The dining hall did not breathe at first. The air was glass—thin, shimmering, and on the verge of breaking.
The echo of the Hydra's heartbeat still lived in the walls, a deep vibration that pressed through bone and thought alike. It came slow now—thump… pause… thump—a rhythm too heavy to belong to the living.
Qaritas felt it inside him. Not under his ribs, but between them—where Eon's second pulse kept time just half a beat behind his own. Every tremor bent the light. Every echo pulled the edges of him out of place.
The blue tear still trembled in his untouched cup.
It caught the lantern glow and threw it back wrong: gold turned pale, red turned white. The world shifted color until everything shimmered like memory underwater. The tear refused to fall.
And then it did.
When it hit the table, the sound was thunder disguised as glass.
Something inside Qaritas seized. The pulse beneath his skin spiked; gold veins turned to blue fire. He tried to blink it away, but vision fractured. The ceiling's ribs warped, the faces around him flickered like broken mosaics.
Eon's voice slid up from the cracks, slick and soft.
"Clock's ticking, little brother. Ascend for an audience. Let's make them watch."
Qaritas's breath came sharp. The hum of a billion heartbeats from Taeterra below narrowed into one strangled thread of sound. He reached for the table and missed it.
Then—
a touch.
Ayla's hand. Warm, human. Her voice followed, low and practiced—the sound of someone who had steadied storms before.
"Anchor," she whispered. "With me."
She moved in front of him, slow as prayer. One hand rose to his sternum; the other traced small circles in the air between them—rhythms borrowed from old divine chants. Her own breathing set the tempo.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
He matched her without meaning to.
The blue fire retreated. The light of the Solmir Lanterns steadied, shifting from bone-white back to gold. The pulse inside him stumbled once, then fell back into rhythm—two hearts forced into uneasy harmony.
Qaritas let out a long, unsteady breath. His voice cracked when he found it.
"Thank you," he managed.
Ayla smiled, small and real. "You always say that like you owe me."
"Maybe I do."
Color returned to the hall—like breath after drowning. Conversations murmured alive again. The Hydra's echo faded into the walls.
From the head table, Rnarah's voice cut across the silence, calm and absolute.
"Someone bring him water."
Zcain didn't need to speak; he only raised a hand. The air behind him tore in a shimmer of gemfire, and Gemma stepped through the breach in a single exhale of light—hair glowing, tray balanced, expression unreadable.
Gemma's arrival shifted the air. The scent of lavender and warm stone followed her, settling the nerves that still clung to the hall like smoke. She carried a tray lined with silver phials—elixirs that glowed faintly from within, the color of calm made liquid.
She moved to Qaritas first.
"Drink," she said softly, voice like glass rolling in silk.
The elixir hissed against his palm, its warmth blooming up his arm. The static in his head eased to a steady hum.
Across the table, Komus leaned forward, his usual grin blunted by concern.
"You don't look at all well, shadow-born."
"I'm fine," Qaritas said, too quickly. "Just need rest."
"Rest looks different on you," Komus muttered.
A pulse of metal answered him—the sound of Rivax's arm unfurling. The smith-god rose from his seat, runes along his prosthetic pulsing to life.
"Before rest," he said, voice carrying quiet authority, "the Valley of Weapons. You'll need what remembers you before you forget yourselves."
The hall stirred. Even the Lanterns brightened, their gold edging into orange, as if agreeing with him.
Tavren looked toward his father. Zcain's crimson-threaded eyes met his son's for a long, unreadable moment before he gave a small, deliberate nod.
"Go. The Valley answers blood, not rank."
Rivax turned, meeting Tavren's gaze. The faintest smile tugged at his mouth beneath the mask. "You hear him."
Around the table, the others began to murmur—Ayla brushing invisible dust from Qaritas's sleeve; Niraí whispering to Cree; Hydeius half-grinning at Gemma's poise. The tension dissolved like cooled glass returning to light.
