The pen scratches across the bottom of the third document when my phone lights up.
I feel the call through the bond before the screen fully illuminates, a pulse arriving simultaneously with the vibration against the desk. The timing is precise enough to make something lock up in my chest.
I turn the phone over.
Rogue.
I stare at his name long enough that the screen begins to dim.
With only Scorch’s reports and nothing else, no direct contact, no voice on the other end of a line, nothing requiring me to hear how he sounded and make a real-time assessment of where he was. The reports were clean, manageable, the kind of information I could process from a distance and translate into strategic decisions without the inconvenient weight of everything else that comes with him.
The screen dims further, so I act. My thumb moves and slides across the screen, and I answer, “Rogue.”
Silence greets me on the other end. Not dead air. I hear him breathing, slow and deliberate, a controlled rhythm as he chooses his next words with the care of knowing he only gets oneshot at landing them. “Crave.” Rogue’s voice comes through the phone, roughened by something that doesn’t belong to him.
Pressure.
The kind that grinds mountains down to dust if given enough time.
“I need you.”
For a moment, I don’t answer, not because I don’t understand the words. Because I understand them too well.
Something shifts in my chest. Not a crack or a break, I am too old for dramatic fractures. It is subtler than that. The slow, grinding adjustment of something ancient acknowledging new weight.
In all the centuries I have known him, Rogue has called for support, for reinforcement, for strategy, for blood, steel, and war.
He has never called forme.
Not like this.
I draw a breath I don’t need and lean my forearms against the edge of the stone table in front of me, staring down at the map spread across its surface without seeing a single line.
“Tell me where you are with her.”
Silence stretches across the bond, then Rogue exhales. “She’s still fighting.”
His voice steadies as he moves into report mode, the discipline sliding into place like armor. It is the only way he knows how to survive something like this. “We tried Scorch’s Dragonfire first. Forty-minute windows. It burns the hunger out of her system, but it comes back stronger every time, like we’re cauterizing something that refuses to die.”
I close my eyes.
Forty minutes.
“Hades ran the Null Pulse,” Rogue continues. “It shut everything down, completely. When she came back from it,she was hollow-eyed and furious. Said she’d rather fight it consciously than disappear inside it.”
There’s a faint tremor under the words, and underneath that, through the bond, the tight, burning pressure of him hating this choice, hating what she’s being asked to endure.
“She didn’t come back clean,” he adds, quieter. “Kept seeing ghosts for hours afterward. Thought something was following her. Wouldn’t let anyone stand behind her.”
My hand curls slowly against the stone. “What about Dread?” I ask.
“We used fear conditioning.” He pauses for a moment. “It went too deep.” He exhales once. “She didn’t resist it the way we expected,” he continues. “She didn’t push back. She leaned into it. Let it in, trying to understand it, to get ahead of it.” His jaw tightens. “Dread’s work isn’t built for that. It compounds. The more you let it in, the more it gives you.” Another pause. “She took too much of it at once.”
I roll my shoulders. “She sounds strong.”
“That’s just it… she apologized,” Rogue adds, quieter. “For not being stronger.”
I have led armies, watched kingdoms burn. Buried people I loved, but something about that sentence unsettles me more than any battlefield ever has.
