He noticed the silence first.
Not the absence of sound. The change in it.
The Diamond Palace was never truly quiet — even at its most still it breathed, distant footsteps threading through corridors, fabric against stone, wind pressing softly at high windows. Silence here was layered, textured, inhabited. But sometimes it shifted. Not fading. Rearranging. Like water pulling back before something larger entered the current.
Aaron felt it before he identified the cause.
A subtle recalibration in the courtyard's rhythm. Servants did not stop moving, but their trajectories altered by degrees too small for most to register. Conversations did not end, but they tightened, words shortening. Even the air seemed to carry more weight, as though the space had quietly decided to take something seriously.
Then he appeared.
Xeno did not arrive loudly. He arrived inevitably.
If Tomo was sunlight breaking into sealed rooms, this was something that had no equivalent in weather. He stepped through the archway and the world adjusted around the fact of him without anyone choosing to let it.
He was taller than most boys their age, though not absurdly so. Size wasn't what made people look. It was density — every line of him settled, as though gravity had made a specific arrangement with him that it hadn't offered anyone else. His shoulders carried breadth without exaggeration, built not from performance but from use. His movements had none of the decorative precision of trained nobility. No ornamental restraint. Just function, plainly expressed.
Each step landed fully. No wasted motion. Not slow, not fast.
Certain.
The kind of certainty that did not come from confidence. It came from something older. Something inherited at a depth where choice had ceased to be the relevant variable.
His hair was dark, cut clean and practical. His expression rested in a neutrality that was not absence but sufficiency — the stillness of someone who had never learned to perform himself for approval and had, at some point, simply stopped considering whether the skill might be useful.
Aaron watched from the edge of the courtyard, hands folded behind his back in the posture he had unconsciously adopted for observation. Tomo was nearby, crouched beside the fountain in the middle of an attempt — clearly not his first — to balance a fallen leaf on the tip of his finger. The laughter from whatever he had been doing before still clung faintly to the air.
When Xeno entered, Tomo paused.
Not consciously. Reflexively. The way a room adjusts to a change in pressure before anyone names it.
Xeno's gaze moved across the courtyard once — steady, unhurried, the kind of survey that catalogued without appearing to. When it reached Aaron it did not linger. It settled. As if it had always been heading there.
He walked closer. No hesitation in it, no ceremonial announcement of his approach. Just movement with a destination.
Aaron felt something align inside him. Not caution. Recognition. The quiet internal shift of two weights finding equilibrium on opposite sides of a scale.
Xeno stopped a few steps away and looked at him with the directness of someone who had not been trained to soften direct looks.
"My lord," he said.
Two words. No embellishment. His voice was low and level, stripped of the upward inflection people used when they were still negotiating the shape of an interaction. It simply arrived. A statement rather than an approach.
Aaron held his gaze. "You know who I am."
"Yes."
"And I don't know you."
"Xeno. My family serves yours." He said it the way you would give someone the name of a river — this is what it is, this is where it runs, this is how long it has been running. No invitation to be impressed, no deflection from the weight of it.
Aaron let the information settle before he responded. He had heard fragments. Lessons half-attended to during the periods when he was performing inattention for his tutors. Overheard conversations between his father's senior staff, the particular tone people used when referencing something foundational enough that it required no elaboration for those who already knew and no short summary for those who didn't.
"The Almata," Aaron said.
Something in Xeno's posture confirmed it without moving. "Yes."
"A thousand years."
"Give or take."
Aaron looked at him steadily. "That's not modesty."
"It's accuracy." A brief pause. "The exact number depends on which founding event you use as the starting point. Historians argue about it. My family doesn't."
The answer was more than Aaron had expected. Not in length — it was still short. In precision. The answer of someone who had thought about this question and arrived at a settled position rather than a performed one.
"Why doesn't your family argue about it?"
Xeno considered the question with the same economy he brought to everything else. "Because the number doesn't change the obligation. Arguing about when it started is a way of avoiding the fact that it continues."
Aaron was quiet for a moment.
He had met people who carried the weight of legacy — his father was one of them, Leonhart was beginning to become one. But Regis carried his with the particular tension of someone who had inherited something enormous and spent considerable energy making peace with its dimensions. Leonhart carried his with the slightly forward lean of someone still growing into the shape of it.
Xeno carried his the way stone carried its own mass. Without apparent effort. Without apparent awareness that effort was the expected response.
"You're assigned to me," Aaron said. Stating rather than asking.
"Yes."
"Did you choose that?"
The question was deliberate. He watched Xeno's face for the reaction — pride, resentment, the subtle instability of someone bound too tightly to an expectation they had never examined. He found none of those things.
What he found was consideration. Genuine, unhurried consideration, the kind that treated the question as worth answering rather than worth deflecting.
"The assignment is inherited," Xeno said. "But I'd have chosen it."
