Vessaria felt it in the marrow of her bones, though she had no words for what “it” was. The air in this cavern did not behave as air ought to. It pressed against her lungs when she inhaled, thick with something older than breath, as though she had wandered into the depths of a great beast and the walls themselves were ribs, flexing faintly around her. Shadows pooled too deep, clinging where no light had reason to yield, and the silence between Ciaran’s footsteps and her own seemed wrong—dragged out, warped, echoing longer than stone should allow.

Her steps had faltered only once, but that was enough. She cursed herself inwardly. The god’s voice was a poison, slow and insidious, weaving itself between the beats of her pulse. Though its words had not been directed to her, she had felt them, tasted the rot of them as though they were smoke curling along her tongue. It spoke of her as if she were a wound left open, raw and festering, and she hated how easily the words slipped beneath her skin.

She kept her gaze forward, though her peripheral vision betrayed Ciaran’s rigid frame ahead of her. His shoulders, always carried with that measured stillness, had shifted—slightly, but she noticed. The shadows clinging about him seemed restless, twitching as though stirred by unseen winds. She wanted to reach for him, even just to brush her fingers along the leather at his back, but the thought died before it fully formed. To do so would have been to call the god’s attention sharper upon her, to confirm its words. And Ciaran had not looked at her once. That told her enough.

Her fingers clenched around the folds of her gown. She hated how small her breath felt here, how shallow. The god’s taunts rang in her skull long after it spoke them. She is no longer mortal. The scent of her betrays it. Her pulse rings with echoes of something more.

The words should have meant nothing—another barb from an imprisoned creature grasping for cracks—but something inside her knew better. Had she not felt it herself? Nights when her dreams burned too vividly, visions she could not control but woke from trembling, her body too warm, her veins singing with something she could neither name nor banish. There were moments when she caught her reflection and swore she did not recognize her own eyes.

She thought of the first time it had happened. The night before their wedding. She had stood alone in the chamber, staring at her trembling hands, and the shadows had bent unnaturally toward her—reaching, almost reverent. She had not told Ciaran. How could she? He already bore too much, his shoulders carved with a weight none could share. What would he do if he saw corruption where once there had been only a woman he had sworn to claim as bride?

The cavern pressed around her more tightly now. The constellations above shifted in her vision, and though she had tried not to look too long, her eyes betrayed her. She saw it too. The tree.

Eriovax.

The name slid unbidden into her mind, cold as a blade against her throat. She had spoken of it once, long ago, when she had barely begun to understand the fragments of knowledge tangled in her bloodline. She had not meant for him to remember, nor for the truth of it to matter here. Yet the branches shone above them, twisting in and out of reality, veins of light that pulsed like the rhythm of a heartbeat. And gods help her, she felt it answer within her chest.

Her steps slowed for the barest instant. She pressed her lips tightly, forcing them forward again. But the truth gnawed. She knew what the god had seen in her—what Ciaran himself likely suspected but would not name. The branches were not just lines of power. They resonated. They tugged. It was as if she were a graft, her veins laced with their echo, her pulse another root among them.

And the thought of it frightened her more than anything Armok had spoken.

Her gaze flicked to Ciaran’s back again. He had tilted his head once, just slightly, when the constellation shifted. His stance had faltered by the barest measure when the god named her. He could hide his turmoil from most—she had seen him face horrors with that same unreadable stillness—but not from her. Not here. She recognized the rigid line of denial in his shoulders, the faint flex of his fingers at his side. He feared. For her. Of her.

When he finally turned, she nearly stumbled at the suddenness of it. His face emerged from the gloom, the sharp silver of his eyes catching hers for a fleeting heartbeat before shifting past her as though to shield her from too much of his own gaze. The command in his words was steady, perfectly measured, yet she heard the thread of strain beneath.

We should leave.

She wanted to say something—anything—but the weight of the cavern pressed the words from her throat. She swallowed, tasting the bitterness of silence, and only inclined her head once.

Her body obeyed his order, but her thoughts strayed. Leave. As if one could ever truly leave what had been etched into bone and blood. The cavern was not simply a place, it was a truth revealed. A truth she carried in her veins.

As they moved, her steps uneven but determined, she kept her face forward. But within, her mind twisted around the words Armok had left behind. No longer mortal. The god had named Wyddah, and others besides, but none of that mattered as much as the fact Ciaran had not denied it. He had not looked at her, not once, while the voice stripped her bare. Silence, his greatest weapon, had cut her deepest.

And though she wished she could despise him for it, a small part of her understood. If he had turned, if he had met her eyes, the god would have swallowed the truth whole and used it as a blade against them both. His silence had been protection. It had also been distance.

Her chest ached with the weight of it.

The shadows around them shifted as they walked, following their retreat, restless like wolves pacing the edge of firelight. She could feel the god’s laughter lingering, even if the voice had quieted. The words had sunk too deep to vanish. She would carry them out of this cavern, perhaps for the rest of her days.

Yet one thought wound itself more tightly than the rest, refusing to yield.

If she was no longer mortal, then what was she?

Her hands trembled faintly as she clenched them at her sides. She could not ask him—not here, not yet. But she wondered if Ciaran knew more than he let slip. The way he had looked at the tree, the way his breath had caught, told her he had seen more than she could name. And when his eyes had finally met hers, even for that single heartbeat, she had glimpsed something raw behind the silver. Fear, yes—but also recognition.

