The world returned slowly — first to sound, then to scent. The thunder in Anay's ears dulled until he could hear only the soft crackle of dying embers. The violet haze around him dimmed to a faint pulse. He ran.
His legs moved before his mind fully caught up. Ash clung to his lashes; the air tasted metallic and sweet with blood. He cut through broken trunks and smoking earth until, at the heart of the clearing, he saw them.
Kael was on one knee, head bowed, blades dull at his side, chest rising in shallow, ragged breaths. Liora leaned against him, a smile like moonlight on a grave — blood darkening the front of her tunic, a wound along her ribs seeping slow and red. They were both alive. Barely. Whole worlds of silence hung between each breath.
"Kael! Liora!" Anay dropped to his knees beside them, hands trembling as he reached for their faces. He couldn't keep the sob from breaking loose.
Liora's fingers found his wrist and squeezed — weakness and warmth in the same motion. Her smile didn't fade. "Anay," she said, voice small and steady. "You… did well." She laughed once, hollow and kind. "You… you were right. You felt it."
Kael forced air into his lungs and blinked up at Anay with eyes bright with a terrible pride. He coughed; a bright thread of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. "Anay," he rasped, and the word held more than breath — it held trust. "Go. Go to Astral. Report to—" he paused, each word like a stone. "—Principal Arvind Dev. You can trust him. He knows. He knows about… Garix,. He'll know what to do." His hand clenched on Anay's sleeve. "Go fast. The elites will come. If they see this—" his voice broke a little, "it will be a problem for you if you get involved."
Anay shook his head, stammering. "No. I'm not leaving you. We—"
Liora laughed softly, as if at a shared joke between old friends. "You must, Anay." She pushed a trembling hand to his chest where his pulse hammered. "Northwest. There are friends our shadow wolf freing you can train there. Train. Grow. Don't get caught up—this is our fight to end. You must learn. You must live." Her gaze flicked to Kael, to the sky where the rift still smoked. "We… we avenge Garix and Anand. In peace." Her smile became an ache: a memory of laughter. "Go."
Kael's eyes shone with something like relief, like the end of a long march. He reached out, brushing Anay's hair back from his forehead with hands that had held a sword more often than a child. "Trust Arvind Dev," he whispered. "And—" a faint choke — "do not forget. We fought so you could go forward."
Anay's hands trembled. He wanted to stay and will them back to life. He wanted to bleed their wounds and stitch their laughter with his own hands and promise revenge and never leave them. But the urgency in Kael's voice, the smile in Liora's eyes, the weight behind their words — all of it pressed into him like cold iron. He swallowed, tears hot and fast, and stood.
"Go now," Kael said again, more firmly. Blood welled at his lips; his voice thinned. Liora's fingers slipped from Anay's wrist and rested on Kael's shoulder. "Be safe," she breathed.
Anay crumpled forward, pressing his forehead to Kael's knees. He sobbed, soundless at first, then raw, a young animal's cry ripped open by grief. For a long stretch of seconds the three of them simply existed: the broken, the burning, and the one who could not hold everything yet.
When he lifted his head, Liora's eyes had closed. Kael's breathing had slowed until it was a quiet echo. A final fragile smile touched their faces — small, like the last ember of a passed fire.
They let go.
Anay stumbled back as if struck. He turned and ran before his limbs remembered that he had been told to leave. He head towards astral because Liora had said so; he ran because Kael's last request was a command. He ran until the smoke thinned and the trees thinned and the shape of the ruined clearing behind him blurred into a wound on the world.
By the time the first of the elites arrived — clad in the seal-marked armor of higher command — Anay had already left. They came with sky-ward lanterns and sealing relics and faces like tombstones. They moved through the hollowed trees and stopped in the center of the carnage, where the two youthful champions had fallen.
They were quiet for a long moment. Then one of them, a woman with hair silvered at the temples, muttered, more to herself than to anyone else, "They're barely—what? Fifteen? Nineteen? Who are they?" Her voice carried disbelief that tasted like fear.
A taller man—Commander Yash, his insignia struck with the emblem of the order—lowered his eyes to the bodies. "They've killed a Seventh Hell," he said, as if saying it aloud might make it mean less. "Impossible."
Another officer, younger, scanned the scene with a portable record. "Their names—there's Kael and liora in the registry. Astral academy listings, official file. It's like they appeared from nowhere in the forest and encounter the seventh hell
The silver-haired woman's jaw tightened.
This name kael and liora she realises they are the prodigws of astral academy, that's a huge loss.
Then
"They may have died here," she whispered, voice flat. "But if they truly slew Abyrus — if two youths did what many generals could not… their names will travel. We must be ready."
Commander Yash's eyes narrowed, the air around him snapping to a new focus. "We may have lost them," he rumbled, "but we are one step closer. Liberation is not a hope — it's a plan. We will not give up." His hand clenched into a fist over a map, over the lands still smoking from the rift.
They began to catalog, to ring the alarms, to send urgent missives to Astral and the Principal Arvind Dev — and yet, in their hurried voices, there was a tremor: astonishment that someone so young could take down a Seventh Hell, and worry that the order of things had shifted under their feet.
Anay's silhouette was already a small smudge against the horizon as the first search drones rose. He kept going. Each step left a footprint in the ash — a path to Astral, to Principal Arvind Dev, to the beginning of something that would demand everything of him.
He cried until the road blurred, then dried his face with the back of his hand. The vow burned colder than grief: he would become what they needed him to be and He would return. He would not let their deaths be the end of the story.