Levi woke up and didn't know where he was.
White ceiling. The smell of clean cold air. The soft sound of a city outside a window he couldn't see yet. A woman in a chair beside his bed, head tilted, asleep.
He sat up slowly. His body registered the movement with the complaint of something that had been through a great deal and had been given time to think about it.
The woman snapped awake and looked at him with the alert efficiency of someone whose sleep was always shallow near a patient.
"Oh, so you're awake." She yawned. "It's about time. You've been asleep for five days and I was starting to get concerned — but it seems you're completely fine."
"Five days," Levi said.
"Five days. I'm Dr Kesiah. Melissa brought you to me because your injuries were beyond standard healing capacity." She moved to the equipment beside his bed. "To any normal healer, severely damaged internal organs at that scale would've been beyond their ability. To me they weren't."
"Because you've reached the mastery phase," Levi said.
She looked at him. "Yes. How did you know?"
"Only explanation that makes sense." He flexed his hands — no trace of damage, no scar tissue. Clean. "Thank you. I'm in your debt."
"We have free medical aid in Blizzaria. You owe me nothing except to look after those organs I spent three days rebuilding." She sat back down. "And you're not in Olympia, if that's what you're about to ask. You're in Frostilia — the capital of Blizzaria. Far south of your border. Melissa brought you here because I'm here."
He absorbed this. "She brought Sylvia and Priscilla too."
"She did. They recovered faster than you — their injuries weren't as severe." Kesiah folded her hands in her lap. "Before I tell you where they are, I need to tell you how they are. What I'm about to say will prepare you for what you're walking into."
He went still. "How bad."
—
Kesiah chose her words carefully.
"First — a lot happened while you were asleep. I don't have all the details, but the essential: the Kingdom of Olympia has fallen to myth attacks. King Gabriel is dead." She held his gaze. "And Melissa Blaze is dead."
The room was very quiet.
Levi looked at her face for the thing that would come after it — the qualifier, the correction, the thing that would make it mean something different from what it meant.
Her face had none of those things.
"No," he said. Not an argument. Just the word.
"I'm sorry," Kesiah said.
He sat with it for a moment. Then: "The girls. You said before I could walk into what they're dealing with."
Kesiah nodded. "Sylvia's reaction was severe. She went through denial first, which was expected. But when it broke, it broke all at once. She had a full arcana flux outburst — fire, uncontrolled, escalating. We couldn't manage it here at the hospital so she was transferred to the R.K HQ. They have a chamber there built to contain that kind of output." She met his eyes. "She's still there, Levi. She hasn't calmed down. As of this morning she was still in active outburst."
He said nothing. He waited.
"Priscilla is the opposite," Kesiah continued, "and in some ways that worries me more. She didn't explode. She went inward. She's in her room at the accommodation the King arranged and she hasn't come out since she was told. No outburst, no visible breakdown." She paused. "But the staff who've gone near the room report that things inside are wrong. Objects drifting. The air heavy and displaced. Things shifting at the edges. Her arcana flux is leaking — not violently, but constantly. Like a wound that won't close."
"Her grief is destabilising her ability," Levi said.
"Yes. And because it's quiet, because she's not burning anything down, people aren't treating it with the same urgency. But an unstable telekinetic flux left unchecked is not a small thing." Kesiah looked at him steadily. "I'm not telling you this to prepare you emotionally. I'm telling you because you strike me as someone who will try to fix both of them at once and burn yourself out doing it." She paused. "Fix one. Then the other."
Levi looked at her. "Which one first."
"The one who is still on fire," said Kesiah.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kesiah left to call ahead to the palace and arrange the transfer. Levi got out of bed, found his clothes folded on the chair she'd vacated, and dressed slowly.
His mother's daggers were on the table beside the bed. Someone had thought to bring them. He picked them up and settled them at his belt — the familiar weight, the handles that had been worn smooth by hands that were no longer here — and stood for a moment.
Then he went to the window and pulled the curtain aside.
Frostilia spread below him. The buildings were pale stone and dark timber, the streets wide and clean, everything covered in white. The sky was the specific pale of winter at high altitude. Snow was falling — quietly, steadily, the particular peace of a sky that had decided on one thing and was doing it.
He had never seen snow before.
He stood at the window and let it be beautiful, because it was, and because the world continued being beautiful at the same time as it was unbearable, and registering both was the only honest response.
The snow reminded him of something. He let the memory come.
✦ ✦ ✦
It had been past midnight at the Blaze mansion and he hadn't been able to sleep.
