The silence after Selena's dissolution was absolute and terrible. Dante knelt beneath the Silence Tree, his arms still extended in the shape of an embrace around nothing, his hands grasping air where her body had been moments before. The void around him held its breath, the nameless dawn dimming as if in mourning, the flame-leaves of the tree flickering uncertainly.
For a long moment, Dante simply existed in that frozen tableau of loss—a man holding absence, a storm wrapped around emptiness, a being who had just watched half of himself dissolve into everything and nothing simultaneously.
Then something broke inside him.
It started as a sound that wasn't quite sound—a vibration deep in his chest that bypassed his vocal cords entirely and emerged as pure force. The storm that had been part of him, that had been freed when his marrow chains shattered, that had learned to dance with Selena's flame—it responded to his anguish with its own.
