After a desperate, gasping sprint through freezing darkness, they burst into a small, abandoned guard post overlooking a desolate, snow choked inner courtyard. Haruto slammed the heavy oak door shut, the oak door bucked violently, splinters spraying like frozen teeth. A guttural snarl, thick with unnatural hunger and the promise of rending flesh, vibrated through the thick wood and into Juro's shoulder as he braced the crowbar beneath the iron bar. Ice crystals, dislodged by the impact, pattered onto the mildewed sacks where Kuro lay gasping, each wet rattle a knife twisting in Shiro's gut. Juro's face was a mask of strain and pain, fresh claw marks on his forearms weeping slow, frozen blood that crackled with every movement. "Resonance," he choked out, his gaze flicking to the pulsing, synchronized starlight scars on Shiro and Kuro's exposed arms. "They're hunting the echo of that power… like frost wolves scenting wounded prey."
Mira stood eerily still in the centre of the small, abandoned guard post, her hood thrown back, revealing a face pale as moon ice beneath the grime. Her star flecked eyes were rolled back, showing only swirling galaxies of darkness. A thin trickle of black blood, thick as oil, seeped from her left nostril, the cost of pushing her crow sight to its limits against the Shadow Hound's unnatural cunning. "Pack Alpha remains focused here," she intoned, her voice layered with distant avian shrieks and the chilling whine of wind over glaciers. "Beta pack… circling… seeking the weak mortar near the old latrine shaft. Breach… imminent." Her fingers twitched, plucking invisible threads in the air. "Murder harries… but the Hounds anticipate evasion. Predators… evolved."
The cloaked figure moved with silent purpose to the narrow arrow slit overlooking the desolate, snow choked inner courtyard. Moonlight, weak and filtered through miles of glacial ice above, cast long, skeletal shadows. From within their stardust patched rags, gloved hands assembled a device with unnerving speed: interlocking brass rings humming with captured frost magic, cradling a core of pulsing blue crystal that cast shifting, cold light on the frozen stone. A high pitched whine began to build, setting everyone's teeth on edge, vibrating in their bones like a trapped insect.
Kuro tried to lever himself up, a choked cry escaping his lips as the movement tore at his shattered ribs. Fresh crimson bloomed stark against the already stained bandages. "Then… we fight," he snarled, defiance warring with agony, his voice raw as ground glass. "Better… torn apart… under open sky… than… skulking… like rats… waiting…" His right arm, the one not bearing the starlight scar, trembled violently. Where the temple ice manacles had clamped, the skin was a mottled horror of purple black frostbite, but worse, tendrils of luminous blue ice seemed to have burrowed beneath the skin. They pulsed with a sickly light, worming their way up towards his elbow. Every pulse sent a wave of agony through him that felt like molten iron bleeding into his veins, a corruption spreading from the unknown. Shiro felt only the phantom echo of the manacles, a deep, bone aching cold in his wrists, like ghostly frostbite teeth gnawing at the memory of the bite.
Ryota slammed his gore smeared executioner's axe down with a thunderous THUNKKKKK that shook dust from the ceiling. His Polaris eyes, swirling supernovae of fury and hard won decision, locked onto Shiro and Kuro. The scars on their arms pulsed in the gloom, an undeniable, eerie counterpoint to the encroaching howls outside and the escalating whine of the cloaked figure's device.
"We watched you," Ryota began, his voice a low, tectonic rumble that vibrated the frigid air. "By 'we,' I mean Haruto, Juro, Mira, and the scattered embers of loyalty I could still fan in the frozen wastes." He jerked his chin towards Juro, who grimaced as another impact slammed against the door, bending the iron bar further. "...Juro here risked his neck smuggling medicine into the Warrens after the last purge. Nearly had his spine frozen solid by black cloaks." Ryota's starburst eyes, swirling with constellations of fury, hardened as they fixed on Shiro and Kuro. "Me however… I thought you two were the pinnacle of fucking idiocy." His voice dropped, thick with remembered disdain. "Defiling academies? Rebelling by defacing academy star charts? Throwing fruit at statues while people froze solid in the streets?" He spat the words like venom. "Kuro, you looked like a spoiled brat defacing your fathers portrait. Shiro, a gutter rat who cant control his rage, carves pretty fucking stars into planks, mistaking brawls for rebellion. Dangerous? Maybe. Like a child waving a lit torch in a cyclone. But meaningful? A threat to Ryo?" He let out a harsh, humourless bark. "I told Haruto watching you was a waste of resources. That the real fight was in the North, against the frost, not babysitting a princeling's tantrums and a slum rat's scratches on the walls of a dying kingdom.
