The gryphon's wings cut through the cold air like living blades. With each powerful beat, the wind slammed into Perseus, stinging his eyes, tugging at the edges of his cloak, and sneaking beneath his armor to kiss every bruise the last battle left behind. The bruises were fading, but the ache remained—more than physical. Deeper. Older.
The sky stretched wide and colorless above him. No clouds, no warmth, just a pale bruise of retreating dawn. The silence of altitude wrapped around him like a shroud. It should have felt clean. Liberating.
It didn't.
He didn't look back.
Below and far behind, the forest dwindled into a green shadow where the paths had split. Eurydice to the south, toward stillness and healing. Boo to the west, chasing rumor and chaos like he always did. Miri, winged and distant, bound for the Isle of Scales.
And Nyxia…
Nyxia had taken the road through the bonewood alone, with Loque at her side and shadows in her eyes.
She hadn't looked at him when they parted.
He hadn't asked her to.
Now he was flying in the opposite direction, toward the mountains. Toward elevation. Toward reckoning.
The Temple of Tyr sat beyond the ridgeline, hidden in stone and smoke and judgment.
It had been his beginning. And he'd sworn it would never be his end.
Yet here he was.
The gryphon grunted low beneath him, adjusting its wings against the high wind. He eased up on the reins, fingers wrapped in worn leather, jaw set tight. The cold wasn't what made him clench—it was the pull of memory. The way this sky, this path, this rhythm of wingbeats… all of it echoed the last time he flew this route.
Not toward the temple.
But away from Nyxia.
He exhaled slowly, watching his breath frost into nothing.
The sun tried to break through the haze ahead, weak and thin as a scraped coin.
His thoughts crawled there first—not to the Creed, not to the Council, not even to the shield that hung at his side like an afterthought.
But to her.
To the silence between them.
And to the storm that silence had come to mean.
The gryphon banked left, angling toward a higher current. Perseus shifted with the motion, steady in the saddle, though the wind dragged at his hood and tugged at the worn leather strap crossing his chest.
His shield rested at his hip—worn smooth at the rim from years of use, its metal pitted and burnished with old scrapes. It felt lighter than it should have.
Like it knew.
Like it, too, questioned what they were flying toward.
Perseus adjusted it by instinct, fingers brushing the inlaid emblem on the front: the symbol of Tyr's creed—an open hand layered over a balanced scale. Half the paint had worn away.
Like the ideals beneath it.
He had grown up with those ideals carved into the walls and burned into his bones. The Temple of Tyr didn't raise soldiers; it forged shields. The ten creeds weren't commandments—they were chiseled into every waking hour.
Valor. Clarity. Mercy. Judgment.Fire. Faith. Stone. Shield.Balance. Oath.
He used to whisper them to himself in the dark when the other orphans had nightmares.
He didn't remember what his own nightmares were about. Just that Lysarielle had always been there to pull him back.
Gods, Lys.
She had been more than a mentor.
She was the first person who didn't look at him like something broken.
When he was young, other trainees mocked the length of his horns, the strange gleam in his irises—traits of the Lightforged lineage that still carried prejudice in quiet corners. Perseus had fought too hard, too fast, too desperately in sparring pits because part of him thought pain might earn place.
But Lysarielle hadn't scolded him for his fury.
She'd taken him aside, shield in hand, and said:"Strength means nothing unless you can hold the line for someone else."
She taught him to fight from center. To feel impact not as domination—but as protection.
She had knelt beside him when the waterlogged satchel arrived with his parents' names but no readable message.
She had spoken for him before the High Council when they debated whether to keep him in service or let him go into the world.
"He needs to be more than a sword on a shelf."
She'd said that.
He still remembered her hand on his shoulder after. Firm. Steady.
Now that shoulder felt bare again.
He wondered if she'd meet him at the gate.
Would she hug him?
Would she flinch?
Would she remember the boy she shaped—or see only the man who walked beside the void?
Below them, the terrain changed—jagged ridges, narrow gulches, and dustings of snow layered over old stone paths carved by the faithful. The temple still rested far beyond the next pass, but the cold had already arrived.
Perseus rubbed at his jaw, feeling the stiffness there. Bruises still bloomed beneath his armor—gifts from the last fight at the pit.
The worst pain wasn't from the void creatures. Or even from the betrayal that still echoed in Nyxia's silence.
It was from the way he'd seen the temple in their aftermath.
And what it had failed to be.
The wind shifted again, colder now—an alpine chill laced with something older than snow. The gryphon gave a short grunt and adjusted course, skimming above the ragged cliffs that marked the spine of the northern range.
