All That Glitters
ETERNAL™ | SHORT STORY
I
The execution square in the Lost Region had once been a communal well. Now it was a ring of frost-glazed stones sunk into the earth like blunt teeth, a place where justice and spectacle were forced to share a stage. Snow drifted through ragged banners. Faces—Northerners exiled on duty, freeblades grown tired of loyalties, civilians with eyes like chips of iron—watched from doorways. The smell of pitch and cold steel laced the thin air.
Akono de Agbara stood in the center, sixteen and cloaked in heat. The crimson coat that sat elegantly over the golden wesekh across his shoulders made a soft sound in the wind, like a flag remembering a warmer country. In his hands, the twin curved swords - Rays of Atum- rested in an easy V, their edges bathing in light and emitting a glorious, unwavering glow. That glow came from him as much as from the blades. When he exhaled, the steam from his breath rose through an invisible halo of warmth.
“The sentence is death,” he said. His voice carried as if the stones themselves had agreed to pass it along.
Before him knelt Fafnir’s right hand - Sivrit, of the dwarven-kin raider with shoulders like a fallen lintel and a face crosshatched by old cuts. Shackles pinched his wrists to purple. Behind him, three subordinates crouched in chains, sullen and silent. Sivrit’s eyes—rust in the blue cold—flicked from Akono’s swords to Akono’s face and back again, like a man measuring a river he intends to drown in.
“Today,” Akono continued, “Ojii’s far light reaches even into the northern ruins of the Lost Region. Remember it.”
He flicked a glance at his men. The Third Division was an imposing knot of older desciples wrapped in boiled leather and patterned scarves against the cold. They were legends in their own way—ghosts that had learned to walk in daylight—but the way they held themselves around him was not deference. It was calculation. They obeyed the boy because he wore the fire of stars like skin and because the orders came stamped with Agbara seals. Obedience was not the same as loyalty. He felt that difference like ice grinding against a keel.
Someone in the crowd spat. “Puppy with a god’s torch,” a woman muttered, not nearly quietly enough.
Akono chose not to hear. He raised one sword, and the snow hissed as it touched the heat.
The first scream didn’t come from the condemned. It came from the edge of the square, where a woman burst out of the broken lane, guiding four and a half stumbling men with her voice. She wore no uniform, only a dark coat stitched with an embellished fist embroidery and a scarf tied too quickly to keep the frost from her face. Raiders came after her like wolves, steel singing; one had a Northern war horn tucked into his belt, another had blood up to his elbow like a gauntlet.
Akono’s chest cinched. His heartbeat lost a step and then found three at once. Girlfriend was too soft a word for what she was to him: trouble and tenderness wound together like rope. She had gone north against the council’s pleas—again—to cut cages open when diplomacy would not, to trade quiet for freedom when quiet cost souls. He had asked her to wait. She had kissed his jaw and said, I’m tired of waiting for those who count votes while our people count graves.
“Close ranks!” one of the disciples barked. “Surround the Admeri—”
But the square had already become a tangle of bodies and intent. Arrows fell with a sound like teeth clicking. The Sivrit scurried towards his saviors at full speed with a howl, bones lengthening, muscles leapfrogging under skin; the shackles screamed but held. His men wriggled like eels and slipped away into the hurricane of feet.
Akono stepped toward Sivirit and stopped. His girlfriend was cornered against the stump of an old post, three raiders pinwheeling around her like blades. If he cut left now, his sword would be in the swine’s spine in two heartbeats. If he cut right now, he might keep the woman who had taught him to laugh from dying in a square he had turned into a stage.
Duty. Love. Ojii. A single life.
He hated that the choice tasted like two kinds of shame.
He went right.
The first raider never saw the blade. The second saw the glow and called a god in a tongue older than the frost and died anyway. The third had time to feel the blade impale his throat, look sorry, and then melt from the neck down. The square’s voices surged, then fell into an odd quiet as if even hatred knew when it was outclassed.
When Akono looked back, Fafnir’s right hand was a receding shadow. The chains lay snapped like bad promises. The Third Division’s line had gaps that hadn’t been there five breaths earlier. The disciples smelled like burned rope—anger, fear, and old pride.
He lowered his sword by inches. In the corner of his eye, he found his girlfriend’s face. She was breathing hard. A strand of hair had frozen to her cheek; she wrenched it free without wincing.
“You’re welcome,” he said, too hot.
“I never asked,” she shot back. Her eyes flicked over his shoulder at the space where Sivrit had been. “And you missed your chance.”