Rivax adjusted the grip on his metal wrist.
"The others will join us at dawn," he said. "He'll be here tomorrow."
Komus raised a brow. "He?"
Rivax only smiled. "You'll see."
Gemma lingered, her gaze flitting to Cree and Hydeius. "You should be proud," she murmured. "Your legacy still forges new light."
Hydeius sighed. "Let's hope it doesn't burn us next."
The faintest ripple of laughter passed through them—a fragile thing, but real. The Solmir Lanterns brightened in response, casting the hall in slow-moving waves of amber.
The world had started breathing again.
Rnarah's veil shifted as she turned toward her son. "How are they tonight?"
Her voice made the word they sound like prayer and curse at once.
Tavren's jaw worked before he answered.
"They're still screaming," he said quietly. "The acid hasn't stopped burning through their skin. I can hear them even when I close the forge. I just—"
He swallowed, anger blurring into grief. "I just wish they'd wake up. Maybe then I could help."
Rivax moved before the silence could harden. His metal hand touched Tavren's shoulder, thumb pressing just above the collarbone. "They'll wake," he murmured. "They're too strong not to. And if strength fails, there's love—and you have more of that than the rest of us combined."
The words struck something soft and dangerous. Tavren's breath trembled.
Rivax pulled him into an embrace, the clink of metal and skin merging into one steady sound.
Across the hall, mortals whispered.
"Two of four Cosmic Executors."
"Knight of the Apocalypse."
The titles fluttered like moths against the hush.
Rivax ignored them. He tilted his head up, mask brushing Tavren's jaw, and whispered where only gods and ghosts could hear.
"I love you, my heir of sin."
Tavren huffed a laugh that sounded too close to breaking. "And I love that you still call me that in public."
Rivax's chuckle was low, metallic. "Let them remember what kind of love built their wars."
Their palms met—flesh and steel. A rune flared between them, gold shot with rose, glowing like a heartbeat caught mid-flame. The scent of oil and iron mingled with rose-quartz dust from Tavren's forge skin.
The glow bled across the floor, soft and steady.
From inside Qaritas's chest, Eon sighed, voice all silk and venom.
"Love built from sin and covenant—how symmetrical."
Qaritas said nothing.
But for one long moment, as he watched Tavren and Rivax hold each other against the weight of worlds, he felt the echo of it under his own ribs—envy and recognition made indistinguishable.
The hum of Taeterra's two billion heartbeats slowed to match theirs.
The Hydra's echo was gone now.
Only love—and its promise of ruin—remained.
The Feast of Recovery
"Eat," Rnarah said.
It wasn't a suggestion. It wasn't even a command. It was the kind of word that creation itself obeyed.
At her gesture, Gemma and the smoke-born servants moved like tide. Platters and bowls and decanters began to fill the table—each carried as if liturgy, not food.
Before Qaritas, Gemma set a shallow black bowl. The broth inside wasn't really liquid. It glowed softly from within, a deep violet-gold that swirled in slow spirals like nebulae folding in on themselves. Chunks of something soft drifted at the surface—braided root-flesh and pale, luminous mushrooms from caverns that hadn't seen sun in a million years. Steam rose from it and curled in faint constellations.
"Drink," Gemma murmured.
Qaritas lifted the bowl. The scent hit first—earth and ozone, salt and iron. Like the air in the moment a star is born and the first scream of light hasn't decided whether it's joy or agony.
He took a mouthful.
Warmth flooded him so fast his vision went white at the edges. It felt like swallowing a sun in miniature, only gentler—heat spreading through his jaw, throat, chest, down his ribs, settling in the fractures like molten gold poured into cracked stone.
A low sound escaped him before he could stop it.
Then his body, still shaking from the Hydra's echo and Eon's pressure, tried to inhale too fast. He choked.
