The sky of that place still remained gray.
After so long, nothing there was new. It was the same as the day before, and the one before that, and the one before that — an eternal plain of solitude and emptiness, covered by a low ceiling of clouds that insisted on blocking the sun even at the peak of day, as though the light itself had given up trying. The kind of place that didn't change because it had no reason to change. The kind of place that forced you to notice time was passing only because you were still standing.
I had already stopped counting the days.
"My Lord… she isn't coming back."
Morgana spoke in a low voice. Without hurry. Without excessive gentleness. With the compassionate precision of someone who has already learned that soft words, in that hour, hurt more than hard ones.
I knew she was right.
The structure in front of me wasn't large. In truth, it was smaller than it should be — an arch of dark stone driven into the ground like a forgotten tooth, too simple for the weight of what it represented. I had already used an identical one to go home, months ago, in a moment that now seemed to belong to another person. But it wasn't the arch I was looking at.
It was upward.
The names descended through the sky like a silent rain.
They weren't projected, they weren't written — they simply appeared, one after another, engraved in the gray color of the sky itself like scars made with extinguished light. Letters that shone for a few seconds with a faint, almost embarrassed luminosity, before rising slowly and vanishing into the horizon. The Oasis made no ceremony. It made no speech. It merely displayed the names of those who would never return — for all the kingdoms close enough to see. A public headstone hung from the ceiling of the world, visible to anyone who raised their eyes.
No one raised them.
I was the only one standing there, my neck tilted back, reading names that descended in a cascade like the closing credits of something nobody asked to watch.
And beside the word "Humans," a number blazed larger than all the others.
Zero.
Zero survivors.
No human who went to the Purge came back.
I processed the information as though it were a system report — with coldness, with distance, with the kind of objectivity you learn to wear after too much time in that world. The number didn't shock me. The number was only a number. What destroyed me was the name in the middle of that cascade that I couldn't stop searching for, even knowing exactly where it was, even having read it three times already, even knowing that reading it again changed nothing.
"I know… I just…"
The word caught in my throat.
It was strange being on this side. I was always the one who entered the portal, the one who advanced, the one who decided to take the risk. Now I was seeing what only those who stay behind see: a name rising slowly in a sky that doesn't care, carrying away everything that person was, everything they could have been, everything they will never be — and the only thing left for whoever stays is the question that has no answer.
Could I have done something?
Deep down, I didn't even know why I was surprised. The signs were too obvious. Piled up, screaming, hanging in front of me like warning flags I chose not to see — and even so, some part of me believed something would happen. That at the last instant, something would change. That the story would have the decency to rewrite its own ending.
It didn't.
"I've seen many names…" Livina spoke at my side. Her voice was drier than Morgana's, cut closer to the bone. "Many I knew. After a while, it gets easier."
I wanted to believe that.
I couldn't.
It was funny — and I use that word knowing there is nothing funny about it — that Eris, at least, had someone who would see her name when it appeared there. Her father. Her family. In some corner of that world, someone would consult that sky, find the name, and know. Would cry. Would remember. The same man who sent supplies every week to keep his daughter alive was going to discover, looking upward, that it hadn't been enough. If it were me, I would be like the names above and below hers — forgotten in the middle of that gray mural that insisted on existing without anyone looking.
With no one to search.
With no one to stop.
"Lord, you gave your maximum. Sometimes, the person has to want it too."
Livina was hard with words.
She wasn't wrong.
But my mind wouldn't accept the clean answer. It had already flown far away — backward, to the moment when the battle had ended and I could still have done differently. The memories were alive. Raw. And mainly the screams.
The screams were branded into me like a burn no healing of the Oasis could close.
✦ ✦ ✦
When I reached the north gate, Fola was already on the ground.
Her body was studded with arrows and spears — so many that the fletchings looked like a second coat of fur being born from her torso, each one driven in at a different angle, each one telling the story of an enemy she couldn't avoid. But it wasn't the arrows.
It was the throat.
A clean, horizontal cut, deep enough that I knew, even from afar, who had done it. Only one creature on that field had skill enough to get close to an Epic heroine and finish what her arrows and spears couldn't.
Leda.
The same one I had killed. The same one who died embracing her brother without giving me her eyes. And there was the price she had charged before going.
