The mist of the Plaza of Screams clung to them like a shroud of forgotten agony, its damp chill seeping through the coarse wool of their robes. Nyxara's final words, "Let us show us just how serious we truly are", hung in the jaundiced air, a sovereign challenge etched not in palace decree, but in the grim reality of this nightmare. They were not a request; they were the unyielding core of her newfound resolve, and they struck Corvin with the force of a physical blow, dismantling the last of his assumptions about the queen he thought he knew.

For a heart stopping moment, he could only stare, his galactic eyes wide, the master spy utterly disarmed not by a better secret, but by a metamorphosis he had believed impossible. The queen of patient diplomacy stood before him in the garb of a beggar, her multi hued eyes reflecting the pulsing, malevolent runes of the plaza. In their depths, he did not see the shattered woman he had left weeping on a floor. He saw the cold, hard surface of the river stone she had willed herself to become.

He swallowed hard, the sound obscenely loud in the psychic silence. "This way," he finally breathed, the words a ragged concession to a new, terrifying reality. He turned, his movements uncharacteristically stiff, and led them deeper into the heart of the nightmare.

The atmosphere was a physical weight, a suffocating blend of ozone, cold metal, and something faintly, unpleasantly organic, the scent of curated despair. The fleshy, membranous floor gave slightly under their boots, a horribly intimate sensation. The jaundiced runes embedded within it pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light, a sick heart beating beneath the world's skin. Each throb was a wave of psychic residue, a scream, a whimper, a final, shattered thought, that washed over them, a symphony of agony whose final, dissonant chord lingered in the air.

Nyxara's steady Polaris blue flickered, momentarily overwhelmed. The Vega silver of profound, aching sorrow surged, a visceral empathy for every soul broken in this place. It was swiftly followed by the Algol red, a hot, furious revulsion so pure it threatened to scorch her newfound calm. She grasped for the ghost of the river stone in her mind, its lesson her only anchor. A stone endures. Observe. Do not be overwhelmed. She let the emotions crash against her, acknowledged their terrifying power, and willed them to recede, leaving the deep, resolved blue to steady itself once more.

Beside her, Statera's meticulously restored composure was a thin veneer over a chasm of anguish. Her Polaris light, usually a beacon of unwavering calm, pulsed erratically, a frantic, strobing heartbeat of blue and panicked silver. The horror of the plaza was a desecration of all she held orderly and sane. But it was layered upon, and utterly eclipsed by, the seismic reality of her sister's fate. This was the kingdom that had consumed Adrasteia. This was the air her niece and nephew had been forced to breathe. Every pulsing rune felt like a judgment on her own inaction, her lifelong atonement now revealed as a pathetic, meaningless pantomime in the face of such absolute evil. Her breath hitched, a soft, broken sound she barely stifled.

Lucifera, in stark contrast, was a study in lethal focus. The binary pulse of her Sirius energy was a low, resonant hum, a calculated counter frequency to the plaza's psychic dissonance. Her brilliant white eyes scanned everything, missing nothing, the pattern of the runes, the structural stress points in the obsidian spires, the minute shifts in the corrosive mist. She was not feeling the horror; she was dissecting it, treating the Plaza of Screams as a tactical equation where variables of pain and dread could be quantified and neutralized. Her silence was not fear, but profound, unsettling analysis.

"The fissure is just ahead," Corvin whispered, his voice strained, cutting through the thick, soupy air. He gestured toward a deeper shadow, a jagged tear in the pulsating floor that wept the same sickly yellow light. "It's our current refuge. We won't stay long. Ryo's patrols avoid this place, believing its own nature is guard enough." He glanced back at Nyxara, his expression still etched with disbelief. "They will be armed. And they see betrayal in every shadow. Follow my lead. Do not make a move unless I do."

"We did not walk into the lion's den to be dictated to by its mice, Crow," Nyxara replied, her voice low but iron clad, the voice that had absorbed a slap and a council's collapse and emerged stronger. "Our actions will speak for themselves. Lead the way."

The fissure was a narrow, jagged wound, barely wide enough for a single person to slip through sideways. From within emanated the low, muffled cadence of a familiar voice, the soft, deliberate scrape of a whetstone on metal, and the faint, warm crackle of a small heating unit. The sounds of life, stubborn and defiant, clinging to existence in a place designed to erase it.

Corvin paused at the entrance, a final, silent look of warning that was met with three expressions of unflinching resolve. Then, he melted into the shadow and was gone.

Nyxara took a final, steadying breath, the air a toxic mix of ozone and dread. She glanced at Statera, whose light had now stilled into a grim, almost fatalistic beam, and at Lucifera, who gave a single, sharp nod. Together, they followed Corvin into the belly of the beast.

