Liz didn't scream.

She didn't need to. The fire screamed for her.

Her halo exploded – no longer a flicker above her brow, but a full corona of blood-red light that detonated behind her skull like a rising sun. The chamber lit up in a flash of crimson brilliance, banishing every shadow, casting the entire empowerment sanctum in blistering, alien day.

She couldn't even remember the last time she'd touched him. Not truly. Not since the hospital bed. Not since the long silence began. Now all she could feel was that silence – tearing open inside her chest, louder than any scream.

For a moment, everything paused. Even breath. Even thought.

Then her body ignited.

It wasn't flame. Not exactly. It was armour – a shell of jagged psychic energy that wrapped around her frame like burning crystal, flickering in and out of phase with her own grief. Every fracture pulsed with red light, every vein etched in fury. Her hair rose as if underwater, lifted by a wind that hadn't been there a second ago.

She hadn't meant to move. Hadn't planned it. It was like her soul detonated first, and her body simply obeyed. Because what else was left to do when the only man who ever told you the world was safe had been turned into a thing?

The glyph beneath her shattered.

There was no war cry. No declaration. Liz simply moved.

She should've come sooner. Should've burned the world before they ever touched him. But she hadn't. She'd waited. Believed. And now they'd made a machine of him.

Red whips of psychic force snapped outward like lashes from a god.

One tore through an Overseer mid-word – her body disintegrated in a single flicker, bones collapsing into fine, smoking dust.

Another whip slammed an Enforcer into the wall hard enough to paint it.

The next one was bisected – neatly, surgically, as if grief had scalpel hands.

The whips kept coming. A blur of motion. Ten of them. Twenty. A storm with no direction but out.

Cameras popped like eyeballs. Soul-lattice equipment burst into shrapnel. Racks of surgical tools flew backward, embedded in the far wall like thrown knives. The doors slammed shut – stone and steel colliding with a concussive crack that echoed across every ritual surface.

The twenty-eight others left in the room – the ones who were supposed to be blessed – fell to their knees in terror. They didn't cry. They didn't scream. They cowered, small and broken, eyes wide with the realisation that this was not salvation.

This was something older. Something angrier.

Something that had lost a father.

And then— Liz turned.

Max was still there. Still crucified on rusted iron. Still leaking spit down his chest. Still impaled like a specimen.

They were gone. All of them. The ones who spoke his name with reverence while carving the pieces out of him. She wanted to scream louder, but there was no voice left. Just the fire. Just the silence after a scream too long held.

Liz stepped into the light and reached for the chains.

They didn't unlock. They didn't snap. They simply ceased to exist.

One after another, the iron links evaporated under the force of her power – dissolving into motes of red light, consumed by a grief too powerful to be called magic.

The shackles on his wrists. The collar. The chain binding his ribs. Gone.

Only the spike remained. Only the wound. Only the wreck of a man still nailed to the floor by a people who dared call themselves saved.

Liz stood over him, halo burning like a mourning star.

She remembered when his arms felt like home. When he lifted her up as if she weighed nothing, spun her around the living room until both of them collapsed laughing. Now he couldn't even hold up his own breath.

The fire didn't stop. Not yet. Because this was not justice.

This was grief.

And grief still had one more chain to break.

…………………

Max fell like a broken scarecrow.

The moment the last chain dissolved, his body pitched forward – no resistance, no attempt to catch himself. Like a marionette whose strings had been severed, all at once.

Dan lunged.

He caught Max just before his skull struck stone. His arms wrapped around the limp frame instinctively, pulling him down into a crouch, guiding the collapse.

But it wasn't easy.

Max wasn't heavy. He should have been. This was the man who used to carry Dan on his shoulders through fire drills. Who once pulled a screaming family out of a burning apartment and still walked back into the inferno for their dog. Max had been unbreakable.

Now—

Now Dan was holding a corpse that hadn't quite finished dying.

