The silence that coagulated in the fissure in the wake of the retreat was not an absence of sound, but the presence of a profound negative space, the void left by violence. The air was a foul brew of pulverized stone, ozone, and the thick, coppery stench of blood, a miasma that clung to the back of the throat and whispered of failure.

The gentle, pulsing luminescence of the wall fungi had been utterly annihilated by the cataclysmic energies unleashed, plunging the chamber into a stygian gloom broken only by the weak, guttering auras of the two wounded mothers. In the deeper shadows, Lucifera stood, a statue of obsidian indifference, her brilliant white eyes reflecting the scene without judgment, but a sense of protecting those close to her.

The battle of blades and spells was over. The war for their son's souls against the tide of shock and agony had just begun.

Statera cradled Shiro's head in her lap, a fresh wave of nausea washing over her as her fingers traced the horrific, burning X carved into his face. It was a blasphemous sigil, a permanent testament to their failure. Each of his breaths was a wet, ragged hitch. But her Polaris lit gaze wasn't just on him; it was locked on the ruin of Kuro's eye, her heart screaming in a silent, shared agony with Nyxara. "Nyxara... his eye..." she choked out, her own horror for her other son making her voice tremble.

"I see it," Nyxara bit out, her own hands shaking as she gently turned Kuro's head. But even as she assessed the catastrophic damage to his eye, her iridescent gaze was fixed on the bloody X marring Shiro's face. "And his face... Statera, his beautiful face..." The shared devastation, the mutual, catastrophic failure for both their sons, was a bond of torment that strangled them more effectively than any enemy's grasp.

The pain in her shoulder where Athena's dagger was still embedded was a white hot sun, sending waves of nauseating fire down her arm and into her chest with every heartbeat. She ignored it. It was a penance. A fitting counterpoint to the searing guilt that was devouring her from the inside.

"I'm here, my rain baby," she whispered, her voice a cracked and broken vessel. She stroked his hair, her good hand trembling violently. "Mother's here. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." The words were a meaningless, desperate chant, a ward against the horrifying stillness that threatened to claim him. "I failed you. I was right there. I should have been a shield. I should have been faster. Forgive me. Please, just keep breathing." Her own breath hitched on a sob, the movement sending a fresh lance of agony through her wounded shoulder that she swallowed down like glass.

But her litany of despair was a whisper against the raw, unending scream of Nyxara's anguish.

Nyxara had dragged Kuro's upper body onto her lap, his head a dead weight against her arm. The deep, diagonal gash on his cheek was a second, weeping mouth. But his left eye… it was a collapsed star of ruined tissue, a grotesque crater of seeping, primordial darkness that seemed to drink the very light around it. His skin was the colour of old parchment, clammy and cold to the touch. His chest did not seem to move.

There was no build up. The dam had already broken in the previous moments of terror. Nyxara's agony was a continuous, deafening sound.

"Kuro! KURO!" The screams were raw, animal things, torn from a place deeper than her throat, a place where her very soul was being unravelled. She shook him, her hands gripping his shoulders, her own body screaming in protest from the wound in her side where Athena's boot had connected. A sharp, stabbing pain flared with every movement, a pain she welcomed, for it was nothing compared to the gaping chasm opening inside her.

"Answer me! Look at us! Please! You cannot leave us here! You cannot!" Her voice scaled into a shriek that scraped the stone raw. "What is a world without you? It is a hollow, screaming void! It is a clock with no hands! A map of lands that are dust! You our my heart! You are our purpose! You cannot take our heart and expect the shells to keep beating! PLEASE!"

She shook him again, her strength born of pure, undiluted terror. Her body was a tapestry of pain, the deep ache of the gash on her thigh, the fiery throb in her side, the myriad bruises and cuts, all of it was meaningless static against the overwhelming signal of her son's stillness.

Her voice broke, the fury spent, leaving only the barren wasteland of despair. "I can't… we can't do it…" she wept, the words a shattered, broken whisper. She slumped over him, her body curving around his as if to protect him from a blow that had already landed. The weight of her grief was a physical force, pressing him into the cold, uncaring stone. She was giving up. The darkness wasn't just closing in; it was inside her, vast and cold and final. "Don't make us live with your silence… Please… just one sign…"

And then, a miracle. A tremor. A faint, violent shudder ran through Kuro's body.