A violent cough seized his shoulders. The bowl slammed down; violet-gold broth sloshed over his fingers and hissed where it touched skin, not burning, but sparking—a faint glitter like stardust scattering across his hands. His breath hitched sharp.
Ayla was already there. She pressed a cup into his palm.
"Slow," she said, voice low.
The drink inside wasn't wine. It was pale and almost clear, but the scent was floral—lavender, rose-sweet, chamomile-soft. When he swallowed, the panic in his chest smoothed to a hum. His pulse loosened. The edges of his vision stopped clawing inward.
He exhaled, throat raw. "I'm okay."
"You're allowed not to be," Ayla murmured, but she let it stand.
Across the table, Gemma set down a second dish: a slice of pie that bled.
The crust was blackened gold, almost caramelized, flaking like sugared ash. The filling inside was red. Not mortal red—divine red, too vivid, glossy, layered like muscle and wildfire. The sauce that ran down from it shimmered with bruised herbs and something metallic. Beside it, a salad of crystalline shards and sliced fruit—jewel-bright segments of something that had once hung in a sky too holy for mortals to see. The crystals crackled faintly, as if still charged.
Niraí let out a reverent, "Oh, yes."
Daviyi reached first, unapologetic. "If anyone touches mine, I'm disemboweling you with medical accuracy."
Komus clicked his tongue. "See, this is why I bring her places. She handles the diplomacy."
"Diplomacy?" Daviyi arched a brow. "I said disembowelment."
"Exactly," Komus said mildly, already stealing one of her crystals.
Niraí leaned in toward Daviyi, voice low. "You think this is the heart or the flank?"
Daviyi studied the bleeding pie with professional interest. "Neither. Too fine-grained. This was cut from something sacred."
Niraí's stomach growled audibly. She went pink, then lifted her chin. "Good. It can stay sacred in me."
Ayla slid a plate in front of Qaritas before he could refuse it: the bleeding slice, and the jeweled salad, and a curl of something charred and fragrant that smelled like smoke, rain, and myth.
"You need the salt," she said simply.
His throat tightened. She didn't say you almost split. She didn't say Eon almost took you in front of everyone. She just fed him.
He took the fork.
When the savory filling touched his tongue, flavor hit like memory—iron-salt, copper-sweet, dark spice, the faint bitter of scorched herbs. Underneath it, something else pulsed. For a moment, only a moment, he wasn't sitting in a hall of gods. He was surrounded by light that hadn't chosen a shape yet. He felt…large. Old. Worshipped.
He startled.
Eon purred, pleased.
Taste that? That's not kitchen craft. That's inheritance.
Qaritas ignored him and swallowed again.
Around them, conversation swelled in warm pockets.
Hydeius and Cree sat close, not touching but orbiting each other's gravity like old binaries. Gemma poured them both a pale iridescent liquor that smelled faintly of sugar and storm-metal. "You should both be proud of your line," Gemma murmured. "It still carries heat."
Cree's jaw flexed. "Heat can burn planets down."
"Planets come back," Gemma said simply.
Hydeius tipped his glass toward Rivax without looking away from Gemma. "Where's your father now?" His voice was carefully even, but the undercurrent wasn't. It was thick with everything unsaid.
Rivax didn't hesitate. "At the Valley," he said. "Same as always. He sleeps between the graves. Says the dead keep the forge honest."
Komus swallowed hard enough to be funny. "That is the most romantic and most horrifying sentence I've heard in days."
"Give it a moment," Niraí muttered. "We're not done eating."
At the high end of the table, Zcain and Rnarah stood.
Their leaving was quiet, but nothing about them was ever actually quiet. The moment they rose, whispers bled through the near tables like ink in water.
"Ecayrous named them."
"Tainted line or chosen line?"
"—her veil cracked—did you see—?"
Rnarah didn't look at a single whisperer. She leaned toward Tavren, touched two fingers to his jaw, and said softly, "We'll see them now."
