POV: Widowlight
They were no longer glowing.
The boys.
Arthur. Vanitar.
The light had left them. The voices too. And yet… the silence they left behind felt heavier than the moment itself. The air still bent around their bodies like it hadn't been given permission to forget them.
I stepped forward.
Slowly. Carefully. Like the floor might collapse if I stepped wrong. Not from weight—but from memory.
Arthur was unconscious. His brow slick with sweat, jaw clenched tight as if trying to keep something in. The sword still lay beside him—that sword. Radiant and hot with a heat that did not burn. Etched with a name no child should carry.
Vanitar was breathing harder. Wrapped in cloth now, but I could feel the corruption pulsing beneath it. Pale. Black. Sick with contradiction. A sickness I couldn't name. A sickness that had spoken through him.
I had seen monsters kneel. I had seen nations fall from a whisper.
But I had never seen something borrow a body like that.
"I've seen power," I whispered to the still air. "But not like this."
No answer. Just that feeling again.
Not fear.
Witnessing.
Something was still watching.
Not from the ceiling. Not the walls.
From behind the sky.
I approached Arthur first.
I tried to speak. To say his name.
But my voice caught.
Not from dread. I do not dread.
From understanding.
If I speak to them now…
If I speak about them…
I won't die.
I'll vanish.
Not fall. Not fade. Just cease to be. Like a phrase scratched out before it could finish.
Even now, something listened through their skin. Something waited behind their breathing. Something far older than Evolvanth, older than story, older than me.
I stood there in the dark, one hand near my blade—but not drawn.
Not out of mercy.
Out of instinct.
My blade erases grief. Their presence rewrites it. And even I could feel it:
Whatever had touched these boys…
Was not done yet.
I stayed longer than I should have.
The Academy's sky was returning to stillness, but I could still feel where reality had bruised. The dust hadn't settled—it had chosen not to fall. As if time itself feared waking them.
Vanitar twitched once.
Not a dream-twitch. Not exhaustion.
The kind of motion you make when your soul tries to get out before your body betrays it.
I didn't speak.
I wanted to.
I wanted to ask what they were. Or who. Or how beings like that had slipped into two boys who, until days ago, barely registered in any Archive.
But then I felt it again.
A shift behind my ribs.
A presence pressing through the seams of this world. Listening. Waiting. Like some language had just been spoken in front of me—and asking questions would be the same as reading it aloud.
My lips trembled.
Not in fear.
In understanding.
These boys hadn't been possessed.
They'd been entered. Borrowed. Cradled.
And something… still lingered.
My mind tried to recall the last time I'd felt anything like this. Not during the fall of the Ivory Throne. Not during the Sundering at Hollowdeep. Not even when Redgut consumed an entire law of nature during the Silencing Wars.
No.
This was before that. Before the Pale Order was named. Before I chose grief as my survival.
Something ancient had moved.
And now, it had found shapes to wear.
I stood between their sleeping bodies, arms folded, watching their breath.
One radiated like myth in human skin. The other curled like silence learning to feel.
I whispered.
"You aren't just anomalies."
"You're anchors."
And the sky—heard me.
For a single heartbeat, the clouds above twisted—not visibly, but mythically.
Like the sky remembered it had once served something older than gods.
And for a moment, I saw the mirror of myself, reflected in the boy's unconscious grief.
They are not evolving.
They are returning.
To what? I do not know.
But I knew this much.
If I told anyone what I saw here—
If I tried to write it down, confess it to the Order, whisper it to even the ground—
I would cease to exist.
Not die. Not unravel.
Just vanish. Like a sentence unwritten.
A flicker behind me.
I turned.
A girl stood at the edge of the ruined corridor. Elanor.
She didn't speak. Didn't blink.
But I could tell by her expression—
She had seen everything.
And yet… she wasn't afraid.
Not of them.
Of what they meant.
"They're waking," I said, finally.
"And they don't even know who's watching."
I didn't say "we."
Because I no longer believed we, the Pale Order, were the ones doing the watching anymore.
We were being observed.
Studied.
Measured.
Like we were the footnotes in someone else's story.
And that story had just begun rewriting itself through two vessels—
One glowing like memory.
The other pale as the void before anything dared to exist.