"How do you know? If you'd never had the choice."
"Because I know what I'm good at." Said without arrogance. Clean and factual, the same register he used for everything. "And I know what matters. Those two things point the same direction. When that happens, it doesn't feel like obligation."
"What does it feel like?"
A beat.
"Like being in the right place," Xeno said.
Tomo appeared at Aaron's shoulder with the energy of someone who had waited a polite amount of time — approximately twelve seconds — before deciding that standing apart from an interesting conversation was no longer sustainable.
"Okay," he said, directing this at Xeno with the unguarded curiosity he directed at everything. "You're not like the other guards."
Xeno looked at him. A single blink — the recalibration of someone who had just encountered a fundamentally different type of presence and was adjusting his operating parameters accordingly.
"I'm not a guard," he said.
Tomo tilted his head. "You feel like a guard."
"I'm Almata."
"What's the difference?"
Xeno was quiet for a moment, and Aaron watched him consider whether this question warranted a real answer. He apparently decided it did. "Guards are assigned to a post. They protect a location, a door, a perimeter. When their shift ends, they leave." He paused. "I'm assigned to a person. That doesn't end."
Tomo absorbed this. "So you just — follow Aaron everywhere? Forever?"
"Not everywhere. Everywhere that matters."
Tomo looked at Aaron with an expression that was trying to determine whether this was wonderful or slightly alarming and hadn't finished deciding. "How do you feel about that?"
"I'm still forming an opinion," Aaron said.
Tomo grinned. It was, Aaron noted, essentially his default response to uncertainty in others — not because he found uncertainty funny, but because he found it genuinely interesting. Uncertainty meant the thing wasn't settled yet, which meant there was still room for it to become something.
He turned back to Xeno with the same open energy. "Have you met Shion yet?"
"No."
"She's — you know, she doesn't say much, but when she does it's always the thing you were almost thinking but couldn't get to. It's a bit unnerving." He said this appreciatively. "Aaron's the same, actually. You're probably going to get along." He looked between them. "You're all very serious. I'm going to be the one who makes this group bearable."
Xeno looked at Tomo for a moment. "What group?"
"This one. The one that's forming." He gestured at the general configuration of the three of them with the confidence of someone who could see a thing before it had fully materialized. "Don't you feel it?"
"I feel a courtyard," Xeno said.
"Inside the courtyard," Tomo said patiently.
Xeno looked at Aaron. An inquiry, wordless, asking whether this was how Tomo normally operated.
"Yes," Aaron said.
Something happened in Xeno's expression. Very small. The line between controlled neutrality and something adjacent to it that wasn't quite warmth but was oriented in that direction. He looked back at Tomo with the particular attention of someone updating a first assessment.
"He's always like this?" he said to Aaron.
"In my experience."
"Has it ever been wrong?"
Aaron considered this honestly. Tomo had been right about the courtyard exhaling when he entered it. He had been right that the palace was holding its breath. He had looked at a silverleaf plant and immediately seen it in terms of what it gave rather than what it was, which was either unsophisticated or direct depending on how you measured sophistication.
"Not yet," Aaron said.
Xeno nodded once. Filed it. Returned his attention to the general space of the courtyard with the manner of someone who had updated their operating model and resumed their primary function.
"Who trained you?" Aaron asked.
"My father. And my father's teacher before him." Xeno paused. "Almata training doesn't come from academies."
"What does it come from?"
"Repetition. And understanding what the repetition is for." He glanced at Aaron sideways, just briefly. "Most combat training teaches technique. How to perform a movement correctly. Almata training starts there and then spends the rest of the time teaching why the movement exists — what it's protecting, what happens if it fails. The technique becomes secondary once you understand the reason."
"Because the reason is what holds when the technique breaks down."
Xeno looked at him with a directness that was not surprise but the particular quality of someone recalibrating upward. "Yes."
"My father would phrase it as: know the load-bearing walls," Aaron said. "The rest you can revise."
A beat of quiet. "That's accurate."
Tomo had wandered back to the fountain and was now skipping a small stone across its surface with the focus of someone who had discovered a project. The stone bounced twice and sank. He retrieved another from his pocket with the preparedness of someone who had planned for this.
"He carries stones," Xeno observed.
"He carries everything he might need," Aaron said. "He's more prepared than he appears."
Xeno watched Tomo for a moment. The evaluation was visible in the quality of his attention — not dismissive, not deferential, just honest. "He's not what the Veld name usually produces."
"No."
"Is that a problem?"
"I think it might be the opposite."
Xeno turned this over without speaking. He had, Aaron noticed, the rare quality of someone who sat with an answer long enough to actually examine it before moving past it. Most people treated silence after a statement as a gap to fill. Xeno treated it as space to use.
"What do you want from me?" Aaron asked.
