The chamber was a cathedral of quietude, its air still vibrating with the sacred frequency of a vow finally spoken. The soft, pulsing luminescence of the wall fungi was a muted choir to the four hearts beating as one. Nyxara held Kuro, her forehead resting against his temple, her multi hued light a gentle aurora that seemed to absorb and soothe the last of his tremors. Across from them, Statera cradled Shiro, her Polaris glow a miniature, steady galaxy in which his chaotic star had finally found its orbit. They were not four individuals, but two pairs, fused at the soul, a perfect, fragile symmetry of hard won peace. The world, with its knives and its pyres, had been banished. There was only the silence, the warmth, and the profound, mending truth of home.

The sound that shattered it was not a sound, but an anti sound, a splintering of reality itself.

It was the scream of stone giving birth to violence. The fissure entrance did not open; it exploded. A shockwave of pulverized rock and malevolent intent blasted into the chamber, a physical force that snuffed the fungi's gentle glow and choked the air with dust and the reek of iron.

From the maelstrom of debris, they emerged. Not soldiers, but instruments of precision tuned agony. Aella and Athena, their hair not red but the colour of a heart's blood sunset, moved with a synchronicity that was abhorrent, a perverse mockery of the embrace they had just violated. Their eyes were not eyes, but polished obsidian chips, reflecting not light but a void that drank the very concept of peace.

The moment stretched, a single, grotesque tableau of understanding dawning a second too late.

Aella's lunge was a scythe stroke of shadow. There was no flash of a dagger, only a seamless, arcing movement. A line of impossible cold, then impossible fire, etched itself across Shiro's face.

The world did not go dark. It unmade itself.

A sensation not of cutting, but of uncreation, seared through his right eye. It was of pure pain, a burning X that carved through nerve and memory, scalding the very image of his mother's face from the inside of his skull. The pain was so absolute, so universe consuming, that his scream was not a sound he made, but a thing that tore itself from him, a raw, primal shriek that was the death cry of the peace he'd just held.

"GGGAAAH! FUCK FUCK! MY EYE! IT'S..! MOTHER!"

He was no longer in Statera's arms. He was a writhing architecture of agony on the cold stone, back arching, heels drumming a frantic, useless tattoo against the floor. His hands clawed at his face, but the pain was internal, a molten parasite devouring his mind from the inside out. Blood, hot and thick, streamed through his fingers, painting grotesque patterns on his skin.

Simultaneously, a twin damnation was wrought.

Athena's attack was not a slash, but a punctuation of absolute malice. A single, dismissive flick of her wrist that traced a line of liquid fire down Kuro's cheek and across his left eye. It was not a deep cut, but a profound one, a wound that seemed to bypass flesh and sever the very tether to his composure.

The strategic mind, the cold calculus, the princely defiance, it all evaporated in the face of this base, animal violation. A roar was ripped from Kuro's throat, a sound of such pure, unadulterated torment that it seemed to shake the foundations of the mountain. It was the sound of a glacier shattering.

"AAAAAGH! FUCK! FUCK! IT FUCKING HURTS! !"

He convulsed, curling into a foetal ball, his body a rigid bowstring of suffering. His good hand slapped uselessly at the side of his head as if to dislodge the pain hammering into his brain. The world was a smear of crimson and blinding, nauseating fire.

The mothers did not move. For a heartbeat, they were statues of perfect, paralyzing horror, their minds refusing to graft this new, bloody reality onto the tenderness of seconds before. The sounds of their sons' suffering, the profane, guttural screams, the wet, choking sobs, were weapons that found their mark more surely than any blade.

Then, the world snapped back into a hyper real, nightmare focus.

Aella stood over Shiro's thrashing form, her voice a silken corruption in the chaos. "Look at him writhe, Polaris dog. Is this the precious light you nurtured? This mewling, broken thing?" She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "The King sends his regards. He says a mongrel should not have two eyes to commit a regicide."