Now I understood. Leda hadn't run down to cover her brother in an impulse of desperation — she had done the hard work first. North gate. Fola. The throat. Clean, fast, surgical. She eliminated the most dangerous piece on the board before descending to what really mattered to her. It was tactics, not panic. It was a warrior fulfilling the correct sequence before going where her heart demanded.
My luck was that it wasn't fast enough to stop my sword.
Fola had fulfilled her role. She held the north gate long enough for the rest to survive. Unfortunately, that role cost her life.
Her eyes were still open.
Full of sadness.
Not of pain. Not of rage. Of sadness — as though the last thing Fola felt wasn't the cut, but the disappointment of believing she had died without managing to protect what she needed to.
The heroes were the only things we summoned in our kingdom that had life.
Not life like the creatures and constructions of the barracks — which obeyed, which followed, which did what nature and the system commanded. The heroes had desires. They had voice. They had opinions that weren't always convenient and temperaments that didn't always make things easier. Apart from the incapacity to betray the Lord, they were far closer to something like a friend than anything else the Oasis could offer. And in a world where you spent an entire year — three hundred and sixty-five days, each one longer than the last — with the only truly trustworthy people being those you yourself had summoned, the bond that formed was something difficult to explain to whoever never lived it.
In my case, I had my creatures. The Urskra, Arachne, Pegasus — each of them was more than a resource, more than a piece. But I knew I was the exception. Most people wouldn't even think of spending time and nectar stones on creatures. They were expensive, difficult to care for, they demanded infrastructure that cost capital nobody had. Who would build a stable without money? Who would feed mouths that don't talk?
In the end, for most, the heroes were the closest thing they had to someone to talk to. To trust. To feel less alone in a world that made a point of reminding you, with each gray dawn, that you were far from everything you knew.
And it was exactly for that reason that the woman bent over Fola's body, weeping with the kind of desperation that comes from a place deeper than pain — the kind that comes from solitude recognizing it has become even more alone — seemed to be much more like me than I imagined.
"AHHHHHHHH… No… NOoooo… NOoooo… Please, don't leave meee…"
Eris's screams weren't of war.
They were of abandonment.
Her hands held Fola's face with a strength that trembled, her fingers sinking into the centaur's coat as though squeezing were a way of holding, as though holding were a way of preventing, as though preventing were still possible. Her entire body shook in sobs that had no rhythm — that kind of crying that has already passed pain and entered the territory where the body simply doesn't know what to do with itself.
I stood still.
Watching.
With the pain of my own body consuming me, with the battlefield still smoking behind me, with the weight of everything I had just done and of everything I still needed to do, I stood there — and the only thing that came out of my mouth was:
"Eris. Get up. We won."
The words were hard.
I know they were.
Looking back, now, under this gray sky where the names rise and vanish, I know I should have done differently. I should have knelt at her side. I should have put my hand on that woman's shoulder and said anything — anything that wasn't an order. An "I'm sorry." An "I know what that is." A silence, at least, that didn't have the arrogance of pretending pain has a solution.
I should have hugged her.
But the pain in my body still consumed me. And the exhaustion. And the urgency. And the thousand excuses I had at my disposal to justify why I didn't — and it was for having a thousand excuses that I really didn't. Because when you have reason enough not to act, inaction dresses itself as a reasonable choice. And you move on. And the person who needed you stays behind, on the ground, embracing a body that can no longer embrace her back.
And you don't even notice that you've just pushed her a little further into the precipice she was already leaning over.
✦ ✦ ✦
The following months were silent.
Not the good silence — that of a kingdom functioning, of gears turning without friction. It was the other kind. The kind you only recognize when it's already too late: the silence of someone who stopped asking for help.
Eris stopped talking.
Not all at once. Not dramatically, not with a declaration or a collapse I could point to and say "it was there." It was gradual. Like a tap closing slowly — and when you finally notice, you no longer remember when the last drop fell.
At first, she still appeared. She brought the supplies her father sent — materials, stones, provisions I would never have obtained alone and that made our deal the most lucrative thing that happened to me in the Oasis. We traded a few words. Short, functional sentences, with the exact temperature of someone fulfilling a contract without pleasure or displeasure. I would ask if she needed anything. She would say no. I accepted it.
