The Sky Hearth Barracks had become less a sanctuary and more a frozen purgatory. The dust from the void entity's unmaking had settled, but a heavier, more suffocating residue remained: the fallout of failure. Shiro and Kuro existed within its walls like ghosts haunting separate corners of the same ruin, the vibrant defiance of their blood oath buried beneath an avalanche of shame and paralyzing doubt.
Gone was the desperate energy of their earlier, flawed training. Gone was the brittle arrogance that had propelled them into the void entity's path. In its place was a profound stillness, thick with unspoken agony. They didn't spar. They didn't drill stances. They didn't even look at each other. The shared bond that had once flared crimson now felt like a chain of shared disgrace.
Shiro sat hunched on the stone platform's frigid edge, an island of desolation adrift in the vast, cold sea of Elara's tomb. He wasn't just apart from the others; he felt severed, a limb left to wither. His ruined hands lay cradled in his lap, not as sources of the ever present grinding shriek echoing up his forearms, a sound that seemed less physical pain now and more the auditory manifestation of his shattered spirit, but as grotesque artifacts. Alien. Betraying. He stared, unblinking, at the scar etched into his palm. The crystal embedded within pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, a mocking heartbeat in the gloom. Useless. The word echoed, hollow. Worse than useless. A tumour of potential that promised only self immolation.
What the fuck is wrong with me? The question wasn't rhetorical; it was the crumbling edge of a precipice he teetered on. He plunged back into the moment before the void whip struck. Not just seeing it, but feeling it anew. The terrifying surge of power had ignited in his palm, a supernova trapped under scar tissue, radiating heat that promised annihilation. But intertwined with that power came the visceral, cinematic flashes of agony: the fused bone fragments in his wrists vibrating like shards of glass dust, threatening to reduce his arms to useless pulp; the superheated scar searing his flesh from the inside, a molten brand threatening to detonate his very hand; the overwhelming, nerve flaying tsunami of the warren backlash that had stolen his sight and voice, leaving only raw, screaming nerves. He'd choked it down. Deliberately. Chosen the certainty of physical trauma, the whip's impact, the broken ribs, the jarring agony, over the gamble of unleashing a cataclysm that might incinerate Kuro, Haruto, Juro, everyone within reach. Cowardice? The accusation hissed in his mind. Or the only sane choice left after the mutually destructive seizure proved the power's true nature? Was it cold pragmatism forged in the white hot furnace of traumatic certainty? The image of Haruto's sleeve torn, the thin line of crimson blood stark against his skin, flashed behind his eyelids. Juro's temple, bruised and darkening. Ryota, a celestial titan, expending the focused wrath of stars because he, Shiro, was weak. Is that the core of it? The thought was glacial water flooding his veins. Am I just… fundamentally flawed? Incapable of wielding this curse without shattering myself and dragging everyone into the fucking abyss with me? Broken beyond forging?
He closed his eyes, but the darkness offered no refuge. Instead, he saw Aki. Not the vibrant girl humming over the plank under the weak sun of their shack, but the spectral figure haunting the plague shadowed gloom. Her face was pale, drawn, sweat beading on her brow despite the chill, yet her eyes… her eyes held a fierce, fading ember. He felt the ghostly weight of her hand in his, smaller, frailer than he remembered, yet guiding the bone handled knife with desperate determination. The scent of sun warmed pine from the plank, the rasp of the blade biting into wood, the shhhk shhhk as Cassiopeia's throne took shape, tilted defiantly west. "Like us," she'd whispered, her voice thin but unwavering. I promised. The words were ash on his tongue now, bitter and choking. Promised to protect that defiance. To shield her stars. Instead, he'd let her last act of rebellion, her fragile map of hope, fall into Akuma's fucking grasp. And here he sat. Amongst the ghosts of true protectors, hands trembling like an old man's, flinching from his own fucking shadow, scared of the very power that was supposed to save her. The image of Akuma lowering the flaying knife towards her neck wasn't a motivator; it was a grotesque, slow motion mockery of his utter impotence. What good is all consuming rage if it only paralyzes you? What good is star forged power if the mere thought of touching it floods you with terror? The Polaris scar pulsed against his muscle tissue, a trapped heartbeat resonating with the sickening grind deep in his wrists. Is this my only truth? A cracked vessel, leaking nothing but pain and drawing death like a void beacon? What the fuck am I even doing here? The question screamed silently within the frozen vault of his mind. Pretending to be a flicker of light in Nyxara's eternal winter, when all I bring is deeper shadow? A burden playing at being a saviour?