Recognition of what, she dared not yet admit.

Her gaze lowered to the uneven stone beneath her boots as she followed him out. She forced her steps steady, though the ground still seemed to ripple faintly beneath, as though the tree’s roots extended everywhere, unseen. She bit her lip until she tasted blood, grounding herself in the sharpness of it.

The silence stretched long between them. Longer than she could bear. She thought, for a moment, of breaking it—of asking him outright what he had seen in the constellations, or if he had felt the pulse in her chest the way she had. But the words remained locked in her throat. The god’s whisper had been right about one thing: the fear of knowing held her tongue still.

So she walked, steady but hollow, the storm inside her hidden behind the pale mask of her face. Her eyes fixed forward, as his had, both of them refusing to look at what might already be unraveling between them.

And though her lips did not move, her heart beat a silent refrain as loud as any prayer:

If I am no longer mortal, then what am I becoming? And when that truth comes, will you still choose me—or will you see only the ruin the gods promised?

Ciaran resumed a perturbed quiet as they retraced their path through the Hallow. His steps were measured and precise once again, each strike of his heel against the cavern stone echoing with a rhythm too steady to betray the heaviness coiling through his chest. The less the enemy could read, the less it could wield. The gates yielded to his hand as they had before, each resealed with a sweep of power so seamless it was as though the stone had never parted. The wards burned faintly beneath his palm before dimming, and still he said nothing, mind relatively numb, focusing on keeping his eyes and steps on the way forward.

Only when they crossed the sepulcher threshold and the cold breath of Umbrythar swept over them did he finally inhale. His chest expanded deeply, shoulders loosening by the smallest margin, as if the clean air itself was a reprieve worth clinging to. For one long heartbeat he let himself feel and appreciate the distance from the god’s voice and the outline of the frustratingly mysterious and evasive tree.

The Night King straightened. Shadows stirred around his feet at the faintest beckon, lengthening and bending until two guards materialized from the dark. Their forms were solid, armored, their eyes gleaming with silver as they stepped to either side of the sepulcher entrance and drew their swords in perfect unison. Ciaran approached them quickly, like ill-disguised urgency. His hands closed on their blades, one in each palm, and he dragged his skin down the steel. Silver blood welled instantly, smearing into the edges of the weapons, and the shimmer it left clung as though the steel itself had been reforged in divine fire. The wounds vanished even as the blood remained on the blades.

“To be more potent against an escaped god, if that becomes an issue,” he said at last, the words meant for Vessaria though his eyes never left the weapons. His tone carried no weight of command beyond what was necessary, but the silver gleam of his blood on steel was answer enough for what power he had deemed prudent to lend.

He turned his hand outward then, conjuring another presence from the shadows. Elandrin stepped forth, her form radiant, the hues of sunset shifting across her skin, purple eyes alive with silent obedience. Ciaran inclined his head to her.

“Send a summons to the council and to the scholars of Umbrythar,” he instructed. Elandrin bowed deeply, the glint of twilight bending with her, and then she retreated wordlessly, her light folding back into the dark. With that done, Ciaran moved forward again, leading the way into the heart of the palace. The guards remained where he had stationed them, warding the sepulcher.

Inside the great halls of Umbrythar, where the air no longer pressed with fetid murk but breathed heavy with old stone and shadowed forest scents, Ciaran finally turned. His gaze sought Vessaria’s, silver eyes steady but wary all the same -- not necessarily of her, but more a wariness of what he had seen and heard stirring in the depths. He couldn't think of what to say.

So he looked at her instead, standing still in the pale glow of the palace’s light, and let the silence stretch while he searched for the right question, the right moment, the right thing to do when the truth she carried still hung heavy in the air between them. Or had it been truth? Not even Ciaran was impervious to the twisted words of the beings hosted in the Hallow, and he knew that. It was was the main reason for his silence; he had to be sure of himself and what was real versus falsehood before even attempting to broach the subject of what had occurred. Finally, he said, "I will admit that the state of the prison is far worse than it was a month ago. I do not know how much time we have if it continues on its exponential course."

Her first breath of Umbrythar’s air felt like surfacing from the bottom of a blackened sea. Vessaria let it fill her lungs, slow and deliberate, the chill tang of shadowroot forests clinging to the back of her tongue. Her fingers flexed at her sides, unclenching only once the sepulcher doors sealed shut behind them, shutting away the voice that had coiled like smoke through marrow and memory. She had held her composure inside—she always did—but only here, under the strange familiar weight of this realm, did her shoulders ease by the barest fraction.

She trailed a few paces behind him, silent, watching the sharpness of his movements as he armed the guards. The sound of his blood hissing against steel caught her attention, and though she did not flinch, her throat tightened at the sight. Silver. The reminder of what he was—and what she had bound herself to—settled heavy in her chest. A strange thing, to see a man wound himself so casually, and stranger still to see those wounds vanish as though they were illusions. She wondered if he felt anything at all when the edge split his skin.

The guards accepted the gift of his blood without word or hesitation. Vessaria’s gaze lingered on them as they stationed themselves, steel glimmering faintly with the light he had poured into it. Weapons sanctified by his essence—she could almost hear the priests of Thaloria shrieking at the blasphemy, could see their hands clutching at their relics while their mouths foamed with condemnation. Yet here, in Umbrythar, the act was not desecration. It was necessity. It was strength, cold and practical, without any veil of sanctimony.