Max's head lolled against his shoulder, hair matted with blood and sweat. His breath came in thin, irregular stutters. His ribs jabbed into Dan's chest. His legs were all bone. The spike still pinned one of them to the floor – iron sunk deep through thigh and stone. Blood leaked down to Dan's boots in thin, dark trickles.

Dan didn't care.

He tightened his grip – careful not to shake him too hard, careful not to fall apart.

He remembered Max the night April died – skin blackened in places, bandages already peeling with blood. He'd been barely conscious, half his body wrapped in gauze, lungs crackling from smoke. But he refused to lie down. Refused to let the medics pull him away. He sat beside the body bag, slumped against the gurney, IV still in his arm. Like if he stayed close enough, she might wake up. Dan had tried to speak, but the only thing Max said – barely audible through blistered lips – was: "I wasn't fast enough."

Now, holding what was left of him, Dan felt that moment collapse into this one. A loop of grief – only worse.

He was supposed to be stronger now. Dan had spent years trying to be the calm one, the moral one, the one who lifted others instead of throwing punches. But none of that mattered if Max didn't survive this. Nothing did.

"You're okay," he whispered. "You're okay. You're here. You're with us."

Max didn't respond. His eyes fluttered half-shut. A tremor ran through his body, like a signal struggling to find the nerve.

Dan could feel it.

The hollowness in Max's chest. The places that had been carved out like meat. The echoes of pain that had nowhere left to go.

It wasn't rage that cracked Dan open.

It was love.

Raw, unbearable, familial love.

Tears welled in his eyes before he could stop them. Not from guilt. Not even grief.

It was Max who taught him how to tie a bandage. Max who shielded him when they fled through the burning house. Max who'd dragged him out of the smouldering wreckage of their old life and said, "Keep walking."

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And now he was a husk.

A relic.

A man who'd spent every last ounce of himself making sure Liz lived… and Dan lived… and the world had one more chance.

Dan pressed his forehead to Max's, shoulders trembling.

"You dumb bastard," he choked. "You held on."

Max didn't move. His breath rasped softly against Dan's cheek. Shallow. Almost imaginary.

Dan's arms shook.

He didn't know what to say. Nothing seemed big enough. Nothing kind enough. Nothing that could unburn what had been burned.

So he just held him tighter.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to kill. He wanted the monsters who did this to vanish from the face of the earth.

But right now, all he wanted—

Was for Max to keep breathing.

Just one more breath. One more heartbeat.

That was enough. That had to be enough. For now.

His arms shook. His throat closed. He tried to say something else, but nothing came.

Just the soft, wet sound of breath through ruined lungs.

Just the quiet horror of how light Max had become.

Just the unbearable truth: The strongest man he'd ever known had been eaten alive— And was still here.

…………………

Liz dropped to her knees beside them – no longer a weapon, no longer the sun.

Her halo guttered like a dying coal. The armour dissolved from her skin in fragments of red light, peeling away like ash flaking off steel. What remained wasn't a warrior. It wasn't a god.

It was just a girl.

A daughter.

She reached for Max's face with trembling fingers. "Dad…"

Her touch was feather-light. Reverent. Like she thought he might shatter.

His skin was too cold.

His cheek didn't move. His eyes stayed open – fogged, unfocused, clouded like milk over glass. One of them twitched. The other… didn't know how.

A thread of drool slipped from the corner of his mouth.

"Dad," Liz whispered again, voice breaking. "Come back. Please."

Nothing.

Just the sound of his shallow breathing, the twitch of fingers programmed to respond to rituals he no longer understood. The face she had grown up loving – strong-jawed, always laughing too loud, always lifting her when the world got too big – was slack now. Hollow.

Liz sobbed.

Not a scream. Not a wail.

Just one breathless, aching sound – like something cracked open in her chest and the rest of her caved in after it. She folded over, forehead against Max's ruined shoulder, fingers curled in his filthy hair. Her shoulders heaved, soundless and shaking.

She didn't care about the others in the room. Didn't care that the air still reeked of blood and fire. That the cameras smoked. That the glyphs glowed faintly.

Nothing mattered.

Her father was here. And he was already gone.