Kuro across the cavernous, ice rimed expanse, Kuro was a slumped monument to ruin beneath the faded grandeur of Corvus. He clutched his corrupted arm, not seeking comfort from the static buzz, a relentless, maddening drone scraping against the inside of his skull like rusty nails, or the invasive cold fire chewing like glacial termites towards the core of him, but in utter revulsion. The limb felt alien, a hostile entity grafted onto him. The grey translucence past his elbow pulsed with a slow, rhythmic throb, a sickly, alien heartbeat visible beneath skin stretched taut and brittle as ancient parchment. It wasn't his anymore. It was a parasite. A visible manifestation of the rot he carried within.
What the fuck am I? The question echoed Shiro's despair but twisted by the unique poison of his birthright. Heir to Ash. The title wasn't just self deprecation; it was his father's legacy, Ryo's scorched earth policy made flesh. Son of a Butcher. A reminder of the blood that birthed him, the ambition that shattered a kingdom and extinguished his mothers light. Titles that hung around his neck like millstones, mocking every faltering step. A weapon? He tried to flex the fingers of his corrupted hand; they responded sluggishly, jerkily, tendons standing out like frozen cables under the skin. The movement sent fresh needles of alien cold burrowing deeper. I'm a fucking hazard. A fucking walking calamity. A beacon pulsing with corrupt energy, screaming Here! Feast here! to the Blight and its servants. He relived the paralyzing micro second as the void claws descended: the instinctive pull towards the Twin Star power, the storm of cold fury and defiance gathering in his chest… and then the icy plunge of terror. Not just fear of death, but the visceral memory of the Blight feasting on their last desperate surge in the warren, digesting the volatile energy, mapping his nerves with predatory glee. The certainty that unleashing it now, uncontrolled, in this state of panic and corruption, wouldn't save Shiro, it would obliterate him faster than the void claws. He'd chosen death. Chosen the certainty of being shredded over the risk of becoming the instrument that tore his friend apart. Weakness? The phantom voice of his father, cold and sober in rare, terrifying moments, slithered through his mind: Weakness is the only true sin, Kuro. It invites the blade. It betrays everything. He felt the truth of it like a physical blow. You prove him right. Every fucking second you sit here, rotting in your own fucking failure, you etch his condemnation deeper. He looked at the crimson scar on his palm, the intricate mark of the Twin Star bond. It felt like a brand seared into failure. Bound to Shiro… not to lift him up, but to drag him down into my personal abyss. To what fucking end? The question spiralled into a crushing vortex of futility. To die nameless in a frozen tomb instead of a plague ridden shack? Is that our grand purpose? The sum of my mothers sacrifice and Elara's defiance?
What are we really doing? The thought crystallized with horrifying clarity. Playing at war? Larping as rebels while people like Mira shrink into shadows, vibrating with terror we amplified? While Haruto bleeds onto stone and Juro carries bruises earned saving our worthless skins? The reality crashed over him: the Frostguard tightening their icy grip on the Warrens, turning slums into frozen charnel houses; Akuma, meticulous and cruel, lowering his flaying knife to the last tangible piece of Aki's soul, her defiance, while they sat here, paralyzed. This isn't rooftop defiance with berry dye and stolen wine. This isn't a fucking game. The realization was a wave of nausea so intense he dry heaved, the sound weak and pathetic in the vast silence. This is life and fucking death. Real blood. Real suffering. Real stakes. He pressed his good hand harder against the pulsing corruption, as if he could physically suppress the cold fire. And we… The admission was ash. We are not equipped. We are children stumbling through an armoury, clutching live grenades. The corruption pulsed in response, a cold, hungry echo of his despair. What's the point of this poison festering inside me? He stared at the sickly grey translucence. What light, what hope, what fucking dawn can possibly emerge from this all consuming, soul eating dark? The silence offered no answer, only the relentless drone of the static and the icy certainty of his own inadequacy.