The space within was a claustrophobic fracture in the world, low ceilinged and cramped. The walls were the same veined, living obsidian, though the captured starlight within was fainter here, choked and sickly. The air was slightly warmer, tinged with the smell of unwashed bodies, boiled nutrients, and ionized energy packs. And in the dim, jaundiced glow, were the seven of them.

Not an army. A constellation of shattered hopes.

Ryota Veyne, the fallen Old Star, sat on a crate, his posture weary but his eyes still holding a flicker of hardened authority as he listened to Haruto. Juro Fujiwara, a mountain of silent resolve, stood with his arms crossed, his gaze perpetually scanning for threats. The seer, Mira, was a wraith in the corner, her hands tracing patterns in the air only she could see, her fractured sight turned inward. And Kuro… Kaya's son, stood near the back, his expression a familiar mask of defiance and deep seated pain that wrenched at Nyxara's heart.

But it was Haruto who turned first as they entered. He'd been speaking in a low, analytical tone to Ryota, but his words died in his throat. His wintery eyes, cold and calculating, snapped to Corvin, and in an instant, they ignited with a frigid, incandescent rage.

"Crow?" The word was a shard of ice, sharp enough to draw blood. He took a step forward, his entire body coiling. He didn't even acknowledge the others; his world had narrowed to the betrayal he was certain was unfolding. "You've sold us out? You lead his hounds directly to our door?"

The reaction was instantaneous. Juro's hand went to the hilt of his axes. Ryota pushed himself to his feet, his weariness replaced by grim acceptance. Kuro's fists clenched, a faint crackle of cold shimmering around them. Mira flinched, a small whimper escaping her lips. The trust in the fissure, always fragile, shattered completely.

Corvin held up his hands, but his voice was a whip crack, devoid of its usual placating charm. "Haruto, stand down! Think for one second and look! I've brought allies, not enemies!"

He stepped aside, forcibly pulling the focus onto the three grey robed figures.

Haruto's furious gaze swept over them, dismissive for a microsecond before sharpening with a dawning, impossible recognition. The coarse robes could not hide the innate authority in their stances, the unique energy that radiated from them, one of royal resolve, one of binary calculation, and one…

Nyxara did not wait. She stepped forward, pulling her mask off. The ethereal light of her skin, a resolved symphony of blue, red, and silver, seemed to push back the gloom of the fissure. Her eyes locked onto Haruto's.

"We are here to propose an alliance," she stated, her voice firm and clear, a sound of absolute authority that belonged in a palace but was somehow more powerful here, in the dirt.

Lucifera and Statera moved to flank her, their masks falling back. Lucifera's brilliant white eyes performed a lightning fast threat assessment of each person in the room, her Sirius energy a palpable, humming pressure. Statera stood rigid, her Polaris light burning with a cold, fierce intensity, her own gaze frantically scanning the faces before her, searching for one in particular.

Corvin found his voice, the spymaster forcing order onto the unbelievable scene. "Haruto, strategist of the Astralon resistance. I present Queen Nyxara of Nyxarion. Councillor Statera of the Polaris High Council. And Lucifera, of the Sirius Council. They have come to offer the formal weight of the Starborn nation to our cause."

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the faint crackle of the fire. Stunned disbelief replaced hostility on the faces of the resistance. Ryota's eyebrows shot up. Juro's hand eased slightly from his axes. Kuro stared, his mask of defiance slipping into pure confusion.

Haruto's icy composure fractured. A minute, incredulous twitch at the corner of his mouth. His gaze swept over them again, truly seeing them. The queen of the failed truce. The heart of Nyxarion's rigid tradition. A mythic Sirius warrior. Here. In the filth of this.

"An alliance," he repeated, the word flat, hollow. He took a single step closer, his eyes narrowing to slits. "You cross the mountains, you walk into the very heart of his power, you find this…" he gestured around the dismal fissure with utter contempt, "…to propose an alliance?" A brittle, humourless sound escaped him. "Prove it."

It was a challenge thrown from the absolute bedrock of his cynicism.

And it was in this suspended moment of high tension that Statera's frantic search found its target.

Her eyes locked onto the figure she had missed at first, half hidden behind Juro's broad frame. A young man, sitting on a pallet, intently cleaning a star carved blade with a ragged cloth. His hair was an imperious white, his frame lean but strong. And as he looked up, drawn by the sudden silence, the jaundiced light caught his eyes.

They were a striking, luminous amber.

Statera's world stopped.

