For a while, no-one moved.
Every God paid their final respect to a formidable foe, as they looked over Soron's fallen form with complicated emotions rising in their hearts, the battlefield suspended in a silence so dense that even the drifting ash seemed reluctant to fall.
Soron lay where he had collapsed, one knee pressed into fractured stone, one hand slack near the Grudgekeeper Dagger embedded beside him, his face disturbingly calm, while the faint curve of a smile still lingered at the corners of his lips as though death itself had failed to strip him of his defiance.
Ru Vassa was the first to avert her gaze.
Her arm lowered slowly, fingers tightening into a knuckle as relief washed through her in a delayed, trembling wave, the kind that left her weak rather than triumphant, as though a terrible weight had finally been lifted only for the emptiness beneath it to be revealed.
Soron was gone.
The nightmare had ended.