Her eyes shifted when Elandrin stepped from the dark at his command. The woman’s beauty was a different kind of radiance, soft yet untouchable, a twilight woven into flesh. Vessaria studied the bow of her head, the way her light folded neatly away again when dismissed, and for an instant something in her chest stirred—curiosity, perhaps, or a prickle of unease at how readily such beings answered to him. She wondered if Ciaran noticed that he moved like a fulcrum in this place, that even silence bent itself around him until it seemed natural for all others to follow.

When the halls of the palace finally opened around them, vast and hushed, she stopped. Her steps faltered of their own accord when his gaze turned upon her, the silver of his eyes catching what little glow the sconces spilled. He looked at her in that way he did sometimes—quietly, searchingly, as though he were trying to unmake her into something he could understand. She met the look, unflinching, though her breath lodged somewhere between her ribs.

The silence hung like a blade drawn but not swung. For a heartbeat, she thought he might break it with accusation, or worse, with the unyielding command of a king. Instead, his words came measured, admitting what she had already known: the prison was failing.

Her lips parted, but no immediate answer came. The truth—the real truth—pressed hot against her tongue, the echo of the god’s voice still slithering through her mind. Son of mine, it had said, and she had felt the world tilt under the weight of it. She could not tell if the claim was truth or trickery, and more dangerously, she did not know if he feared it more than she did.

“I felt it,” she said finally, her voice low but steady. “The decay. It was not just in the stone or the wards—it was alive, festering, as if something inside had already begun to eat its way free.” Her hands folded before her, fingers threading tightly together. “If it spreads as you say, then time is no longer a luxury. We walk in days, not months.”

Her gaze flicked away, tracing the black-veined columns that rose into unseen heights. Shadows curled against them like restless smoke. “You would not have bled yourself into their weapons if you did not fear what might come. You say it was precaution, but I see what you do not say.”

Her eyes returned to his, sharp with the unspoken accusation. “You think it will break. Not someday. Not eventually. Soon.”

The words tasted of iron. She wanted him to deny them, to tell her she was wrong, that her mortal perception of the Hallow had made the corruption seem worse than it was. But she knew better. Ciaran did not bleed his blood lightly. He did not summon councils for shadows.

“I should be afraid,” she admitted, softer now, though her tone carried a defiant edge. “I should be trembling, knowing that the god who calls you son may soon walk free. But I am not.” Her chin lifted, the faintest tilt of defiance. “What frightens me is not him. It is what you will do when he comes for you.”

Her heart thudded hard at her own daring. Perhaps it was reckless, speaking aloud the thought she had carried since the sepulcher—the thought that his silence had already confirmed. But she could not choke it back. Not when every step toward the heart of Umbrythar felt like steps toward a storm none of them could avoid.

She exhaled, long and quiet, then let the stillness swallow her words. For a moment she only stood there, the pale light skimming over her hair, her dress, the tension strung through her shoulders. She did not fill the silence again. She let him decide what weight her words would carry, if any at all.

Yet inside, where he could not see, she braced herself—not for the god’s escape, not for the war to come, but for the answer he might give.

Sorry, I am suffering from good ol' writer's block, so this one is a bit short))

The unease about Vessaria, combined with her words -- which he was fairly sure were meant well -- brought out a flare of childish offense in him. Ciaran huffed, the sound sharp and edged, the indignation flaring in him before he could temper it. His voice followed, clipped yet ringing with finality, “I am not his son.”

The words echoed in the cavernous hall, biting into the silence and creating a new quiet even more thick than the first. However, the defiance in the sentence wilted almost as quickly as it rose. His shoulders eased fractionally, not so much in surrender as in the weary acknowledgment of how tangled such truths could be. He sighed, the sound less sharp this time, more resigned.

“Gods, immortals, and humans are not all that different,” he continued, though his tone carried a tired sort of gravity. “Though the gods -- the most complex of us -- have more ways of bringing about offspring.” His gaze drifted toward the massive black columns, not meeting hers. “Some can clone themselves, creating beings equal in power, yet saddled with the same weaknesses. Others do it the common way. And others… form a body from some material and place their own essence within it.”

He drew in a breath, let it out slow. “I am one of the latter. In that sense, I suppose, Armok is my father. I am his son only in as much as the word suits convenience. We share many of the same abilities. But my body was forged from the blood and bones of another goddess, the goddess of the heavens -- the mother of Solara and Lunareth, though I'm not sure how much mortals know or talk about her in comparison to the twins. Anyway, because I was made from another being outside of Armok's power, I am not bound to my maker in the same way another half-clone or full copy created from the elements would be. He cannot simply reach inside me with his essence and turn me to his will.”

Ciaran shook his head then, a scowl hardening his features as though the mere thought left a bitter taste in his mouth. “Armok finds my irritability amusing, nothing more. That is the extent of his claim over me.”

His voice grew neutral but firm, the indignation tempered into something more deliberate and precise. “The point of all that was to say I have my agency. Armok cannot control me through the thread of his being, no matter what words he speaks or what truths he bends. For that, he would have to reach for alternate methods.” His silver eyes lingered on her now, having turned from the rafters to his greatest strength -- and his greatest weakness. “Such as you. Or words about you that I can neither confirm nor deny.”

The Night King let the ensuing silence stretch for a moment, refusing to break it too quickly. He did not move, save for the faint flex of his fingers against his thigh, as though some shadowed thought coiled there and would not unspool. When he finally spoke again, the bluntness in his voice had not lessened, but it was now accompanied by a seriousness that demanded no evasion.