I accepted it.
That was the problem.
Fortunately — and I use that word with the bitter taste it deserves — the defense of the Gargantua wall stopped being a real concern. Without the Tyrin queen, the attacks were paltry; they served more to feed my growing garrison of Arachnes than to represent any threat. I myself needed to seek enemies outside the wall just to maintain a sustainable structure of evolution. With time, the Castle reached level six — in large part thanks to the resources Eris channeled from her father. I decided to reduce the creation of Yokais and focus on the barracks' production. I bought male and female Crukotons with her help, assembled a farm structure, began to raise my own food for the creatures. What she provided me was something hardly anyone without a name or power would obtain — even someone capable of killing Burmans.
Unfortunately, that was how it worked for humans.
The mission that once seemed impossible turned into a stroll of force composition and strategy. I was evolving. The kingdom was growing. Everything was moving forward.
And Eris was dying right in front of me.
I simply didn't see it.
The signs were there. All of them.
The rage that came first — short outbursts, with no apparent reason, that began and ended in seconds and left a trail of silence even heavier. Then, the frustration — the impatience with small things, the incapacity to finish a sentence without her voice breaking in the middle. And last, what should have frightened me more than anything: the inanition. Not hunger — the giving up. The body that no longer cared about feeding itself properly. The eyes that no longer searched for anything when they looked at the horizon.
Each of those phases was a scream.
And I heard none of them.
When she made her second hero summon, I should have paid attention to the result — and even more to her reaction. The summon was a failure. The creature that appeared was of a race I didn't know, something that looked like a mix of Gnoll and Goblin, probably weaker than humans, which was rare. A normal summon was, to many, something worse than death — it meant an entire year tied to a hero who didn't help, who didn't protect, who existed only as a constant reminder that luck had turned its back.
Eris looked at the creature.
And simply didn't care.
She didn't complain. She didn't curse. She didn't cry. She didn't give that hero a single order. She didn't try a third summon to compensate. She simply… let it be. Like someone receiving bad news about something that no longer makes a difference.
That should have been the second sign.
And I simply didn't see it. Or I didn't care. I don't remember properly — and that doubt, of not knowing whether it was blindness or indifference, is the part that hurts most. Because blindness is an accident. Indifference is a choice.
✦ ✦ ✦
The third sign I remember with surgical precision.
Because it came with words.
We were celebrating — if that could be called celebrating — the nearness of the Purge and the end of my mission to protect her. The contract with her father had changed after the Belt fell and the nest was discovered and discarded as too dangerous for humans: my mission stopped being to defend the Gargantua wall and became simply to protect Eris. To guarantee that no harm came to her until she could go home. The father was head of the family and overprotective — he promised even more resources if I merely kept his daughter alive. To me, it was a greater income than I would have if my entire base were packed with workers. The only thing I needed to do was get stronger. Evolve. Grow.
A perfect deal.
For me.
Unlike me, who could leave at any moment since I had completed the first year, Eris still hadn't participated in the Purge. That was the condition. The portal only truly opened after you survived the Purge. So the best place for her was near someone capable. Eris had told her father about our victory against the Burmans, and he probably saw in me the person most fit to keep her safe until the Purge.
I saw it too.
What neither of us saw was that safety wasn't what she needed.
That night, sitting on the parapet of the wall with the gray horizon stretching as far as the eye could reach, Eris said a sentence I filed in the wrong place of memory. I filed it as a comment. As a sigh. As the kind of thing tired people say at the end of a long day and forget the next.
"I feel like I'm not going home…"
She said it looking at nothing.
Not at me. Not at Morgana, who was nearby. At nothing — as though she were testing the weight of the sentence in the air, waiting for someone to contest it, for someone to say "of course you are"with conviction enough for her to believe it.
I said nothing.
I remember thinking it was exhaustion. That it was the kind of thing you say near the end of a long mission — the natural fear of someone about to face the last trial. I found it normal. I found it human. I thought that, after the Purge, when she went home and hugged her father and slept in her own bed, she would laugh about it. She would say "how silly, I was exhausted," and she would move on.
I thought so many things.
None of them was: "Eris, are you asking for help?"
