Lyrathiel's delighted laughter was the only sound, a cascade of silver chimes that seemed to sharpen the stunned silence around it. "A twist truly worthy of the oldest ballads!" she repeated, her luminous eyes dancing between the queens and their sons. "All that fearsome power, given a name. A heart." Her gaze, sharp and ancient despite its playful glint, settled on Shiro and Kuro. "But such a bond… it begs a question far more intriguing than battle formations. If they are your mothers… then from what shadowed lineage do you two spring? The last scion of a fallen court and a Polaris Lumina who has walked alone for an age… how does such a tree bear such unexpected fruit?"

The question, posed with theatrical curiosity, was a scalpel probing a wound still raw and weeping. The pressure in the chamber intensified, a vacuum waiting to be filled with an answer that could not be given. The twins felt it, the weight of a hundred hostile, curious stares. But more than that, they felt the immense, protective pressure of their mothers auras flare around them, a silent, desperate command to let the question lie.

It was this pressure, this unspoken plea, that catalysed a physical reaction. The humiliation of their helplessness, the vulnerability of their scars, and now this public inquisition into the very core of their new, fragile identity, it was too much. A spectacular, furious heat bloomed beneath their skin.

It began on Shiro's neck, a flush of crimson that climbed with alarming speed, painting his throat and flooding his cheeks, a stark, violent contrast to the angry, silvered stitches of the X brand. It was a blush of pure, defiant mortification.

Simultaneously, a matching tide of colour rose on Kuro's face, starting at his collar and surging upwards until his ears burned a brilliant, furious scarlet. Even the skin around his black salve packed socket seemed to glow with an angry, internal fire. The "Storm Baby" and the "Rain Baby" were, in that moment, a perfectly matched set of incandescent embarrassment.

Lyrathiel's smile widened into a grin of pure, mischievous delight. "Oh, and what is this?" she purred, leaning closer as if examining a fascinating new species. "The living weapons blush! The 'Twin Stars' flare with the heat of a red giant! Does the truth of your origin burn so brightly, or is it merely the heat of a mother's gaze that sets your skies on fire?"

The twins were paralyzed, caught between the public scrutiny and the unyielding, silent pressure from Nyxara and Statera. They could not answer. They could only sit there, radiating a heat that felt like it could melt the very stone of the chamber.

Seeing their utter, flustered incapacity, Nyxara moved with the swift, decisive finality of a queen ending a dangerous line of inquiry. She stepped forward, her multi hued light, which had been a protective corona, now sharpening into a blade of authority that cut through the thickening atmosphere.

"The origins of my son and his brother are not a subject for this council," she stated, her voice a glacier scraping over bedrock, leaving no room for argument. "They are here. They are mine. That is the only genealogy that holds any relevance for the war to come." Her gaze swept the room, daring anyone to contradict her. "The past is a corpse. We are here to discuss the future we will carve from its bones. Umbra'zel. Phthoriel. Your reports on the mustering of forces. Now."

The shift was jarring, a violent wrenching of focus from the intimate to the apocalyptic. But Nyxara's will was a force of nature. Reluctantly, with muttered complaints and sidelong glances at the still flushing twins, the council's attention began to turn.

Yet, Lyrathiel was not so easily dismissed. As Phthoriel of Betelgeuse began to speak in his low, grinding rumble about the slow cooling of his warrior castes, the Vega poetess drifted closer to the twins' side of the stone table.

"Do not mind the old magma breather," she whispered conspiratorially to Shiro and Kuro, her voice a melody beneath the droning report. "His thoughts move as slowly as his people. And you," she said, her eyes twinkling, "must not let our grim company stifle you. Anyone who can make those two formidable women glow with such… maternal intensity… is a friend of mine. You may call me Aunty Lyra. I have known your mothers since they were girls trying to set the academy ablaze with more than just ambition." She winked. "I know all their secrets."

The battle planning continued, a grim exchange of numbers, positions, and bleak assessments. Statera pointed to ethereal maps of light, indicating potential weaknesses in the Black Keep's void shielded spires. Nyxara spoke of supply lines through the dead zones, her voice cold and strategic.

In a lull, as the logistics of moving Betelgeuse's stone legions were debated, Lyrathiel, Aunty Lyra, cleared her throat delicately.