“What do you believe has happened to you?”

The Night King’s sharp words had not startled her, though their echo carried a sting through the cavern that even silence struggled to contain. Vessaria stood her ground, gaze steady on him as indignation flared and then tempered into weary honesty. His rejection of Armok, of the title of “son,” was not bluster—it was raw and wounded, laced with an exhaustion that spoke more of burden than denial.

She listened, absorbing each word of his explanation—the forging of his body, the blood and bones of a goddess not Armok’s, the sliver of agency carved into him by that difference. Vessaria heard the quiet scorn in his tone, the shadowed weight in his shoulders, and she understood enough to know this was no small offering. For him to speak of such truths was to bare fault lines in his being that others might exploit.

When his silver gaze fixed on her again, unyielding, his question struck like an arrow: What do you believe has happened to you?

The question hung in the air, demanding no evasion.

Vessaria did not answer at once. Her hands folded loosely before her, a gesture that looked like prayer but held the weight of defense. Her gaze flickered briefly away from him, to the black pillars that loomed like watchful sentinels, before she met his eyes again.

“I do not think you are his son,” she said softly. Her words carried no sharpness, only the tempered certainty of her own belief. “Not in the way mortals mean it. Not in the way he wants it said.”

She drew in a slow breath, her voice steadying as she began. “What I believe has happened to me… is not simple. Something was planted in me long before I knew your name. A thread tied at birth, perhaps before, meant to tug when the time was right. Whose hand tied it, I cannot say. It would be easy to believe it was Armok. But what I carry does not feel like his claim. It feels older.”

Her steps carried her closer, soft yet deliberate, until her words could fall lower without losing strength. “When the priests of Thaloria called me Bride of the Moon, I thought it only a title to bind me to ritual. But when I crossed into Umbrythar—when my foot touched your earth—I felt something answer. Not to the priests. Not to their god. To this place. To you.”

Her breath caught on the memory, but she pressed on, unflinching. “I do not think I was merely chosen. I think I was made. Perhaps not as you were, not forged with intent and hammer, but shaped, all the same. Shaped to fit a place beside you. Shaped to be a key in a door I have not yet seen. There are echoes in me. Not commands, not strings—but resonance. As if part of me has always been waiting to wake.”

She held his gaze then, giving him truth as he had demanded it, unsoftened by fear. “I am not only Vessaria Nemea. I am something more—or less—depending on who looks. And if Armok thinks to use that to reach you, then he underestimates me. He may have threads in me. But threads can be cut.”

Her words lingered in the chamber, not loud, not sharp, but wrapped in a quiet conviction that seemed to fuse with the silence rather than break it.

//No no You're fine :) Dont worry, It happens to the best of us.//

Ciaran’s silence stretched long after Vessaria’s final words yet again. The cavernous halls hushed, keeping her voice within its ribs of stone as if even Umbrythar wished to contemplate what she had offered up. Instead of wandering away as he wished them to do, his eyes fixed on her, unblinking, as though the solidity of her conviction had unsettled him deeper than he would allow to surface.

For a moment, he did not see her at all. The sight of her blurred into vague recollections that he had tried to press down for centuries, and his eyes once again witnessed the shattering of the skies, when Solara’s light and Lunareth’s shadow, once wove together in perfect symmetry, split and fractured under the pressure of war. The mortals of Thaloria had long held the Sun and Moon in high regard, and yet, during the battles that rent the tapestry of the sky and forged the hell that was the Hallow, Solara and Lunareth had vanished in silence.

That silence had never truly ended.

When his vision returned to the present, to Vessaria’s pale and unyielding face, he straightened slowly.

“You believe you were made.” His gaze narrowed, silver irises catching the faint glimmer of the columns' obsidian veins. “There is truth in that. I cannot say whether or not your body and spirit were conjoined for a purpose, but I do believe that the long hand of mortals, who could not abide a silence their gods would not break, made a part of you.”

His eyes drifted briefly upward, where unseen beyond the cavern roof, the constellations shifted in their faltering patterns.

“They called it the Bride of the Moon," he sighed, his voice carrying both disdain and remembrance. “It began after the Hallow was sealed, after Solara and Lunareth withdrew from their temples, their voices gone from the ears of priests who had once claimed certainty. Mortals grew restless. Fearful. They needed balance, as we all do -- sun and moon, light and shadow -- yet the balance was broken. And so they looked to me, the half-blood cast-off, child of the night, brother by blood if not by grace. Tainted, yes. But I was close enough to Lunareth that their desperation forged a bridge where none should have been.”

His mouth curved upward faintly, but it was the ghost of scorn rather than any emotion that could bring about a true smile.

“Solara and Lunareth stood as siblings, equal halves of the firmament. Mortals could not imagine a world where their union was anything but familial harmony. And so, to restore that harmony, they sought a different familial union: matrimony. They desired a bride to stand beside me, their so-called Night King. Every century, the oracle would choose a vessel -- pure and unscarred, willing or unwilling mattered little -- and send her here, into Umbrythar, into my keeping. They thought her presence would ignite mine, that her mortality would be the key to immortality’s door, that she could coax open the gates of the Hallow and summon the twins back into their rightful places.”