The crowd made a sound like an opportunity leaving a room. Akono’s men stood very still. Somewhere in the back, someone laughed once. It was not a kind sound.
Fear did not like to see itself denied. Terror campaigns were hammers; hammers needed nails. Today, Akono had pulled the nail free to keep a hand from being pinned. The hammer looked stupid for a moment, and tools hated that.
Snow hissed. His swords cooled by degrees, and the square settled around a new center of gravity: one where the boy with the crimson coat and the sun’s heat had chosen a woman instead of a warning.
He felt the world mark the moment and move on.
The Council of Admeri had a dominant crest on their doors. They wore rings with ancient sigils and precious jewels. They were nobles; their authority rang out from process and blood. Their presence alone could cut a man in half. Gold from the Kenkara Ravine flourished a room that gathered every thought into an anvil and held it in the air until gravity failed.
Akono stood in the center with his coat on. He did not offer it to anyone. The twin swords cemented to his waist, silent as sleeping moons.
Admeri Atu, who’d seen too many sons turn into captains, tapped his fingers on the table. “The objective was terrorism.”
“It was public theater,” Akono said. He kept his voice even. “Terrorism is what you ask for when you think people are too stupid to count bodies.”
Admeri Lily, seated two places down, pursed her lips; the tiara on her head shimmered. “Whatever the language, the result was failure. The assistant of a known trafficker escaped from a lawful sentence.”
“Lawful,” another Admeri Raza murmured, “and necessary. The Lost Region knows our discipline for its Imminency. We sent a storm, and you brought back mist.”
Akono closed his eyes for a moment. He could feel the gaze of a thousand eyes that weren’t in the room: the people, who would decide who would become the Eternal next; the whispering merchants; the miners who knew how many men had gone down shafts and not come up; the hunters who stalked from the shadows and the fishermen who could tell a change in tides simply by smell.
“You saved a rebel who refuses to coordinate with this body,” Lord Raza said. “In exchange for a fugitive who will now recruit twice as many raiders.”
“She is also our responsibility,” Akono said. “She is a citizen who cuts cages open in a place where our influence stops at death. She—”
“Enough,” said Lady Lily gently.
They scribed the tally in neat lines. Points deducted: two for failure to secure the condemned, one for the collapse of spectacle, one for damage to unit discipline. The kingdom’s votes would come later—the significant weight—but the points mattered now. It was a system built to keep seven candidates from eating the city in one bite. One day, Akono would be grateful for the constraint. Today, it tasted like dull iron.
Agbara hold themselves to a higher degree than any other clan. Their blood could raze nations. Yet, shame could bruise their pride just as much. When they finished, he left with his coat under his arm and his swords sheathed, in his hand
In the corridor, he nearly ran into her.
“Admeri,” Rhea de Hamora said, inclining her head like a fellow craftsman greeting another at dawn. Rhea had a way of occupying space without insisting on it. Calm, contained, her styled afro pulled back to show a face the people already trusted to read their wills. She carried maps in her head and names in her pocket. That combination made Queens. Or made kings possible.
“You heard,” he said.
“I listened,” she said simply. “There’s a difference.”
He waited for pity to roll off her like a wave. It did not. What came instead was a question with a rope attached.
“Let me help,” she said.
He frowned. “Agbara business is not for—”
“I’m sanctioned,” she said. “They’d like me to put out the fires you leave behind. I prefer to rise with the sun and share the glow.”
He should have bristled. He should have told her the Third Division was not a project for soft hands. But something in the way she said sun—without fear, without that little clutch in the throat most people let slip—snagged him.
“Why?” he asked. “The points aren’t yours to win or lose.”
“You’re not just a candidate in a race,” she said, and her eyes were unblinking in a way that wasn’t a challenge so much as a diagnosis. “You’re a son of Ojii aiming the country’s wrath. You shouldn’t have to bear that alone.”
The council’s door opened behind them. Two Admeri flowed past with gazes like paper cuts. Somewhere else in the building, a bell marked the hour. Akono tasted iron again and nodded once. She inclined her head like a promise and was gone.
In the shadow of a pillar, Neema watched Rhea’s back with a look that would have set silk on fire if silk could feel shame. Jealousy was too cheap a word for it. It was hunger, with a knife in its hand.
II
Maps lied. They were honest about distance and wrong about everything that mattered. They didn’t tell you how wind could crawl under a man’s skin and nest there. They didn’t record which ridge carried whispers better than sound. They could not mark the way a unit’s spirit thinned when a boy led men who had already watched more commanders die than this boy had years.
