The battlefield had stopped screaming an hour ago. What remained was worse than the screaming.
Azer dragged himself across the ash, past the ribs of towers that had once marked the border of his sanctuary, past things that had been soldiers and were now only shapes the fires hadn't finished with. He was the God of Peace. His power had been built for closing wounds, not making them, and yet here he was, crawling through a field made entirely of wounds no hand of his could close.
He had not been made for this war. He had entered it anyway, because no one else would.
His shields had broken sometime before dawn. He could not remember the exact moment — only that one instant they had been there, humming faintly gold around him, and the next they simply weren't, and the cold had come rushing in to take their place. His angels had bought him these last hours with their bodies. He could feel, distantly, how few of them were left to buy him any more.
Not yet, he thought, forcing his elbow another inch through the ash. It isn't over yet.
The sky above him rotted.
That was the only way Azer could describe what happened to the clouds when Rostiel drew near — they didn't darken so much as curdle, folding in on themselves like something dying. The Demon Lord's shadow fell over him a heartbeat before his footsteps did: a towering shape of shifting black sinew and wings that seemed to swallow what little light the ruined sky still gave.
"Peace," Rostiel said. He turned the word over slowly, the way a man might turn a coin he suspected was counterfeit. His voice carried none of the fury Azer had braced for — only a terrible, unhurried calm. "Such a fragile little idea. Look what it's made of you. On your knees. Bleeding into the dirt. A god, brought down to this, by nothing more complicated than violence."
He didn't strike. He simply stepped onto Azer's shoulder, unhurried, and let his weight settle. Azer's vision whited out at the edges as the last threads of his power were pressed out of him like water from a cloth.
Then a voice cut through the haze. "Get away from him!"
Floryn fell from the smoke-choked sky, her wings torn ragged, soot ground into feathers that had once been white as new snow. She landed between her god and the demon with her arms spread, and for one absurd moment Azer thought she looked less like a soldier than like someone shielding a child from the rain.
Rostiel laughed — a low, grinding sound, stone dragged over stone. "Devotion. How dull." He flicked his wrist, almost lazily, and a spear took shape in his open palm — the Spear of Destruction, its crimson edge pulsing with a hunger that made even Azer's blood run cold. Old stories said that blade had killed gods before. Azer had never let himself believe them. He believed them now.
"No," he managed, the word scraping out of him. "Floryn — run —"
She didn't run. She threw herself into the spear's path instead, and the blade went through her without slowing, and the sound it made was small and wet and would stay with Azer for however long he had left to remember anything.
She fell back into his arms. Cracks of black spread from the wound, her light dimming to ash, flaking away like the last pages of a burning book.
"Azer," she breathed, her hand finding his cheek with the last of her strength. "Don't let it end here. Find the one who can still fight. Find them, and protect them."
She didn't speak again. What was left of her burned outward instead — one final flare of light that drove Rostiel back a step, hissing, one clawed hand thrown up against the glare.
It bought Azer exactly as many seconds as she'd meant it to. He gathered whatever was still his to gather, teeth gritted against the pain of it, and forced the words out before his courage could catch up to the cost of them.
"Divine Teleportation."
Gold swallowed him, and the battlefield was gone.
He came back into being on marble — cool, smooth, and impossibly quiet after the roar he'd left behind. The Realm of the Gods received him the way it always had, indifferent to whether he arrived triumphant or in pieces. Right now he was closer to pieces. He could not draw a full breath. The divine ichor in his veins had gone heavy and slow, like something already half-dead.
But his purpose hadn't dimmed with it. If anything, it had sharpened.
Footsteps rang against the marble, quick and unsteady. Krezia reached him and dropped to her knees, and whatever composure she usually wore like armor had already come apart. "Lord Azer — what happened to you?"
"Floryn is gone." The words cost him more than he expected. He pushed himself up onto his hands regardless, every motion threatening to tear something loose inside him that he wasn't sure would mend. "The mortal realm falls if I don't act, Krezia. I cannot stop him myself. I have to forge the Orb."
Her tears came fast. "No — if you pour what's left of yourself into that thing, you'll fall into the Deep Slumber. You might never open your eyes again."
"It's the price of peace." He found something like a smile, thin and worn but real. "Trust the hero I send, Krezia. That has to be enough. I have to begin."
He didn't raise his hands like a god calling down judgment. He offered them forward instead, palms open, in something closer to surrender. Golden light gathered in the air around him as his body thinned toward the translucent.
"To whoever answers this call," he said, and his voice filled the temple though it was barely above a whisper, "I give what I have left. Mana without end, so the fight never runs dry beneath you. The tongues of every people, so no one you meet is a stranger. And the grace to heal what Rostiel breaks. Take it. I have no more use for it than this."
The Orb formed between his palms — small, and then not small, pulsing like something newly alive and hungry for the light he kept feeding it. When it finally tore free of his hands and vanished into the dark beyond the temple, Azer felt the last of his own warmth go with it.
Far below, in the wreckage his enemy had made his home, Rostiel went still.
He tilted his head back toward the smog-choked sky, and Mizawa — who had learned, over the centuries, never to speak first when her lord wore that particular stillness — waited until he broke it himself.
"Lord Rostiel? Has he gone into hiding?"
"No." A smile crept across his face, slow and entirely without warmth. "His warmth is gone from the world. Not hidden. Spent. The coward burned himself out trying to save it." He turned from the window. "Ready the vanguard. This realm is ours to take."
Back in the temple, the light had gone out of Azer almost entirely.
Krezia caught his head before it could meet the marble, cradling it in her lap while her tears fell against a cheek that had gone the color of old parchment.
"Azer," she whispered.
His eyes opened — barely, a sliver of gold beneath heavy lids. "The Orb…"
"It's gone. Out past the stars, looking for them." Her voice broke on the last word.
He exhaled — the last full breath he'd draw for longer than either of them could measure. "Then there's still hope."
His eyes closed, and this time they stayed closed, his body settling into something too still to be called sleep. The God of Peace had fallen. Somewhere in a world he had never seen, the future of everything he'd tried to protect now rested on a stranger who didn't yet know he'd been chosen.