White.
Not light.
Not warmth.
Just white—so absolute it felt like the world had been erased and left unfinished.
Manraj couldn't feel his body.
Couldn't feel the floor.
Couldn't feel his own breath.
But he could feel pressure—two forces tearing at the same center.
Fire.
Silence.
Both his.
Neither his.
Something spoke inside the white.
Not a voice.
A decision.
CHOOSE.
---
Outside the White
The cavern did not collapse.
It folded.
Reality snapped back in jagged pieces—like someone had glued a broken mirror together wrong.
Zoya hit stone hard enough to bite her tongue.
She tasted iron before she tasted air.
Then sound came back in a choking rush—the roar of water, Azhar shouting her name, the distant grind of moving rock.
She forced her eyes open.
The ruins were wrong.
Some pillars were gone. Others were in places they hadn't been. Carvings she'd seen only once were suddenly everywhere, repeating in dizzying loops along the walls.
Like the cavern was remembering different versions of itself at the same time.
"Manraj—"
Her voice cracked.
The center platform where he had been standing was gone.
In its place:
A sphere of white light.
Not blinding.
Not gentle.
Dense.
Contained.
Alive.
Azhar stood at the edge of it, one arm wrapped around his ribs, shadows clinging to him like bandages. His face was pale in a way she'd never seen.
"Don't touch it," he rasped, as she stumbled toward him.
"I wasn't going to hug it," she snapped, but her voice shook.
The sphere pulsed once.
Her Silence flinched in her veins as if something had swatted it aside.
"Is he inside?" she whispered.
Azhar nodded once.
"Both of them are."
Zoya swallowed.
"Fire and… whatever that thing is?"
Azhar's jaw tightened.
"That thing is older than Surtr. Older than the companions. It doesn't need a name."
"I'm going to call it something anyway," she muttered. "Not-a-thing isn't helpful."
---
Inside the White
Manraj hung in mid-air—or something trying to be mid-air.
There was no up, no down. Just white stretching in all directions, different shades of memory smudged into it like fingerprints.
In front of him, the fire flared.
Not outside his body.
Out of it.
Amber-gold flames, the ones that had lived in his chest for as long as he could remember, hovered as a separate shape—a burning echo of himself, eyes bright and wild.
Opposite it, the Silence gathered.
Not Zoya's Silence.
Whiter. Colder. Deeper.
It took a humanoid outline, made of edges his eyes couldn't quite hold. Where its face should be, there was only a suggestion of eyes that had seen too much.
Between them:
Manraj.
"You're… both me," he said hoarsely.
The fire-shape laughed like crackling kindling.
"I kept you alive," it snarled. "While they cut you apart and sealed you like a broken weapon."
The white-Silence didn't laugh.
It just watched him.
"You were mine first," it said—not with anger. With hurt.
Memories spun around them like orbiting shards:
—A ritual circle.
—White light flooding a child's chest.
—A hand of fire grabbing that light and twisting it.
—Shadow trying to pull him free and failing.
—A third presence roaring in protest.
Manraj clutched his head.
"I didn't choose either of you," he said. "You just… happened to me."
The fire-shape surged forward.
"You fought with me," it hissed. "You burned. You survived. That's choice."
The Silence-shape stepped closer too, wings of not-quite-light unfolding behind it.
"You rested in me," it murmured. "Every time the world tried to overwrite you. You hid in my gaps. That's choice too."
"I didn't know," he snapped, voice cracking.
The white around them shook.
The fire bared its teeth in a semblance of a grin.
"You know now."
Silence tilted its head.
"Now you must decide which part of you leads."
Manraj stared between them, breath coming in jagged pulls.
"You want me to pick?" he whispered. "One of you? And kill the other?"
The fire burned hotter.
"Better a sharp blade than a cracked one."
Silence's non-face didn't move.
"Better a whole truth than a weapon that forgets itself."
Manraj shut his eyes.
Outside, he could feel Zoya.
He could feel the edge of her Silence tapping against the white like careful fingers on glass.
He could feel Azhar's shadows, circling, refusing to abandon him—even when they were terrified.
"I'm not a god," Manraj said quietly. "I'm not a cage. And I'm not a shrine."
He opened his eyes again.
"I won't choose one of you. Not like that."
The fire lunged.
Silence flared.
The white world shook apart.
---
Outside the Sphere
Zoya pressed both palms against the edge of the light.
It burned.
Not heat.
Not cold.
Something in-between—a static that buzzed through her bones and tried to wipe the thought of her own name from her head.
She gritted her teeth.
"You are not taking him," she whispered. "Not fire. Not whatever you are. He's—"
She broke off, breath hitching.
He was Manraj. That should have been enough.
Azhar watched, jaw clenched so hard a vein stood out at his temple.
"You're going to fry your brain," he said. "Pull back."
"No," she said.
She pushed harder.
Silence surged through her—not like a calm, but like a breaking point. The part of her that had always stepped sideways out of sound, out of time, leaned forward instead.
She didn't try to mute the sphere.
She tried to thread herself into it.
The light shuddered.
Hairline fractures of gray shot across its surface.
Azhar swore under his breath.
"That's not supposed to be possible."
"Oh good," Zoya gasped. "Then we're all equally horrified."
A crack appeared—small, thin, just enough for her Silence to seep through.
Zoya sucked in a breath and shoved more of herself toward the break—
—and felt something shove back.
Not the entity.