Tavren bowed his head a fraction. "Tell them I'm coming," he whispered.
"I will," she said.
Zcain's shadow spilled long across the floor as the two of them turned and left the hall, vanishing past the Solmir Lanterns' red-gold glow and into the darker archways beyond.
The moment they were gone, Eon stirred again in Qaritas's chest, low and hungry.
Follow them, little brother. Secrets smell fresher than soup.
Qaritas took another slow sip of the floral tea instead.
The warmth of the table settled around him. The Lanterns shifted back toward gold, softer now—less divine proclamation, more firelight. Laughter rumbled under the ceiling ribs. The hum of Taeterra's two billion heartbeats calmed from panic-drumming to steady thunder.
For a few breaths—just a few—the world pretended to be gentle.
Qaritas let it.
He ate.
And the dread didn't leave him. But it stopped screaming.
They did not descend.
They rose.
The stairs to the Valley didn't make directional sense—nothing in Taeterra really did. A spiral of translucent stone, each step lit from within, uncoiled from the dining hall's far edge like a ribbon of condensed dawn. Tavren led. Rivax walked at his side, metal arm glinting in the lantern-light.
"Stay close," Tavren said over his shoulder. "If the stairs don't like you, they fold."
Komus blinked. "Fold how?"
"Inside-out," Rivax said mildly.
"Excellent," Komus said. "Reassuring."
The first ten steps were warm. Gold. The air still carried spices and wine and the low, living hum of voices behind them.
By the thirtieth, the warmth bled out.
The gold dimmed to amber, then to bruised violet. The air sharpened. You could taste stone now, and iron. Qaritas's breath left soft ghosts in front of him. The lantern glow from below became a distant ember, far behind and far beneath.
By the time they reached the ninety-ninth landing, the world had changed colors.
The Valley opened in front of them like a wound in the planet.
It wasn't a valley in the mortal sense. It was an expanse—an endless plain carved into the living stone of Taeterra, stretching out under a sky that couldn't decide what war it was remembering. Red bled into blue bled into deep, iron purple, the colors sliding over each other like oil on water. Lightning stitched slow, delicate seams across the clouds, too beautiful to be natural, too patient to be accidental.
The ground was graves.
Millions of them.
Rows upon rows upon rows, each marked not by stone, but by sigils burned directly into the rock. Some sigils glowed faintly—soft white, low gold. Others were dark. Too many were dark.
Niraí stopped walking. "Those are all…?"
"Ascendants," Rivax said, voice quiet now. The showman in him had gone still. "War-blood. Forged-blood. The ones who stood and the ones who broke."
Komus swallowed. For once, he didn't have a joke.
The air here hummed. Not like the dining hall's heart-sound. This hum was metallic. Edged. It prickled along the gums and under the tongue, like the taste of lightning before it strikes.
Distant forges thrummed beneath the Valley like sub-bass—felt more than heard.
Rivax stepped forward.
He unlatched a segment of his prosthetic wrist. The metal withdrew with a soft hiss, revealing living flesh beneath—scarred, but whole. The skin there was marked with thin lines of script, burned-in runes like promises soldered to blood.
He didn't hesitate.
With a practiced, almost casual motion, he dragged one clawed fingertip across his own wrist and opened himself.
Blood fell.
It wasn't red.
It struck the Valley floor in thick, molten drops the color of fresh-forged steel—silver shot with ember-gold. Each drop hissed as it hit the stone, then burrowed in like seed.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then the graves woke.
Light erupted across the field in a wave, racing outward from Rivax's blood. Sigils blazed to life—white, gold, cobalt, obsidian violet, sun-red, void-blue. Symbols spit sparks. Some graves answered with flame that rose in the shape of bows, blades, axes, chains, staffs, things that weren't human words at all. For an instant it was like standing in the heart of a dying star, surrounded by every weapon ever raised in love or rage.
