Rosaline's body swayed, then folded. She caught herself on one hand, the other still gripping the blood-wet umbrella. Half her face, once split open, had knit smooth in that strange, gentle blue. The other half was red and ruined, hair matted, eye a shard of glass.

Kaiser walked through the dust without hurry. Bosch lay in his arms, light as an empty canvas. He knelt and eased the old man down until Bosch's knees touched the marble in front of her. For a breath, none of them spoke.

Rosaline blinked. The red in her eye faltered. Her fingers reached forward, searching the air, then found his cheek. She stopped on the bones beneath his skin—gentle, as if afraid she might break him with the touch alone. "Nymus," she breathed.

Bosch smiled, small and tired. "My beautifull Rose..."

Aria stood a few paces back, one hand pressed to her mouth. Celestine, blood on her lip, lowered her blade by inches but didn't sheathe it. Ivan slid one of the dropped med-peks toward Kaiser with his boot and didn't say a word.

Kaiser didn't look at any of them. His palm hovered above the back of Bosch's skull, and surprising he was pouring Sol into him, somehow stabilazing his shaterred dust of a Core for a bit. "I told you already old man, you only have minutes left," he said to no one in particular. "Use them well."

Bosch coughed, and a thin line of red traced his chin. He didn't wipe it away. He leaned forward until his brow met Rosaline's. "I'm here," he whispered. "I'm late. I should've… fixed what I ruined much, much sooner."

Her mouth quivered. Even damaged, the old, familiar tilt was there. "You didn't ruin anything, dummy," she managed to say.

"I should have known," he said. "You alone told me never to doubt my sight."

Behind them, something in the walls creaked. Blue still drifted from the little doors Aria had used, thin as smoke, sinking into Rosaline's skin. It steadied nothing. It only made her look, for a few seconds at a time, like herself.

Kaiser spoke, flat as a verdict. "Your core is dust and hers is burning out. There is no rescue." He turned his head a fraction, enough for his voice to carry to Celestine and Aria both. "If you have prayers, tell them before you perish."

Bosch drew a thin breath. "Let me have them, just a handful of breaths. Enough to sign my name at the bottom of this disaster."

Rosaline's eyes flicked toward the sound of him, then back to Bosch. "You always pick terrible moments to find poetry," she murmured.

He huffed a laugh that hurt. "Terrible timing is just a thing I learned from you."

He lifted a shaking hand and found the edge of her jaw. The pads of his fingers traced the seam where blue met red. His thumb paused beneath her mouth, the way it always had when he studied a face he was about to paint. Habit, even now.

"I thought I was keeping you safe," he said. "A month ago you were still… you. You laughed. You told me to make the sea colder. I thought if I kept the world out, it would stay true." His breath hitched. "I should have made the sea true."

Silence thinned around them. Celestine looked down, jaw tight. She had known him as a child—old man Bosch with hands full of charcoal sticks and pockets even fuller of love. Hearing him say it like that made something in her chest ache. She didn't speak. She didn't trust her voice.

Kaiser shifted, the Sol in his hand growing weaker, sealing another slow bleed of Bosche's broken Core. He didn't soften, but he did angle Bosch a little closer, so Rosaline didn't have to reach so far. "Say what you need to say," he told them, and for once there was no contempt in it.

Bosch drew in close until their foreheads met again. "Listen to me," he said, the old stubbornness threading through the ruin of his voice. "If they have to end you… they will end you as Rosaline. Not as whatever this is. Do you hear me?" His fingers tightened under her jaw. "They'll end me as Bosch."

A tear slipped from the golden eye and stopped in the red, caught on a crack of blood. She smiled and nodded.

His laugh was soft. "We did live," he said. "I held you under our small tree. I painted the dragon too big for the dome. I kept your favorite brush even when it frayed. We had a boy who stole my eyes and your beauty." His breath shuddered. "We have truly lived as we wanted... And we have had enough."

Rosaline closed her eyes. "More than enough."

Behind them, Aria turned her face aside, shoulders quivering once. Ivan fixed his jaw and stared too hard at the floor, because men don't cry, not when anyone is watching. Celestine lowered her head, the gesture dressed up as checking her grip, though her knuckles were already white on the hilt.

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Kaiser's gaze never left the two of them. He didn't flinch when Rosaline's fingers fumbled toward him and caught his wrist. She didn't have strength enough to hurt him, but Kaiser didn't pull away.

"Painter," Kaiser murmured, his gaze fixed ahead. "You can feel it, can't you? What's holding her together won't last. When it breaks, so will she. If you mean to finish this, do it now, before there's nothing left to speak to."

Bosch nodded against Rosaline's brow. "Damn it boy, stop it. I know," he said."But she remains Rosaline still."

Kaiser inclined his head once, the closest thing to a sign of non aggression he could have offered.