Her breath vanished. Her heart, a frantic drum against her ribs, seemed to freeze mid beat. Her Polaris light didn't just flicker; it guttered like a candle in a gale, plunging into a panicked silver before flaring back into a desperate, unstable blue.

Adrasteia.

It was her sister's jawline. Her sister's defiant posture. Her sister's fiery spirit, now banked into a grim, survivalist ember. This was no report, no ghost from a sad story. This was her blood. Her sister's son. The boy she had left to the wolves. The guilt of a lifetime, the decades of rigid protocol, the unwavering loyalty to a crown that had exiled his mother, the desperate, silent atonement, crashed down upon her with the force of a collapsing star. It was a weight so immense she felt her knees weaken. She saw Aki's face then, superimposed over his, broken and used, and the thought was a knife to her soul. He must hate me. He must despise the very air I breathe for what I let happen to them. I do not deserve to look upon him. A choked, suffocated sound escaped her lips, and she took an involuntary, stumbling step forward, her hand outstretched as if to touch a mirage.

The movement, the raw, shattered sound, drew his attention away from the queens and the strategist.

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Shiro looked up from his blade.

His amber eyes, tired and ancient, met hers. He saw a Starborn noblewoman, her face a mask of utter, devastating agony, staring at him as if she were witnessing a resurrection. He saw the distinctive light, his mother's light, flaring wildly across her skin. Confusion knitted his brow. And then, something deeper stirred, a primal pull from a place beyond memory, a ghost of a feeling from a time before the darkness, a warmth he thought he'd imagined.

He forgot the blade. He forgot the tense standoff. The world narrowed to this woman's face, to the inexplicable and overwhelming sense of connection that made his chest ache.

He rose slowly, his movements hesitant, almost dreamlike. He took a step forward, then another, weaving through the stunned resistance fighters who watched, mesmerized by this private apocalypse unfolding in their midst. Nyxara and Lucifera fell silent, the political shattered by the profoundly personal. Haruto's analytical mind, for once, had no calculation for this.

Shiro stopped a few feet from Statera, his young face a battlefield of confusion, a dawning, impossible hope, and a fear so profound it made him tremble. He looked at her, really looked, and the ghost became flesh. The feeling broke through the walls of survival and loss, and a name, a word, the first and most important word he had ever known, formed on his lips. It was not a question of identity, but a recognition of essence, a soul crying out for what it had lost.

His voice, when it came, was not that of a resistance fighter, but of a lost, heartbroken child, trembling with a vulnerability he had sworn he'd never show again.

"…Mother?"

The word hung in the cramped, tense air of the fissure, a single, fragile syllable that shattered the political standoff and replaced it with a profoundly personal earthquake.

"...Mother?"

The sound of it, so hopeful, so broken, so utterly wrong, was a physical blow to Statera's chest. She stood frozen, a statue of Polaris light and paralyzing grief. Her frantic, strobing luminescence seemed to freeze mid pulse. The entire world narrowed to the young man before her, to the amber eyes, her sister's eyes, that were now looking at her with a dawning, desperate recognition that she knew she had to shatter.

The air left her lungs in a soft, pained rush. She took a single, faltering step forward, her hand, the one that had signed a thousand edicts with unwavering certainty, trembling violently as it rose, not to reach for him, but to press against her own heart, as if to keep it from breaking through her ribs.

"Shiro," she whispered, his name a prayer and an apology on her lips. Her voice was a frayed thread, trembling with the weight of decades of concealed truth. "I'm… I'm so sorry. But I'm not your mother." The words were agony to form, each one a shard of glass in her throat. She saw the first flicker of confusion in his amber gaze, the first crack in the hopeful illusion, and it nearly broke her. She forced herself to continue, the confession dragged from the deepest, most painful vault of her soul. "I am her sister. I am… your aunt."

I Know… you just look so much like her…

The final word fell into a silence so absolute it was deafening. The fissure, its inhabitants, the very universe seemed to hold its breath.

Shiro did not move. He stood rooted to the spot, the cloth he'd been using to clean his blade slipping from his numb fingers to the floor. The words "her sister" echoed in the cavern of his mind, a key turning in a lock rusted shut by years of trauma and survival. Fragments, sensations long buried, surged to the surface: the scent of star lotus that wasn't his mother's, but was so similar it ached; a low, resonant laugh he'd heard in a dream; a phrase, whispered to him when he was small, a secret between sisters: "Shiro, Rewrite the sky."

His hands, which had been so steady with the blade, began to shake. A bitter, disbelieving smile twisted his lips, a defence mechanism against the tidal wave of pain rising within him.

