My bones had forgotten what it meant to be whole.
Every breath was a vow I couldn't keep. Every heartbeat was a blade grinding against the cage of my ribs. The Sun Duel had broken more than my body—it had burned through whatever illusion of invincibility I clung to.
I was dying.
Not in the theatrical way, no. This was slower.
Quiet.
Like unthreading.
I remember crawling. Ash in my throat. My fingers trying to dig into the fractured ground as if I could claw my way back into my own skin.
The stars above me blurred.
And then—
She arrived.
Her presence was silent, like snowfall in a cathedral of corpses. Light poured from her footsteps—silver, soft, sacred.
Eirin.
Not as I remembered her.
Not as the tender healer with ink-stained hands and whisper-prayers stitched into her sleeves.
No.
This was her Moon Form.
She knelt beside me, and the world bent inward.
Time forgot how to move.
Her hair floated like a halo of mercury. Her eyes... stars pulled too close. Beautiful, yes—but not safe. Never safe.
Her hands hovered over my chest.
And without asking, she touched me.
I screamed.
Because healing, in the hands of a being like her, is not a kindness.
It is a reckoning.
The Riftfire inside me fought her light.
The constellation beneath my skin—still raw from awakening—flared and cracked. I saw memories pour from me in rivers:
Lucien's broken blade.
Serai burning.
My third death.
My first birth.
They rose in smoke, and she breathed them in.
"Stop," I choked. "You're taking too much—"
Her voice came then. Not from her mouth, but from behind the veil of my own skull.
"I am not taking. I am remembering."
And then I saw it.
The thing she'd hidden.
The Void.
It was nestled behind her sternum, masked in starlight. A pulsing seed of darkness, older than the Rift, colder than the space between lives. It looked at me—no, through me—and I felt its voice without sound:
"We are patient."
Eirin's hands trembled.
Only for a second.
Then she closed her eyes, and light surged through me again.
The wound in my chest closed.
The blood reversed.
The stars within me calmed.
But I couldn't unsee what I had seen.
She rose as if gravity no longer applied to her. The garden ruins around us shimmered with her presence. Every flower bowed. Every shadow held its breath.
She wouldn't meet my eyes.
So I forced her to.
"That thing inside you," I said. My voice still tasted of fire and grief. "What is it?"
Eirin didn't blink.
"My burden." she said. "And someday, yours."
I stood.
Barely.
The healing had worked—but left my soul frostbitten. Something of me had been stitched with moonlight and mystery. I could feel her magic under my skin, pulsing with its own heartbeat.
"Why save me?" I asked.
"Because you're not finished," she replied. "And because I remember what you'll become."
The silence that followed wasn't peace.
It was preparation.
A tear escaped her eye—not sorrow. Something worse.
Recognition.
"You will stand at the hinge of fate, Aetherion Vale. One side holds salvation. The other, absolute ruin. And I—" she paused, voice cracking into divinity, "I won't be able to follow you there."
She turned, and moonlight folded around her like a closing eye.
As she faded, I saw it again.
That Void.
Wider.
Hungrier.
And it smiled.
Beneath the ash where I had fallen, a sigil began to glow.
One I did not carve.
One I had seen once—in my first death.
A whisper echoed from the ground itself.
"He watches now."
And I knew—
The god who made the Rift was waking.