"What about you?" He said.
"What do you mean?" Solus loved to speak instead of using their mind link. It made her feel normal and allowed her to hear the sound of their voices.
"Are you angry with me as well? First, I kept you a secret from the entirety of Mogar and now I leave you alone a lot. On top of that, I used you as an excuse to justify my actions after Phloria broke up with me." Lith said.
"A bit, but not for the reasons you think." Solus replied.
"I'm happy you finally made me part of the group and I understand why it took you so long. Now I realize how naïve I was in the past and how meeting a paranoid, cynical man was the best thing that could happen to me.
"A normal child would have never been able to keep the secret, dooming the both of us to become victims of unspeakable experiments. Another mage, instead, would have either enslaved me or forced me to become like Dawn.
"Even when you still didn't trust me, you always treated me with respect because you know the pain of being stranded amid a hostile world. Thanks to our bond, I experienced Mogar, growing and healing alongside you." Solus held his hand while never averting her gaze from the waning moon above them.
"I must admit that, at first, I was angry and jealous of you spending so much time alone with Kamila. Over time, however, it helped me put things in the right perspective. Like Tista told me for years, I needed to get a life of my own.
"For a long time, I couldn't even imagine my life without you." Solus suddenly blushed, then turned pale and rushed to say:
"Don't get me wrong, I still can't. What I mean is that before I considered myself more like another of your limbs rather than a person. The time we spent apart helped me to grow, both as a woman and as a tower." She brought his hand to her face as if she was expecting to be caressed.
"Use Invigoration on me and avoid checking me out with the excuse of a diagnosis." She chuckled.
Lith had used his breathing technique on Solus many times in the past, yet none of it prepared him for what he saw. Inside her humanoid form, it was possible to distinguish the outline of organs, veins, and bones.
Yet, more importantly, he could see a second core inside her body. It was different from everything he had encountered in all his life. The second core resembled a golem's power core, but it was complex beyond what Lith's mind could conceive.
It was both small and hazy, making it hard to properly distinguish its features or the complex network of runes that surrounded it like several asteroid belts, but Lith could sense the power core getting stronger by the second.
"You never had a second core. When did it manifest'" Lith asked.
"A bit after I obtained my energy body. Please, now focus on my human core." Solus replied.
At first, Lith didn't understand her request. Solus's deep cyan core looked no different from all those he had examined in the past, at least until he used Invigoration to look at it real close.
Part of the cyan sphere was blurry as if a small chunk of it had turned from solid into a highly compressed gas. It took Lith a while to realize that Solus missed part of her core which caused her mana to leak and formed the blurry area.
Once Lith understood the situation, he focused even more, checking Solus's two cores down to the slightest detail. The power core was deeply connected to the cyan core, keeping it stable and allowing it to slow down the mana leak.
Lith's own core was linked with Solus's, providing it with more energy than it lost over time and slowly nurturing the damaged core.
The shock left Lith with his mouth agape. He stared at Solus with eyes wide open for a few minutes, incapable of speaking a word.
"By my maker, you should see your face." She chuckled. "If anyone saw you now, they would think that I just told you that I'm pregnant."
For a long time, Solus had an energy slate with only eyes and a mouth for a face, but now that they were so close, Lith could almost see her nose and cheekbones.
"Didn't you wonder why it took me so long to gain my wisp form and reach the green core whereas I quickly refined a cyan core after achieving my energy body? As I told you before, being apart did me good.
"Remaining at your finger nurtures my human core, of which I was in desperate need after almost dying of starvation. Yet it's by tapping into a mana geyser that I can nurture my tower core back to its full strength.
"A living core, no matter how powerful, cannot empower something so big and complex as a mage tower, only a mana geyser can. After we started to spend more time on our own, my tower core managed to reassemble itself thanks to the constant exposure to the mana geyser.
"The more my tower core grows in power, the more stable my human core becomes and the more efficiently I can process the energy I receive from you. Tista and I have studied the phenomenon for a while and together we reached the same conclusions.
"The good news is that now I more or less know why Master Menadion did this to me and the bad news is that I'm screwed. Maybe I failed my breakthrough, or maybe someone killed me.
"Whatever happened, my core cracked, bringing me beyond what even today's healing magic can repair. To give me more time, Master Menadion somehow fused me with her tower, using its power core and the massive amounts of energy it draws from the geysers to keep me stable.
"Unluckily, either the strain killed her or whoever did this to me came back to finish the job and killed Menadion as well. Last, but not least, whenever we are together in the tower, like now, my recovery speed skyrockets.
"It's still damn slow and I have no idea when flesh will replace energy, but you've seen the progress I made. I can be human again. In the future, maybe I'll be able to keep my body without the tower, to have a normal life."
Solus gave Lith a radiant smile and took his hands into hers.
"Why do you say you're screwed, then?" Lith dragged Solus closer, embracing her with the foolish hope that physical contact would help her to recover faster.
He discovered that not only her body's warmth was now no different from a regular person, but she also smelled good whereas in the past she had no smell.
"Because a cracked core cannot be healed." Her smile disappeared, but Lith couldn't notice it with her face buried in his shoulder. "Saving Protector almost killed you and you wouldn't have even succeeded without Scarlett's help.
"Even once both my cores go back to their full strength, I will always be dependent on our bond to survive. I will be a burden for you and force you to take care of me no matter what kind of life you're going to build for yourself."