"Her sister," he repeated, his voice low, flat, and dangerously calm. The bitterness in the smile reached his eyes, hardening the amber into something cold and sharp. The initial shock was curdling, transforming into something darker, more potent. "All these years… you were out there. Living in your crystal spires. Breathing clean air." His voice began to climb, each word gaining a sharper, more serrated edge. "Did you think of us? While you were polishing your protocols and upholding your precious laws, did you ever once think about what your laws did to her? To us?"

Statera flinched as if each word were a lash. Her Polaris light, which had stabilized into a beam of resolve, guttered again into a chaotic, silver storm of pain. A single tear, glistening in the jaundiced light, escaped and traced a hot path down her cheek. She didn't wipe it away.

"I…" she began, her voice cracking under the strain. She swallowed hard, the sound a dry, painful rasp. "I was afraid. I was a coward." It was the weakest, most pathetic truth, and she hated herself for it.

"Afraid?" he echoed, the word a venomous, disbelieving scoff. He took a step forward, his body trembling now not with confusion, but with a rage so pure it was terrifying. "You were afraid?! What about her fear?!"

His voice rose, cracking with a raw, adolescent pain he'd long since buried beneath layers of hardened defiance. The dam was breaking, and a lifetime of grief, of terror, of watching his world burn while no one came to help, erupted from him in a torrent of anguished fury.

"You abandoned her!" he shouted, the words tearing from him, raw and ragged. He took another step, jabbing a finger toward her, each word a hammer strike. "You all did! You cast her out and you left her to HIM! And you left us to HIM!"

He was screaming directly into her face now, his body shaking with the force of his sobs, tears of rage and helplessness finally streaming down his own cheeks, cutting through the grime.

"Where were you?!" he screamed, his voice echoing off the close walls. "Where were you when they dragged her away, screaming our names?! Where were you when Ryo's thugs kicked down our door and she shoved us into a closet, Aki's hand over my mouth to keep me quiet?!" His breath hitched, the memories playing like a fresh horror behind his eyes. "Where were you when they took Aki, because I was too weak to stop them?!

He was gasping now, chest heaving, the images too vile, too vivid. The final, worst memory clawed its way to the surface, and he could no longer hold it back.

"WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THEY BURNED HER ALIVE?!"

The final question was a raw, primal scream that seemed to suck all the air from the fissure. The image it conjured was hideous, visceral. The smell of smoke and searing flesh. The sound of a scream that was not just sound, but the very essence of a soul being unmade. The way the crowd cheered in the vison that was forced upon him in the crypt, to what felt like years ago.

It was the final, annihilating blow. Statera's last vestige of control evaporated. A wounded, guttural sob was torn from her throat, a sound of such profound despair that it was almost inhuman. Her own tears fell in a silent, relentless river. She doubled over, as if he'd physically struck her in the stomach.

"I'm sorry," she wept, the words barely intelligible, mangled by her sobs. "Shiro, I'm so sorry… I'm so sorry for not being there… For not fighting harder…. For choosing duty… over family." The admission was the most profound shame of her life. She was on her knees now, not in ceremony, but in utter defeat, her forehead nearly touching the cold stone. "I was a coward. I let them paint her a traitor and I… I just… built my walls higher. I didn't know if you existed, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I should've looked for you I'm sorry..."

She was babbling, confessing not just to him, but to the universe, to the ghost of her sister she felt hovering in the charged air. She reached out a hand, not toward him, but to the floor, her fingers scraping against the stone as if she could dig her way back in time and change it all.

Shiro stared down at her, this woman who was a stranger, yet whose blood ran in his veins. The anger that had sustained him for so long suddenly had a target, and in striking it, it began to dissolve, leaving only the vast, empty ache it had been protecting. The fight drained out of him all at once. His shoulders slumped. A humourless, broken sound escaped him, something between a laugh and a sob.

"Afraid," he whispered again, the word now filled with a devastating, weary understanding. He wasn't shouting anymore. The truth was too heavy for volume.

"Do you have any idea," he said, his voice dropping to a shattered whisper, each word measured and agonizing, "what it's like to watch your mother die? To see… to see the skin…" He choked, the memory too vile to give voice to. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if to block it out, but it was burned onto the inside of his eyelids. He wrapped his arms around himself, a solitary, fragile figure. "To be powerless as they take your sister? To know it's your fault for not being strong enough? To be so alone you think you might be better off to just…die?"

His voice broke completely on the last word. The strength left his legs. The defiant slum rat, the fearless resistance fighter, collapsed to his knees before her. He wrapped his arms around himself, his body folding in on itself as silent, gut wrenching sobs wracked his entire frame. Years of bottled up pain, of forced toughness, of smothering his heart to keep it from breaking, poured out of him in a helpless, overwhelming flood.