The northern valleys of the Lost Region breathed cold around them as they moved. Ruined watchtowers pin-needled the horizon. In the dark hours, the ice hummed up from beneath like something dreaming far below.
The Third Division traveled light now—four disciples and the Admeri—and Rhea, whose steps neither crunched nor slipped, as if she’d come to terms with the ice in a private conversation it would never share. The disciples gave her sidelong looks at first, then wider ones when they realized she never shouted, never froze, and always had enough food left to offer the man who had dropped his when his hands shook without asking him why.
They followed gossip that had teeth. Sivrit had been seen at a cavern where an old god was said to have once kept their ears. A slave train had passed three nights ago, dragging chains through the snow. A corpse with dwarven footprints around it had been found belly-down in a drift with a gold token in its mouth. Each rumor pointed them northward, toward a line of hills that cut the sky like a scab. The local word for that country was Sheol, which meant a place where names went to wait for their owners to admit they were dead.
At night, Akono took first watch because he didn’t like the way the cold made his mind a still pond with a shadow under it. He warmed his hands over a flame the color of ripe fruit. The fire of Mons Crimson did not consume wood unless he wanted it to. He had learned restraint as a child—first from a nurse who’d slapped his hand when he singed the curtains, then from a mentor who taught him fire could be a promise instead of a punishment. Both lessons tunneled through him now.
Rhea sat across from him, a cloak around her shoulders that looked thinner than it should, and never let the wind in anyway. She stared into the dark, not the flame.
“You burn,” she said, “and think it’s the burn people see. Sometimes it’s the light.”
He rubbed his thumb along the curve of one sword and didn’t look up. “Light can blind.”
“So can pride,” she said mildly. “And shame.”
He felt the slight flinch in his face and hated that she saw it. He tried to herd the words that came next back into his mouth and failed. “I chose her,” he said. “I’d do it again.”
“I know,” Rhea said. “I am not your clan.”
The disciples muttered in their sleep, turning in their blankets. One spoke a name and then apologized to a mother he’d buried twenty years ago. Another snored like a saw. A third held the hilt of an invisible knife and smiled.
Before dawn, the wind shifted. The snow got heavier without looking thicker. They broke camp and moved, taking the kind of steps men take when they know something will happen and are tired of guessing what.
By midday, the line of hills came into focus, and on a ridge between two defunct observatories, the world opened like a bright wound: a circle of standing stones around a ruin whose dome had fallen like a skull caved in with a hammer. Old lenses lay cracked to the sky. Someone had carved dragon teeth into the lintels and then come back later and carved them deeper. Even in the daylight, the place kept its shadows.
Rhea lifted her hand, fingers soft as a lullaby. The unit stopped as if she’d pulled a cord tied to their boots. Akono started to be annoyed and then recognized the wisdom in the thing his body had done without asking.
“Movement,” one of the Rhea whispered. “Heat signatures in the belly.”
Akono felt it, too. Not the heat—Rhea’s device could spit out maps of warmth that made his eyes water—but the way a place fills with intent when men have decided to do harm there. It was like walking into a room where a fight had happened ten minutes ago. The air remembered how to flinch.
He looked at Rhea. She looked back. She nodded once.
They went in.
The cold inside was a more intimate animal than the cold outside. It slipped around the ankles and up the calves, licked the backs of knees, and settled on knuckles like familiar rings. They moved past racks of cracked brass and a platform built for a lens that had been stolen long ago and replaced with stories about where it had gone.
The informant waited where informants always did: somewhere he could run and somewhere he thought men with swords would be too proud to follow. A wiry man with a face like a pine cone, eyes moving as if they were on strings. He smelled like he’d been close to dragon fire recently and was too excited to wash. When he saw Akono, he tried to be defiant; when he saw Rhea, he tried to be charming; when he saw the disciples, he tried to be brave. He failed at two and faked the third.
“You’re late,” he mumbled.
“I’m here,” Akono said.
“You think you know what you’re walking into,” the informant sneered, voice trembling. “You don’t. Fafnir will burn you to—”
“Lead us,” Akono said, and people who’ve lived too long with men who set the tone for rooms recognize that tone when it’s dressed in a boy’s chest. The informant’s mouth closed. He turned.
Rhea’s gaze flicked to a seam in the wall no one else had noticed. The seam shivered once. She opened her mouth and—
The wall roared.