Athena kicked Kuro's shuddering leg, her contempt a physical force. "And you," she hissed at Nyxara, whose multi hued light was now flickering in a staccato rhythm of incipient cataclysm. "The Queen of a fallen court, playing mother to a failed heir. He screams just like the weakling he always was. A fitting son for a barren queen."

The taunts were the final, sacrilegious spark.

The love that had moments ago been a shelter now mutated into something terrifying and absolute. It did not warm; it ignited.

Statera's Polaris light, usually a beacon of healing, did not brighten, it detonated. A silent, concussive wave of pure white fury erupted from her, banishing the shadows around her son. Her face, usually a mask of serene compassion, was a rictus of primordial rage. Her gaze found the sword leaning against Shiro's pallet. Her hand did not reach for it; it was simply there, the hilt seeming to leap into her grip as if summoned by her will.

She did not charge. She appeared before Aella, the movement too fast to track. The air crackled with ozone.

"You will fucking pay for you transgression," Statera's voice was not a shout, but a low, glacial tremor that promised the extinction of suns. The sword in her hand was no longer metal; it was a shard of concentrated vengeance.

Nyxara's transformation was even more profound. Her multi hued light didn't flare, it collapsed inwards, condensing into a corona of black hole darkness shot through with furious, dying star colours. The temperature around her plummeted. The air itself seemed to scream as it was pulled into the vortex of her wrath. She was no longer a woman, but a constellation of vengeance given form.

Kuro's sword was in her hand, its edge humming with a silent, deadly frequency. She did not look at Athena; she simply fixed her with a gaze that held the cold of the void between galaxies.

"You have carved your death warrant into my son's flesh," Nyxara whispered, and the whisper carried the mass of a collapsing world. "I will ensure you read every word of it before you die."

The chamber, once a sanctuary, was now a crucible. At its centre, two sons writhed and screamed on the altar of their torment. And circling them, their mothers, transformed into avenging deities of love and fury, prepared to paint the stones with the blood of those who had dared to break their world.

The battle had not begun. It was a force of nature already in motion.

The chamber did not descend into chaos; it crystallized into a nightmare of perfect, opposing forces. The air, thick with pulverized stone and the coppery stench of fresh blood, became a conductive medium for hatred. On one axis, Statera and Aella, a maelstrom of glacial fury against a whirlwind of sadistic precision. On the other, Nyxara and Athena, a dying star's final conflagration against a poised, mocking shadow.

The screams of their sons were the engine of the violence.

"GGGK! MOTHER..! IT'S..! AAGH!" Shiro's shrieks were not words but raw, synaptic feedback, the sound of a mind being flayed alive by the unholy geometry of pain Aella had carved into his face. He thrashed, a dying fish on the cold stone, his back arching and slamming down, his fingers scrabbling at the ruin of his eye as if he could tear the agony out by its roots.

Each guttural, broken sound was a shiv of ice plunged into Statera's heart. She felt them physically, each one a puncture wound to her soul. Her love, a moment ago a sanctuary, was now a supernova of protective rage. She did not engage Aella; she unmade the space between them.

Her sword, a shard of her own Polaris light given brutal form, met Aella's twin daggers in a shower of white sparks that sizzled like dying stars. The clash was not of metal, but of concepts, healing versus violation, love versus nihilistic hate.

"He calls for you," Aella hissed, her voice a serpent's dry slither in the din. She flowed around a decapitating strike, her form blurring. "But what is a 'mother' to a thing like that? A temporary comfort. A delusion. His true mother was ash on the wind long before you decided to play house with a stray."

She ducked under Statera's guard, not to strike at her, but to plant a brutal kick into Shiro's ribs.

CRACKKKK.

The sound was sickeningly loud. Shiro's scream hitched, then exploded anew, a wet, choking gasp of pure, airless agony. His body curled instinctively around the new hurt, a fresh wave of tremors wracking his frame.

"See?" Aella taunted, dancing back from Statera's enraged lunge with infuriating grace. "He only knows pain. That is his true inheritance. Not your pathetic, borrowed love. Ryo will remind him of that when he peels the other eye from its socket."

Across the chamber, a symphony of parallel torment played its movement.