"It is a sound strategy, Nyxara," she began, her tone innocent. "But I recall a time when your idea of a 'flanking manoeuvre' involved convincing a pack of celestial hounds that Professor Aurelian's robes were made of mutton. Your tactical genius has certainly… evolved." She turned to Statera. "And you, Statera, my dear Polaris. So precise, so measured. I remember when your 'precision' involved misaligning every star chart in the dormitory because Nyxara beat you at Stellar Conquest. For a week, the poor girl couldn't cast a light spell without making her hair smell of wet dog."

The effect was instantaneous and glorious. Nyxara, the Queen of a fallen court, flushed a deep, furious amethyst. "Lyrathiel! That was a calculated… a tactical misdirection!" she sputtered, her composure cracking.

Statera's Polaris light flickered erratically. "The records were… in need of recalibration!" she insisted, a rose coloured blush staining her own cheeks. "It was a… a service to the academy's archival accuracy!"

The twins stared, their own embarrassment forgotten in the face of this new, incredible sight: their mighty, terrifying mothers, reduced to sputtering, red faced girls by a single, well aimed memory.

It was too much for Umbra'zel. He slammed a fist, a thing of condensed, cooling fury, onto the stone table, the impact echoing like a cliff shearing off into the sea. "Enough!" he roared, his voice a blast of furnace heat. "This is a council of war, not a nursery reminiscence! We are planning the extinction of a kingdom, not trading tales of juvenile pranks! Treat this with the gravity it demands!"

Lyrathiel turned her serene gaze upon him. "Oh, but Umbra'zel, that is precisely what I am doing," she replied, her voice still melodic, but now edged with an unyielding core. "You speak of extinction, of gravity. Those are empty concepts without a 'why.' They are the cold equations of a dead universe." She gestured to the flustered queens and their stunned sons. "This is the 'why.' The laughter, the blushes, the memories that make even queens feel young and foolish. This is what Ryo seeks to eradicate. Not just a people, but their stories. Their capacity for love that is so fierce it becomes embarrassing. Planning a war without remembering that is to build a sword with no hand to wield it. It is the most serious of follies."

Her words hung in the air, a profound truth that silenced even the Algol envoy's fury. The mood in the chamber, for a fleeting moment, shifted from grim necessity to grim purpose.

Nyxara took a steadying breath, the colour receding from her cheeks as she reasserted her icy control. "Lyra is correct," she conceded, though her tone was sharp. "But the memory must fuel the action, not delay it." She turned back to the map. "The mid phase is complete. The legions of Betelgeuse will anchor the left flank. The Algol vanguard will probe the Keep's western approaches. We move at my command."

The battle plans were set. The course was charted. But as the council adjourned, the envoys departing into the gloomy corridors of the palace, the unanswered questions lingered like a psychic miasma. The twins, Shiro and Kuro, were the great, unsettling variable in the equation. Where had they come from? Who, truly, were they? The mystery of their origin was now a ghost at the feast, a silent, watching presence that promised the coming war would be about far more than thrones and power. It would be a war of truths, long buried, now clawing their way into the light.

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The heavy basalt door of the council chamber sealed with a final, grinding click that sounded like the closing of a tomb. The immense psychic pressure of a dozen warring factions, the weight of stellar strategies and the cold gaze of alien envoys, bled from the room, leaving a silence that was both profound and fragile. The air, once thick with ozone and hostility, now held only the faint, crystalline hum of the dormant silver veins in the stone.

Lyrathiel, Aunty Lyra, had not departed with the others. She remained, a wisp of moonlight and melancholy woven into the form of a woman, her presence a gentle counterpoint to the chamber's grim architecture. She watched as the rigid postures of the two young men finally slackened.

A synchronized, shuddering sigh escaped Shiro and Kuro. It was the sound of two beings who had held a star's worth of tension within their mortal frames, finally allowing a fraction of it to dissipate into the void.

Shiro was the first to break the quiet, his voice a low, hesitant thing, still rough from disuse and the memory of screamed pain. "Aunty Lyra?"

The poetess turned, her large, luminous eyes soft. "Yes, my little star?"