He'd gone to the kitchen and on the way back heard the television — low volume, the sound of something being watched with genuine attention rather than filling the silence. He'd looked into the lounge and found Melissa on the couch with a bowl in her lap, watching an animated series he'd loved since he was fourteen. One he hadn't watched since Velvetia.
He'd gone back to the kitchen, collected more snacks than he needed, and dropped himself on the couch beside her.
"Oh, Levi. How nice of you to join me," she said.
"How could I not," he said. "I didn't know you watched this."
"When I get the chance. Which isn't often." She looked at the screen. "I find that not having time to watch it regularly has its advantages — you get to binge instead of waiting a week per episode."
"I hate the waiting," he said. "Especially when they end on a cliffhanger."
"Especially then." She smiled. "Though I suppose all we can do is wait."
They watched in comfortable silence. The lounge was warm. Outside, the estate garden was dark and quiet.
"Sensei," he said eventually.
"Hm?"
"Can I ask you something serious?"
"Ask."
He looked at the screen rather than at her. "I made a promise to my mother before she died. That I would end the war between myths and humans. Since then I've learned more about what the war actually is — how much has already been lost, how deep it goes. And I've been wondering whether that promise is something that can actually be kept." He paused. "Do you think it's possible?"
Melissa was quiet for a moment — the specific quiet of someone choosing words rather than finding them.
"You're not doubting yourself," she said. "You're looking for something to hold onto when you're at your lowest. That's different."
"Yes," he said.
"Then here's what I honestly think." She turned to face him properly. "Anyone with sufficient determination could change the course of this war. The difference between you and everyone else isn't ability — it's that while everyone else is focused on surviving, you're focused on ending the thing that makes survival necessary. That takes a specific kind of courage. And the potential your ability carries doesn't hurt." She looked at him. "I believe you will end this war."
He felt something settle in him. Not certainty — the foundation for it. "Thank you. That's enough." He looked at the screen. "I don't think I can do it alone, though. Which is why I hope you don't mind — you, Sylvia, Priscilla. Walking this path with me."
Melissa looked at him with the expression she wore when something genuinely surprised her.
"Of course Sylvia will walk this path with you," she said. "I would want nothing more for her." Something shifted in her voice. "I'll take you as far as I can. But the path—" She stopped.
"But what?" he asked.
"My gut tells me I won't make it to the end," she said simply.
He turned to look at her properly. "Don't say that. You're the Blazing Beast. You're one of the Seven Wonders. How could you possibly—"
"Being powerful enough doesn't mean being powerful enough to change fate," she said. Not sad — considered. The tone of someone who had thought this through completely. "I don't know what's coming. I just know what my gut tells me."
"Then your gut is wrong," he said.
She smiled — warmly, completely, the smile of someone who appreciated the conviction even knowing what she knew. "Maybe." She looked at the screen. "Promise me something, Levi."
"Anything."
"Take care of Sylvia. She's fiercer than anyone I know, but she carries more than she shows. Be her solid ground. Her strength and her joy." She looked at him. "That's all I ask."
His face went warm. "Sensei, that's almost like you're giving me your blessing."
"I suppose I am," she said, without embarrassment. "So don't waste it."
He looked at the screen. He was smiling despite himself. "I'll be there for her. I promise."
"Good." She picked up the remote. "Now stop talking and watch the show."
✦ ✦ ✦
The snow was still falling over Frostilia.
Levi stood at the window and let the flashback settle into the past where it now lived — fixed rather than fluid, the way memories of people who were gone became fixed. Not gone. Just fixed.
She had known. Not specifically — not the how or the when — but she had known the shape of it and she had lived toward it anyway. In the last hours of her life she had killed four legendary class myths and the traitor who had been designed to end her, and the city was still standing because of her.
That was Melissa Blaze.
He thought about everyone the war had taken from him: his mother, who had killed a legend and been killed by one. Kevin, who had failed four trials and passed the fifth and died protecting a line that held. Gabriel, who had built every sword in his palace with his own hands and met the Sword God in his throne room and spent the last of himself to shatter a blade that would have ended the city. Melissa, who had known the path ended and walked it anyway.
The grief was there. He wasn't going to pretend it wasn't.
But underneath it — steady, unchanged, the thing he'd carried since a poolside in Velvetia — the promise remained.
He pressed his hand against the cold glass and looked at the snow and thought: I'm still here. The path is still ahead.
"Mom," he said quietly. "Sensei. Kevin. Gabriel." A pause. "Watch over me. Because what comes next is going to need everything I have."
He let the curtain fall.
He turned away from the window.
Sylvia was still on fire. Priscilla was still leaking. And somewhere out there, the mystery man was watching something approach the sky.
There was work to do.