The sound followed an instant later—a rising, layered resonance. Metal singing through bone. Choir and forge married. It hit the sternum first and rattled the teeth after.
Niraí stumbled back a step, eyes wide. "That's—That's beautiful," she whispered.
"It's horrifying," Daviyi whispered back.
"Yes," Niraí said. "Exactly."
The light from the graves painted their faces in shifting color—Komus red-gold, Ayla soft blue, Cree in stormwhite, Hydeius in violet like bruised royalty. Qaritas's skin shone back twin-toned: violet overlaid with a pulse of warm gold.
Rivax watched the field blaze, eyes gone molten crimson behind the mask. Pride lived in that look, and fury, and something close to grief.
"Every soul," he said softly, "is born with a weapon folded inside its name."
He turned back to face them all, prosthetic hand re-locking around the bleeding wrist like a brace. "Most never learn it. Most die before they ever call it."
Komus found his voice again. "And you just… know them all?"
Rivax's lips curved, humor dark and fond. "I learned at Dheas's side. At Tavren's. Under the Apocalypse."
That name moved through the group like cold air.
Rivax went on. "My father was Ascendant of Demons. My mother—an Archangel. I watched my universe fall screaming into Eirisa's teeth. I crawled through that ruin. I bled in chains. I lost my arm, my leg, and nearly my mind. And then the Apocalypse came."
He lifted his metal arm. The runes along it pulsed. "They cut us loose. They taught us to stand. They taught us that love is a weapon sharper than divinity, and mercy can cauterize as well as any blade."
His voice softened, almost reverent. "We tore our world back from her. We drove her out of the 1999th. We freed demonkind. I forged my first war-blade out of the bone of the thing that tried to devour my brother."
Silence.
Even the Valley's hum seemed to lean in.
Rivax let out a slow breath. "So yes. I know these weapons. I remember what each grave swore to hold."
He looked at each of them—Komus, Niraí, Daviyi, Cree, Hydeius, Ayla, Qaritas.
"Hrolyn broke you," he said, not unkindly. "He made you forget what you were. He convinced you to call survival penance."
His voice dropped, iron wrapped in silk. "Stop mourning."
He pointed to the blazing graves.
"Re-forge yourselves."
The Valley answered with a single, low chord, like a heartbeat struck on steel.
Rivax didn't shout. He didn't gesture dramatically. He just nodded once toward the living graves, and the ritual began.
"Blood to wake," he said. "Blood to answer. Blood to claim."
Cree went first.
They stepped forward with healer's hands and a war-leader's spine, eyes bright with something close to fury. Without hesitating, they drew a nail across their wrist. Their blood hit the ground in a bright flare of orange-white.
The earth responded instantly.
Light cracked open beneath their feet, spilling upward in a column. The glow gathered, spun, braided itself—bone-white cords laced with ember. When it solidified, Cree was holding it: not a scalpel, not a blade. A filament-thin chain of radiant marrow, humming with contained violence. It smelled like cauterized sanctuaries.
Cree stared at it. Their jaw trembled once. Then they nodded, slow. "Good," they whispered. "Stay with me."
Hydeius followed.
When his blood struck the soil, it didn't flare. It sank. The grave in front of him pulsed violet, then black, then violet again. A weapon rose from that grave like an accusation: a long, elegant spear of shadow-crystal, edges so thin they disappeared if you looked straight at them. Whispers came off it like steam—memories, vows, warnings. Hydeius wrapped his fingers around the haft and exhaled through his teeth like someone finally allowed to breathe.
Daviyi went next.
Her blood sizzled on contact, tasting the ground like acid on scripture. The light that answered her was scalpel-precise. She didn't get a sword or a spear. She got a set of six floating blades, each curved for dissection, each orbiting her wrists like loyal moons. They clicked and re-angled with every breath she took, adjusting for strikes she hadn't thrown yet.