I came too late, she thought. I brought fire, and it wasn't enough.

Dan knelt beside them, silent until now.

He watched her, and something inside him cracked in a place that hadn't felt anything in years.

Max had been the one who caught him after the funeral. After their parents' deaths. The one who taught him how to shave. The one who stood at the back of their wedding, trying not to cry.

He had always been the steady one. The unshakable one. The fireman who never flinched. The brother who never let go.

And now he was limp in Dan's arms like a child's broken puppet.

Dan wiped a line of blood from Max's temple with his sleeve. His fingers shook.

He laid Max down slowly, gently – like he might wake up if disturbed.

Then he swallowed. Hard. His voice came out ragged. "Let me try."

He looked at Liz – not asking permission, just sharing pain.

She nodded, barely.

Then moved aside, still holding Max's hand. Still touching his face.

Because she needed to believe he could feel it.

That maybe, somewhere in the wreckage of him, he still knew—

I'm here. I made it. I found you.

…………………

Dan gripped the spike with both hands.

It was embedded deep – black iron, crusted with rot, still warm from Max's blood. The metal resisted him like it belonged there. Like it wanted to stay. Like it had grown roots in Max's flesh.

"I'm sorry," he breathed again, barely audible.

Then he pulled.

The spike screamed. So did Dan's muscles – cording beneath his skin, shaking with the effort. It felt like dragging a spear from the heart of a mountain. Max's body convulsed weakly, a breath hitching behind pale, broken lips.

The spike slid free.

And Max collapsed into his arms – slack, weightless, boneless. A husk that barely held shape.

Dan eased him down onto the floor, cradling the back of his skull like he might crack open any second. His fingers hovered over Max's face. The skin was hot and clammy. His jaw hung loose. Drool still leaked down his chin.

But it was the eyes that broke him. They were open. But not awake.

Unfocused. Dull. The light that had always lived behind them – gone.

Dan's throat caught.

He stared down at the man who once dragged him through fire. The man who made him laugh harder than anyone ever had. Who taught him how to throw a punch, how to take one, and how to stand up again afterward.

Max was supposed to be the one who didn't fall.

And now he lay on the floor like a discarded doll.

Dan rose to his knees.

And something inside him tore open.

His halo ignited – not a shimmer, not a glow.

A detonation.

Golden light burst from his skull and chest and hands, flooding the ritual chamber like dawn after centuries of dark. His breath tore out of his lungs like he was dying – like he was trading every cell for fire.

The light swept outward.

Not in a beam. In a wave.

A perfect golden sphere erupted from Dan's body – engulfing the shattered glyph, the broken chains, the scorched walls. It pulsed once. Then began expanding.

Ten metres. Fifty. A hundred.

One kilometre in every direction.

But Dan wasn't thinking about that.

He was inside the light now – inside the memories.

Max, carrying him on his shoulders when Dan broke his ankle at age twelve.

Max, holding April's hand in the hospital after Liz was born, whispering, "She's ours. We did this. We get to protect her."

Max, smiling – not like a hero. Just like a brother.

Dan sobbed. Not from grief now.

From refusal.

"You don't die like this," he whispered. "Not you."

Then he reached out – not physically, but deeper. Past flesh. Past thought.

Into the places where pain had buried itself.

He saw the damage.

The severed neural pathways. The psychic scars like cauterized tunnels running through Max's prefrontal cortex. The soft erosion of self. The careful, surgical obliteration of identity.

He saw Zagan's work.

And deeper still – Belphegor's imprint. Not just lobotomy.

Control.

A slow drowning.

Dan raged.

He screamed without sound, and his halo flared white-hot gold.

The light collapsed inward and surged again – flooding Max.

Muscle returned. Bone thickened. Bruises vanished. Veins reignited.

And inside Max's skull – he rebuilt him.

Synapse by synapse. Memory by memory.

Dan reached in and reforged the man he loved most.

And in the wake of that miracle—

Others followed.