The question landed differently than Xeno had anticipated — or if he had anticipated it, the specificity of the phrasing registered as something worth addressing carefully. He looked at Aaron directly. "I don't want anything from you."
"Everyone wants something."
"I have what I need," Xeno said. It was not dismissal. It was the statement of someone whose requirements and their fulfillment had been in alignment for long enough that the gap between wanting and having had closed. "My family has served yours for a thousand years. I'm not here to change that arrangement. I'm here because it's what I am."
"That's not an answer to what I asked."
Xeno held his gaze. "You asked what I want from you. I want you to be worth protecting." Said without drama, without threat. A simple, honest standard laid between them. "Not because your bloodline requires it. Because the person behind the bloodline earns it."
Aaron was quiet for a moment.
In his first life he had been surrounded by people who wanted things from him. Resources, influence, conclusions they could use. The ones who had claimed to want nothing had generally wanted the most. He had become fluent in the grammar of disguised interest over fifty years, and he had learned to mistrust its absence.
This felt different.
Not because Xeno was without motive — everyone had motive, that was simply the mechanics of being a person with history and investment. But because his motive was legible. It sat on the surface without apology. He wanted Aaron to be worth the weight he was prepared to carry alongside him, and he had said so directly, and he had not softened it into something more comfortable.
That was, Aaron realized, itself a form of respect.
"And if I'm not?" he asked.
Xeno answered without hesitation. "You will be."
"How do you know?"
The response that came was neither boast nor reassurance. It was the tone of someone reporting an observation. "Because you asked the question. People who aren't worth protecting don't ask whether they are."
Tomo's stone skipped three times before sinking and he made a quiet triumphant sound that he then immediately tried to contain because he remembered where he was, which was a palace courtyard, and then abandoned the containment because he had already committed to the triumph.
The sound reached them across the open stone — small, real, entirely itself.
Xeno's expression shifted. The thing that was not quite a smile moved closer to its destination.
"He's going to make this difficult," he said.
"Yes," Aaron agreed.
"In a useful way."
"Probably."
Xeno looked at him with the same directness he had brought to everything else in the last twenty minutes. "And the girl? The scholar's daughter."
Aaron glanced at him. "You've already done some research."
"My family is assigned to yours. I knew who was visiting before they arrived." He paused. "She's sharp."
"Very."
"She sees things she doesn't say."
"So does she about you," Aaron said.
Xeno absorbed this. "Good." He meant it as assessment, not compliment.
The afternoon light had moved while they had been talking, the shadows in the courtyard lengthening at their slow, indifferent pace. Elsewhere in the palace the rhythms were already adjusting toward evening — the shift in footstep frequency that Aaron had long since calibrated, the particular quality of light that meant candles would be lit within the hour.
Time moving, the way it always moved, without reference to the conversations running inside it.
Aaron looked at Xeno.
A thousand years. A family that had built an identity so deeply into a single function that the function had become indistinguishable from the person. He had built models in his first life for every kind of human motivation — fear, ambition, loyalty, love, ideology, survival — and had found that most people oscillated between several of them depending on circumstance.
He had not built a model for someone whose internal landscape was this still.
It required a new category.
Not a guard. Not an ally. Not a subject, not a peer in the conventional sense.
A constant.
And constants, in any system, were the things around which everything else organized.
"I have one question," Aaron said.
Xeno waited.
"You said you want me to be worth protecting. Not because of the bloodline, but because of the person behind it." He paused. "If those two things ever conflict — if the person and the bloodline point in different directions — which one do you follow?"
Silence.
Not the silence of someone searching for an answer. The silence of someone making sure the answer they already had was the right one to give.
"You," Xeno said.
One word.
No embellishment.
Full stop.
Aaron nodded once. Not in satisfaction exactly — in recognition. The particular acknowledgment of a variable that had just resolved itself into something stable.
He did not smile.
But something in the architecture of how he understood the next years shifted quietly to account for a new load-bearing element.
Across the courtyard, Tomo had produced a third stone.
"He's going to be insufferable when he gets it," Xeno said, watching him.
"Almost certainly."
"Are you going to tell him the technique?"
Aaron had, in fact, noticed three adjustments that would improve Tomo's success rate by a factor of roughly four. He had been watching for the last several minutes. "No."
"Why?"
"Because he'll figure it out. And it'll mean more to him when he does."
Xeno was quiet for a moment.
"All right," he said. The tone of someone revising a model upward for the second time in twenty minutes. "You'll do."
Aaron looked at him. "Was that in question?"
"Everything starts in question," Xeno said. "That's not an insult. That's just how it works."
The stone skipped. Once, twice, three times, and — on the fourth — caught the far edge of the fountain basin before it sank.
Tomo's quiet sound of triumph was slightly less contained than the previous one.
Xeno's expression reached its destination.
Aaron filed that too.
Carefully.
Among the things he intended to build toward.