Ciaran sighed again, this time looking slightly guilty, like a child who had been scolded for playing with his food. “I did not stop their ceremonies. Not because I believed in them; I found it quite stupid. I knew even then that matrimony forged of desperation and superstition would not have any effect on the ways of the heavens. I allowed it only because to refuse them meant incessant, irritating, and obnoxious pestering. Mortals grow dangerously annoying when their fear festers into hunger. Better to let them believe their rituals held weight than to endure their endless assaults upon my borders. So I played my part, I buried the women they sent when their mortal span ended, and the centuries turned over and over. I cannot tell you how many centuries have passed; they've all blurred together.

“The Oracle's picks were nothing but echoes, each of them. Echoes of a song that was never meant to be sung. Until you. When you stepped into Umbrythar, the stars reacted.” His chin tilted up slightly so that he was watching her with lower eyelids. The expression was neutral, but a thread of contemplative bewilderment made its way to the surface. “But they reacted with failure. Constellations dimmed; the sky itself faltered at your arrival. For centuries, their rhythm was unbroken, even as mortals prayed in vain and brides passed through these halls. But when you crossed my threshold, the heavens changed. Perhaps the priests were not entirely wrong. Perhaps there is something in their tradition that even I, in my arrogance, dismissed.”

Ciaran clasped one wrist behind his back and lowered his head again. “I am certain you are not the key they dreamed of, but you may be a key nonetheless. If your resonance stirs the fabric of the skies, then perhaps you are bound not to me alone, but to the silence that swallowed Solara and Lunareth. Perhaps you were shaped to wake them.”

There was a hesitant beat of silence before he added, with deliberate precision and pointed syllables: “If they still exist.”

He did not disguise the uncertainty he felt; Ciaran had not felt any hint of their presence outside of the literal sun and moon for eons. “I have not seen them since the Hallow was sealed. I do not know if their forms endure, or in what form they would endure, or if they were unraveled into the void. But if they do live, if they can be found and stirred from their exile, then perhaps… perhaps the four of us together could bind what is being fractured. We could permanently close the Hallow and restore balance not through mortal rites, but through the power that once was, magnified by what you are becoming.”

His voice fell into silence. His silver eyes remained fixed upon her expectantly. "Bride of the Moon, Daughter of the Sun... Hmm. I wouldn't mind a family reunion."

Vessaria did not move when his voice fell quiet. Her chest rose and fell in a rhythm that seemed steady, but in truth it strained against the storm surging beneath her ribs. His words were a tide, dragging her into depths she had not imagined—truths unearthed like bones in the soil, left to bleach under cold starlight. And yet she stood, her face pale and unyielding as before, as though she too were carved into the ribs of Umbrythar’s endless stone.

Her eyes lingered on him—silver, unblinking, sharp even in their contemplative bewilderment. The Night King, with constellations etched into his skin like living scars, stood as if the heavens themselves answered to him and him alone. And yet there had been something else—hesitation, a sliver of guilt, a confession that even his timeless arrogance could not polish into certainty. That, more than the words themselves, caught her.

“You speak of them,” she said at last, her voice low, meant for the cavern as much as for him, “as though they were myths that once carried flesh. As though Solara and Lunareth were more than light and shadow—more than symbols woven into every cradle-song and prayer of Thaloria. To you, they were blood and kin. To me, they were stories.”

Her lips parted, then closed again. The cavern pressed close with its silence. She forced herself to keep her eyes upon him, though every instinct whispered that to look too long into the void of those silver irises was to surrender ground.

“I was raised beneath the priests’ assurances,” she went on, quieter, but no less steady. “Every dawn I was told Solara breathed warmth into my chest. Every dusk I was told Lunareth swallowed my dreams to turn them into prophecy. Their names filled my mouth before I had teeth to speak. Yet I never saw them. Never felt them. Never heard more than echoes of silence, gilded by men who could not bear the truth of absence.”

Her throat tightened, but she pressed onward, her voice gaining steel. “So when you tell me that I may be their key—that I might have been shaped to wake them—I do not know whether to laugh, or spit, or fall to my knees. Because part of me has yearned all my life to believe that the stories were more than chains. That Solara and Lunareth did not simply abandon us, did not betray their mortal children with silence. If there is even a fragment of truth in your words, then what has my life been, if not a slow march to this very moment?”

She let her hands fall loose at her sides, though her nails dug crescents into her palms. Her gaze did not waver.

“But you speak as though I should be grateful,” she said, quieter now, though the edge of defiance glimmered beneath it. “Grateful that your mortals chose me, as they chose the others. Grateful that I may be some instrument of restoration. Do you not hear yourself? Do you not see what you are suggesting? If I was made for this, then I was never allowed to belong to myself. My life, my body, my spirit—stitched together not for my own sake but to serve the silence of gods who could not bear to face the world they abandoned.”

Her words hung between them, sharp as shattered glass.

She inhaled, slow, steady, dragging the weight of his revelation into herself until it threatened to splinter her spine. “You say the constellations dimmed when I arrived. That the stars faltered. You see failure. I see proof that the fabric of this world has already begun to unravel—and perhaps I am not here to mend it.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, and for the first time, a flicker of something dangerous glowed behind them. “Perhaps I am here to unmake it altogether.”

The admission tasted bitter and sweet at once. She could not stop it from leaving her tongue.

