“You can spend your whole life letting it consume you, poison you, or you can make amends in your own soul and move forward.” - Zoey Draven (Madness of the Horde King)

  * * * *

  The boathouse stood silent against the grey stretch of the mid-morning sky, moored just off the quiet curve of Ashenridge’s inlet. Wind skimmed across the water, whispering like forgotten names against the boards and tarps lashed down along the pier.

  No one disturbed the silence. The world had lost its voice. Or perhaps, those who remained simply no longer had the strength to raise theirs.

  Inside, the air was still.

  The boathouse, once a sanctuary of hidden meetings and rapid-fire strategising, now felt like a mausoleum of memory. Tools lay untouched along the workbench. The narrow staircase leading to the second floor creaked softly whenever someone passed overhead, though none had dared today.

  Not with her down here.

  In the far-left corner of the boathouse’s lower level—tucked behind an old, rusting lifeboat and beneath a mounted blueprint of Eldario’s underground tunnels, Sera had made a shrine.

  Nothing elaborate. Three candles, their wax pooling slowly on the driftwood altar she had fashioned from the hull of a broken skiff. A strip of dark cloth served as a runner beneath them. Each candle was spaced evenly apart, deliberately measured, as though symmetry could impose sense on grief.

  The flame flickered for Claudia, whose laughter had once echoed like sunlight through rain. For Ness, whose quiet courage had been a compass when Sera had none. And now, for Tatius, the man who had once asked no one’s permission to die, but had done it anyway, on his own terms.

  Sera knelt before the altar, her legs folded beneath her. Her coat was undone, hanging like a shadow from her frame, black against the dimness of the boathouse. Her head was bowed slightly, but not in prayer.

  She hadn’t prayed since she was twelve.

  She didn’t flinch when she heard the soft clack of boots against the wooden ramp.

  Didn’t look up when the door opened behind her. Didn’t move when a familiar weight settled in the space just beyond the candles.

  Only when the air shifted slightly, like a presence folding itself into the room, did Sera finally speak.

  “Zest.”

  “Thought I might find you here,” came the reply.

  His voice was quieter than usual. Not soft. Just…restrained. Like someone walking through a graveyard who didn’t believe in ghosts, but knew enough not to tempt them.

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  Zest stepped into the glow of the candles, his flame-hemmed hoodie muted in the low light. His raven hair, streaked with faint purple, caught the dull shimmer from the lantern overhead. His crimson eyes weren’t burning with fire today. They looked…scorched.

  “I suspected something was wrong,” Sera murmured, her gaze fixed on the dancing flame in front of her. Her hands were still, resting loosely in her lap. “Back when we were planning the op at Kald. Tatius’s Gift was never suited for infiltration, or large-scale combat. His role was always support. Logistics. Tech interface. Surveillance. You know that. I knew that. He knew that. But he still volunteered.” She paused. The candlelight danced in her eyes, dulled beneath the weight of exhaustion. “That should’ve been the first sign.”

  Zest folded his arms and leaned back against the rusted hull beside her, his eyes never leaving her profile. “Are you blaming yourself?”

  “I know I should,” Sera whispered. “But…”

  “He wouldn’t want you to,” Zest finished quietly.

  Sera gave a small nod, but her lips didn’t move beyond that. Just the briefest tilt of her chin, as if accepting a truth she couldn’t bear to say aloud. “You know…” Her voice cracked slightly. “The first time I met Lucas… Back then, I was still debating whether I wanted to go through with forming Aegis. Whether it was worth it. Whether I had it in me to lead something again.” She let out a soft breath. Her fingers curled slightly around the fabric of her coat. “It was Tatius who convinced me.”

  Zest turned slightly, watching her as her voice softened.

  “Even from the start, something about him reminded me of you. Not the way he looked. But… The way he talked. His bluntness. The way he never softened the truth, even when it hurt. He had that same fire under the skin, the same way you do. And sometimes, that same emptiness in his eyes when he thought no one was watching.”

  Zest said nothing. But his jaw tightened.

  “It sounds awful, but… After Claudia and Ness died, he was just breathing. Not living. Like he was waiting for the end. And maybe, in his own way, this was the only one he could accept. The only one that made sense.”

  The silence between them swelled.

  “For people like us… For the Gifted in Eldario,” Sera said, her voice lower now, “there is no happy ending. We all know that. We don’t get to grow old. We don’t get to live in peace. We’re weapons. Symbols. Monsters. All we can do is make sure that when we die, someone remembers why. Not how we lived. But how we fell.”

  Zest didn’t answer at first. Then, slowly, he let out a quiet, humourless huff. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I remember Karl saying something like that once. Back when we still believed we could fix anything.” He looked up toward the ceiling of the boathouse, where the rafters trembled faintly in the breeze. “‘You’re not remembered by how you live, but by how you die’,” he quoted.

  Sera closed her eyes. Just for a moment. “He was right, wasn’t he?” she asked softly.

  Zest didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  They sat in silence for a long while, watching the candles burn.

  Outside, the wind had picked up. The faint creak of the moor lines echoed like an old lullaby, and the waters of the inlet sloshed gently against the dock pilings.

  But the world felt brittle. Poised on the edge of something vast and irreversible.

  Three days ago, the Blue Pandora manufacturing facility had gone up in fire and ash. The hunters’ secondary base in Kald had been obliterated along with it, its secrets buried in the flames alongside the bodies of hundreds of Gifted who had been kept alive for harvesting—used as fuel for a synthetic poison that was being refined to be slipped into the nation’s water supply.

  It was no longer just a war on the Gifted. It was a war on everyone.

  Raul’s voice still echoed in Sera’s mind from the debrief two nights earlier.

  “It’s not just about us anymore. Nicolosi isn’t hunting Gifted. He’s cleansing the entire nation. He’s turning Eldario into something else. And the hunters… They’ll follow him to the end.”

  The hunters didn’t want truth. They wanted obedience.

  Zest had seen it too. The rage in their eyes. The way they responded when someone like the water purification plant manager—a Normal, a “fellow citizen”, spoke out.

  They hated it. Hated the disruption of the narrative. Hated being reminded that the Gifted weren’t the only ones who saw the truth now.

  The rage of cornered zealots was the most dangerous kind.

  And Nicolosi, at the heart of it, was more than a leader. He was a fanatic cloaked in state authority, masquerading as salvation.

  He had never seen the Gifted as human.

  He had never seen anyone as human.

  He was building a world of obedience. Of sterilised silence. Of purity through death.

  And now, the cities burned. The ESA was gone. The Eldario Council, slaughtered like cattle. The hunters ruled the surface in all but name, and the few who dared to resist were scattered, hidden in holes like this one.

  Ashenridge was all they had left, along with Zalfari, and the Abyss.

  And even that would not remain safe for long.

  Zest broke the silence again, his voice quieter this time. “I came to get you.”

  Sera turned to him slowly, her eyes rimmed in the shadow of grief, but sharp beneath it, still burning in that quiet, defiant way that had kept Aegis alive this long.

  “Rex is all set up in the war room,” Zest said. “We’re calling in the Abyss. Leroy and Alisa are patched in too. Everyone’s waiting. We’ve got one shot at this.” Her fingers uncurled from the coat fabric. “We’re almost at the end.”

  Sera stared at the candles a moment longer. Then, slowly, she stood.

  The flames still burned behind her—three small lights in a dark and uncertain world.

  She didn’t blow them out. She left them burning.