Days dissolved into a grey, suffocating sludge within the Sky Hearth Barracks. Time lost meaning, measured only by the grinding shriek resonating deep within Shiro's wrists and the maddening static drone that had taken permanent residence in Kuro's skull. The air hung heavy, not just with cold, but with the palpable weight of their shared failure and the chilling efficiency of the others moving around them. It was a silent purgatory, a "Wall of Silence" built not of stone, but of unspoken reproach and their own crushing despair.
Haruto approached Shiro not with pity, but with the detached precision of a surgeon assessing a complex wound. He held out the waterskin and dried meat, his voice stripped of its usual layered intonations, flat and functional. "Sustenance accelerates cellular repair. You require it to heal, Shiro." It wasn't a request; it was a biological imperative stated to a malfunctioning component. Shiro didn't look up. He kept his gaze locked on his scarred palm, the faint pulse of the scar a mocking counterpoint to Haruto's logic. The memory of Haruto's bleeding arm, his blood blood stark against pale skin, flashed with painful clarity. Healing? For what? To fail again? To be a liability that needs patching up after dragging him into the fire? The thought was a fresh wave of humiliation. He remained motionless, a statue of desolation. Haruto's sharp eyes lingered for a fraction longer, not angry, but deeply analytical, perhaps recalculating the viability of damaged material. He placed the offerings silently beside the stone platform and withdrew, his footsteps unnaturally quiet. The untouched food became a monument to Shiro's refusal, a silent accusation heavier than any shouted insult. Each time Shiro's peripheral vision caught the dried meat, the image of Akuma lowering the flaying knife superimposed itself, the desecration feeling like his own doing, amplified by his inaction. What good is healing this fucking broken vessel Haruto?
Juro didn't offer sustenance; he offered confrontation. Days later, his prowling perimeter tightened. He stopped abruptly in front of Kuro, who sat slumped against the wall. Juro didn't speak. He simply drew his scavenged dagger with a soft, metallic shink. Not threateningly, but deliberately. He held it loosely, then suddenly snapped it through a complex disarming manoeuvre Haruto had drilled them on what felt like weeks ago, fast, precise, lethal. He stopped the blade a hair's breadth from Kuro's good arm, his expression unreadable stone. "Up," he grunted, the single word a challenge. Show me you're not just rotting meat.
Kuro flinched violently, not from the blade, but from the sudden demand. The movement jolted his corrupted arm. The static buzz spiked into a physical jolt, a needle of alien cold lanced deep into his shoulder joint. The grey translucence pulsed visibly, angrily, as if disturbed. He gasped, clamping his good hand over the corruption, his single eye wide not with defiance, but with raw, panicked revulsion. Move? Train? With this inside me? The memory of the Blight feasting on their power surge, digesting it within him, flooded back. Juro's bruise, a sickly yellow green brand on his temple, seemed to glow in the dim light. My fucking failure. My fucking weakness carved onto his skin. The thought of engaging, of risking even a fraction of the volatile power near Juro, near anyone, was paralyzing. He shook his head, a minute, jerky motion, his gaze dropping to the floor, unable to meet Juro's eyes. Juro stared for a long, cold moment. He didn't sigh, didn't curse. He simply sheathed the dagger with a final, dismissive click, turned, and resumed his patrol, his silence now vibrating with contempt. The phantom voice of his father hissed: Weakness invites the blade. See how he turns away? He knows your worthlessness. The corruption throbbed in time with Kuro's hammering heart.