Nyxara froze, her entire world narrowing to that single, infinitesimal movement. She dared not hope. She dared not even breathe.

A low, wet, rattling sound gurgled in his chest, escalating into a series of harsh, body wracking coughs. It was the sound of a drowned man being dragged back onto a shore of pure agony. He convulsed in her arms; each cough a fresh torment that made him gasp and choke.

"Kuro?" Nyxara breathed, the word a fragile, shattered thing.

His good eye, fluttered open. It was glazed with agony and shock, swimming in a world of incomprehensible pain. It slowly, painfully, tracked through the haze until it found her face, looming over his, a mask of tears, blood, and utter devastation.

His voice was a shredded, broken whisper, the rusted hinge on a door to a room of pure suffering, punctuated by another weak cough.

"…M…Mother…? It… h…hurts…"

The word, that single, shattered syllable, broke the dam completely. A sound ripped from Nyxara, a sob, a laugh, a scream of pure, unadulterated relief that was almost as terrifying as her screams of despair, and she fell upon him. She wrapped her arms around him like a vice, pulling him into an embrace so tight it was as if she were trying to physically weld their broken pieces back together, ignoring the scream of protest from her wounded side.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"I'm sorry! We're sorry! We're so sorry, My son! I'm sorry!" The apology was a torrent, a frantic, repetitive prayer spilled into his hair, against his uninjured cheek. She rocked him, holding him as if the very tides of reality would try to steal him from her again. "We failed you. I'm so sorry. Forgive me. Forgive us."

Across the chamber, Statera watched, her own tears flowing freely, mingling with the blood on Shiro's face. She held him tighter, whispering her own constant, desperate litany. "Hear that? He's awake. You hold on. You hear me? You hold on. We have you" Her own shoulder screamed in protest, the dagger a cold, foreign weight of failure.

She looked up, her eyes wild with a pain that was more than physical. Her gaze found Lucifera, the silent, unmoving witness.

"Lucifera," Statera's voice was hoarse, stripped raw. "The medicines. The strongest sedatives. The Axiom extract. The salves for burned flesh. Anything. For the pain. For the… the wounds." Her voice broke as she looked down at the horrific brand on Shiro's face. "Normally… normally we'd need to stitch… to cauterize… but we can't. Not like this." She gestured weakly at her own impaled shoulder, then at Nyxara, hunched and bleeding over her son. "Not in the condition both of us are in. We can't… we can't be the ones to hurt them more. Please."

Two mothers, themselves broken and bleeding, clung to their shattered sons, their whispered apologies and desperate tears the only balm they could offer. The air was thick with their regret, a palpable fog of love and catastrophic failure, as they hovered on the precipice, their only lifeline the cold, uncertain mercy of the shadows.

Awareness returned to Shiro and Kuro not as a gentle dawn, but as a series of brutal, hammering blows against the anvil of their consciousness. The first was the pain, a symphony of agony so vast and intricate it defied isolation. For Shiro, it was the world reduced to a single, burning, X shaped universe of fire etched into his face, a pulsar of torment that governed every shuddering breath. For Kuro, it was a dual hell: the deep, throbbing ruin of his eye, a black star of suffering, and the secondary, searing ache of the gash on his cheek, a constant, mocking echo of the primary injury.

The second blow was the sight of their mothers.

Through the haze of pain, Shiro's world a narrow, blurred slit of amber, Kuro's a lone, swimming grey eye, they saw them. Statera, her face ashen, her Polaris light guttering like a candle in a tempest, a dagger's hilt still protruding from her shoulder like a vile, metallic growth. Nyxara, hunched and trembling, her multi hued aura dimmed to a sickly smear, her own wounds weeping freely, her expression one of such absolute, shattered devastation that it was a pain unto itself.

Seeing this, a third, more profound agony seized them: a guilt so crushing it momentarily eclipsed their physical torment. They had been rendered weak. They had been made into vulnerabilities. They had caused this.