Stone peeled like bark. A pressure wave punched through the chamber and hurled dust into their mouths. The observatory did not merely collapse; it exhaled. Sections of the wall blew outward, and night seemed to pour in, though it wasn’t yet evening. Through the new wounds in the building, silhouettes dropped on cables, scales catching pale light—raiders in half-armor, cheekbones sharpened by their heritage, eyes with the stillness of reptiles.
“Formation!” Akono shouted.
The disciples closed like a fist. Rhea slid to the center, bracing a spear that unfolded in her hands with a whisper of metal and math. A thin, translucent field blossomed from the emitter at her wrist and settled over them like a second skin. The first volley of fire bolts struck and skittered, leaving white scratches of heat.
The informant laughed—too bright, too close—and bolted for a side passage. One veteran reached to catch him and caught a knife in the palm instead. He hissed and tore the blade out with his teeth.
The raiders hit the circle. Broadswords scraped the field with a sound like chalk on bone. Akono moved, and the field accepted his passing as flame accepts a blade pulled through it. He stepped out and became speed.
Light bent along his path. The twin swords drew glowing arcs that ended in dark shapes dropping soundlessly, then ended in sparks where steel met scale. A raider raised a shield and found only incisions in his chest; another lunged and found only the memory of a boy already gone.
Still, there were many. And the observatory had been prepared to be bait.
Rhea felt the emitter’s numbers climb. The shield ate kinetic insult and fed it into capacitors that thrummed against her wrist like a second pulse. She bled the excess into the floor, and the old stones drank it with the greed of thirsty saints.
“Left!” a disciple barked. Rhea turned her spear, caught a blade on its haft, and stabbed into the crease of a pauldron. “Breathe,” she told the men, and the word did what it always did in her mouth: it made room in tight places.
The raiders parted.
What entered the breach was less a man than a verdict. Golden scales showed between plates of blackened iron. A hammer as tall as a man hung from one fist, its head fuming with a slow chemical hunger that curled the air. The eyes above the jaw were not human, but they were not beast either; they were what you get when ambition borrows a body.
“Fafnir,” a disciple said, and the name came out like an old prayer flipped over.
“Agbara!” rumbled the dragon-blood, and his gaze found Akono as if the boy were a coin he’d been tracking by sound alone. “You should have kept your blades tucked and pride quiet.”
Akono stepped free of the circle entirely. The heat coming off him made Rhea’s shield flutter like a breath caught between ribs. “You took your last slave,” he said. “And your last step in my shadow.”
Fafnir laughed. He didn’t throw his head back; he didn’t need to. The hammer lifted.
The first blow broke the floor where Akono had been. The second would have taken a wall if the wall had stayed, but there were only edges now and the sky beyond. Akono slid up those edges like a bead on a wire, cutting as he went. Sparks skittered across scales and died hissing. Fafnir’s swing whistled past and sent a gout of acid against a pillar, which melted the stone into wax.
“Don’t play with me,” Fafnir said, almost bored, and stepped forward with a speed that belonged to limber animals. The hammer came down, a judgment in gold and acid.
Akono met it, and the room rang.
The force of it shoved him to a knee. The floor cracked outward from the point of impact, a stark flower. Flames danced off his shoulders. He rolled, came up, cut over and under, two strikes and a third in between—only one bit. He pivoted again, cut low, found a seam in the armor, and wrote his name in light there. Fafnir hissed. The hiss smelled like coins splattered with blood.
“Rhea,” Akono said without looking.
She was already moving. The emitter’s field was down, but her Usuro Izo was up, and she had expanded it with haste because life insisted. She flipped over the dragon. The lattice changed color. The pentagonal dome surrounded them; a new, brilliant azure lattice ran from Fafnir’s tail to Akono’s back. They were sealed in. Akono’s eyes lit, and an exoshell of light grew.
Akono felt it as if it were a release of intention. The next stroke landed with precision instead of rage. Scales parted where he asked them to. He did not roar; he breathed.
“Better,” Fafnir said, amused—and then not amused, as a cut took him under the left arm where plate met flesh. Molten gold drooled. He swung backhand, fast enough to ruin a man; Akono wasn’t there to be ruined. He stepped inside the arc and wrote a half-circle under the hammer-hand’s wrist. The tendons there screamed; the hammer sagged.
The disciples saw it at once. “Now,” one growled, and they crashed into the raiders with the ferocity of men who know how to be useful again. The circle broke outward in a wedge. Rhea held the barrier steady, the lattice flexing as Akono and Fafnir turned the old observatory into a geometry lesson about force.
