The funeral pyres burned for three days.
Verdwood's tradition was to honor its defenders, and with over three hundred dead, the pyres never stopped. The smoke was a constant, acrid presence in the valley, a thick, gray pall that blotted out the sun. It was the smell of our victory. Ash, and charred bone, and a grief so profound it had become a physical, choking weight.
I stood at Lysara's pyre longer than at any of the others. Kaela stood beside me, a silent, hollowed-out statue. We had found her blue journal in the rubble, but her other research, decades of work she had inherited and expanded, was gone. We burned the copies with her. She would have wanted her knowledge preserved, but the originals... the originals were hers. They deserved to go with her.
"It's supposed to help," Kaela said, her voice a dry, raw whisper. She hadn't really spoken in days. "Closure. Watching the fire. Accepting that they're... gone."
I looked at the simple, white-wrapped bundle on the pyre. Miren had done her best. "Does it help you?" I asked.
"No," she admitted, her gaze fixed on the rising flames. "It just... it just makes it final."
Elder Stoneheart, his face aged a decade in a week, spoke the traditional words. "She gave everything in defense of Verdwood. She dies honored. She will be remembered."
The words were hollow. They were a lie. Lysara didn't "die defending Verdwood." She had died in a random, pointless accident, a stray piece of rubble, after she had already won the battle for us. She had been killed by physics, not by the cult. It was a stupid, senseless, dumb ending to the most brilliant mind I had ever known. That was the truth, and it was a truth so bitter and unfair that no ceremonial platitude could touch it.
The fire caught the edges of her journals, and they began to curl, her neat, precise handwriting turning to black ash. I tried not to think about how she should be here. Right now. She should be in the war room, her face alive with analytical fire, cross-referencing battle reports, calculating the cult's losses, and planning our next ten moves.
Instead, she was just... ash.
Three days after the last pyre had gone out, the living gathered. The council chamber had been hastily rebuilt, the air still smelling of new, raw wood and old smoke. Representatives from the allied settlements had arrived, their faces grim. This was the continental assessment. This was where we counted the cost.
The numbers were read out, one by one, a litany of our failure.
"Verdwood," Elder Stoneheart read, his voice dead. "Three hundred and twelve defenders... dead. One hundred and eighty-seven wounded, forty-three of them... critically." He paused. "Half the settlement is destroyed. And... the cult... we have confirmed they captured three of the younger children during the initial chaos."
My stomach clenched. We hadn't just lost Lysara. We had lost children.
"Riverholt," Councilor Aldrich reported, his voice tight. "Eighty-nine dead. Significant structural damage. Our... our own marked individual... he was killed in the first assault."
"Brookhaven," Kaela's voice, flat and military. "One hundred and thirty-four dead. The settlement was breached, but it held. Their two marked children were successfully defended."
The reports went on. Saltmere, 67 dead. The eastern settlements, a combined casualty count over 400.
And then, Master Dren's report from the north. "Ironrest," he said, his voice heavy, "refused to coordinate. They... they were annihilated. The settlement... is gone. Wiped from the map."
A sick silence fell.
"The... the children?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "The ones you..."
"The three children we extracted," Dren confirmed, "are, as far as we know, the only survivors."
The final tally. The price of our "victory." Approximately 1,500 defenders, across the new alliance, were dead. Dozens of settlements were damaged. One was just... gone. And the cult... the cult had, by Mira's and Serra's combined estimates, successfully "Harvested" between forty and sixty convergence-marked children from the unallied territories.
"We won," Councilor Aldrich said, his voice hollow, "but the cost... it's staggering."
I looked at the map, at the red circles marking the dead. "No," I said, my voice quiet, but it cut through the room. "We didn't win. We survived. They accomplished their primary objective. They retreated after they had finished their Harvest. The assault on us... that was just a secondary goal. A distraction. They got what they wanted."
The room was silent. The truth of it, the weight of it, settled on all of us. We hadn't won. We had just been the ones left behind.
"What," Elder Stoneheart finally asked, his voice the sound of a man at the end of the world, "do we do now?"
That evening, I looked at myself in a cracked piece of mirror in my ruined room.
Kaela's words from weeks ago came back to me. You're going to get us all killed.
She hadn't been far off.