Instinct, honed over lifetimes of hiding weakness, took over. Shiro's hand, trembling violently, twitched toward his face but stopped, clenching into a fist at his side. He drew a sharp, controlled breath, trying to force his features into something resembling composure, to swallow the scream that clawed at his throat. Kuro's jaw locked, the muscles in his neck cording with the strain of suppressing the animal sounds of suffering that threatened to escape. They would be strong. For them. They would not add to their burden.

It was a futile, heartbreaking pantomime.

A fresh wave of pain, deep and internal from Aella's kicks, lanced through Shiro's ribs. The controlled breath became a choked, wet gasp that escaped him as a stifled whimper. Kuro, trying to shift his weight to appear less broken, jarred his savaged eye socket. A strangled cry, half gargle, half scream, was torn from him despite the iron clamp of his teeth. The sounds were small, pitiful things, but in the tomb silence of the fissure, they were as loud as thunderclaps.

Their mothers flinched as if struck, fresh tears welling in their eyes. The attempt to hide their pain was a deeper wound than the injuries themselves.

"Don't," Statera whispered, her voice ragged. "Oh, my rain baby, don't try to hide it. Please not now."

"Let it out, both of you," Nyxara begged, her hand hovering over him, afraid to touch and cause more hurt. "Do not bury this. Not for us."

It was Lucifera who broke the emotional deadlock with action. She moved between them, her presence a cold, stabilizing force. She carried a small, chest, its contents emitting a faint, astringent smell that cut through the stench of blood. Her brilliant white eyes assessed the scene with a terrifying, dispassionate clarity.

"The facilitators of this misery have retreated. The misery itself remains. It will be addressed in order of severity," she stated, her voice a dry rasp. She knelt first before Statera, producing a pair of cruel looking, needle nosed pliers from the chest. "The foreign object must be removed. This will be disagreeable."

"Them first," Statera and Nyxara said in ragged unison, their voices overlapping in a single, desperate command.

Lucifera did not even acknowledge the objection. Her hand shot out, gripping Statera's arm to steady her. "You are bleeding. You are compromised. A compromised medic is a corpse. And a corpse cannot heal the living." Without another word of warning, her other hand moved. There was a sickening, wet pop as the dagger was extracted from Statera's shoulder. Statera gasped, her body seizing, her face draining of all colour. Before the scream could fully form, Lucifera had packed the wound with a dark, moss like substance that immediately began to glow with a soft, silver light, staunching the flow of blood and seemingly numbing the agony. Statera sagged, breathing in ragged hitches.

The process was repeated on Nyxara with the same brutal efficiency, Lucifera cleaning and packing the gash on her thigh and side with the same strange, glowing moss. The two queens could only watch, helpless, as the shadowy councillor tended to them first, their protests dying in their throats.

Only when they were stabilized did Lucifera turn to the sons.

As she approached with salves and bandages, Shiro and Kuro, through teeth gritted against the pain, found their voices.

"You… you shouldn't…" Kuro rasped, each word a monumental effort. "The salve… for your own…"

"We can wait," Shiro choked out, the movement of his lips pulling at the burned flesh of his face, making him hiss in a breath. "You're… you're hurt worse."

The attempt at bravery, so transparent and frail, finally shattered the last of their mothers' composure. With cries that were both grief and love, Statera and Nyxara, ignoring their own freshly treated wounds, lunged forward and gathered their sons into another desperate embrace.

This time, the sons could not return it. Their arms were too heavy, their bodies too wracked with pain. They could only endure the embrace, a faint, pained sigh escaping Shiro, a shuddering breath from Kuro. But they leaned into it, accepting the comfort they believed they didn't deserve.

Lucifera worked with a frantic, yet precise, energy. She applied a cooling, silver bright salve to Shiro's horrific brand, the substance sinking into the burned flesh with an immediate, numbing effect that made him sob with relief. For Kuro, she used a different unguent, black and thick as tar, carefully packing it into the ruined socket. He cried out, his back arching as the strange medicine made contact, a cold so intense it felt like fire battling the internal heat of the wound.

"The sight is not lost," Lucifera stated flatly, as if commenting on the weather. "The damage is severe. The mark is permanent. But the organ may yet be saved from necrosis. Do not touch it."

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