Corvin's approach was the most insidious. He didn't bring food or issue challenges. He simply shifted his silent communion with the stone. One day, he drifted closer to where Shiro sat, stopping a precise ten paces away. His ringed hand didn't trace the wall; it hovered, palm out, towards Shiro. Not threateningly, but assessing, the air around him as it seemed to bend, distorting the weak light, creating a localized zone of unnerving stillness. He didn't speak, didn't gesture. He simply observed Shiro with that impenetrable hooded gaze, the swirling stars within seeming to pulse faintly. It felt like being scanned by something profoundly alien, measured for flaws Shiro already knew were terminal.
Shiro felt it like a physical pressure. The grinding in his wrists intensified, the phantom vibration of bone dust becoming almost audible. The scar on his palm grew warm, the crystal pulsing erratically, as if reacting to the proximity of Corvin's ring. "You are NOT READY." The words weren't spoken; they resonated directly in Shiro's mind, cold and absolute, an echo of the void itself. It wasn't just a verdict on his power; it felt like a judgment on his very existence. Corvin stood there, a silent pillar of impenetrable truth, for what felt like an eternity, amplifying Shiro's sense of being a flawed specimen, an error in Kaya's design. Then, without a sound, he turned and drifted away, leaving behind a chill deeper than the barracks frost and the crushing certainty of his assessment. Shiro's breath hitched, a near silent gasp of despair. The urge to curl into a ball, to vanish, was overwhelming. He sees it. He sees it just how broken I've become a living joke conjured from my own fucking stupidity.
Ryota observed this grim ballet of refusal. He saw Haruto's clinical offering rejected, the untouched food a stark symbol of Shiro's internal shutdown. He witnessed Juro's wordless challenge met only with Kuro's flinch and the visible, sickening pulse of corruption, Juro's turned back radiating disgust. He felt the oppressive weight Corvin exuded, the way his mere presence deepened the twins paralysis. He saw Mira, a shadow among shadows, her fractured lens reflecting only stone and void, her silence a chilling withdrawal of the hope her visions sometimes offered. His own pacing had slowed, the initial fury banked into a deep, weary understanding. The untouched food, the vacant stares, the flinches at proximity, the deepening lines of despair etched on their young faces, it spoke of a fracture far deeper than any physical wound. The crucible of combat hadn't forged them; it had revealed a foundational flaw, a crack in the spirit that drills and shouted commands couldn't mend. The silence wasn't just absence of sound; it was the crushing weight of their perceived irredeemable failure, and the team's cold, pragmatic response to it. He watched, a scarred general surveying a battlefield lost not to the enemy, but to the collapse of his own would be champions. The path forward was shrouded in ice, and he saw no way to force them across it. The Wall of Silence stood, impregnable and desolate.
The silence in the Sky Hearth Barracks had congealed into a physical entity, thick with frost and failure. Days bled into one another, marked only by the agonizing symphony of Shiro's grinding wrists and the maddening static drone gnawing at Kuro's sanity. The untouched offerings of food near Shiro's platform were grim monuments to his withdrawal, each dried strip a silent accusation echoing Akuma's flaying knife poised over Aki. Kuro, slumped beneath Corvus, felt the cold fire in his corrupted arm burrow deeper with every contemptuous click of Juro's dagger sheath, a constant reminder of the weakness his father's phantom voice hissed about.
One evening, as the feeble grey light bleeding through the fissure finally surrendered to the barracks deep, hungry gloom, Shiro finally stirred. It wasn't a movement towards Kuro, nor towards the untouched food. It was a slow, almost painful uncoiling, like frostbitten joints cracking. His ruined hands, cradled uselessly, trembled slightly as he lifted his head. He didn't look at Kuro, a ghost across the icy expanse. Instead, his gaze, hollow and haunted, sought the dark silhouette of Ryota standing sentinel near the ruined entrance, framed against the dying light like a monument carved from shadow and starlight.
His voice, when it finally tore through the tomblike silence, was a ruin. Raw, scraped thin by days of disuse and choked by the ash of despair, yet it carried with unnatural clarity in the frozen air. "We need time." three words. Stark. Simple. Utterly inadequate for the chasm they tried to bridge, yet they landed like stones dropped into stagnant water.