My reflection... it wasn't me. Not anymore. The convergence marks, which had once been faint, spider-web lines on my arms, were now thick, black-violet veins. They had spread. They were up my neck, across my collarbone, creeping toward my face like a slow, dark tide. And my eyes... my eyes no longer just "flickered" with violet. They glowed. A permanent, low-level, luminescent violet that was visible even in the bright light of the setting sun.
Miren had done the measurements. Her face had been pale. "Ren," she'd said, her voice clinical but shaking, "when you... when you lost control... after Lysara... your integration level... it spiked. I registered it at 97%."
One hundred, I had thought, but I didn't say it.
"It's... it's dropped since," Miren continued, her hands twisting. "It's... 'stable'... at around 89%. But... it's not stable. It's... it's fluctuating. Wildly. From 86% to 91%, just based on your stress, your... your proximity to the void-scarred courtyard."
"That's too high," I said, my voice flat.
"It's... it's dangerously high, Ren. At this level... you're... you're closer to Elara than to what you were. You... you're on a razor's edge. You're... you're permanently unstable."
Now, I just stared at the glowing eyes in the mirror. I looked like a monster.
"You look like death," Kaela said from the doorway.
"I feel like it," I replied, not turning.
She walked in, her boots silent on the dusty floor. She sat on the edge of my cot. "Miren says you're a time bomb."
"That's one way to put it."
"So we keep you stable," she said, her voice a forced, rough attempt at confidence. "With the resonance. With the others. With..."
"With Lysara's protocols?" I interrupted, the bitterness a poison on my tongue. "With her analysis? With the one person who actually understood the math behind this?"
Kaela was silent.
"I... I miss her," I finally said, the admission a physical, agonizing crack in my chest. "I... I keep... I go to the war room, and I have a question... a strategic problem... and I... I turn... to ask her. And... she's not there."
"I know," Kaela whispered. "I... I do it, too. In the yard. I'll... I'll see Torren's footing is off, and I'll... I'll turn... to tell her to add it to her notes." She paused. "The... the absence. It's... it's worse. It's worse than the battle was."
We just sat there. The two of us. The broken remains of the trio.
The new reality settled in over the next few weeks. Master Dren's combat days were over. The void-corruption that had torn through his chest had damaged him permanently. He would live, he would walk, but he would never, ever, fight again.
I visited him in the recovery ward. He was sitting up, his face grim, staring at the wall.
"You look terrible," he said, his old bluntness still there.
"You're one to talk," I replied.
He gave a dry, pained laugh. "Fair. The council... they're asking about training."
"When will you be back?" I asked.
"I won't," he said, his voice flat. "My body's done, Ren. Someone else... someone else has to take over. To... to train the network."
"Who?" I asked, but I already knew the answer.
"You," he said. "You've been doing it for years. You... you understand the curse. You're... you're all they have left. You're the Anchor, Ren. You're the teacher now."
The weight of it, the formality of it, was crushing. "I'm fourteen years old, Dren."
"You're also a reincarnated tutor, a 90-percent-integrated void-marked, and the symbolic center of the entire continental resistance," Dren countered, his voice rough. "Age... age is the least relevant thing about you. It... it has to be you."
The alliance we had built was already fracturing. With the Harvest over, the immediate threat had passed. And now, the old fears were creeping back in.
"We lost three hundred people!" Ironwood's voice was a roar in the council chamber. "Three hundred! Defending void-touched children! At what point... at what point... does this idealism become a suicide pact? Maybe... maybe the cult is right! Maybe they can't be integrated! Maybe they should be... contained."
"We won because of them!" Stoneheart roared back.
"We survived!" Ironwood fired back. "And we buried half our village to do it! Principles don't resurrect the dead!"
"No," I said, my voice quiet, but it silenced the room. "They don't. But they define whether the dead mattered. They define whether we are a civilization... or just... a pack of animals, sacrificing our children to save ourselves. We... we do not... become what we are fighting."
The debate ended, but the fracture was there. The alliance was holding... but by a thread.
The kids... the kids were broken. Torren was withdrawn, his new prosthetic leg leaning against his cot, a constant reminder of his failure. He wouldn't touch it. Zara... Zara had grown hard. Her grief had calcified into a cold, protective rage. She was... she was becoming Kaela.
