The Devourer was gone.
But the ground still screamed.
Ash clung to the air like a second skin, stinging Mira's eyes. Burned leaves fluttered like cinders, and the faint echo of the Devourer's shriek still trembled across the dead trees. The world hadn't caught up to the silence yet. It was the kind that followed grief, not victory.
Xerces stood at the center of it.
Still.
Exposed.
A lich in full.
The illusion of flesh had long since burned away, and what remained was something older. Older than crowns. Older than fire. His skeletal frame towered in the moonlight, robes torn and blackened at the edges, soullight burning deep in the sockets of his skull.
And still, she was staring at him.
Mira.
Wrapped in her own shock.
He hated how it made him feel.
"I… I didn't want this," Xerces said softly, the words echoing with a depth that no living voice could reach. "Not yet. Not like this."
"You saved me."
Her voice cracked like new ice.
"You saved us."
She took a trembling step closer. His wards flared—protective, instinctual—and he forced them down with a breath. Or something like breath.
Mira reached out. Her fingers hovered just an inch from the polished bone of his chest.
She didn't flinch.
"I've never seen anything like that," she whispered. "You fought for us. For me."
"I exposed us," he said, bitter. "There's no more hiding what I am."
She looked up, into those pale blue flames.
"You're more than what you are."
Behind them, Sael knelt beside the shattered remnants of a burned sigil. His armor was torn. His sword dripped black ichor. He didn't speak—not at first—but when he did, his voice was cold as the steel he carried.
"That thing will come back."
Xerces turned to him.
"It will."
"And next time it won't be alone."
He stood, wiping blood from his temple. "I don't know what you are anymore. I don't trust what you are. But… you kept her alive."
Sael sheathed his blade. His expression unreadable.
"So we survive. Together."
Xerces didn't thank him.
Didn't need to.
They moved quickly after that.
Into the trees.
Into hiding.
Xerces carved a sanctum—a hollow beneath the roots of an ancient elm, folded in illusion and shielded by necrotic fog. It pulsed faintly with his magic. Sael said nothing of it. Mira stayed close, quiet, the weight of her near-death encounter still sinking in.
But what lingered most was the mark.
Xerces saw it before she did.
A small line of black spiraling up her wrist—subtle, like ink spilled under the skin. No human would have noticed. But to his eyes, it was screaming.
The Devourer had touched her.
That night, he couldn't sleep.
He sat apart from them, near a cold stream that once ran clear but now shimmered faintly with ash. His skeletal fingers moved over the water. He didn't see the reflection. Only fire.
The power he'd unleashed… it had felt good.
Too good.
Like coming home to something he thought he'd buried.
That wasn't just power, he thought. It was me.
The spells he'd used weren't the simple wards and illusions he'd practiced in secrecy. They were ancient. Buried beneath the skin of the world. The kind of magic that warped mountains and turned kings into dust.
And when he'd cast them… the world had listened.
It terrified him.
"Can't sleep either?"
Mira's voice was soft behind him. He didn't turn.
"I don't sleep."
"Right."
She sat beside him anyway, knees drawn to her chest.
For a long time, she didn't speak. Just listened to the wind shift through the ruined trees.
"Back there," she said finally, "when I saw you… for what you are… I wasn't afraid."
Xerces said nothing.
"I thought I would be," she added. "But you didn't feel like a monster. You felt like… someone who'd lost something. Who's still losing something."
His jaw clenched—not from anger, but from how close she was to the truth.
"I was a man once," he said. "A soldier. A scholar. I died, and I thought that would be the end. But I woke up in this world—changed. Hollowed."
"Yet you saved me."
"I'm not your hero, Mira."
"I didn't say you were."
She leaned against him—not flesh to flesh, but still close enough to feel the weight of him.
"You don't have to be a hero," she whispered. "You just have to be real."
Something stirred inside him.
Not a heart.
But the faintest memory of one.
Later, when Mira had fallen asleep under the boughs of the elm and Sael kept watch with his silent sword, Xerces sat awake—staring at the mark on her wrist.
It pulsed faintly.
A tether.
A warning.
It will return, he thought. And next time… it won't be alone.
He rose slowly, bone creaking like old timbers, and walked to the edge of the forest. There, beneath the stars, he raised his hand—and began drawing a new spell in the air.
Something he hadn't dared to use in centuries.
Something old.
And forbidden.
If the Devourer wanted her, it would have to go through the King of the Forgotten Dead.
And this time—
He would not hold back.