counter. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Enya had left the drawers open.

All of them.

The top drawer - the one she’d pulled his lotuses from - was empty now. But the others weren’t. Raizen’s gaze moved from one tray to the next, down through the rows, and something cold settled in his stomach.

Every drawer. Every small, fabric-lined slot. Every single one.

Black lotuses.

Dozens of them. Row after row after row - dark petals, gold centers, each one identical in structure to the two he’d just put in his pocket. Some were slightly larger. Some slightly smaller. But they were all the same flower. The same impossible, un-withering, un-dying flower that the vendor couldn’t explain and Enya had pulled from nothing.

An entire box of memory vessels.

And Enya hadn’t mentioned a single one.

Raizen’s eyes widened.

He looked at Enya.

She was watching him. The grin was partially gone. The expression of someone who knew exactly what he was looking at and had been waiting to see when he’d notice.

She didn’t say anything.

Neither did he.