Her voice steadied, cutting through the cavern’s breathless hush. “Tell me, Night King—what if Solara and Lunareth are not meant to be woken? What if their silence is not absence, but refusal? What if they sleep because the order you speak of—sun and moon, balance and harmony—was a lie from the beginning? What if the heavens trembled not because I failed to match the song, but because I was born to sing a different one?”

Her heart thundered in her chest, but her tone remained cold, measured. “Do you understand what I am saying? That perhaps I was not made to restore what was, but to end it. To sunder sun and moon, silence and shadow, until there is nothing left of the old order. Not reunion. Not harmony. But release.”

The words echoed back at her, chilling in their certainty. For a moment, she thought she heard the faintest sound—the shifting of unseen stone, or perhaps the ripple of some great presence stirring in the dark.

Vessaria’s eyes softened slightly, though they did not lose their fire. “And yet… you speak of family. Of reunion. You—who scoff at mortal desperation, who mock their ceremonies, who scorn the very idea of matrimony—speak now of binding yourselves together, four broken beings, to seal what was never yours to close.” She tilted her head, studying him. “Why? What is it you fear, Ciaran, that would drive you to wish for their return? For their harmony?”

Her voice sharpened. “Do not tell me it is for balance alone. You have lived centuries without them. You have endured silence longer than any mortal mind could dream. What makes you now whisper of reunions?”

She stepped closer, not so near as to be bold, but enough that the obsidian veins caught faint glimmers in her eyes, making them burn with reflected starlight. “If I am to be your bride, your key, your undoing or your salvation, then I will not move as an echo. I will not be an ornament draped beside you, nor a vessel shaped by others’ hands. If I am to wake gods, or slay them, or become the fracture that splits the sky itself, then it will be because I chose to.”

Her words fell sharp, unrelenting. “You say you would not mind a family reunion. But if Solara and Lunareth return—if they stand before you in flesh and form—do you truly believe they would embrace you as brother? As kin? Or would they see only the half-blood cast-off, the tainted king who wears their silence like a crown? Tell me, Ciaran: what place do you imagine they would grant you in their harmony? At their side—or beneath their heel?”

The question landed like a stone cast into still water, and she let it sink, watching the ripples unfold in his silence.

For a long moment, she said nothing more. Her breathing slowed, and her hands, still balled into fists, eased open. At last, her voice came again, quieter now, more raw, though no less resolute.

“You say I was made. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I was woven from desperation and superstition. But every stitch still bleeds when it is cut. I am not merely a vessel. I am not merely a bride. If I am to be a key, then I will decide what door I open.”

She drew in a breath, steadying herself against the enormity of the moment. The cavern loomed vast around them, the silence pressing close as if Umbrythar itself had leaned forward to hear her final words.

“And if the gods do still exist,” she murmured, her gaze never leaving his, “then they will answer to me as much as they answer to you.”

//ouu fiesty side ynlocked xD//

Ciaran bit his tongue to keep himself from interrupting, though mild irritation still flashed across his features. When did I ever suggest that? he wanted to argue. I never said I saw failure. Yet the thought burrowed at the back of his mind with unwelcome persistence. Had he implied it without meaning to? He had spoken of the stars dimming, yes, and of the tremor in the constellations when she stepped into Umbrythar. But that had not been a condemnation. It had been fact. Still, facts, when spoken by him, carried weight that mortals always twisted into judgment.

He huffed softly through his nose, silver eyes narrowing as his thoughts turned inward. He had watched millennia pass in monotonous procession, mortal kingdoms rising, fracturing, burning to ash, and reemerging again in other names. He had received daughters, priestesses, and brides in endless cycles, one handpicked by oracles after another. They had all been told they were chosen. They had all believed they carried some destiny that would draw the gods from silence. Through it all, the heavens had remained steady. The constellations had burned without falter, until Vessaria.

So perhaps she had a right to accuse him. Perhaps some trace of failure had touched his voice. He did not think of her as weak, no, but for the first time, the stars themselves had reacted. And what did that mean? Was it a herald of something greater, or a foretelling of collapse? Even he had no answer, and the uncertainty gnawed at him more than he would ever confess, particularly after coming face-to-face with Armok. He shook his head slightly, dismissing the train of thought with the habitual impatience of someone long accustomed to solitude. This is why I never bother talking, he reminded himself. Mortals always twisted the shape of words into things he had never meant.

As Umbrythar’s queen -- though the title still sat oddly on his mind -- challenged his interpretation of the celestial twins’ silence, a muscle in Ciaran’s jaw twitched. The air grew colder, a subtle shift that the stone itself seemed to recognize. The massive obsidian pillars that lined the hall stiffened beyond their natural hardness, as though bracing themselves against a storm he might unleash. He glanced at them with a dry, reproachful flick of silver eyes, and the chamber exhaled again, returning to its customary weight of watchful silence. He had not yet lost his temper, but the room, like all things in Umbrythar, anticipated him.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. He almost smiled at the thought, though the expression never reached his mouth.

Her tirade had carried with the fury of a thousand cannons, but as it dwindled into something quieter, he stepped forward. His movements were heavy with the gravity of a being who rarely chose to move at all. Closing the distance, he inclined his head until he was nearly nose-to-nose with her, the chill of his presence radiating back to him with the proximity.

“The gods,” he said at last, his voice just as soft as hers had been, but lined with frost, “do not answer to me at all.”