Kuro's head snapped up, a violent jerk that sent fresh needles of alien cold lancing from his corrupted shoulder into his spine. His single eye widened, not with hope, but with pure, startled disbelief. Shiro speaking? After days of being a statue of desolation? And this? Not a plea for forgiveness, not a roar of defiance, but a request for… time? The sheer unexpectedness of it momentarily fractured his own corrosive reverie.
Shiro continued, his gaze fixed not on Ryota's face, but somewhere near the frost rimed stone beneath the warrior's boots, as if anchoring himself to the cold reality. "Not... not for training. Not yet." He swallowed, the sound a dry, painful rasp that echoed too loudly. "We need… to figure out…" He gestured vaguely, helplessly, a trembling movement of his scarred hand towards his own chest, then a blind, fluttering wave in Kuro's general direction, still refusing to meet Kuro's eyes. "...what this is. Who we are. If…" His voice frayed, the final, terrifying implication, If we can even do this without destroying everyone we touch, too vast, too heavy to voice. It hung in the air, unspoken but deafening.
Kuro found his own voice then, a hoarse counterpoint to Shiro's thin scrape. It felt like dragging gravel from a poisoned well. "He's right." He pushed himself slightly straighter against the unforgiving wall, biting back a groan as the corruption pulsed angrily in response to the movement. "We're… broken." He spat the word, tasting its bitter truth. "Not just wrists and… this." He touched his corrupted arm, a gesture filled with such visceral revulsion it was almost a recoil. The grey translucence throbbed beneath his fingers, a sickly heartbeat. "Inside. The core's… rotten. We don't know… what the fuck we're doing. If we want this… truly want it… knowing it means swallowing this poison every damn day." His storm grey eyes finally lifted, locking onto Ryota's distant gaze across the cavern. The anguish and confusion reflected there went far beyond the physical agony of his arm; it was the terror of the abyss staring back. "This isn't carving stars on a roof, Ryota. This is… Mira flinching at shadows we made darker. It's Haruto's blood on the stone. It's Juro's bruises from hauling our worthless carcasses out of the fire. It's the Warrens freezing while we cower. It's Aki…" His voice cracked, the image of the flaying knife lowering onto her neck vivid behind his eyelids. "...in that fucking plaza, waiting for the knife. We drag everyone into the fire with us… and we just… burn. We don't save. We consume."
Silence descended again, but it was a different silence now. Not the suffocating weight of shared shame, but a charged, brittle stillness thick with the raw, terrifying vulnerability of their confession. It was the sound of masks shattering. Around them, the frozen tableau of the others fractured. Haruto, mid stride on his perimeter check, froze, his sharp, analytical gaze snapping to the twins, reassessing, recalculating the variables of this unexpected breakdown. Juro turned slowly from the entrance, his expression still unreadable granite, but his posture rigid, every line radiating a tension that hadn't been there moments before. Mira's crow, perched on her shoulder, tilted its head with a soft kraa, a sound that seemed unnaturally loud. Corvin's finger, tracing the cold stone wall, stilled completely. The swirling stars within his hooded gaze seemed to fix on the scene, an ancient, alien witness to human fracture.
Ryota looked at them. Not with the expected fury, nor the crushing disappointment they'd braced for. What settled on his scarred features was far worse: a profound, bone deep sadness, weary and ancient. It was the look of a man seeing not defiance crushed, but the fragile spark beneath nearly extinguished. Not arrogance humbled, but the terrifying void where purpose had been utterly lost. He saw the shattered aftermath laid bare, the raw nerves exposed. He took a slow, deep breath, the inhalation seeming to draw some of the oppressive chill from the air, the exhale a soft sigh that echoed faintly in the vast, listening space.
Then, with a gentleness that felt alien in this place of frost and failure, he turned his gaze not to the twins, but to Haruto, Juro, Mira, and Corvin. His voice, when it came, was low, resonant, a command softened by understanding. "Leave them."