Kuro's roars were deeper, more bestial, the sound of a fortress being demolished from the inside. "NNNHHGG! He clawed at his own face, his nails drawing bloody furrows alongside the precise, burning line Athena had scored across his eye. His body was a rigid arc of suffering, every muscle locked in a battle against a fire that consumed thought, strategy, pride, everything that made him, him.

Each desperate, shattered sound was a hook in Nyxara's soul, tearing chunks from her with its passage. Her multi hued light wasn't just dark; it was a cancellation. It drank the light around it, a localized apocalypse contained within the form of a queen. Her attacks were not swings, but gravitational events, each one meant to pull Athena in and crush her into dust.

Athena met her not with brute force, but with a viper's contempt. She parried, her own blade a sliver of darkness that seemed to absorb the fury of Nyxara's blows.

"Listen to him sing," Athena mocked, her voice a cold, clinical scalpel. "The mighty 'Baby Black Prince.' Reduced to a sobbing infant. Did you think a title bestowed in pity could ever replace the blood he lacks? You are a placeholder, Nyxara. A barren queen cosplaying a mother for a broken son. Ryo will enjoy showcasing your failure."

She feinted high, then swept a leg out, not at Nyxara, but at the ground near Kuro's head, kicking a spray of sharp stone fragments into his writhing form. He flinched violently, a fresh, hoarse cry tearing from his throat, the sound of a spirit breaking.

The taunts were weapons as potent as their blades. They found the cracks in the mothers' armour, not in their skill, but in their newfound, terrifyingly fragile hearts. Every jeer about their "fake" motherhood, every promise of Ryo's victory, was designed to unbalance them, to make them doubt the very thing that gave them this fearsome power.

And it worked.

Statera, driven mad by the sound of Shiro's ragged breathing behind her, overextended. Her rage made her predictable. Aella flowed inside her guard, and the pommel of a dagger cracked against Statera's temple. White light exploded behind her eyes. She stumbled, the world tilting, her Polaris glow flickering erratically.

"You bleed like any other creature," Aella purred, pressing her advantage. A slash opened a line of fire across Statera's forearm. "Not so divine. Not so maternal. Just another fool who attached her heart to a thing meant for the pyre."

Nyxara saw Statera falter from the corner of her eye, and the split second distraction was all Athena required. A kick, deceptively graceful, caught Nyxara in the side. The air left her lungs in a pained grunt. The crushing gravity of her aura wavered for a microsecond.

It was enough.

Athena's blade, a tongue of black flame, licked out and traced a burning line across Nyxara's thigh. It was a shallow cut, a mockery of the wound she'd given Kuro, but it carried the same corrupting fire. Nyxara hissed, not just from the pain, but from the insult of it.

"He will make you watch," Athena whispered, her face inches from Nyxara's as their blades locked, her obsidian eyes reflecting Nyxara's fury twisted features. "When he takes the other eye. When he breaks the other twin. He will make you watch, and then he will ask you if your love was worth the price of their suffering."

The fight descended into a brutal exchange. The mothers, fuelled by a love that felt like a sickness, fought with terrifying, wild strength. But the aggressors, fuelled by a cold, practiced cruelty and the tactical advantage of having already won their primary objective, were their perfect counters. Aella and Athena were unhurried, precise, their movements an economy of malice. They parried and struck, not to kill immediately, but to wound, to exhaust, to mock.

They used the room itself, kicking the sons, scattering their pallets, forcing the mothers to choose between an attack and putting their own bodies between the monsters and their children.

Panting, blood tracing lines down her temple and arm, Statera finally managed to drive Aella back with a desperate, sweeping arc of light. But as she did, Aella smiled, a thin, cruel slash of a thing.

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In that moment of perceived victory, Athena disengaged from Nyxara and, in a move of flawless synchronicity, threw one of her daggers. It wasn't aimed at Nyxara. It was aimed at Shiro.