He watched her carefully, searching the storm of emotions that flickered across her face. Her eyes, sharp and burning blue, met his without flinching, and for the briefest instant he thought he caught something of himself mirrored there. The fire was hers, but it had been fanned by his words. Have we spent so long together that she takes on my mannerisms? he wondered, the corner of his mouth twitching with the barest trace of irony. No, she had always carried this spark. He had simply thrown kindling onto it, and now it burned brighter than perhaps even she expected.

He straightened again, drawing back to return her space. His voice remained steady, clipped, matter-of-fact.

“If Solara and Lunareth are no more, then you have already laid eyes on every single remaining god in this world. Wyddah. Latayel. Zel’lathal. Zel’aran. Zel’idar. Armok, Aranyak, Quir, Even, Zeba, Jeth, Naga, Mir’avar, and Cynthe.” He recited the names as if pulling them from stone tablets, his tone cool, stripped of reverence. “That is the list in its entirety. There are no hidden deities slumbering in forgotten temples. There aren't any saviors lurking in the ether. If the twins are gone, then they are gone. The order you speak of has already fractured.”

His gaze lingered on her, and he added with quiet finality, “And I am not a god.”

His voice softened, though not with warmth. “It was never my desire to rule. I may look like a king, Vessaria, but I am only a soldier. That is all I have ever been. I adapted to this role because Umbrythar needed a shield, and because the mortals would not leave me in peace unless I wore a crown. That crown is a burden, not a prize."

His mouth hardened into a grim line. “So understand this -- I never claimed you were forged in body or mind. I meant only that your title was forged. Fabricated. Bent into shape by desperate humans. Your actions, your choices, your defiance -- those are yours alone, as you have made abundantly clear.”

There was a flicker of something close to humor in his tone, though it was nearly buried under his habitual dismissal. For a man like him, it was as close to a joke as he would offer.

Yet his eyes did not lose their edge. He returned again to her words, her dangerous suggestion that perhaps she was meant to unmake, not restore. He couldn't say he liked the sound of that. He studied her in silence for several long breaths, then spoke again, more slowly, as though measuring the weight of each word.

“Perhaps you are right. Perhaps Solara and Lunareth do not wish to return and their silence is deliberate. But consider this -- if they are gone, if they chose or were forced to abandon what they once held, then what remains to fill the void?” His voice grew colder, sharper. “Chaos does not remain idle. Power left unbalanced festers. It births corruption. You saw it yourself in the Hallow. You smelled it. You felt it. It is not release that waits on the other side of collapse, Vessaria. It is rot.”

The silver in his eyes glimmered with a frigid fire of his own. “And that is why I speak of family reunions. Not because I crave their embrace or imagine myself welcomed as kin, but because this world cannot survive untethered. You think me arrogant enough to stand against the tide of gods alone? No. I am weary enough to seek allies where I must. Even from those who would see me beneath their heel.”

He tilted his head, expression unreadable. “You ask what I fear. I will tell you. I fear nothing for myself. I have lived long enough to know my place in the pattern, and I have walked through every trial it has cast. But I fear what will become of this world if balance is lost entirely. Not because I care for mortals -- though you may believe that if it comforts you -- but because even Umbrythar will not endure unmoored chaos. And if my silence allowed it, then their silence will finish it.”

Ciaran paused then, as though closing a door within himself. He shook his head and returned to his original thought. “So no, Vessaria. I do not see you as failure. I see you as disruption. There is a definitive line between the two."

Vessaria did not recoil. She felt the cold pulse from him, that unyielding frost which had silenced mortals before her and kept even Umbrythar itself taut in anticipation of his will. The chamber seemed to breathe with him, as though it, too, awaited his judgment. Yet where others would have bent their heads beneath the weight of his words, she did not bow. His voice might have carried the cadence of law, but for her it struck like flint, sending sparks deeper into the marrow of her bones.

Disruption. The word lingered in her like a living thing. It might have wounded her once, when she still thought her purpose fragile, when she still believed she had to prove herself against the shadows of women who had walked these halls before her. But not now. Not after what she had seen, what she had felt in the Hallow’s depths, what she had survived in the face of gods who would devour the world rather than see it free. Failure, he had not called her. Weakness, he had not named her. He had spoken truth sharper than accusation: she was a fracture line. A disruption. And perhaps that was not condemnation, but revelation.

Her lips parted, but for a heartbeat, no sound came. She let the silence stretch, let it coil through the cavernous hall until even the obsidian pillars seemed to lean nearer, listening. Let him feel that she was not cowed, that she carried silence as power just as he did.

When at last she spoke, her words slid free like a blade drawn slowly from its sheath. Her voice was low, but sharpened, each syllable deliberate enough to strike.

“And what is disruption, if not the first stone cast into stagnant water?” Her eyes burned as they held his. “What you name chaos, I call change. Perhaps the silence of Solara and Lunareth is not neglect, but mercy. Perhaps it is not balance that sustains this world, Ciaran, but the breaking of it.”

She stepped forward. The motion seemed small compared to the vastness of the chamber, but the sound of her boots against stone rang like defiance. The cold radiating from him coiled around her, biting her skin, settling into her lungs. Still, she moved closer until his shadow stretched fully across her body. She tilted her chin upward, daring his frost to freeze her flame.

“Rot festers when nothing stirs it,” she pressed on, her tone fierce though quiet. “When the same roots choke the same soil for too long. When no hand dares to tear them free.”