"I hated her," he confessed to the floor between them, his voice muffled and thick with tears. "For leaving us. For making a choice that got her killed and left us alone. I hated her so much it felt like a fire in my chest…." He sucked in a ragged, shuddering breath. "But I missed her… , I missed her. But every single fucking night. I dream of that day… I smell the smoke… of her skin burning, her eyes..."

It was the most vulnerable thing anyone in the room had ever witnessed.

Statera didn't see a warrior or a symbol. She saw her sister's son, a broken, lonely boy drowning in a pain she had helped create. With a cry that was all grief and no grace, she scrambled forward on her knees. She didn't ask permission; she simply opened her arms and gathered him in.

He was stiff for a heartbeat, a lifetime of survival screaming at him to push away, to not show weakness, to never let an enemy this close. His muscles were coiled steel, every instinct forged in the crucible of the slums and Ryo's tyranny telling him to shove her off, to retreat behind his walls of anger and indifference. It was the only armour he had ever known.

But the need was too great. The dam had broken, and the lonely, terrified boy he had buried years ago under layers of hardened defiance was screaming to be held.

With a sound of utter surrender, a ragged, broken exhale that was half sob, half the death rattle of his old defences, he collapsed against her. It wasn't a gentle lean; it was a total structural failure. His body went limp, his full weight falling into her arms as his face buried itself in the coarse, scratchy wool of her shoulder. He clutched at her robes, his fists not just gripping but clawing at the fabric, as if she were the only solid thing in a world that had always been liquid fire beneath his feet.

Statera gasped softly at the impact, not from his weight, but from the sheer, devastating trust of it. This was not just acceptance; it was a complete relinquishing of control. She tightened her arms around him, one hand splayed across his back, feeling the sharp ridges of his spine through the thin fabric of his shirt, the tense, knotted muscles of his shoulders that were now shaking uncontrollably. Her other hand came up to cradle the back of his head, her fingers tangling in his dark, sweat dampened hair. It was an instinctual, protective gesture she hadn't made in decades; a ghost of a motion Andra might have used to comfort her a lifetime ago.

He wept without sound at first, great, heaving shudders that wracked his entire frame. She could feel the heat of his tears seeping through her robe, a scalding brand on her skin. Then the sounds came, muffled, choked, animalistic gasps for air that were torn from a place so deep within him it seemed to fracture the very air around them. Each sob was a convulsion, a physical expulsion of a piece of the poison he'd been forced to swallow for years.

"I' have you now…" she murmured into his hair, her own voice a wrecked, watery thing. She rocked them, a slow, steady rhythm that was the complete antithesis of the chaotic storm of his grief. "I'm here. I'm not letting go. Never again." Her own tears fell freely now, dripping onto his head, mingling with his. They were tears of shared agony, for the sister they had both lost. They were tears of profound shame, for her own catastrophic failure. And they were tears of a fierce, blazing love, rediscovered and redirected at this broken piece of her family she had found in the dark.

She could feel the moment his silent, body wracking shudders began to give way to audible, heart breaking cries. The dam within him was not just broken; it was utterly demolished. He wept for his mother, for the sound of her voice, for the warmth of her embrace that had been stolen and replaced by the memory of fire. He wept for Aki, for every day of not knowing, for the helplessness that was a constant, gnawing companion. He wept for himself, for the boy who had to become a man too soon, who had to learn that he was too weak to save anyone.

And Statera held him through all of it. She whispered nonsense and endearments, a steady stream of comfort against the torrent of his pain. "Let it out, let it all out. You've been so strong for so long. You don't have to be strong right now. Just let go. I'm here. I'm here." She repeated it like a mantra, a vow, a prayer.

Slowly, infinitesimally, the violent tension in his body began to ease. The claw like grip on her robes softened, his fists unclenching to simply hold onto her. The raw, ragged sobs deepened into slower, hitching breaths, though the tears did not stop. He was exhausted, hollowed out, but the frantic, trapped energy of his pain was finally spent. He was simply present in the circle of her arms, a child finally safe enough to cry himself to emptiness.

She adjusted her hold, pulling him even closer, until his head was tucked under her chin. She could feel the steady, solid beat of his heart against her own frantic, guilty rhythm. In that moment, nothing else existed, not the watching resistance, not the political alliance, not the war outside. There was only the cold floor beneath her knees, the scratch of wool, the smell of dust and sweat and tears, and the overwhelming, sacred responsibility of holding her sister's son together as he finally, finally fell apart. It was the most important duty she had ever been given, and she would not have traded the crushing, beautiful weight of it for all the order and protocol in the world. She held him, and in holding him, she began, for the first time, to forgive herself.

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