Ella finally broke the silence. “Now what?”
Her voice sounded small for the first time since I had met her. “How are we supposed to helphim?” She shook her head slowly. “Didn’t legend say Caelor burned in the depths of Nox Eternum?”
The phrasing struck me instantly. Notyourlegend. Simplylegend, implying an unspokenour. Like me, Ella no longer saw herself as human first. She belonged to this story now. To the Arkhevari.
Dravok exhaled slowly. “My memories are much clearer now,” he admitted. “And many things I thought true aren’t.”
His dark gaze drifted toward the Shard of Echoes secured across the room. “Our memory must have become faulty over the years.”
“Fuzzy,” Zapharos corrected mildly. “Not faulty.”
Dravok gave him a dry look. “A distinction without much difference.”
“Suit yourselves,” Thyros drawled lazily. “Mine is perfectly fine.”
I bit back a smile. Even exhausted and emotionally wrecked, he somehow still managed to sound unbearably arrogant.
Zapharos snorted. “You were not born yet, whelp.”
Thyros rolled his eyes dramatically. “Yes, yes, I know. You’re ancient. Revered. So superior to me in every imaginable way.”
A grin tugged at Zapharos’ mouth. “You were merely a spark drifting in Nox Eternum when our war began.”
“Tragic for all of you, really,” Thyros replied solemnly. “Imagine having to survive without my brilliance for several million years.”
To my surprise, laughter rippled through the room. Real laughter. Warm and familiar. There was no bitterness beneath the teasing. No resentment. Only affection forged through endless war. And through the bond, I felt something inside Thyros easing at last. For so long, he had viewed himself as separate. Other. Wrong.
But now he sat among the surviving Arkhevari as one of them, accepted so completely that they mocked him like family and he mocked right back. The realization softened something deep inside me. Zapharos’ expression grew thoughtful again.
“It is true, though,” he admitted quietly. “I believed the females died.”
He rubbed a hand over his face as though physically trying to reorder memories millions of years old. “When in reality… they fled.”
“To Terra Nova,” Nadine added immediately, snapping her fingers. All of us looked at her.
“The duplicate of Earth.” Wonder still threaded through her voice. “I still can’t fully process that.”
Ella shook her head slowly. “The first world recreated.”
“The legend that the females died alongside the elders might not be completely accurate,” Nadine theorized softly, “but that doesn’t change the fact that only the younger Arkhevari remained.”
Without Aelyth. Without balance. Fighting an endless war alone. Silence settled heavily across the room. Because that loneliness still lingered inside all of them. Millions of years of loss. Of waiting. Of believing the other half of their souls had vanished forever.
Thyros looked at me, and everything in his expression changed. The loneliness receded beneath something warmer. Something awed.
“She came back to us,” he said quietly.
Emotion lodged painfully in my throat. Not just me. All of us.
Ella reached for Zapharos' hand.
Nadine drifted instinctively closer to Dravok.
For one fragile moment aboard our battered ship, surrounded by darkness and war and impossible revelations, it felt as though something ancient and broken inside the universe had finally begun to heal.
“Still,” Ella broke the heavy silence, “now what? What are we supposed to do now?”
“Wait.” Thyros lifted a hand.