Haruto stepped forward, his aristocratic composure replaced by a flinty, battle hardened edge. The silver threads in his torn blue tunic caught the pulsing light from the scars and Ryota's eyes. "We saw the pyres burn in the merchant square," he stated, his voice cold and sharp. "We saw children vanish into the Black Vaults for whispering Kaya's name. We saw the frost creep into the Rat Warrens, turning beggars into frozen statues…" His gaze swept over Kuro and Shiro, lingering on their wounds. "…And we saw you. Kuro, twisting tutors' words like a bored dilettante, lobbing dried fruit at statues of your ancestors. Shiro carving glowing stars on the sundial. It looked like… adolescent noise. Petty defiance. Spoiled princeling boredom and gutter rat frustration playing out against the backdrop of true horror." He met Kuro's pain glazed stare. "We saw sparks, yes. Kaya's fire flickering in you both. But sparks in a blizzard, gutter rat. Dangerous perhaps, but ultimately… distracting. Insignificant background radiation against the decaying star that is Ryo's reign."
"But Then came the Observatory." Ryota's starburst eyes narrowed, the swirling galaxies within them recalling the shattering moment. The air around him seemed to vibrate with the memory. "That wasn't just a flare, boy. That was a scream. A scream ripped from the fabric of reality itself. It made the bedrock of the Black Vaults hum like a plucked nerve." He looked directly at Shiro, the contempt replaced by a dawning, terrifying realization. "That... that wasn't a tantrum. That was raw fucking power. A power that tore the world. A power that... that made me look twice. Made me think maybe, just maybe, that torch in the cyclone wasn't just stupid... it was a fucking detonator."
"But then… after your detonation you got captured by Akuma, tortured, placed in the temples abhorrent creation. I thought about whether it was worth it contemplated for what felt like year within my mind thinking is the risk worth it but then Haruto,Juro and Mira begged me to try and save you then as I was watching in the shadows within that bastards throne room…"
Haruto's voice, charged with witnessed horror, cut in: "But the throne room… That sold it. That fucking sold it for me, Ryota, and I know it did for you too." He drew his humming blade. "We saw you dragged before the Butcher King... heard him promise Aki's torture, the starvation of the Warrens... saw Akuma offer the knife..."
Ryota shifted his gaze to Kuro cutting Haruto off, the intensity deepening. "And you, Prince. Standing before the King, renouncing your name, your blood… taking that shard of ice and carving your father's brand from your own flesh like excising a tumour…" Ryota's voice dropped, thick with a terrible, hard won respect. "That wasn't just defiance. That was unmaking. You unmade the son he tried to forge. You became Kuro the Unbranded. The Unforged Star. That made me lean in. Made me think.. that maybe just maybe Haruto and Juro might not be chasing phantoms after all."
Ryota slammed his fist against his breastplate, the sound final, decisive. "WE SAW YOU SCREAM PROFANITIES SAW YOU DECLARE WAR ON THE KING!" he roared, the sound shaking the room. "Not with a whimper. Not with a bargain. With RAGE! Pure, universe scorching RAGE! Broken, bleeding, branded by his chains and your own stars, you looked into the devouring darkness of his soul... AND YOU ROARED BACK!" He stepped closer, looming, his Polaris eyes blazing with the light of absolute conviction. "THAT rage? That refusal? That's the spark that burns empires down! Watching that... that was the moment I fucking knew. Knew you weren't just dangerous idiots. Knew you were the fucking detonator we needed to blow that fuckers rotten kingdom apart!"
