The Ironclad Order did not hold its official meetings the way the Yecine held theirs, exactly. Where the family preferred a more standing forum style, minus the seat of the Patriarch, a set of long tables let everyone in the Guild arrange themselves into the groups for whatever the day’s business required. Sometimes that was an open session from the Guild Master, or Vice-Master, addressing all attendees. Sometimes it was just disparate groups huddled around maps and missives and discussing plans in the almost cafeteria-like setting.

Qatrand had spent the morning moving between the meeting hall for general Guild talks and private rooms at the back of the headquarters. Most of it was not about her former family, as while the change of leadership was a big thing... the Order’s concerns were broader than only that of their largest single membership contributing faction in their ranks. It was going on a third of the time between Descent cycles and that meant a lot of the early heavy guard rotations on caravan routes was slowing down.

People that insisted on becoming bandits in the wake of their losses had mostly either been captured - or often starved, forced out in the kind of nature they weren’t prepared to survive. That change in operational pace meant that a lot of Order members were growing more free with their time. And it also meant a lot of them were needing to shift back into training and working alongside those cultivators who were coming of age these years.

To build trust and morale among the martial group before the next Voidling invasion in thirteen years. So it was not as if there were *no* looks or comments given to the people whose private situation had imploded onto public spectacle, but for the most part the members of this Guild were all highly professional. Including the Yecine who showed up on time and engaged with their superiors and squadmates like always, as duty suggested they should.

And as Navuill er Yecine ordered.

For Qatrand’s part, a Warden Patrician with a territory still finding its full footing - and with fort construction beginning on the near timeline - was a person whose reports and projections mattered. She gave her assessments of the settlement’s growth, words from her own mouth rather than the reports filed with the Continental Council (they were the same words), and fielded questions about the rail extension and the southern supply lines expected effect on the inner continent’s economy.

She also sat through a longer-than-necessary discussion about Descent tactics modeling, based on the last one’s differences, that two senior members of the Voidling Defense Society seemed to be conducting that day... mostly at each other. Neither of them matched what was in her spouse’s letters sent back from the Exclave at all, so she could only be polite and respond when directly asked for a detail she experienced personally.

As Vice-Master Reshna had ordered.

Throughout the morning somewhere across the city, her wife was doing and thinking things that Qat could feel pulsing faintly inside her chest the entire time she spoke to people. Pleasure, mostly, if you ignored the longing. The warm kind that meant Elua was enjoying herself, which was as reassuring as it was alarming. Because she had also been enjoying herself at the Yecine Estate up until she began to be annoyed that her ’fortress’ was not faster moving.

A few sharp spikes of something the swordswoman had learned to read as ’restraint’ would always return to her own feelings. More than once it caused others she was speaking to to glance up at the top of her head. But no one, including herself, was indelicate enough to mention that the roots of her hair couldn’t decide whether to remain black or blonde. Out loud. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

By the time the last meeting released her, the morning was well gone and her spiritual patience had been worn to a particular thinness. A kind which literally made her shaped tendrils of energy almost feel flat and sheet-like. Not from certain unhappiness or ire - she was good at this work, and she did not resent attending organization interactions that put her in the spotlight - but it was still almost like the searching roots of her soul were feeling dehydrated after being baked by the attention

’Which is strange, considering I’m feeling better just at the idea of going to her, and having her provide all her patient attention to me. Attention that is very warm... but also a bit humid, I guess? Maybe that’s the difference.’

"You move quickly when you have somewhere to be. You always did. Most of our ilk does."

She was only halfway out of the main door when a voice that did not belong to the Order’s usual sounds reached her. Though it was not as pleasant as the desired ouzo-like tone, even if it had its own niceness to it, it still caused Qat to stop and have her impatience restrained. For Lirades er Yecine was seated on an exterior bench taking in the sunlight... waiting in the way of a person who had decided to be exactly where she was.

Judging by the uncomfortable looks of the Order guards at the door, the woman with silver-streaked black hair would not be moved from it by anything as trivial as ’nicer waiting areas’ inside. A tea tray sat beside her, with house retainers mingling around a distant black-wood carriage - looking even more put out than the guards. All of them were the old woman’s spy-people and not only would they have preferred to act as actual servants for their mistress who deserved relaxation, they also would have loved to do so for Qatrand gil Yecine.

"Elder Lirades."

She didn’t ask what she needed, though she knew something was up. Because the oldest living daughter of the regional family did not come to you for casual conversation and worries - people, mostly the cloistered women, went to Lirades for that. When the woman came to you, when the still strong volcano waited for you in a corridor or a bench or walked right into your room when she had no other reason to be in it?

That was because there was something that needed to be said and she had decided to be the one to say it. Now. Qat knew this quality of her very-great relative for years. And so the pull toward *home* - toward wherever the chaotic cultivator across the city was going - went quiet under the weight of her respect for the woman. So too did Elua start munching on a skewer far more contemplatively, guarding the whole of her mischievous personality from being sent through their spiritual connection.

"Would you sit with me a moment? Or walk, if you would rather move."

The corner of her mouth moved. Though she was tired, in so many ways, the older woman also still remembered finding the brunette that their once-heir was married to... in their estate, in this young woman’s bed. And as Navuill told it - badly, she felt - as he heard from Rezzue... that was no longer a place just for sleeping to the blonde struggling with which color hair to adopt for this talk.