Fafnir shifted.
The hybrid shape swelled, not taller—he had enough height—but denser, as if someone had twisted a dial labeled Weight of Intention. The hammer rose light as a stick. He brought it around in a killing sweep.
Akono jumped and did not come down where gravity expected. He let the lattice push him, let it borrow his momentum, let it turn a fall into a slide along an invisible curve. He passed over Fafnir’s shoulder, both blades out, and for a heartbeat, the dragon-warlord wore a radiant collar. He tore free a beat later, bellowing, golden blood painting the air.
The hammer hit the floor and stuck there, hissing, the chemical hunger finally satisfied with granite. Fafnir tore it loose and raised it again—too slow.
Akono stepped into him.
Two strokes, then a third, inverted. Not power; precision. Not rage; decision. The first parted scale, the second parted tendons, the third asked the heart a question it could not answer. Light went in; light came out tinted.
Fafnir made a sound that had no word. The hammer fell like an idea someone had outgrown. He staggered, the hybrid shape losing coherence, dragon and man trying to decide who got to die first. He fell to his knees, then his head slid forward, the molten cracks across his breastplate mapping all the places he had believed himself unbreakable.
The raiders saw a world ending and did what terrified men do: ran to look for a new one.
Silence welcomed the battlefield, patient.
Akono stood over the body and did not move until the heat in him stopped shaking his hands.
Rhea collapses the lattice, energy shattering like glass, then dissipating into the air with a soft, satisfied hum. Her knees remembered to tremble only once it was off. One disciple leaned his forehead against a column and did something that looked like prayer.
“You listened,” Rhea said at last.
“You aimed me,” Akono answered, surprised at how grateful the words felt on his tongue.
“Both can be true,” she said.
III
Outside the shattered observatory, the afternoon thinned toward bruise-blue. The wind had lost some of its teeth as if even the weather paused when a legend fell. Raiders fled ragged into the white, their tracks immediately softened by drift, the hard men suddenly ordinary when the beast behind them stopped roaring.
Akono leaned his blades against his shoulders, point down, and breathed. The heat burned along his arms in pulses, a living thing returning to its den. His girlfriend stood three paces away, chin high, eyes hard. Rhea’s emitter still laced the air with a cage of warmth that smelled like metal warmed by hands. The four disciples were suddenly ten years younger and ten years older at once.
“Inventory,” Rhea said, gently, to the men. The word settled them like a hand between the shoulder blades. They began to count, to bind, to wrap, to write.
Akono turned toward the woman he had chosen in a square of ice when shame had two faces. “You still followed,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She shook her head with more defiance than accuracy. “Obligation.”
He reached to touch her elbow. She didn’t pull away, but her mouth thinned as if the feeling of his heat on her skin angered her because someone else had helped him stoke it. He let his hand fall. “Next time,” he began.
“Next time,” she cut, “I don’t run into your square. I know.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” he said, surprised to discover it was true. “Next time, tell me where you’ll be cutting and when. We can set our lines so you don’t drag wolves into a village when you save sheep.”
“You mean coordinate with the council?” she asked, and her laugh made the word sound like curdled milk.
“I mean coordinate with me,” he said, and the way he said it—tired, stripped, honest—took the blade out of the word despite her. “I’m done letting the kingdom score points. Name my fire. Let me aim it.”
She looked at him for a long breath, then longer. “You chose me,” she said, not admitting anything else, but letting the ghost of a smile show. “Make that mean something.”
“It will,” he said.
Rhea approached then, the warmth at her wrists dimming as she dialed the emitter down. Her hair was a wild, loose mane. She looked at Akono as one artisan looking at another’s work, not to judge but to understand its edges.
“This is the first time we’ve seen eye to eye in a long time,” she said. “And you asked for help. It made the difference.”
He wanted to shrug; he didn’t. “You were right about patience. I was right about time.”
She smiled. “Both can be true.”
One of the disciples limped over, a bandage already darkening around his thigh. “Admeri,” he said, using the title without a slant for the first time in many days, “we’ve got five living captives and three dead. The raiders dropped a pack with correspondence. There’s mention of a ‘Shepherd at the Ice Bridge’—sounds like a code name. Maybe the one who’ll try to pull Fafnir’s pack back together, now that the dog’s gone.”
“Then we’re not done,” Akono said. He looked at the shattered dome. He looked at the line of hills. He looked at his hands. “But we’re not crawling anymore.”
