The battlefield was still. Too still.
The smoke rose in lazy spirals, black against a bruised-orange sky that no longer pulsed with the Ebon Core's malignant light. The ground was fractured into chasms that bled faint shadow-mist, as if the world itself had been wounded.
Altharion's breathing was ragged. His shadow-armor had crumbled away, leaving only scorched robes and blood-drenched skin. Velian sat nearby, propped against a jagged stone, his broken arm bound crudely in strips of cloth torn from his own cloak. Maelis stood apart, wings dim, her gaze locked on the faint ember of the shattered Core drifting above the ruins.
It wasn't joy that hung in the air. It was uncertainty.
"Shouldn't it… feel different?" Velian's voice was hoarse, but there was an edge beneath it. "When you kill gods, isn't there supposed to be some sense of… release?"
No one answered.
The silence had a weight, pressing down on them harder than the battle had. The wind carried no scent of life, only cold ash. Even the qi in the air felt wrong—thin, brittle, almost starved.
Maelis finally spoke, her voice low. "I've fought long enough to know the difference between a foe dying… and a foe letting itself be killed."
Altharion's head lifted sharply. "You think—"
"I don't think." She turned toward him, eyes like molten gold but shadowed with dread. "I know. Those weren't the Thrones in their fullness. They were… projections. Fragments."
Velian cursed under his breath. "So what? We've been bleeding ourselves dry for shadows of shadows?"
The word hung in the air. Shadows.
Altharion looked at the fractured Core again. The ember's pulse was fading—but not in the way a dying thing should. It wasn't dimming. It was retracting. Retreating.
His stomach turned. "We didn't destroy the Core," he said slowly. "We… released it."
The sky answered for them.
A single crack of thunder—though there were no clouds—split the horizon. From the wound, something vast moved. Not in the physical sense, but in the way a nightmare shifts in the mind: impossible to measure, yet instantly felt. The temperature plummeted. The qi in their bodies recoiled like prey sensing a predator.
Velian gritted his teeth, shoving himself upright despite the pain. "Tell me that's not—"
"It is," Altharion cut in. His voice was steady, but only because it had gone cold. "The real enemy. The one behind the Thrones. The Thrones were only seals. We've broken them."
Maelis closed her eyes for a heartbeat, then opened them with grim resolve. "Then we have one choice. We hunt it before it regains its full form."
Velian laughed, bitter and breathless. "We're half-dead, running on scraps of qi, and you want to hunt that?"
Altharion looked at him, and for the first time in hours, a faint smirk crossed his blood-streaked face. "You're forgetting something, Velian. It's wounded too. And wounded prey…" His shadows stirred again, weaker but still alive. "…is easier to kill."
The ember above them flared once, as if mocking his words—then shot toward the distant mountains, disappearing beyond the torn horizon.
None of them spoke as they began to follow. They didn't need to. The silence between them was no longer empty.
It was a promise.