Statera's world shrank to the spinning blade. With a cry torn from the depths of her being, she threw herself in its path. The dagger meant for Shiro's heart sank into her shoulder instead. The impact was brutal, a punch of cold iron followed by a bloom of searing, debilitating pain. Her sword clattered from nerveless fingers as she cried out, falling to one knee.

Seeing her sister's perfect strike, Aella used Nyxara's horrified distraction. A boot hooked behind Nyxara's ankle, and a sharp, precise blow to the wrist from a dagger's hilt sent the queen's own sword skittering away into the darkness. A second punch, driving into the same wounded spot on Nyxara's side, dropped her to the ground with a choked gasp of agony.

Silence, for a heartbeat. The only sounds were the ragged, pained breathing of the mothers and the continuous, horrifying, wordless mewling of their shattered sons.

Aella and Athena stood over them, their forms silhouetted against the dusty gloom. The two aggressors looked down at the queens, one kneeling, clutching the dagger in her shoulder; the other on her hands and knees, fighting for breath and then at the broken twins writhing at their feet.

"The performance is over," Aella stated, her voice devoid of triumph, merely stating a fact. "The children have been punished. The stand in mothers have been corrected."

Athena nudged Kuro's shuddering form with her toe. "The King awaits his property."

They had come. They had carved. They had conquered. The sanctuary was a charnel house. The family was a collection of broken things on the floor. And the two harbingers of Ryo's wrath pressed their advantage, their victory absolute and utterly devoid of mercy.

The victory of Aella and Athena was a cold, settled thing. It hung in the dust choked air, as tangible as the iron scent of blood. They stood over the wreckage of the family, not with the heavy breath of exertion, but with the calm poise of archivists who had successfully filed away a case study in despair. The mothers were broken at their feet, one impaled, the other gasping, their power seemingly spent. The sons were still lost in their private hells of agony, their sounds now reduced to wet, hitching whimpers, a continuous, low grade torture for the women who loved them.

It was this silence, this assumption of their defeat, that gave the aggressors leave to indulge.

"The theatrics were entertaining, I'll grant you that," Aella mused, her voice a dry rustle. She stepped over Statera's kneeling form as if she were a piece of debris and approached Shiro. "The fierce protector act. It almost felt real."

With a grip of terrifying casualness, she fisted a hand in Shiro's blood soaked tunic and hauled him up. He was limp, barely conscious, a marionette with its strings cut. A low, broken moan escaped his lips.

"But this," Aella said, her obsidian eyes fixed on Statera's horrified face, "this is what is real."

She drove her knee once, twice, into his stomach.

The impacts were sickening, hollow thuds that spoke of internal damage. The little air left in Shiro's lungs burst from him in a choked, silent scream. His body went rigid, then completely slack. With a final, contemptuous flick of her wrist, Aella threw him. He landed in a broken heap at Statera's knees, his face, a mask of crimson and ruin, turned up to her.

"Your son, Councillor," Aella stated, the title a vicious slur. "You can have him back. He's no use to anyone now."

Across the chamber, Athena mirrored the cruelty with her own clinical brand of malice. She grabbed a handful of Kuro's dark hair, yanking his head back. A fresh, raw scream was torn from him as the movement jarred his savaged eye.

"And you," Athena said, her voice cutting through Kuro's anguish to lash at Nyxara. "The Queen of Nothing. You couldn't protect your court. You couldn't protect your people. You can't even protect this snivelling replacement you've adopted. What use is a mother who cannot shield her child? You are a monument to your own failure."

She shook him, a predator shaking a dying thing in its jaws. "Ryo was right. You are just a barren woman playing with broken toys."

Something in the air changed.

It was not a sound. It was the cessation of one. The constant, knife twisting whimpers of the twins faded into a background hum, not because they stopped, but because they were drowned out by a new frequency, a silent, building pressure that made the very stone of the fissure groan in protest.

The love that had defined Statera and Nyxara, the nurturing, healing, fierce protectiveness, had been a complex and beautiful thing. It had been a source of strength. But now, it was gone. In its place was something primal, elemental, and utterly devoid of the constraints of mercy or reason. It was not love. It was the void left when love is annihilated.