The truth of it burned through her, raw and unbidden, words she had never spoken even to herself spilling loose as though pulled from the marrow of her soul. Had the priests ever known? Had the oracles truly seen, or had they simply clothed ignorance in prophecy? Perhaps no one had understood. Perhaps she was not meant to restore anything. Perhaps her purpose was to unmake.

She drew in a sharp breath, steadying herself against the tremor rising beneath her ribs. But she would not let him see her falter. “You say I was fabricated. That your crown is nothing but a burden carved by necessity. Then tell me, why do we clutch the bones of their order like relics, when even you admit the structure cannot hold? Why wear their crown, why bear their names, why echo their silence when all it breeds is rot?”

Her hand rose unconsciously, carving through the heavy air between them as though tracing constellations only she could see. Her fingers trembled faintly with the intensity of her conviction, but she did not lower them.

“What if my title was never forged?” Her voice dipped softer now, though danger coiled more tightly in its quiet. Her gaze held his, unwavering, searching for any fracture in the soldier’s armor he always wore. “What if it was born? Not of their will. Not of their games. But of the void itself. What if I was not chosen by gods at all, Ciaran—what if I was chosen by their silence?”

The words reverberated through her chest, through the pillars, through the very air. They seemed to echo in places beyond the chamber, as though the unseen threads of Umbrythar itself had pricked awake to listen.

Her heart beat hard, but not with fear. No, it was something sharper, stranger—an ache of certainty that terrified her more than doubt ever had. To be chosen by gods was a story she could live within, even if she defied it. To be chosen by their silence…that was something else entirely.

Her gaze did not waver, though her chest heaved with the effort of the storm she had loosed. She studied him, the silver fire in his eyes, the cold crown that sat upon his head like a punishment more than a prize. “You call yourself a soldier,” she murmured, her tone shifting, softer but no less searing. “But soldiers obey orders. Tell me, then—whose orders do you obey now? The gods you name gone? The mortals you claim you do not care for? Or the silence that has shaped you as surely as it has shaped me?”

The distance between them was a breath, a heartbeat, a gulf. Her voice dropped further, almost a whisper now, but sharp as the point of a blade: “And if it is the silence that binds us both, Ciaran, then tell me—are you truly its shield, or are you its prisoner?”

Vessaria’s words still rang in the hall long after her voice had stilled. They echoed along the obsidian pillars, folded themselves into the seams of the stone, pressed into the silence as if Umbrythar itself weighed and measured what she had dared to speak. She stood within that silence, her chest rising and falling as if she had run a great distance, though she had taken only a handful of steps.

Her hand lowered slowly to her side. The trembling in her fingers refused to stop, no matter how she willed it, but she refused to curl them into a fist. Let them shake. Let him see. They trembled not with weakness, but with the force of something too vast for her body to contain.

Her eyes remained fixed on Ciaran, though a part of her longed to look away. He stood as he always did—stone-faced, carved from frost and shadow, his expression nearly unreadable save for the flicker of silver fire in his gaze. He was not a man who yielded easily, not in stance nor in thought, and yet… she could not shake the sense that something in him had shifted. Whether it was a tightening or a loosening, she could not yet name.

Inside her, the storm roared. What have I done? she wondered, not with regret, but with awe. She had spoken what no priest would dare, what no oracle had ever whispered: that perhaps she was not chosen by divine light, but by divine absence. That perhaps her crown was not a gift at all, but a curse made flesh. A void’s answer to a void.

And yet the more she turned the thought, the more it rang true. Since her arrival in Umbrythar, the air itself had felt different around her. The stars had stirred. The constellations had trembled. The Hallow had breathed her name in voices not her own. None of it matched the neat promises the temple had told her. None of it bore the hand of gods long silent. No—everything pointed to the truth she had just bared. It was the silence that had chosen her. Silence, absence, disruption.

She swallowed, her throat raw, as though her own words had burned her on the way out. But beneath the rawness was clarity. She remembered standing in the temples of Thaloria, the suffocating scent of incense, the way priestesses had spoken her destiny as though it were scripture etched into her flesh. She had never believed them—not fully. Even then, something in her had rebelled, whispering that they spoke only to comfort themselves, not her. And now, in this cold hall of shadow, she had finally given voice to that rebellion.

Her heart thudded hard against her ribs. She had struck at him with more than words—she had struck at the foundation of all he carried. She had questioned not only the gods but his place among them, his crown, his role, his endless burden. She had dared to ask if he was shield or prisoner, and she knew the question was no less a blade than any he wielded.

Would he hate her for it? Would his frost turn on her at last? Or… would he recognize himself in her words, the same way she had caught glimpses of herself in his?

She searched his face, desperate for the smallest betrayal of thought. The cut of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes, the way his silence grew denser with every breath—it all pressed down on her, made her ache with the weight of anticipation. He was not a man who revealed easily. But if he gave her even a single crack, she would pry it wide open.

A sliver of fear wormed through her chest, not of him, but of herself. She had not meant to speak so plainly, not meant to cast her defiance into the air like a gauntlet thrown. And yet she had, because the thought of remaining silent was worse. She was tired of silence. Tired of crowns carved from lies. Tired of being told what her fire was meant to burn for.

If I am disruption, she thought, then let me burn until nothing remains hidden. Not even him.

She clenched her jaw, steadying her breath, and forced herself to meet his silver eyes without flinching. The tremor in her fingers did not matter. The rapid beat of her heart did not matter. What mattered was this: she had spoken, and she would not take the words back.

No matter what storm they stirred.