Elara was the worst. She was still trapped in the moment she'd killed Finn. She blamed herself for everything. For the breach. For the voidflame. For... for Lysara. She believed that if she hadn't lost control, if she hadn't been a liability, Lysara would never have had to leave the infirmary. She was drowning in a guilt that wasn't hers.
I... I tried to help them. But how could I? I, the failed leader. I, the reincarnated teacher, who couldn't even protect his own.
"You don't have to have the answers, Ren," Mira said, finding me one night, staring at the rebuilt wall. "You just... you just have to be present. That's... that's more than most of us ever had."
"Lysara would have had the answers," I said, my voice bitter.
"Lysara was exceptional," Mira said, her voice soft. "You're not her. You're... you're you. And that... that has to be enough."
It was her journal that saved me.
I found it, the blue one, the one she'd mentioned. It was in the small, waterproof chest under the wreckage of her cot. Her last, most precious research. Kaela and I sat in the ruined library, a single lantern between us, and we opened it.
It was... it was her. Her entire, brilliant mind, distilled onto paper. Convergence mark progression. Void mechanics. Tactical analyses.
And then... the last entry. The one she'd written in a frantic, hurried script the night before the siege.
The coordinates. The Eastern Mountains. The cult's main stronghold.
And the why.
"If you're reading this," she'd written, "something has gone wrong. But... the work. It's not about random corruption. It's... it's a bridge. A 'void bridge.' They're... they're engineering a permanent, stable gate. They need... my calculations say... they need at least 50 marked children. At high integration. 90% or more. They're not... they're not 'indoctrinating' them. Ren. They're using them. As... as components. As living, mortal batteries... to power the bridge. To... to stabilize it. They're... they're burning them out, one by one. The Harvest... it wasn't just to capture assets. It was to fuel the endgame. They're... they're going to rip open reality."
Kaela was crying, silent tears streaming down her face. I... I couldn't breathe.
I read the last lines, her final message, to us.
"...don't blame yourselves. Please. I... I calculated the risk. This... this was always... a probability. I... I chose to help. That's... that's who I am. Honor... honor my choice. Finish... finish what we started. Stop them.
I love you both. I always have. I always will.
—Lyss"
She knew. She knew she might die. And she... she left us a map. She left us a mission. She had... she had planned for her own absence. She had given us what we needed... to continue... without her.
The next six months were a blur. We rebuilt Verdwood. We buried our dead. We mourned. I... I turned fourteen. There was no celebration.
The long, hard winter came, and with it, a new, cold focus. Kaela became a ghost, a hunter, ranging far into the wilderness, hardening her body, her mind, her soul. I did the opposite. I burrowed into Lysara's research. I became the analyst. I absorbed her.
Torren, his new leg mastered, his mind sharpened by grief, became my lieutenant, my strategist. Elara and Zara, bound by their shared trauma, became the core of the new network.
We trained. We grieved. And we... we reforged ourselves.
The snows thawed. Kaela returned.
She found me, Dren, Torren, Mira, Zara, and Elara in the war room. She was leaner, harder, her eyes as cold as the mountain ice. She didn't say hello. She just walked to the map and, with a thud, dropped a high-level cult commander's insignia on the table.
"I scouted the pass," she said, her voice a low, cold rasp. "The Eastern Mountains. Lysara's coordinates... they're correct. The stronghold is there. It's... it's vast. And... it's active."
She finally looked at me. The hollow, grieving girl was gone. In her place... was a warrior. A warrior who had been to the forge, and had come out as steel. Her fire matched my own.
I looked at my new network. My new... family. Broken. Traumatized. And... terrifyingly powerful.
"Lysara gave us the target," I said, my voice quiet, but filling the room. "She gave us the why. For six months, we've healed. We've prepared. We've become the weapons she knew we would have to be."
I looked at Kaela. The last, true piece of my old life. "It's time," I said. "It's time to keep our promise."
She just nodded, her hand falling to the hilt of her blade. "We take the fight to them."
"We're not just taking the fight to them," I said, my hand closing over the blood-stained, blue journal. "We're going to rescue those children. We're going to stop that bridge. We... we're going to finish what she started."
Tomorrow, we would leave. A suicide mission into the heart of the cult's power. It wasn't about revenge anymore. It was about a promise.