The fear of bringing the mountain down on their sons, the fear of the cataclysmic power within them, it evaporated. There were no more calculations. Only extinction.

Statera's hand, trembling around the hilt of the dagger in her shoulder, stilled. Her head, which had been bowed in pain and defeat, rose. The blood from the gash on her temple traced a path down her cheek like a tear of pure rage. Her Polaris light, which had flickered and died, did not return.

Instead, a cold so absolute it burned the air began to emanate from her. Frost crackled and spread from her knees across the stone floor, racing in jagged lines towards Aella. The moisture in the air crystallized, falling as a fine, deadly snow.

"You touched my son," Statera said. Her voice was not her own. It was the grinding of tectonic plates, the cracking of ancient glaciers.

Aella's mocking smile finally faltered, replaced by a flicker of wary interest. "Finally. A spark."

Statera's good hand came up, her fingers contorted into a sigil of absolute zero. The air around her screamed as it was unmade, all heat and energy violently ripped away and funnelled into a point of incandescent, killing cold between her palms.

"CYNOSURE'S WRATH!" The spell name wasn't incanted; it was screamed, a raw throated invocation of oblivion.

A beam of pure, silent white lanced across the chamber. It did not burn; it dissipated existence itself. The very air it passed through turned to brittle, frozen dust. It struck Aella square in the chest.

There was no explosion. There was a terrible, silent implosion. Aella's body arched backwards, her mouth open in a soundless 'O' of shock. A complex, glittering lattice of frost erupted from the point of impact, spiderwebbing across her torso, her arms, her neck. Her skin turned the colour of bleached bone, her eyes frosted over into blind white orbs. She stood frozen for a heartbeat, a statue of exquisite, absolute cold.

Then, she shuddered. A sound like shattering glass filled the chamber as a web of cracks appeared all over her body. A dry, rasping laugh escaped her frozen lips, the sound itself seeming to freeze and break as it left her mouth.

And then she collapsed. Not like a person, but like a sculpture of ice dropped from a great height. She shattered on the floor into a thousand crystalline pieces that then sublimated into a fine, misting cold that stank of ozone and void.

The silence that followed was louder than the battle.

It was broken by Nyxara's awakening.

While Statera had summoned the cold of dead space, Nyxara reached for the madness at the edge of it. Athena's taunts had not weakened her; they had honed her. They had sanded away the last of her restraint, leaving behind a razor edge of pure, psychotic will.

She pushed herself up from the ground, her multi hued aura not flaring but inverting. It didn't push out; it pulled everything in, a vortex of impossible colours that hurt the mind to look upon. Her eyes were no longer those of a queen, but of an archon who had stared into the abyss and decided to weaponize it.

"You speak of failure," Nyxara whispered, her voice a chorus of a thousand shattered realities. "You have no concept of what failure truly looks like. Let me educate you."

Her hands moved, weaving a pattern that seemed to fracture the light around them. It was a forbidden Sirius art, a spell that didn't attack the body, but the soul's anchor to reality. It forced the victim's own mind to become their torturer, conjuring illusions so potent, so personally horrific, that the victim could not distinguish reality.

"See the truth of your existence," Nyxara hissed, and she unleashed the psychic torrent not at Athena's body, but at the space just behind her.

It was a gamble. A feint. A misdirection born of a strategic mind pushed to its absolute limit.

Athena, sensing the horrific, non corporeal attack, instinctively flinched away from its perceived path, her obsidian eyes widening for the first time with genuine alarm. She raised her hands in a warding gesture against the mental assault she believed was coming.

It was the split second Nyxara needed.

As Athena was distracted by the phantom horror, Nyxara's true weapon moved. Her sword, forgotten on the ground, seemed to fly back into her hand, summoned by her will. She didn't lunge. She flowed. One step, two, her body a blur of motion and vengeful light.

The blade, humming with the energy of a dying star, cut a diagonal line through the air, from Athena's right shoulder down to her left hip.

