The journey back from the Silent Tundra was a march through a world in rapid transition.
What had been a desert of white silence for centuries was now a quagmire of churning black mud and flash-floods. The "Melt," triggered by the death of the Lich Queen and the destruction of the Tundra Cradle, had turned the geography of the North into a chaotic slurry. The Army of the Broken, their boots caked in slush, trudged southward with the weariness of men who had fought a war against the weather itself.
Kael Light sat in the back of a covered steam-wagon, his body vibrating with the aftershocks of the "Stable Agony." The battle against the Monarchs had forced him to break his own structural limits repeatedly, and even now, days later, his marrow felt like it was simmering.
But he was not focused on his own pain. He was focused on the two children sleeping across from him.
Castor and Pollux. The Binary Stars.
They were curled together on a pile of fur blankets, their hands clasped so tightly that their knuckles were white. Even in sleep, they glowed. Castor emitted a low, hum of dry heat, like a coal bed, while Pollux radiated a cool, sharp light, like the reflection of the moon on ice.
"They are unstable," Martha whispered, sitting beside Kael. She held a mana-sensor over the twins, the needle twitching erratically. "Their resonance isn't individual, Kael. It's a circuit. Castor generates the energy, and Pollux stabilizes it. If they are separated by more than ten feet, the loop breaks. Castor will burn out, and Pollux will freeze."
"The Liches tried to merge them," Kael said softly, his iridescent eyes tracking the flow of mana between the siblings. "They wanted to create a singularity. By keeping them apart but imprisoned, they created a tension that powered the Necro-Ice."
"And now that they're free," Martha said, lowering the sensor, "that tension has nowhere to go. They are building up charge, Kael. They are two nuclear cores walking around in the bodies of seven-year-olds."
Suddenly, the wagon hit a deep rut in the thawing road. The jolt woke the twins.
Castor sat up instantly, his eyes wide and burning with a terrifying gold light. He didn't see Martha or Kael; he saw a threat.
"Don't touch her!" Castor screamed.
A wave of heat exploded from the boy's small body. The fur blankets instantly singed, the smell of burning hair filling the cramped space. The temperature in the wagon skyrocketed to oven-like levels in a split second.
"Castor, no!" Pollux cried, grabbing her brother's arm.
Her touch released a counter-wave of absolute cold. The heat clashed with the frost, creating a violent explosion of steam that blew the canvas cover off the wagon.
The convoy halted. Soldiers shouted, raising their black-iron weapons, unsure if they were under attack.
Kael didn't flinch. He didn't raise a shield. He leaned forward, letting the steam scald his face, and placed his hand over the clasped hands of the twins.
"Peace."
He didn't use a spell. He used the "Blessing." He channeled the silver-blue light of the Goddess Aura into the circuit between the children. He became the ground wire for their panic.
The heat rushed into Kael's arm, searing his flesh. The cold rushed into his palm, freezing his nerves. The "Stable Agony" flared, breaking his radius and ulna to accommodate the energy transfer.
CRACK.
The sound snapped the twins out of their panic. They looked at Kael, at his smoking, freezing arm, and then at his eyes.
"You're... breaking," Pollux whispered, her teal eyes filling with tears.
"I break so you don't have to," Kael said, his voice calm despite the agony. "Breathe. Just breathe. You aren't batteries anymore. You're just children."
The glow faded. The steam began to clear. Castor slumped against his sister, sobbing quietly.
"I didn't mean to," the boy wept. "It just... happens. It's too loud inside."
Kael healed his arm with a flash of violet light. "I know. We're going to fix it. We're going home."
Three days later, the Army of the Broken crested the final ridge overlooking New Aethelgard.
To the twins, who had known only the black ice of the Necropolis, the city must have looked like a hallucination. The white marble towers gleamed in the afternoon sun. The "Radiant Grid" pulsed with a gentle, golden heartbeat. Steam-trains moved along elevated rails like brass snakes, and the green farmlands surrounding the walls were alive with the harvest.
"Is that... the sun's house?" Pollux asked, pressing her face against the glass of the wagon's window (which Ignis had hastily installed to replace the canvas).
"It's our house," Kael said.
They entered the city to a hero's welcome. The "Little Suns" lined the streets, throwing petals of jasmine and star-mint. They cheered for Thorne, for the Iron-Guard, and for the Moon-Scarred pack that loped alongside the tanks.
But when Kael's wagon passed, they went silent. They bowed. It was a reverence born of love, but also of fear. They saw the "Monster-Saint" who had walked into the ice and come back, and they saw the two glowing children he brought with him.