Not fire.
Manraj.
His panic slammed into her like a physical thing—
the blurred image of him caught between two forces that wanted to rewrite him in opposite directions.
Zoya's throat closed.
"Manraj," she whispered, forehead pressed to the sphere. "Listen to me."
Her voice didn't pass through as sound.
It passed through as absence—a pocket of stillness reaching toward him.
---
Inside, Again
Manraj flinched.
Between fire and Silence, a third presence flickered.
Zoya.
Not as a shape.
Not as a face.
As a choice he hadn't known he had.
"You don't have to decide what to be for them," her voice hummed inside the white. "You decide what to be for you."
The fire snarled.
"She is not part of this."
Silence's light sharpened.
"She is the only reason he is still breathing."
Manraj laughed once—a broken, exhausted sound.
"You're both so sure you own me," he said. "You talk like I'm…a house you're arguing over."
His gaze hardened.
"I'm not a house. I'm the one who lives here."
The white trembled again.
The memories orbiting them slowed.
Fire hissed.
"You can't hold us both. You'll tear apart."
"Maybe," Manraj said. "But if I choose one, I lose everything I've already survived. I lose you—" he jabbed a finger at the Silence, "—and you—" he pointed at the fire, "—become the lie they wanted."
Silence's wings folded inward.
"What do you propose, then?"
Manraj inhaled.
"Neither of you leads," he said. "You don't get to sit in the driver's seat."
His hand pressed flat over his own chest.
"I do."
The white buckled.
Fire screamed without a mouth.
Silence roared without sound.
Their shapes lunged—
—and Manraj stepped into both.
Not away.
Not between.
Through.
---
Outside Again
The sphere surged.
Azhar stumbled backward as shadows recoiled violently.
Zoya almost bit through her tongue.
Light flared so bright the whole cavern turned negative for a heartbeat—stone black, water silver, carvings burning like carved suns.
Then—
It collapsed inward.
Not an explosion.
A compression.
The sphere shrank from the size of a room
to the size of a door
to the size of a fist—
—and vanished.
For a moment, there was nothing.
No Manraj.
No entity.
Just the echo of both.
Then something hit the stone.
Hard.
Zoya blinked spots from her vision—
and saw him.
Manraj.
Kneeling in the center of the platform, one hand braced on the ground, the other fisted in his own shirt.
His eyes were wide open.
Not amber.
Not white.
Both.
Amber ringed with a thin, glowing halo of pale light—like fire wearing Silence as a second iris.
"Don't move," Azhar said sharply, shadows poised to slam down around him if he went feral.
Manraj didn't move.
He just breathed.
Long. Slow. His.
Zoya approached first.
"Manraj?"
His gaze snapped to her.
For a terrifying second, she saw too much in it—firestorms and empty skies and erased timelines and gods with unreadable faces.
Then his shoulders dropped.
"Still me," he rasped.
Zoya's knees nearly gave out.
She caught herself with a shaky laugh. "Good. I was going to be very offended if you came back as someone irritating."
Azhar didn't laugh.
He watched Manraj like he was a bomb.
"What did you do?" he asked.
Manraj swallowed.
"I told them," he said hoarsely, "that if they wanted in…they had to live on my terms."
"And they… agreed?" Zoya asked skeptically.
"They didn't get a vote," he said.
For a second, pride flickered in Azhar's eyes—quickly buried under worry.
"The being?" Zoya asked. "The white one. Is it gone?"
Manraj looked down at his own hands.
Tiny flickers of pale light danced along his fingertips, braided with the familiar warm amber.
"No," he said quietly.
"It's here."
---
The Cavern Reacts
As if in response, the carvings around them dimmed.
Not fully.
Just enough to feel like whatever lived in the stone had leaned back to watch.
The water calmed.
The oppressive weight in the air lightened by a fraction.
But under it all, a new rhythm had started—a pulse that matched the beat in Manraj's chest.
Zoya felt it.
So did Azhar.
"So now you're… what?" she said. "Fire and Silence?"
"Wrong order," Manraj murmured, a ghost of a smile touching his mouth. "Silence and fire."
"That's not better," Azhar muttered.
He stepped closer, shadows still hovering but less aggressive.
"Can you stand?"
Manraj tried.
His legs shook.
Zoya grabbed his arm on one side.
Azhar grabbed the other.
He got to his feet with both of them holding him up.
Something small and bitterly fond twisted in Zoya's chest.
"Look at that," she said softly. "Elemental catastrophe in the middle, bad decisions on either side."
Manraj huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh.
Azhar didn't smile.
"Don't get comfortable," he warned. "The moment the world realizes what you just did, everything that pretended to be asleep is going to wake up angry."
Zoya's fingers tightened around Manraj's sleeve.
"Good," she said, voice steady.
"Then we stop reacting…and start hunting first."
---
Watching
Far above the cavern—beyond stone, beyond water, beyond the river's skin—
something else shifted.
Not white.
Not fire.
Not shadow.
A different presence.
Older.
Amused.
"Three paths," a voice murmured in the dark.
"Silence that refuses to be quiet.
Fire that remembers it was never meant to be a prison.
Shadow that chose loyalty over fear."
A hand traced a sigil in the unseen.
"Let them walk together," the voice said.
"For now."
The sound of distant cracking stone echoed faintly—echoes of a war that had ended badly once.
"It will be more interesting," the voice finished, "when they finally remember me."