He looked from Shiro to Kuro, his gaze encompassing them both. "We watched. We doubted. We dismissed you as noise. We were wrong." The admission was stark, gravelly. "What you showed tonight… that was the birth of something that can end him. And that, Twin Stars, is something worth fighting beside. Worth bleeding for. Worth dying for."
Haruto raised his humming blade high, the starlight metal catching the eerie glow of the pulsing scars, Ryota's star pupiled eyes, and the dying frost lights. The blade seemed to drink the disparate luminescence's, humming with a resonant energy that vibrated in the bones. "I Haruto Isamu renounce the Oji Dynasty!" His voice, usually precise and clipped, rang out with the clarion call of a war horn, sharp and final, cutting through Kuro's wet gasps and the splintering wood. "Here! Now! Not for land, not for titles wrung from blood and ice! For justice!" The word wasn't a plea; it was a sentence passed. "For the pyres Ryo lit in the Merchant Square, turning mothers and dreamers to ash for whispering hope! For the eyes he carved from Kaya's living skull while she defied him with her last breath! For Yuki Aratani's screams swallowed by the Temple flames, her brilliance extinguished for daring to shine too bright!" He took a step forward, his aristocratic bearing replaced by the stance of an executioner. "For the countless souls ground to dust beneath his boot, their names forgotten, their stories erased by frost and fear!" He slammed the sole of his boot down onto the discarded silver lyre insignia he'd ripped from his tunic earlier. The crunch of delicate silver filigree under hardened leather was obscenely loud. He ground it into the filthy, blood stained stone with brutal, deliberate finality, twisting his heel as if grinding Ryo's very lineage into the muck. "My people! My resources! My life! They stand with the Broken Chains! They stand with you!" His blazing eyes locked onto Shiro and Kuro. "FOR YOUR LIGHT IS TRUE, AND IT BURNS AGAINST THE LIE HE BUILT THIS KINGDOM UPON! I HARUTO FORMERLY HEAD OF HOUSE ISAMU STANDS WITH THE TWIN STARS!"
Juro, muscles straining against the buckling door, barked a laugh that was half pain, half exhilaration, a wild sound in the confined, freezing space. "House Fujiwara's river barges!" he gasped, bracing as another impact sent shockwaves up his arms. "Think they just carry grain and star iron ore for the Crown's forges? Think again! For months, they've been smuggling Polaris defectors beneath sacks of barley! Weapons wrapped in reed mats! Forbidden texts hidden in hollowed out plain sight!" He flashed a grin, fierce and defiant, despite the blood freezing on his temple. "Right under the Jade Guard's pampered noses! Paid them off with spiced wine and gilded lies!" He winced as claws, black and impossibly sharp, punched through the wood near his head, scraping against the iron bar with a sound like nails on slate. "Though busting into the Frozen Heart itself… pulling the Butcher's prized dissidents straight from his obsidian claws…" He laughed again, the sound raw. "That's a new fucking verse in the ballad of Fujiwara audacity!" He shoved harder against the door, his voice rising above the din. "My warehouses hold supplies earmarked for your war! My coin funds safehouses from the Warrens to the Whispering Peaks! My network of whispers stretches farther than Akuma's shadow! House Fujiwara renounces the Bloody Star! WE STAND WITH THE TWIN STARS! FOR THEIR LIGHT IS TRUE, AND IT PROMISES A DAWN FREE FROM RYO'S FROZEN NIGHT!"
Mira stepped forward, the star chart held before her like an offering. Her star flecked eyes, though shadowed with exhaustion and the strain of holding back the Hounds through her avian network, burned with a fierce, cold light. "The crows," she whispered, her voice layered with distant shrieks and the sighing of frigid winds. "They are not just eyes. They are memory. They remember the warmth before the frost. They remember Kaya's laughter echoing in sunlit courtyards." Her gaze fixed on Kuro's corrupted arm, the ice tendrils pulsing malignantly, then on Shiro's raw wrists. "They saw the rot take root in the palace heart. They saw the darkness gather around the Throne of Screams. And they saw you." She looked between them, her expression unreadable yet profound. "Not just defiance. Not just power. A resonance. A call older than kings, truer than crowns. The crows answer that call." She raised the chart slightly. "They guided us in. They will guide us out. And they will guide us back. For Aki. For Yuki. For every stolen dawn." Her voice firmed, losing its ethereal quality for stark resolve. "THE CROWS STAND WITH THE TWIN STARS! FOR THEIR LIGHT IS TRUE, AND IT PIERCES THE VEILS OF FROST AND LIES!"