There was no silent frost. This was visceral, brutal metal meeting flesh. The sound was a wet, terrible tear. Athena's black armour parted like paper, and beneath it, so did skin, muscle, and bone. A gasp, sharp and stunned, ripped from her throat. Not a scream of pain, but one of profound, unbelievable shock. She looked down at the ruin of her chest, at the deep, pumping wound, her clinical arrogance replaced by blank disbelief.

Her grip on Kuro's hair vanished. He dropped like a stone, his head striking the floor with a sickening thud that finally, mercifully, silenced his cries as unconsciousness took him.

Athena stumbled back, one hand clutching at the catastrophic wound, the other held out as if to ward off the impossible. Her eyes, wide with shock and a dawning, primal fear, were fixed on Nyxara, who stood before her, chest heaving, her sword dripping onto the frost rimed stone.

The tide had turned. The sanctuary was a charnel house of ice and blood, but the invaders were broken. One was a mist of frozen memory on the floor. The other was staggering, mortally wounded, her invincible facade shattered along with her body.

The mothers, bleeding, exhausted, their souls scarred by the sounds of their sons' agony, now held the advantage. Their love had been a fortress. Their rage had become an apocalypse. And it was not yet done.

The advantage was a phantom, a fleeting tremor in the scales of violence. Athena, though mortally carved, was a creature of refined malice, her will a honed weapon. Blood sheeted down her torso, painting her black armour in grotesque, glistening patterns, yet she did not fall. Her obsidian eyes, wide with shock, narrowed into slits of pure, venomous intent. She took a ragged, wet breath, the sound like a bellows in a ruined forge.

"A… scratch," she gasped, the lie giving her a moment's strength. "You fight for broken things. Your love is a… disease. And we are the cure."

From the ground, Aella's shattered, frost bleached remnants began to… move. The crystalline shards trembled, sliding across the stone with a sound like grinding teeth. A low, harmonic hum filled the air, a dissonant chord that vibrated in the teeth and bones of everyone present. The motes of frozen essence coalesced, swirling like a blizzard in reverse, pulling themselves back toward a central, horrifying point. A form began to reconstitute itself from the agony of absolute zero, a puppet of ice and hatred being restrung.

Statera and Nyxara stared, a fresh wave of dread washing over their rage fuelled exhaustion. They had poured the core of their power into those strikes, one a spell of absolute entropic cold, the other a wound that would have unmade a lesser being. And it was not enough. The reality of what they faced, not soldiers, but extensions of Ryo's will, entities whose existence defied natural law, crashed down upon them. Their sons were broken at their feet, and their most powerful blows had merely inconvenienced their tormentors. The void where their hope had been was now filled with the crushing certainty of failure.

It was in this moment of suspended horror that a new presence announced itself.

She did not emerge from the shadows. She was the shadow given sentience and purpose.

Lucifera moved with an economy of motion that was utterly alien. There was no battle cry, no telegraphing of intent. One second she was a still statue near the chamber's entrance, her silver hair the only hint of her form in the gloom. The next, she was between the mothers and the reforming monstrosities.

Her fighting style was not a style at all. It was a spasm of calculated erasure. Her body seemed to lack solidity, her movements a series of disjointed, impossible angles. She didn't flow like Aella or stand firm like Athena; she flickered.

Two figures, previously unnoticed in the chaotic periphery, moved to intercept her, Marcus and Lucius, their faces set in grim masks of duty, their own blades drawn. They were mere footnotes to the main tragedy, but they were in her way.

Lucifera's response was not an engagement; it was a dismissal. Her hands blurred. Two brutal, heavy shards of sharpened obsidian, daggers that drank the light rather than reflected it, left her grasp. They did not whistle through the air; they simply ceased to be in her hands and reappeared, embedded to the hilts. One found the gap between Marcus's breastplate and gorget, piercing his throat with a wet, final thunk. The other took Lucius directly in the eye, the force of the impact snapping his head back and dropping him to the stone like a sack of grain. Their deaths were not events; they were punctuation marks in her sentence of violence.

She did not pause to acknowledge them. Her form twisted, a thing of impossible angles, and she was upon the true threats.