Niraí grinned like a wolf seeing the moon for the first time. Her blood, when it hit, burned sky-blue. The ground split with a delighted hiss, and what came up was a bow, but not in any mortal sense; it was strung with light itself—living lightning caught and made obedient. The quiver at her hip filled with arrows that whispered her name back to her.
Komus cut his wrist and yelped. "That's cold—! Oh, that is cold—"
His blood didn't fall. It froze midair in a spray of crimson sparks, then snapped into a blade so thin it was practically an insult. A duelist's weapon. Flashy. Deadly if you laughed at it.
Komus twirled it once. "Oh," he said softly, light glinting in his eyes. "Hello there."
Ayla stepped forward without being asked.
Her cut was clean. Her blood shone gold.
The ground didn't answer with a weapon at first. It answered with light—rising, soft, warm, like dawn swelling in cupped hands. When the light faded, she held something like a staff, but alive. Vines of pale metal spiraled around it, blooming with crystal flowers that pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Protection. Healing. And if she chose, rupture.
She didn't smile. But her shoulders lowered.
Then—
Qaritas.
He didn't move.
Ayla touched his elbow. "You have to."
Eon hummed sweetly inside his chest. Yes, little brother. Let's see what you are.
Qaritas swallowed. His palm felt numb.
He drew his blood.
It fell.
The Valley didn't know what to do with it.
The soil sparked violet first—Aun'darion's color, deep and ancient, the pulse of something old and wrathful. Then, violently, gold surged through it, Ayla's gold, steady and anchoring. The two lights collided, snarled together, tore apart, collided again. For a heartbeat, every grave in sight flickered in sympathy, as if unsure which of him to answer.
Qaritas staggered.
His knees buckled. The air around him warped, heat and static pressing in. He could feel Eon pushing up through him—stretching, reaching, claiming.
Let me, Eon whispered, almost tender. I'll make it glorious.
"No," Qaritas ground out.
His vision went white. The Valley roared in his bones.
Then—Ayla. Again.
Her palm pressed flat between his shoulder blades. Not holding him up. Holding him in.
"Anchor," she breathed. Not a plea. An invocation.
The lights snapped into alignment.
The ground in front of Qaritas split with a sound like a scream cut short. Something rose from the stone—not slowly, not gracefully, but like it was ripping itself free from being buried alive.
His weapon wasn't elegant.
It was brutal.
It was a blade, yes, but too wide for mortal hands, too heavy for mortal wrists. Its edge shimmered between violet and gold, never quite settling—alive with that same double heartbeat that rattled his ribs. Sigils crawled along the flat in languages he didn't know and one he almost did. The air around it felt wrong—like gravity had leaned in to listen.
Qaritas reached for it.
The second his fingers touched the hilt, both heartbeats—his and Eon's—slammed into rhythm.
Eon went very, very quiet.
Oh, he whispered finally, not mocking at all. Oh. So that's what we are.
Qaritas's hands shook.
Ayla's stayed on his back. "You're okay," she murmured.
He nodded once, throat tight.
Across the Valley, Tavren and Rivax had stepped apart from the others.
They didn't bleed into the ground separately.
They bled together.
Tavren cut his palm. Rivax did the same. They pressed their hands together—flesh to metal—and let their mingled blood fall as one.
The Valley reacted like a struck nerve.
Light roared up beneath them in a column of rose-gold and forge-white so bright it threw shadows across the graves. When it cleared, two weapons stood in the stone at their feet like declarations: Tavren's hammer, massive and radiant, runes along its head burning with covenant-fire; and Rivax's blade, long and wicked and beautiful, its edge singing audibly, still hot enough to ripple the air.
For a moment—one heartbeat—they touched.
The hammer's glow bled into the sword. The sword's song resonated inside the hammer. The two weapons recognized each other. Answered each other. Became, briefly, one sound.
Rivax leaned in, his voice low, meant for Tavren alone. "If we fall," he murmured, "at least the weapons will remember us."