"I know you have somewhere you would like to be. Or someone else you would prefer to be with, if I’m not mistaken. I’ll try not to keep you from her more than necessary."

"That’s a kinder sentiment than I’d expect, considering the trouble she put on you."

"If we start taking account for trouble on either side, I’m not sure ours would win. But it makes sense that you wouldn’t expect accounting and understanding from the leadership of this family."

"I didn’t mean-"

Patting her hand in the air to ease the knee-jerk apology, the woman stood and linked her arm with that of the suit worn by her many ladder directions down the genealogy tree blood relation. Guiding them both back inside the building, which only made the guards scratch their heads, the Order’s first layer of corridors eventually gave way to a quieter side passage and a locked office. A key was pulled out from the woman’s handbag to open her old, retained space that usually only ever saw the occasional cleaning when the door was pushed open... rather than genuine use.

"He will be a better leader than he believes."

There was a heaviness in her voice when she closed the door that Qat had never heard from her. Qat said nothing back, letting the elder arrive at whatever she had actually come to say in her own time. Lirades did not need any prompting, though she did need more time than she expected... and her comment *was* one of those she did sometimes. Where she would shrewdly use questions and statements in order to gauge the response of the other side.

"Your brothers should come back, too. With the way things are."

"I’m not going to disagree, or force them, but I do not know your logic. Would you share it?"

"They have been gone a long while. Longer than anyone their age is ever away from the estate while retaining the status of active cultivation candidates."

"Nor will I argue with that, though of all the rules I expected you to protect, that one seems among the least consequential."

"But it’s not. I have the slimmest understanding of what they have been up to, but Navuill did see them sparring. They have probably changed more than anyone outside a small circle is prepared to witness. Which is why I am positive that they need to return, to serve as example, without any stupid little rules being used as argumentative tactics."

Pigeon blues stared at steely grays for some time, before coming up with her next question. Qatrand was hardly going to decide anything concrete about their futures without discussing it with them first. But she also knew what their answer would be, based on who they were.

"The new Patriarch does seem like he isn’t going to pay attention to things like that. So why is it important this time?"

"The less he has to use his willpower alone to enforce things, the less strain there will be on the whole system. It’s going to be impossible to deny that your wife had an effect on them the same way she had one on you. No Elder on the council believes that, whatever sort of outlier Elua er Goltbred is, she will go without meddling with how a cultivator in her orbit grows."

Her network knew about Fusand hez Talcres and Nohre er Talcres. About Sevra, Aleck, and even Dima. The overall quality of the entire Youth Guild during her tenure was even a notable blip above baseline records. The fact that people in her graces seemed to have notable improvements in cultivation, compared to where they were before meeting her, was a surprisingly badly hidden ’secret’ if you were willing to believe she could cause such ripples.

Part of her was also really excited for what may have happened with Rezzue, a woman that had been not so different than many other wives in the estate. But she didn’t have to come today and request that woman return, since she would obviously be doing so. Less obvious had been Qatrand’s intentions for Kaland and Ajoreal.

"But we need more of that, in our ranks. People who have been affected by changes. The old can teach old tricks and they can try and protect the young with those, but they can’t properly teach the prosperity of *new* things. Not like peer rivalry can."

The woman standing and listening bit the side of her mouth, kind of wanting to comment that anything Elua teaches others is, by default, an Old Trick - or an ancient one. However, that joke that would reveal too much, and aside from that she understood what the woman was getting at. In fact, Qat also once thought that her own staying in the Yecine, even as she showed off that she had diverged from the orthodoxy of a pure heavy blade wielder, was a good way to live as an example.

"They left as children somewhere in the middle of their cohort. Underperforming, most likely, by the measures the family uses. By the one’s our father certainly does."

The blonde chose to let a small, true thing of another kind into her voice. Anper had hopes for them, but frankly speaking the man had not been seeing the height of the section of forest two of the young trees were growing within. He was too wrapped up in teaching them alone. Neither of them would have been picked as an heir candidate for the next cycle... they would have simply been the same sort of addition to the ranks that he never gave two looks toward in any other situation.

For that much, Qatrand was admittedly a little jealous. The truth of her gender had defaulted his assessment into disappointment. The truth of theirs had blinded him in the other direction. No hope for her, all the hope for them. That place in her heart once wounded by his words no longer turned cold, or hot, due to thoughts about Anper er Yecine’s personality. But sometimes it did feel like the hole weeped a tepid fluid of some sort... just a bit.

"Unless something else major has happened I do not know about, they would be returning as the strongest two of their generation."

The kind she wished was a sap that would seal it for good, but was probably just a sign of her spiritual body fighting off an infection there of some sort. It often flared up when it seemed like he was getting what he wanted, in some sort of way. Some sort of sad, twisted and tangled way that he would never recognize or be happy about. If he was capable of that emotion any longer.

Similar to the tangled grief that kept Qat unsure she was capable of the kind of love those two boys she talked to recently still had for him. Though it was hard to genuinely appreciate any other kind of ’love’ other than the one exuding from inside her chest now, sent from her mintdrop, making her suddenly feel like she could endure another few hours of meetings if necessary.

A thought which immediately made the tele-feelings retreat, to be replaced by the firmest sense of pouting that the heiress could muster.