A third dagger, thrown with that same dispassionate finality, found its home in the centre of the swirling vortex that was becoming Aella. There was a sound like a glacier cracking in half. The harmonic hum of reassembly choked off into a silent scream of thwarted purpose. The swirling ice shards lost their cohesion, falling to the ground as inert, dead glass. Aella's form was not killed, it was unmade again, this time permanently, her essence scattered into non viable fragments.

The fourth and final dagger took Athena in the shoulder, the obsidian blade punching through armour and bone with contemptuous ease. It was a wound meant not to kill, but to maim and send a message. Athena screamed, a raw sound of pain and fury, stumbling back as the force of the blow spun her around. She clutched at the protruding haft, her other hand dropping her sword. Her obsidian eyes, wide with pain and shock, locked onto Lucifera's impassive face.

The retreat was not a flight; it was a strategic withdrawal forced by a superior predator. The psychic echo of their will, now fractured and bleeding, vibrated through the chamber.

This was but a preview. The real war begins now. He comes for the fallen court. He comes for Nyxarion.

Athena, gripping her shoulder, spat a mouthful of black blood onto the frost rimed stone. With a final, venomous glare that promised a future of exquisite torment, she turned and vanished into the darkness of the tunnel from whence they came, leaving her two dead foot soldiers and the scattered remains of her sister behind.

Then, the true battle began, the one for their sons.

The fury, the cosmic power, the will to fight, it all drained from Statera and Nyxara, leaving behind a void filled only with a crushing, suffocating guilt. They fell to their knees not as queens and warriors, but as mothers who had failed the most sacred of charges.

"Shiro… oh, my boy, my rain baby…" Statera's voice was a broken thing as she gathered his limp form into her lap. Her hands, which had moments ago summoned a spell to unmake a soul, now trembled as they hovered over the ruin of his face. The angry, burning X was a brand of her failure. Each wet, shallow breath he took was an accusation. She tore a strip from her already ruined tunic, her fingers fumbling as she tried to staunch the bleeding. "I'm here, I'm here," she whispered, over and over, a desperate mantra. "Mother's here. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I didn't stop them. I'm so sorry." Her tears fell onto his forehead, mingling with the blood, each one a drop of acid on her soul.

But her pain was a quiet storm compared to the hurricane of anguish that broke from Nyxara.

She crawled to Kuro, her hands shaking so violently she could barely touch him. The deep diagonal gash on his cheek was bad, but it was the eye, the eye that was a mess of ruined tissue and seeping, painful fire, that held her horrified gaze.

"Kuro?" she whispered, her voice a dry leaf scraping on stone. She gently turned his head, her touch feather light. "Kuro, can you hear me? Speak to me. Please."

There was no response. His stillness was a terror far greater than any battlefield. It was the silence of a future snuffed out.

A sound built in Nyxara's chest, a low, animal whine of pure despair that grew in volume and pitch until it shattered the silence.

"KURO!" she screamed, the name tearing from her throat raw and bloody. It was not a call. It was a shriek of absolute, world ending terror. She gathered his upper body into her arms, clutching him to her chest, rocking back and forth. "Wake up! Look at me! Please, you have to look at me! Don't you dare leave me! Don't you dare! I forbid it!"

She shook him gently, then more frantically, as if she could jostle his soul back into his body. "You are my son! You do not get to leave! Do you hear me? YOU ARE MINE! AND I AM YOURS! COME BACK TO ME!"

Her voice broke, dissolving into great, wracking sobs that shook her entire frame. She pressed her forehead against his chest, her tears soaking into his tunic. The fight was gone. The queen was gone. All that was left was a woman staring into the abyss of her greatest loss.

"I can't… I can't do this without you…" she wept, her voice a shattered whisper now, all the fury spent. "Please… please, just one sign. Just one breath. Don't make me live in a world where I failed you… don't make me live with your silence…"

Her body slumped over his, the weight of her grief seeming to press him further into the cold stone. She was giving up. The darkness was closing in.

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