The twenty-eight kneeling souls around them – the outcasts, the broken, the sick – each gasped in unison. Legs regrew. Eyes healed. Cancers disappeared in a breath of golden air. Minds once corroded by trauma cleared like stormclouds burned away by sun.

They stared at Dan like he was something sacred.

But he didn't see them.

Above the chamber, cracks split the roof, letting the golden light ascend.

A beam of healing fire shot upward, punching through the cathedral foundations, out through stained glass and sacrificial altars, into the sky.

Across Prague, they saw it.

A sun beneath the earth.

A second dawn erupting from the bones of the city.

Pedestrians stopped. Cars skidded to halts. Children pointed upward. Dogs howled in delight.

And those within the sphere – those who had limped, bled, or wept that day – felt it.

Sores vanished. Lungs cleared. Chronic pain gone in a blink. Lost memories returned like dreams remembered at last. Strangers wept in alleys. Men and women fell to their knees in bedrooms and doorways and market stalls.

The city didn't understand what had happened.

Only that, for one perfect moment, Prague healed.

And at the centre of it—

Max twitched.

He breathed.

He stirred.

Dan fell forward, hands still glowing, tears falling like rain down his cheeks.

Max's eyes fluttered. They blinked. Then focused.

He looked up at Dan.

And began to cry.

…………………

Max stirred.

It was small at first – a twitch in his fingers, a shift in breath. But then his chest lifted. His ribs expanded, slow and shaky. His jaw tensed.

Then his eyes opened.

And they flickered.

Not blue. Not white. Gold.

Dim at first, like a candle behind fogged glass. But then brighter – warmer – growing with each breath that didn't hurt.

He blinked.

And saw her.

Liz.

She knelt in front of him, halo dim now, armour long gone. Just a girl. His daughter. Her face soaked with tears, ash smudged across her cheek. Her lips were trembling.

His voice cracked. Barely audible.

"Liz…?"

She collapsed forward.

Not like someone fainting – but like someone falling into gravity that had finally come back.

Her arms wrapped around him. His around her.

It wasn't graceful. It wasn't strong.

It was desperate.

Max clutched her like a man drowning in light and memory and pain. His hands fumbled over her back, her shoulders, her face – like he couldn't quite believe she was solid.

"You came back for me," he whispered. The words rasped out of him like they were pulled from old wounds.

She couldn't answer. Not with words. Just a nod. Just her body trembling against his, sobs wracking through her chest.

Dan dropped beside them – exhausted, golden light still fading from his skin.

He reached for both of them. Liz's shoulder. Max's wrist.

Three of them. Entwined. Exhausted. Weeping. Whole.

For one long, perfect moment, there were no demons.

No glyphs.

No cathedrals.

Just a father, a daughter, a brother – together again beneath the wreckage of the lie that had tried to unmake them.

Outside, the sky blazed.

The golden beacon pulsed across Prague, a second sun rising from the bowels of the earth. People looked up in awe. Some wept. Some knelt. Some simply stared and felt—for the first time in years – that maybe, just maybe, something sacred had survived.

Back in the chamber, Liz pressed her forehead to Max's.

He breathed her name again. Like a prayer.

His voice shook. "You're alive."

Her fingers tangled in his hair. "You saved me. Again."

Dan's arm wrapped around both of them, pulling them tighter. His chest hitched once—then again. A quiet, broken laugh escaped him. The kind that comes from someone who hadn't dared believe this moment could exist.

Max trembled. "I thought I lost you both."

"You didn't," Dan said, voice thick. "You never did."

Liz buried her face in his shoulder. "We're here. Dad, we're here."

They stayed like that. A tangle of arms, tears, and shaking relief.

Three bodies held together not by strength, but by love that had survived everything – abduction, possession, fire, lobotomy, loss.

Max's halo shimmered – soft gold now. Whole. Healing. Real.

Outside, Prague stared upward, caught in the light of an impossible sun. But down in the dark, in the chamber that had broken so many—

—something beautiful had survived.

Family.

And in that gold-lit silence, Max whispered the only thing that mattered.

"…You found me."

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