Tavren huffed a breath that wasn't a laugh. "And each swing will be a prayer."
"Exactly," Rivax said softly.
The Valley quieted.
One by one, the graves that had flared with Rivax's blood dimmed back to a steady, waiting glow. The hum under their feet softened, slipping from battle-resonance into something like a vow.
All except one grave.
Far at the edge of the field, a single mark refused to light. Its sigil stayed black—burned, sealed, silent. The air above it wavered with heat, though no flame burned there. The wind moved across it in a whisper that wasn't wind at all, a faint shaping of a name no one wanted spoken in this place.
The name drifted across the Valley like a bruise.
Eirisa.
No one said it aloud.
The last of the light bled away. The sky above them deepened from war-purple to something almost night. The hum of Taeterra's heart rose again beneath their feet—slow, uneven, out of rhythm.
Qaritas tightened his grip on the blade that answered both halves of him.
Four days, Eon whispered, voice soft with something that wasn't quite fear. Hellbound awaits.
Qaritas swallowed.
"I know," he whispered back.
The ritual's echoes faded slowly, like heat withdrawing from iron.
One by one, the lights within the graves dimmed to quiet embers, leaving the Valley bathed in a faint afterglow—red, violet, and soft white breathing together like distant stars.
No one spoke at first. The others drifted toward the ridge in small, reverent clusters, each still wrapped in the haze of what they had seen, what they had forged.
Komus broke the hush only once, a muttered "We'll need better armor," before even he fell silent.
The air held its warmth longer than it should have. It smelled of new metal and blood turned holy.
Qaritas lingered, blade across his knees, watching the fading light move along its surface.
Eon's voice rose inside him, quieter than usual—an echo inside an echo.
"Love," he murmured, "is the oldest weapon.
Every covenant, every war, was forged from it first."
Qaritas didn't answer. The silence between them said enough.
Far ahead, at the lip of the Valley, two figures sat apart from the rest—motionless except for the faint shimmer of forge-light breathing through their shadows.
Tavren and Rivax.
The smoke from the still-cooling graves curled up around them in long ribbons, translucent, ghostly, perfumed faintly with oil and ash.
Rivax had removed his mask; the scars across his mouth caught the red glow like lines of molten glass.
Tavren's hammer rested against his knee, the runes along its head still warm, pulsing in slow, tired rhythm.
For a while, they didn't speak. They didn't need to. The quiet between them was older than words.
Then Rivax reached into his chestplate and drew something small from beneath the armor—a shard of metal, blue-white, cut from the plate that had replaced his heart once upon a war.
He placed it in Tavren's palm.
Tavren smiled, faint and raw. From his belt he pulled a sliver of his own rune—one of the covenant sigils that had flared during the ritual. Its edges were sharp, still humming with promise. He set it gently into Rivax's metal hand.
"If they forget us," Tavren said, his voice low, "the steel will not."
Rivax looked down at the tiny exchange of pieces, the metal and the rune gleaming against their mismatched skin. "Then let it remember everything," he said. "Every strike. Every vow. Every name they burned out of the records."
He leaned forward until their foreheads touched. The gesture was neither dramatic nor desperate—it was simple, steady, like two anvils resting together after the hammer's work was done.
Above them, the sky shifted color again—red into violet, violet into molten gold—clouds rippling like breath across the stars. The light from their shared tokens bled upward, reflected in the silver of Rivax's arm. For an instant, it looked like a tear rolling down metal—a mirror to the Hydra's single blue drop still hidden somewhere in the world above.
Behind them, the Valley exhaled.
Its graves dimmed to deep embers, the forges beneath cooling to silence.
From far overhead, the clouds parted once, letting a single shaft of pale gold light fall across the lovers, across their weapons, across the waiting field of the dead.
Then the world went still.
The valley breathed once, as if testing a new heart,
and the night remembered their names in heat and metal.