He shifted uncomfortably, his single amber eye avoiding her gaze, fixing instead on the intricate whorls of the stone table. "What you said… in the council… about the academy. Is… is there more?"

Kuro, emboldened by his brother's question and the sudden absence of prying, hostile minds, added, his voice a gravelly echo. "They have done nothing but tease us since we arrived. Relentlessly. Surely… surely they were not always so…"

He trailed off, lacking the word. Lyrathiel supplied it with a silverbell laugh that seemed to cleanse the lingering taint of Umbra'zel's fury.

"So effortlessly formidable? So infuriatingly perfect?" she finished, gliding closer. She reached out with slender, almost translucent fingers and gently pinched Shiro's cheek, then Kuro's. The touch was cool, but it sent a fresh wave of spectacular, furious crimson blooming across their faces. "Oh, you precious, symmetrical boys. You think this is teasing? You have only witnessed the gentle drizzle. You have not yet weathered the monsoon of their affection."

From across the chamber, where they had been studying the fading light maps, two voices chimed in perfect, flustered unison.

"We do not tease."

Nyxara and Statera turned, their own auras flickering with a tell tale warmth. Nyxara's multi hued light shimmered with hints of rose and gold, while Statera's Polaris glow pulsed a soft, embarrassed silver.

"We build character," Statera clarified, her tone attempting its usual serene authority but landing on something decidedly maternal.

"We in still resilience," Nyxara added, lifting her chin with regal hauteur that was utterly undermined by the faint blush on her own cheeks.

Shiro found his voice, a spark of street level defiance igniting behind his embarrassment. "You call being spoon fed in front of an entire resistance 'building character'?"

"You call being carried over a shoulder like a sack of potatoes 'instilling resilience'?" Kuro grumbled, the memory a fresh brand of humiliation.

Lyrathiel clapped her hands together in sheer delight. "Oh, they have you there! The mighty Queens of Nyxarion and Polaris, brought to account by their own progeny!" She swept between the boys and their mothers, a playful, ethereal shield. "Very well. If they seek ammunition, I shall be their armoury. Let us speak of the 'Tears of Kerykethel'."

Nyxara's face, which had been flushed with mild embarrassment, drained of all colour. "Lyrathiel, that is a sacred memory of my mother. Do not trivialize it."

"Oh, I am not trivializing it, my dear Queen," Lyra said, her eyes twinkling. "I am celebrating its origin! You see, boys, your mother, this formidable nexus of cosmic power, was not always so… stoic. When she was a girl, the smallest slight, a misplaced hairpin, a cloud passing before her favourite star, a slightly tart piece of fruit, would send her running to her mother, my Aunt Kerykethel. The tears! They were not mere droplets. They were a deluge. A celestial event. Kerykethel would hold her and say, 'My little nova, you weep with the force of a dying sun. One day, these tears will water a garden of great strength.' And so she began to call them 'The Tears of Kerykethel', not for their cause, but for their comfort. Of course," Lyra added, leaning conspiratorially towards the twins, "the other children just called her 'The Drizzle.' She once cried for an hour because she couldn't get a constellation in her hair to align properly."

Shiro and Kuro stared at Nyxara, who looked as if she wished the floor would open into a friendly void. The image of their fierce, unyielding mother as a weeping child over a misplaced hairpin was utterly, devastatingly perfect.

"A… Drizzle?" Kuro repeated, a slow, incredulous grin spreading across his face.

"It built character," Nyxara muttered, crossing her arms tightly over her chest, her multi hued light flickering with a defensive, stormy violet.

"And you, my serene Statera," Lyra continued, turning her mercilessly fond gaze on the Polaris Lumina. "So perfect. So precise. The untouchable scholar. But the universe has a balance for all things. Your flaw was… rhythm."

Statera's Polaris light guttered. "My timing is impeccable."

"In battle, in strategy, yes," Lyra agreed. "But in the Grand Refractorium, during the annual Harmonic Convergence Choir? A different story. One micro second off the beat, one note held a fraction too long, and the entire, perfect edifice of your composure would shatter. I saw you, after the concert where you sang a B flat instead of a B natural. You didn't speak for two days. You just sat in the observatory, reciting logarithmic tables to yourself as if to rebuild your shattered reality from first principles."