The cloaked figure, having finished their adjustments to the screaming device on the door, turned. They pushed back their hood slightly, revealing not a face, but a smooth, featureless mask of polished obsidian reflecting the chaotic light. A single, stylized eight pointed star was etched into its forehead, but crossed through with a jagged scar of pure starlight. They placed a hand over their heart, the gesture simple, yet radiating ancient solemnity. A voice, resonant and melodic despite the rasp of disuse, emerged from behind the mask: "The Forgotten Path remembers the True Stars. We walk in shadow no longer. WE STAND WITH THE TWIN STARS. FOR THEIR LIGHT IS TRUE, AND IT ILLUMINATES THE DAWN TO A NEW AGE."
Silence fell, heavy and expectant, broken only by the frantic scrabbling outside and Kuro's agonized breathing. All eyes turned to Ryota. The giant knight stood like a monolith carved from vengeance and glacial patience finally at its end. He hadn't moved, but the air around him crackled. His Polaris eyes weren't just swirling; they were infernos contained within orbits of scarred flesh, miniature supernovae casting stark, jumping constellations onto the smoke stained walls and the terrified faces of the frozen guardsmen depicted in the murals.
He slowly lifted Star breaker the legend living breathing no longer shackled by Ryo pulsing with a new light a light that BURNS. Not with ceremony, but with the grim finality of a headsman raising his blade. The notched edge, dark with old blood and fresh crow feathers, caught the light, a jagged line of darkness against the pulsing luminescence.
"Decades," Ryota began, his voice a low, grinding rumble that seemed to emanate from the bedrock itself. It wasn't loud, but it silenced the clawing at the door, the very air seeming to still. "Fucking decades." He took a single, deliberate step forward, the rusted plates of his makeshift armour groaning. "I watched Kaya's stars gutter and die. I watched the man I swore my sword to, the man who fought beside me in the Borderless Wars, drown in paranoia and poison. I watched him murder countless watched him mock the Queen I pledged my loyalty to listened to his detailed gore of carving eyes." His gaze, burning with the intensity of a collapsing star, fixed on some point far beyond the ice encrusted walls, seeing horrors only he remembered. "I held her broken body in the throne room he defiled, while he ranted about celestial treachery, her blood soaking into the obsidian like ink into cursed parchment."
He slammed the butt of star breakers handle down onto the stone floor.
CRACKKK!
A spiderweb of fractures radiated outwards from the impact point. Dust and ice shards rained down. "I buried my brothers and sisters in the Knights of the True North in unmarked graves in the fucking permafrost! Cut down not by the enemy beyond the Wall, but by the King's own Blackcloaks, for daring to question his descent into madness! For remembering Kaya's oath!" Spittle flew from his lips, glistening in the starlight. "I played the knight of one. The broken relic. Licking my wounds in the frozen wastes, watching his rot spread, watching Nyxara's ice creep closer, fed by his fucking soul!" His voice rose, a building avalanche of fury. "I bided my time. I gathered embers. Haruto's whispers. Juro's smuggled steel. Mira's watchful crows. Waiting for a spark hot enough, bright enough, to ignite the tinderbox this kingdom has become!"
He turned his incandescent gaze fully onto Shiro and Kuro, the force of it almost physical. "I thought you were children. Spoiled. Reckless. Playing with fire you couldn't control. I thought you were the god damned pinnacle of idiocy!" The admission roared out, raw and honest. "Defiling academies? Carving stars? Throwing fucking fruit? While the world froze and bled?" He shook his head, a gesture of profound, discarded contempt. "I told Haruto watching you was a waste. That the real fight was out there," he jerked star breaker towards the north, "against the frost, not babysitting princeling tantrums and slum rat graffiti!"
