Her jaw tightens.
“That doesn’t make it right,” she says, her voice low, controlled.
“No,” Thalmyr agrees.
And again, it lands harder than any defense could.
Silence settles over the room, thick and suffocating, pressing in on every side.
Ronyn exhales a sharp, disbelieving breath, dragging a hand through his hair.
“You know what I remember?” he says, his voice cutting clean through the tension.
No one answers.
His gaze fixes on Thalmyr, unflinching.
“I remember my baby brother crying because he was hungry,” he murmurs, each word steady, deliberate. “I remember my parents stealing an apple to feed him.”
A beat passes.
“And I remember you hanging them all for it.”
His voice does not break. That is what makes it unbearable. The words drop into the space like a blade. Cold. Precise. Final.
No one moves. No one breathes.
Thalmyr does not look away. Does not deny the casualties of his choices.
Elyssara’s eyes drift to Calira, and for a fraction of a heartbeat, she thinks she sees a crack in her control. But it’s gone as quickly as it arrived. She does not fight for the memory of her mother. Does not fight for the family she lost to this wreckage too.
So Elyssara does. She fights for the man that raised her and loved her as his own.
Her voice follows, quieter, but no less devastating.
“You took Revryn’s wife from him,” she says, her tone stripped of everything but truth. “You built an army of savages that took from her how Rhex took from Nyrielle. So she sent her soul back to the Stars.You did that.”
Calira does not flinch, does not speak, but somehow, Elyssara feels like the words land. Maybe not consciously, but somewhere deep, she knows they cut.
Her gaze hardens, old anger flickering beneath the surface.
“And you called it duty.”
The silence that follows is unbearable. Elyssara feels it in her bones, in the marrow of everything she has been forced to become. She steps forward. Not with fury now. With certainty.
“You took everything from me,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. And somehow, it is the loudest thing in the room.
Thalmyr closes his eyes. Just for a moment. When he opens them again, there is no defense left in them. No justification. Only acceptance.
“I know,” he says.
The words do not fix anything. They do not undo what has been done. But they land.
Elyssara inhales slowly, her chest tight, her pulse loud in her ears as something shifts beneath her anger.
Not softening. Never that. But sharpening. Refining. Because now the truth is clear. There is no more guessing. No more half-understood history or fractured memory. Everything is on the table. Everything is known.
“What now?” she asks, her voice cutting through the silence.