Shiro's single eye widened. "You? A singer? Off key?" The idea was more bizarre than any void touched horror.

"It was a complex polyphonic arrangement!" Statera insisted, her cheeks burning. "The overtones were deceptive!"

"And then there was 'Stellar Conquest,'" Lyra pressed on, a wicked smile on her lips. "The great Statera, the undefeated champion. Until a certain 'strategically challenged' novice, cough, Nyxara, employed the 'Nebula Drift' manoeuvre. It was not a tactical defeat; it was an existential crisis. The pouting! The passive aggressive misalignment of Nyxara's star charts! The… scented sachet incident in the linen closet was, I believe, a direct result of that loss."

"It was a controlled meditation!" Statera and Nyxara said in unison, then glared at each other.

The twins were in heaven. This was better than any tactical briefing. "So you're a sore loser," Shiro said to Statera, his voice full of awe.

"And you were a cry baby," Kuro added, looking at Nyxara with a newfound, brotherly glee.

"We are building a dossier," Kuro announced to Shiro. "This is critical intelligence."

"Aunty Lyra," Kuro said, with immense satisfaction, "you are our favourite person in all the twisted, cold cosmos."

The mothers exchanged a look of utter defeat that quickly melted into something softer, something ancient and fond. They had missed this. They had missed her.

Seeing their speechlessness, Nyxara seized the opportunity to reclaim the upper hand. Her eyes narrowed with playful wickedness. She looked directly at Shiro.

"Well, my little rain baby," she said, the nickname dropping into the conversation with the weight of a fallen moon.

The effect was instantaneous. Shiro's triumphant expression crumpled. The crimson that had been fading from his cheeks returned in a torrential flood. "Mother," he groaned, slumping in his chair. "Not… not here."

Statera, picking up the cue with devastating synchronicity, turned her gentle gaze on Kuro. "And you, my beloved storm baby," she cooed, "must not let your tempers flare. We are amongst family, after all."

Kuro looked as if he'd been struck by a bolt of lightning forged from pure embarrassment. His good eye widened in betrayal. "You swore! After the… the spoon incident… you said you would retire that accursed moniker!"

Lyrathiel's laughter was a symphony of pure, unadulterated joy. "Oh! Oh, they are perfect! Rain Baby and Storm Baby!" She looked at Shiro, her head tilted. "Let me guess… 'Rain Baby'… because this one's emotions are as prolific and cleansing as a downpour? The tears of healing, perhaps?"

"He cries at the slightest provocation," Statera confirmed, her smile warm and wicked. "Like a little rain cloud. It's why the name fits so well."

Lyra then turned to Kuro. "And 'Storm Baby'… for the brooding, the dark glowers, the sudden, magnificent tempests of emotion?"

"The tantrums," Nyxara clarified sweetly. "The magnificent, strategic, utterly dramatic tantrums. He could brood for days over a single, perceived slight. Just like a storm cloud gathering its energy."

The twins were utterly, completely defeated. They looked at Lyra, their last hope, their newfound ally, with expressions of profound betrayal.

Lyra simply smiled, pinching both their cheeks again. "Do not look at me so. They are names of endearment! They speak to your very natures, just as 'The Drizzle' spoke to your mother's. My dear Rain Baby. My sweet Storm Baby. They suit you beautifully."

In that moment, surrounded by the echoes of ancient laughter and the warm, embarrassing glow of familial love, the Black Keep felt a million light years away. The war, the scars, the unanswered questions about their origin, all of it receded, if only for a moment.

Nyxara's expression softened, the teasing fading into something more genuine. She looked at Lyrathiel, a world of unspoken history passing between them. "We have missed you, Lyra."

"We are sorry," Statera added, her voice soft. "For leaving Nyxarion to its silence. It was… necessary."

Both queens turned their gazes, not to the past, but to the present. Their eyes settled on Shiro and Kuro, who were still sulking magnificently, their faces aflame.

Lyrathiel followed their gaze, her own smile softening into an expression of deep understanding. "I can see why," she whispered. "To find such light in the outer dark… it was a quest worthy of any exile. To find not one, but two such sons… the garden watered by those tears has grown strong indeed."

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