Perseus didn't feel the cold anymore.
Not really.
He was elsewhere—trapped in a season long gone, back when his armor had still gleamed and his heart hadn't yet calcified into something safer.
He saw her.
Not the Nyxia who walked into the void and came out fire-scarred and furious.
The Nyxia from before.
Summer sun tangled in her wild hair. Eyes sharp, but not guarded. The kind of laugh that came out of nowhere—cutting and alive. She was chaos even then, but it was a chaos that sang. It made you want to chase it, not tame it.
They were still training back then—barely adults, sharing a borrowed cot during long rotations, taking watch together in the upper towers where the air always tasted like pine and storm. He remembered falling asleep next to her, once. Close enough to hear her breath shift between dreams.
He hadn't touched her. Hadn't dared.
Perseus clenched his jaw.
He hadn't known what to say to her. Not then.
He wanted to be worthy. Wanted to be composed, noble—someone she could rely on. But his words always tripped. His gaze always dropped. The fire inside him was real, but it had no shape.
And then…
Ves'Sariel.
She had arrived wrapped in beauty and shadow—voice like velvet and eyes like obsidian hooks. Where Perseus hesitated, Ves moved like she owned the air. Where he admired Nyxia, Ves saw her.
Saw her power.
Spoke to it. Fed it.
And pulled it toward something Perseus couldn't touch.
He didn't even have the chance to lose her.
Nyxia had drifted.
A little at first—quiet distance, missed meals, long stares out over the cliffside walls. Then came the disappearances. The bruises she didn't explain. The nights she didn't return.
By the time Perseus understood what Ves was doing, it was already too late.
He never got to tell her. Never told her how he looked for her in every courtyard. How he listened for her laugh in every empty hall. How every word he never said rotted into something heavier than regret.
When the summons came—his official reassignment back to the Temple—he didn't question it.
Didn't fight it.
He told himself it was duty.
But deep down?
He knew.
It was surrender.
It was easier to return to stone halls and carved creeds than to stay and watch her vanish into shadow beside someone else.
He hadn't seen her again for years.
Not until she came back through the gates of the temple, half-dead, limbs trembling, eyes void-lit.
Not until the void nearly killed her—and she survived it anyway.
Not until she looked at him, blood in her mouth and fire in her gaze, and he knew.
She had searched for him.
She had needed him.
And he hadn't been there.
The wind howled across the peaks. The gryphon shrieked in kind, cutting a wide arc as the next ridge drew near.
Perseus closed his eyes.
Behind the silence in her parting, there had been a question.
He hadn't answered it then.
He still didn't know if he could.
The ridgeline crested, and with it came the first glimpse of the Temple of Tyr.
Perseus had forgotten how stark it looked from a distance—its black stone towers rising like blades from the spine of the mountain, each one sharpened by centuries of purpose. Sunlight glanced off snow-dusted rooftops and brass-shielded domes. Bells hung silent in their housings, catching the wind with the faintest of groans. To anyone who didn't know better, the place might still look holy.
To Perseus, it looked like a trial waiting to begin.
The gryphon descended in a long glide, wings stretched wide, tail feathers slicing the wind. Beneath them, narrow roads twisted upward from the valley—paths once worn smooth by pilgrim boots and shieldbearer patrols. He knew them all. He had marched those stones as a boy, feet blistered, trying not to fall behind the older initiates.
Now he was the one returning.
Alone.
Perseus adjusted the grip on his reins as the wind thickened with cold. Snow began to fall—not in sweeping drifts, but in sharp, straight lines, like judgment etched from the sky.
He thought about the last time he stood in the temple's coliseum.
Not to fight. To watch.
Nyxia had just returned. Her body barely held together, void rot coiled through her veins, but her grip on her scythe hadn't wavered. The arena lights had cast her in silhouette, and he remembered the silence that had followed her arrival.
No cheers. No welcome. Just measured glances. Whispers.
He'd been seated behind the eastern screen, among the other senior initiates. His palms had sweated against his gauntlets as she stepped forward, unafraid.
He remembered the exact moment she looked up into the crowd and saw him.
Her eyes had gone still.
Not angry.
Not afraid.
Just tired.
And when the fight ended—when she stood bloodied and victorious, panting in the center of the coliseum ring—he had heard it.
"Voidborn."
The word hissed from one of the acolytes beside him. The tone wasn't curiosity. It was disgust.
A verdict.
And Perseus had sat frozen, jaw tight, heart pounding.
He hadn't turned. He hadn't spoken.
Not then.
He'd told himself it wasn't the right time. That she didn't need more attention drawn. That a confrontation would solve nothing.