He took another step, looming over them, the heat from his eyes contrasting violently with the chamber's deep freeze. "Then you screamed." He looked at Shiro. "In that Observatory. You didn't just flare. You tore a hole in the world. A scream of pure, fucking power that made the Black Vaults sing. That… that wasn't idiocy. That was a detonator." His gaze shifted to Kuro, laden with a terrible respect. "And you, Prince. Carving his brand off your flesh like a cancer. That wasn't defiance. That was unmaking. You unmade the puppet he tried to make you. Became Kuro the Unforged. That… that made me lean in. Made me think maybe, just maybe, that spark could burn hotter than I dreamed it would."
He slammed his fist, not on his breastplate this time, but against the ice encrusted stone wall beside him. A section of frost shattered, revealing dark, weeping rock beneath. "BUT THE THRONE ROOM!" The roar was titanic, shaking the entire guard post. Ice stalactites snapped from the ceiling, shattering on the floor. "THAT SOLD IT! Watching you broken on his fucking floor! Listening to him promise to carve up Aki! Hearing him vow to starve the Warrens into eating their own dead!" Ryota's face contorted with a rage so pure it bordered on sanctity. "Watching you, Shiro, wrists ground to pulp, roaring like a cornered leviathan! Watching you, Kuro, spitting your renunciation in his face like holy acid! Seeing those chains on your arms blaze like captured fucking nebulae!" He was breathing heavily, the air pluming around him like dragon's breath. "That rage! That absolute, universe scorching REFUSAL to break! To kneel! To give him one fucking inch! That… THAT is the fire I've waited DECADES to wield!"
He raised the axe high, the blade a silhouette against the pulsing starlight scars. "The Knights of the True North are scattered embers! But embers remember! They remember Kaya's stars! They remember true north! They remember the oaths sworn on starlight steel!" His voice dropped, not in volume, but in temperature, to a sub zero vow that promised annihilation. "Ryota Veyne renounces the False Star! The Butcher King! My axe! My life! And every loyal fucking knight, squire, or stableboy I can drag from the shadows or thaw from the ice…" He swung star breaker in a short, brutal arc, its edge stopping inches from the floor, pointing like a compass needle towards the heart of the palace. "…WE STAND WITH THE TWIN STARS!"
The words weren't just spoken; they were hurled, each syllable cracking like a whip. "Not to claim his blood soaked throne! Not to rule over the fucking ashes! TO MAKE THEM! To shatter his empire of pain! To tear it down! Stone! By! FUCKING! Stone!" With each word, he slammed star breakers butt down, punctuating his vow, the impacts echoing the Shadow Hound's assaults. "To reduce his gilded cage of agony to rubble and frozen screams! To hunt down every last shadow he cast! Every bootlicker! Every frostbitten sycophant! Until only his fucking ashes remains…" He paused, the silence suddenly profound, filled only by the escalating whine of the cloaked figure's device and the frantic scrabbling outside. His Polaris eyes locked onto Kuro and Shiro, blazing with absolute, terrifying conviction. "…AND WE EXTINGUISH THAT TOO! WE STAND WITH THE TWIN STARS! FOR THEIR LIGHT IS TRUE! IT IS THE FIRE THAT WILL CLEANSE THIS ROTTEN KINGDOM! THE ONLY LIGHT WORTH FOLLOWING INTO THE DARK!"
The sphere on the door pulsed once, violently, its whine reaching a skull splitting, ultrasonic crescendo. The wood visibly bulged inwards.
"NOW!" Ryota roared, the sound raw with decades of unleashed fury.
Kuro, The Unforged Star, pushed himself up on trembling, blood slicked arms, ignoring the grinding agony in his ribs and the molten iron fire spreading from the ice corruption towards his shoulder. He looked at Ryota, the grizzled knight whose eyes now blazed with the starlight of absolute conviction, then at Haruto, the aristocrat who had ground his own heritage into dust, at Juro, who he saw many times as he is head of House Fujiwara, at Mira, the crow seer, and the enigmatic masked figure. A grin, sharp as a shard of black ice and just as deadly, split his ruined face.
"Took you fuckers long enough," he rasped, his voice like gravel dragged through hellfire. "Now… let's give those starved shadow hounds a fucking supernova to chew on."