They have no magic. No marks. No training. They crossed dimensions for Elle, and they did it without hesitation. I think about that sometimes. What it means to show up for someone when you have nothing to bring except yourself.
Mora is still on the walkway beside me.
A medical pack is strapped across one shoulder, and she hasn’t stopped moving since the first wave. Wrapping bandages. Applying pressure. Dragging wounded defenders to cover.
She looks up and catches my eye. There’s blood on her hands, someone else’s blood streaked across her cheek. Her braid has come half undone.
She is, without question, the most beautiful person I have ever seen in any realm, any dimension, any iteration of reality that has ever existed.
“Still here,” she says.
“Still here.”
Two words. That’s all we get. Then another construct hits the wall and I’m turning, sonic pulse, dodge, Kevin screaming past my ear to sting something.
I catch myself staring at the Cathedral during a lull.
Peeble is in there with Elle, Kaelren, Thalia, and Nimor. Doing whatever it is you do inside a walking cathedral made of dead realities, vine armor, and the consciousness of a man who turned himself into a building because he was sad.
Which, by the way, is the most Kaelren thing I’ve ever heard. The man can’t just be depressed like a normal person. He has to become architecture.
I think about what Peeble would say if they were on my shoulder right now. Something about constructs having no manners. Something about refusing to die without dignity. Something sharp and theatrical that would make me laugh at exactly the wrong moment and remind me that we’ve survived worse than this.
Have we survived worse than this? I’m actually not sure. This might be the worst one.
Kevin buzzes from my shoulder. Missing his beetle.
“They’ll be fine, buddy,” I say.
Kevin doesn’t believe me. Neither do I. But we’re saying it, because that’s what you do when the people you love are somewhere you can’t follow and the only thing left is to hold a wall and wait.
Mora finds my hand between waves. Squeezes once. Lets go.
That’s enough. That’s everything.
The ground shakes violently.
The Cathedral goes rigid.
Every vine. Every tendril. Every petal-mouth, frozen mid-gape. The root-legs lock in place.
The constructs freeze a second later. Across the entire battlefield, every single one of them stops. Mid-charge, mid-climb, mid-swing. They stand like statues, locked in whatever position they held when the signal cut.
Silence.
After hours of grinding, screaming, cracking wood and breaking bones, the silence is so sudden it hurts.
Sarnyx is beside me.
“Something happened,” she says.
We stare at the Cathedral. The sickly green pulse in its walls is gone, replaced by a flat, steady glow. Unmoving. Locked.
Then, from somewhere deep inside the structure, a light.
A bright, white light bleeds through the vine armor in thin lines, pushing through cracks in the bark plating, spreading outward.
Mora grabs my arm.