Haruto's brow furrowed, a silent question forming in his sharp eyes, Biological inefficiency? Risk assessment? but he remained silent. Juro's jaw clenched, a muscle ticking near the fading bruise Kuro couldn't stop staring at, but after a tense moment, he gave a single, curt nod, the dismissal in the gesture somehow less brutal than before. Mira simply melted further back into the shadows, her fractured lens glinting faintly. Corvin's hood tilted, a minute acknowledgment, and he drifted soundlessly away, the unnerving stillness around him dissipating like smoke.
Ryota turned back to Shiro and Kuro. His Polaris eyes, usually blazing with celestial fury, now held a different intensity, fierce, painful conviction, a light that seemed to pierce the despair shrouding them. "This," he stated, his voice gaining strength, carrying the weight of truths forged in countless battles and losses, "is precisely the victory Volrag Savors. Not broken bones, but broken spirits. Not captured territory, but paralyzed wills. Lights that sputter and die under the suffocating blanket of their own doubt." His gaze swept over their shattered forms, not with judgment, but with a terrible clarity. "We cannot conscript unwilling souls into this war. We cannot hammer weapons from ash that shrinks from the flame."
He paused, letting the stark truth resonate in the frozen air, watching it land on the twins like physical blows they needed to feel. "The Twin Stars…" he continued, the name imbued with a gravity that transcended mere power, "...they were never just raw energy. They were conviction. Kaya's desperate gamble wasn't placed on brute strength, but on the stubborn ember, the fire that refuses to die, no matter how fierce the storm." He took a single, deliberate step closer, his presence a solid anchor in their desolation. "You stand at the still point. The crucible that comes before the crucible of combat. This…" he gestured broadly, encompassing the frozen barracks, their isolation, the untouched food, the palpable weight of their failure, "...this desolation is where you choose. Not what to train, but who to be. Who are you?" The question wasn't rhetorical; it was a chisel aimed at their frozen cores. "Strip away the titles. Heir, prince, slum rat… cast them off. In this silence, in this cold, look into the abyss you carry and ask: Who. Are. You?"
His voice dropped, becoming a resonant whisper that nonetheless filled the cavernous space, vibrating in their bones. "If the fire still burns… not the consuming rage that paralyzes, not the pride that shatters, but the quiet defiance, for her," he nodded towards the imagined direction of the plank holding Aki's stolen stars, "for them," his gesture swept towards Mira's shadow, towards the Warrens freezing under Frostguard boots, "for the fragile light Kaya gave her life to preserve… if that single, stubborn ember still glows beneath the suffocating ash of your failure…" He paused, his Polaris eyes blazing now with that internal fire he spoke of. "...then you will rise. Not because my fist demands it. Not because Haruto's drills compel it. But because you choose the searing heat of the forge over the soul numbing certainty of the frost."
He turned fully to his waiting team, his voice regaining its command, yet tempered by the gravity of the moment. "We pull back. We secure the perimeter. We watch the enemy. We wait." His gaze met each of theirs, Haruto's analytical sharpness, Juro's stoic readiness, Mira's haunted stillness, Corvin's alien impenetrability. "The forge is cold. The metal is cracked. We wait…" His eyes flickered back towards the twins for a heartbeat. "...to see if the shards remember the star they were meant to become."
He gave Shiro and Kuro one last, lingering look. It held the terrible weight of potential loss, yet also a fragile, almost desperate hope, the hope of a commander who has seen too many lights extinguish. "Be reborn from these ashes… or be broken by them. The true war," he said, his voice fading as he turned towards the deeper shadows of the barracks, "starts here. In the silence. In the choice." His footsteps echoed softly, then faded, leaving the Twin Stars utterly alone in the vast, frozen stillness. They were surrounded only by the silent, watchful presence of the others, withdrawn but present, and the deafening, terrifying echo of Ryota's final question, now branded onto their souls: Did a single, defiant ember of the Twin Stars truly survive beneath the crushing weight of their ashes? The answer, forged not in drills but in the terrifying crucible of silence and self confrontation, would determine everything. The barracks, holding its frigid breath, waited.