They brought the twins directly to the Royal Spire, to Ignis's laboratory.
The lab was a chaotic blend of alchemy and engineering. Brass gears littered the floor, and half-finished automatons hung from the ceiling. Ignis cleared a large table, setting up a complex array of copper coils and crystal lenses.
"Sit them there," Ignis commanded, his mechanical eye whirring as he adjusted a caliper. "I need to measure the frequency of the loop."
Kael sat the twins on the table. They refused to let go of each other's hands.
Ignis spent an hour running tests, muttering to himself in binary and curses. Finally, he stepped back, wiping oil from his remaining organic brow.
"It's worse than I thought, Saint," Ignis said, pulling Kael and Martha aside. "Their output is exponential. Every day they are awake, their resonance amplifies. In a week, they'll be generating enough power to overload the Radiant Grid. In a month... they'll go critical. They'll become a literal binary star. They'll vaporize the city."
"So we dampen them," Kael said. "We put dampening cuffs on them."
"We can't," Ignis shook his head. "Their physiology is dependent on the flow. If you block it, they die. If you let it run, we die."
"There has to be a third option," Martha said, looking at the children, who were currently marveling at a clockwork bird.
"There is," Ignis said slowly. "We integrate them."
Kael stiffened. "No. I am not turning them into batteries. I promised them they were free."
"Not batteries, Saint. Regulators," Ignis corrected. "Look, the Radiant Grid is powered by the ambient mana of the earth and your Dawn-Mana. It fluctuates. It's inefficient. But if we built a 'Resonance Chamber' in the Spire... a place where the twins could live comfortably... we could hook their natural output into the city's stabilizers."
Ignis pulled up a schematic. "They wouldn't be drained. They would be venting. The city would act as a heat-sink for their excess energy. It would keep them stable, and in return, their resonance would amplify the Grid's range by a thousand miles. We could power the entire continent."
Kael looked at the schematic. It looked like a cage. A gilded, comfortable cage, but a cage nonetheless.
IT IS THE ACADEMY'S LOGIC, KAEL, the God whispered, its voice dripping with cynicism. USE THE BLOOD TO TURN THE WHEEL. ISN'T THAT WHAT WE FOUGHT TO DESTROY?
"It's not the same," Kael said, though he wasn't sure if he was convincing the God or himself. "They won't be prisoners. They can leave the chamber whenever they want."
"Only for short periods," Ignis warned. "If they stay away from the sink for too long, they overheat."
Kael walked back to the table. He knelt before Castor and Pollux.
"We have a problem," Kael said honestly. "Your light is too big for your bodies. It needs somewhere to go."
"Like the wagon?" Castor asked, looking down shamefacedly. "Will I burn the city?"
"Not if we help you," Kael said. "Ignis can build a room. A special room that drinks the light so you don't have to hold it. You would help keep the city warm. You would help the lights stay on. But you would be tied to this tower."
Pollux looked at her brother, then at the window where the city lights were flickering on for the evening.
"We were in the ice for a long time," Pollux whispered. "It was dark. I don't want it to be dark anymore."
"We want to help," Castor said, squeezing his sister's hand. "We want to be the sun."
Kael closed his eyes. He felt the crushing weight of the crown. He was saving them, yes. But he was also binding them. He was becoming the Architect he despised, making hard choices for the "greater good."
"Fine," Kael said, standing up. "Build the chamber, Ignis. But it will have windows. Big ones. And the door is never locked. If they want to leave, they leave. Even if the city goes dark."
"Understood," Ignis said, already sketching the designs.
That night, Kael stood on the balcony of the Spire. The twins were sleeping in a temporary dampening field Ignis had rigged. The city below was celebrating the victory in the North. Fireworks—alchemical sparks of green and gold—exploded over the harbor.
Kael felt the "Stable Agony" settle into its nightly rhythm.
Thud. Crack.
His spine adjusted. He gripped the railing.
He had saved the North. He had saved the twins. But as he looked at his reflection in the glass, he saw the face of a man who was slowly carving away his own humanity to make room for the King.
"Garret," Kael said to the shadows.
The werewolf stepped out, silent as smoke. "Father."
"The Frost Lords are dead," Kael said. "But the 'White Shadow' wasn't there. Sam was right. There is something else in the deep North. Something that the Liches were afraid of."
"The Void has many teeth," Garret agreed. "And now that the Ice is gone, the other predators will wake up."
"Let them wake," Kael said, his iridescent eyes cold and hard. "We have the Twin Stars now. New Aethelgard is the brightest thing on the map. And light... light invites war."