But later, in his quarters, he'd punched a mirror until the frame cracked.
And now, months later, that moment still pulsed like an infection beneath his ribs.
He leaned into the gryphon as it banked right, breath misting from his lips.
The elders hadn't seen what he'd seen.
They hadn't been there when she clawed her way free of Ves's illusions.
They hadn't knelt beside her as she shook, half-conscious, refusing healing until she knew the rest of them were safe.
They hadn't seen the way her body shuddered when the void offered her power—and the way she turned her back on it.
They called her dangerous.
He called her enduring.
They called her cursed.
He called her survivor.
He clenched the reins tighter.
His jaw locked until his teeth ached.
If they couldn't see her humanity—if they refused to acknowledge the weight of what she had sacrificed—then what use was their creed?
What justice lived in their mercy?
What faith remained in their fear?
He wasn't flying back to seek forgiveness.
He wasn't returning to ask permission.
He was coming to speak.
To remind them what they had forgotten.
Loud enough that even these walls—carved by centuries—might remember who he was.
And who she had become.
The last slope before the temple narrowed into a sharp ridgeline, hemmed in by cliffs on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Wind howled through the pass, strong enough to lift loose flakes of snow into spiraling patterns. The sun had vanished behind a wall of cloud, leaving the world in steel-gray light.
The gryphon flared its wings and let out a sharp, low screech as it dropped into its final descent.
Perseus rose slightly in the saddle, heels pressed into the beast's flanks, balance steady. As the temple's upper courtyard came into view, he felt a familiar pressure settle over him—not fear, exactly, but the weight of recognition.
The Temple of Tyr wasn't just a place. It was a crucible.
Everything it had forged into him—faith, discipline, the shape of duty—still lived beneath his skin like an old scar.
He just didn't know if it still fit.
The gryphon's claws struck stone with practiced ease. It landed at the edge of the high platform beneath the southern tower, snow skidding off the stone under its weight. Perseus swung down in a single motion, boots hitting the ice-glazed flagstones with a sharp crack.
He unbuckled the saddle harness, murmured thanks to the beast, and watched it take off again—wings slicing sky as it vanished over the ridge. The sound of its departure echoed like a warning bell.
He turned slowly.
Before him stood the gates.
Two enormous bronze doors inset with sacred reliefs—Tyr offering his open hand to a faceless pilgrim, scales balanced behind them. The image had once given Perseus comfort. Now it felt like a test.
Flanking the gates were two guards, just as in his memory: heavy cloaks, expressionless helms, halberds gripped like extensions of their arms.
They didn't move. Didn't raise weapons. Just stared.
He stepped forward.
One of them spoke.
"Shield-Bearer Perseus."
A statement. Not a question.
He paused.
Let the silence linger before answering.
"Not for much longer."
The guard tilted his head slightly, like a wolf scenting the air.
"You've come back with shadows on your heels."
Perseus didn't blink."I've come back with light. You just forgot what it looks like in blood."
The second guard tapped the butt of his halberd against the ground—once.
The doors opened.
Warmth bled out from within—incense and stonefire, familiar and foreign all at once.
He stepped through.
Every inch of the temple interior had been etched into him: the cracked floor tiles beneath the entry arch; the rows of torch brackets shaped like guardian lions; the heavy scent of beeswax, oil, and age.
He walked slowly at first.
Then faster.
Until the halls swallowed him whole.
The bells did not ring.
There was no formal reception.
But he could feel them watching.
Acolytes in prayer alcoves. Initiates pausing in their drills. Elder knights standing at high windows.
Whispers.
They knew who had returned.
They just didn't know why.
Perseus didn't flinch from their gazes.
He kept moving, step after step down the corridor that would lead him to the Hall of Ten, where the Creed was kept and the Elders met.
He reached into his cloak.
Pulled out the folded cloth that wrapped around his personal seal.
The wax had cracked.
Good.
He wanted them to see it broken.
He wanted them to ask why.
And when they did, he would tell them.
He would speak of a huntress who bore the void and bled for strangers.
Of a woman they failed to believe in.
Of a creed that had drifted too far from mercy to call itself just.
He would speak until the echoes rattled the banners from the ceiling.
As he reached the far end of the corridor, he paused at the old mosaic—the one they all passed before standing before the Council.
A warrior stood at its center, arms wide, a shield in one hand, fire in the other.
Below it, inlaid in silver:
"Let justice know your name. Let mercy carry it forward."
Perseus pressed two fingers to the inscription.
Then turned.
Eyes forward.
Heart ready.