"Rosaline," Bosch said, his thumb finding its old place beneath her mouth, steadying it as he had so many times before. "You remember the rule you gave me. Paint what frightens you… and make the sea colder. But I never could, could I? I always left it too warm."

She huffed the faintest laugh. "I could never blame you for that... Your soul was always warmer than you knew."

"I'm cold now," he said, and for the first time a little fear edged the words.

"Then take mine," she whispered. Her hand slid from his cheek to his chest and rested over his heart. "Whatever's left."

Red crawled from her palm into his torn white cloak. It made his breath easier for a handful of seconds. But it made her dim faster.

"Rosaline—" he started.

"Shh." She leaned in, pressing her mouth to his brow. "Nymus."

The name cracked him open. A sound slipped out of him, raw, broken, stripped of all the poise he had once carried. His shoulders shook. When she drew back, he caught her hand and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, then her palm, the old ritual of gratitude. The gesture steadied him, the way it always had before a difficult line, even now when there were no more lines left to paint.

"Old man Bosch," Celestine whispered, so quiet only the two closest heard it.

Rosaline's eye fluttered back to Kaiser, the last threads of blue in it thinning to gray. "I can… feel you," she whispered. "I can see you. You're cruel… so cruel." Her breath rattled, but her chin lifted, fragile and proud. "But not to her. Not to the girl. Please, go against what you are. There is still hope, even for something like you."

Her gaze tilted toward Celestine, the faintest nod in her direction.

Kaiser's reply came in a shadow of a nod. "Everyone gets what they've earned."he said. "She has done well so far."

Rosaline's eye softened when it found Celestine. "I always liked you," she said, voice thinner than it had any right to be, but warm beneath the ruin. "You were kind when you were young, when you came to us. I'm glad… glad I could see you once more."

Her lips curved faintly, the ghost of a smile rising through the pain. "You were small," she went on, almost fond. "Always trying to carry everything in hands that were too little. Put something down, once in a while."

Celestine swallowed. "Y-Yes, my lady."

"And you," Rosaline said, her gaze sliding back to Bosch. For an instant the red in her eye faltered, and it was only her again. "You don't get to rest just yet. There's still one more thing we must do."

Her trembling hand lifted, the same hand that had once painted every sea beside him. She placed it over his. "One more stroke."

He understood without words. His fingers pressed to the marble. Together they dragged a line across the floor, a faint streak of blue... And the world answered.

Outside, the sea below shifted. A single, bright band of blue carved across the green. Kaiser's eyes followed to surge of Sol, and for once, his lips moved. The faintest shadow of a smile touched them.

Bosch's breath broke, shallow, fluttering, every inhale rattling like glass under strain. His gaze never left Rosaline's face, even as the strength drained from him.

His last breath left him warm against her cheek. His head tipped, and before it could fall, another hand was there. Kaiser's. Cold, precise fingers caught the painter with a care that did not belong to Kaiser, but belonged perfectly to that moment.

Rosaline stayed upright through sheer force, fingers still at Bosch's chest. The blue that had once made half her face whole went thin as silk and then thinner still. She looked at Kaiser, then past him, at the doors where the house had let blue through. "Thank you," she said—to whom, no one could tell.

Kaiser set Bosch down as if placing a brush he respected back into its case. Then he stepped behind Rosaline and lifted his sword.

Aria flinched. Celestine's knuckles went white.

Rosaline reached back without looking and laid two fingers against the flat of the steel. She whispered. "Let me go to him first."

Kaiser paused. He counted the seconds by his own heartbeat. Rosaline leaned forward until her brow touched Bosch's again. "Nymus," she said one last time, as if answering a roll call only she could hear. Her hand slipped. Her body sagged, her head nestling into the hollow above his shoulder where it had always fit.

For a long moment, no one moved.

Dust settled. Somewhere in the house, something old cracked, then held. Kaiser laid a palm over both of them. He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, the red in his gaze had burned back to absolute. "Up," he said to the living, and the word rang like a bell. "We're not finished."

Aria wiped her face with the heel of her hand and nodded. Ivan gathered what med-peks hadn't shattered, though there was no one left in the room they could save. Celestine lingered a heartbeat longer, her eyes drinking in Bosch's still face, the tenderness carved there like a wound she would carry forever.

Kaiser moved to turn away, and then stopped.

Rosaline's lashes fluttered. The faint blue that had returned to her eye wavered… and slipped fully. A thin vein of red lit beneath the iris, threading out like cracks in glass... But Kaiser did not hesitate. His sword was already drawn, and he drove it straight into her heart.

The blade slid clean. Rosaline gasped, a small, sharp sound. Her hand, trembling, clutched once at Bosch's cloak before falling still. Her eye, the one that had almost been hers again, dimmed to gray.

Kaiser withdrew the blade without ceremony, but when he turned, his face was shadowed.

"Curse you, painter."

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