Maybe I overestimated that woman's capacity to stay standing. I looked at her and saw someone who was in that hell before me, who had summoned an Epic heroine, who commanded a deal that fed two kingdoms. Someone strong. Someone who didn't need me to ask how she was — because strong people don't need to be asked, right?
Right?
I repeated that word in my head there, standing beneath that gray sky, watching names rise slowly one by one, without hurry, as though the Oasis wanted to give enough time for each one to hurt before the next arrived.
Where was my head?
The answer was simple, and it was the worst possible.
In mine.
I was in my own head. In my kingdom. In my creatures. In my evolution. In my next level, my next wall, my next plan. Eris was part of the scenery — the part that brought resources and gave no trouble. The part I didn't need to fix. The silent part.
And I forgot that silence, in people who used to make noise, is never peace.
It's giving up.
✦ ✦ ✦
"My Lord. Your mission is over."
Morgana's voice brought me back.
The gray sky kept pouring out names like a cascade that didn't know how to stop. Hundreds of them. From every kingdom, from every story that ended in the same place and the same way. The Oasis made no distinction. It treated each ended life with the same administrative indifference: a name, a few seconds of faint shine, and the horizon swallowing the rest.
The enormous zero beside the word "Humans" was still there. Blazing. Obscene in its simplicity. No human who entered the Purge came out alive.
None.
My eyes descended through the cascade again until I finally found her:
"Cassandra Bern"
"Vicent"
"Carant"
"Eris Crivald"
"Brina"
.
.
.
Crivald.
I knew that name. Of course I knew it — it was on the contract, on the supply lists, on every transaction that kept my kingdom alive. Crivald was the signature at the bottom of a deal. Crivald was the family that hired me. Crivald was money, influence, and resources arriving every week like clockwork.
I had never heard it from her.
Months. Months at that woman's side — eating from the same resources, defending the same wall, sharing the same gray horizon every morning — and I had never once heard her say her own surname. I never asked where she came from beyond what the dossier told me. I never asked the name of the father who sent the supplies — I only knew him as "the client." I never asked the name of the mother who probably didn't sleep. I never asked whether she had friends, whether she had someone waiting beyond the contract.
She was Eris.
Just Eris.
And to me, that had been enough. I knew "Crivald" the way you know a brand printed on a box — not the way you know a person's name. The surname existed in my head as an entry in a ledger, not as something that belonged to a woman who sat beside me on a wall and told me she felt she wasn't going home.
I caught myself thinking — there, with my neck tilted and my eyes burning — that to her it must not have been enough either. That at some moment of those silent months, while I leveled up and expanded walls and planned strategies, she must have waited for me to ask. Not her surname — she knew I had that from the paperwork. Something else. Anything else. For me to notice. For some of my thousand strategist's abilities to serve to see what was happening right in front of me, closer than any enemy, more urgent than any Tyrin.
And that was the cruelest part of all.
I saw signs of ambush from kilometers away. I read intentions in the gazes of creatures that didn't even speak my language.
And I didn't see a woman dying at my side.
Not of a sword. Not of an arrow. Not of poison or magic or monster.
Of loneliness.
Eris's entire life — her whole story of overcoming, of fear, of pain, of courage, the girl who entered a portal without knowing whether she would return, the woman who summoned an Epic heroine and fought at her side and lost her and kept standing out of pure habit when the reason had already gone — all that life now reduced to a name rising slowly through the gray sky and vanishing gradually forever.Buried in the Oasis.
Without reason.
Without belonging.
Without affection.
And with no one there who knew that her surname was Kuznetsov.
Morgana approached. She said nothing. She just stayed at my side, her shoulder almost touching mine, her presence saying what words couldn't.
Livina stayed on the other side. Also in silence.
The three of us stayed there, looking up, while the names kept descending — and I understood, with the kind of clarity that arrives too late to be of any use, that the Oasis didn't kill only with monsters.
It killed with distance.
With loneliness.
With the empty space between two people who share the same wall and never learn each other's surname.
Her name rose a little more. The letters were almost translucent now — Eris Crivald dissolving slowly into the gray, like ink thrown into water, like a voice no one answered.
I watched until the end.
It was the least I could do.
It was the only thing I could still do.