Rhea tilted her head. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m not going to be a monster in public and a boy in private,” he said, speaking slowly as if discovering the shape of the statement as he set it down. “I’m going to be what I am, where everyone can see it. I’m going to cut chains and scare slavers and speak to citizens like I’m not their judge.” He glanced at her. “And when I don’t know what to do, I’m going to ask.”
She nodded, not solemnly, not theatrically—just an assent to a plan that had been waiting for someone to say it aloud. “Then we go home through settlements,” she said. “Not around them. We let people see you walking back with freed men behind you. We bury our dead where the children can put stones on their graves and learn their names.”
The disciples listened with the kind of quiet that comes from a tiredness so complete it becomes a state of receptivity. One of them cleared his throat. “Admeri,” he said, “permission to say something unwise.”
Akono arched an eyebrow. “Say it.”
“You’re a better leader today than you were yesterday,” the man said. “On account of you let us be also.”
Akono didn’t know what to do with the heat that moved through him then; it wasn’t Atum’s. Rhea saved him by speaking to the men again about pack lists and routes and which sled they’d drag the golden carcass out on because the people would need proof to tell their cousins who had stayed home.
By dusk, the unit had become a procession. Captives in blankets, stumbling but unbound. Disciples with poles and sled ropes over their shoulders, a grunt turning into a hymn under someone’s breath. Rhea at the front with a map in her head and meaning in her pace. Akono walking the line like a second spine, not at the point, not at the tail, but where a commander belongs when what he commands is not fear but forward.
The wind came down mild from the ridge. The stars pricked awake one by one. The Lost Region smelled, briefly, not like ruin but like iron cooled after a long day.
At the first settlement they passed, a little northern boy ran into the road and stopped, his knees and jaw all a-quiver. He looked up at Akono the way he would look at a story and a sunrise at once. “Are you him?” he asked in a stage whisper that forgot what the stage was for. “The Crimson Killer?”
Akono crouched. The coat hem touched the snow and hissed once. “It’s just Akono,” he said.
The boy’s eyes slid to the sled where the raiders’ emblem had been draped over the dragon’s severed helm like a net. He swallowed hard. “You’re… a monster.”
“To the right people,” Akono said, “no different from your kin.”
The boy paused. Silence
Akono glanced back. “Exactly.”
The boy reached out as if to test the flames and then, with a look at his mother, tucked his hand back against his ribs. “damn you,” he said. It had the tone of a thief who had nothing to take.
IV
They camped beyond the settlement. Rhea shared her emitter’s warmth with a ring of disciples who told stories about their leader from before he was Admeri. They ate with the liberated they had recovered. Akono sat on a step and cleaned his swords with slow, even strokes. Neema sat beside him, not touching, near enough. After a while, she leaned her shoulder into his just enough to say what pride could not.
“You didn’t burn me,” she said.
“I’m learning what to do with the fire,” he said.
She nodded. “Then we both are.”
In the morning, the sky went the color of iron filings, and the road waited. Word would run faster than they could. The Council would count and discount. The candidates would add a new rumor to the old pile: that the Third’s Admeri had killed a dragon with the help of the people’s favorite, that he had asked for help and shared credit. Some would call it weakness. Others would call it a new kind of strength: harder to imitate than theater, easier to trust than terror.
As they broke camp, Rhea came to stand in front of him. “We still have to find the Shepherd at the Bridge,” she said. “We still have to root out the trade lines. One victory is a spark. We need a hearth.”
“Then we build it,” he said.
She smiled. The look they shared wasn’t romance. It was the look carpenters share when they decide which wall to raise first.
They set out. The wind walked at their shoulders like an old dog, calmer now, not tamed, never that, but recognizing something it could travel with without baring its teeth.
Behind them, the observatory sank back into silence, one more ruin among many. Ahead, the Lost Region made room in its white for a thin black line of footsteps that would, if the weather held, show someone else the way.
Akono adjusted the coat on his shoulders. It felt both lighter and truer than it had when he’d put it on that morning in the square. He let a little more heat into the air—not enough to frighten the elders, enough to keep the toddlers from crying at the cold.
He glanced at Rhea; she nodded once, approving of a temperature no map could mark.
“Onward,” he said.
The word did not boom. It didn’t need to. It moved through the line like a current, turning ankles into a rhythm, faces into a direction, a rescue into a return. Fire into purpose.
And the Lost Region, which remembered everything and blessed nothing, let them pass.