Shiro lifted his head. The movement required immense effort, like breaking through a shell of ice encasing his entire being. Not to look at Kuro, a ghostly echo of his own despair across the short, infinite distance. Not towards the untouched food, the stark monument to his refusal, to his belief that he didn't deserve the energy to continue. His gaze, hollow and stripped of everything but a terrible, exhausted clarity, slid past the weeping mirrors, past the multiplied, mocking reflections of his own ruination. It fixed, with the finality of a condemned man looking towards the gallows, on the far end of the crypt. Past the last obsidian pane, past a jagged pile of fallen rubble, yawned a low, crumbling archway. Partially collapsed, choked with frost heaved stones and veiled in deeper, beckoning shadow. But beyond it… not the barracks. Not Ryota's crushing expectation. Not Haruto's clinical assessment or Juro's contempt. Not even the suffocating weight of their shared, monumental failure.
Just… the vast, frozen silence of the Razorwind Peaks. A void. An end.
An escape route. A void colder than the crypt, but infinitely cleaner. A place devoid of people he could fail, could harm, could accidentally immolate with the unstable power he carried. A place where the supernova trapped in his palm could finally detonate, unleashing its annihilating fury harmlessly against unfeeling rock and endless ice, leaving no scar but his own vanishing. A place where his very existence would cease to be a flickering threat to everyone he'd ever dared to care for. Protecting her stars… the cold, logical whisper curled around his frozen heart, its seductive tendrils offering the only solution that absolved him of further failure, …means leaving. Removing the danger. The thought wasn't grand or tragic; it was the final, chilling solution to an impossible equation written in pain and fear. Sacrifice the flawed, dangerous vessel to preserve the fragile light he'd sworn to protect. The seductive relief of it washed over him, a paradoxical warmth spreading through his icy limbs, a stark, almost cruel counterpoint to the grinding agony in his wrists. It promised an end to the constant fear, the gnawing shame, the paralyzing terror of his own potential. Just… walk. The words formed in his mind, simple, final, heavy with a terrible kind of peace. Walk away from the war you were never equipped to fight. Walk away from the people you only ever hurt, the lives you endanger just by existing near them. Walk away from the crushing weight of a destiny you were broken for from the start. Let the frost take you. It's already in your bones. It's the only thing you deserve. It's where you belong.
Who the fuck am I? The final echo was a breath, thin and cold, almost peaceful as it dissolved into the crypt's relentless hum. Someone who finally understands. Someone who causes only harm. Someone who walks away to save them.
Kuro followed the direction of Shiro's gaze, his own eye tracking slowly across the weeping mirrors, the pools of cold mercury light, the jagged teeth of the rubble pile. He saw the same archway. The same promise of obliterating silence. The same end. The corruption in his arm flared, sending fresh, jagged needles of alien cold deep into his chest cavity, a final, vicious protest from the parasite within. But this time, the pain felt… distant. Abstract. Insignificant against the vast, yawning relief offered by the void beyond the stones. The static drone faded, muffled, replaced by the seductive, whispering call of the infinite frozen wastes, promising numbness, promising an end to the struggle, the shame, the constant battle against the rot inside and the judgment outside. Leave. The word wasn't a thought; it was a balm poured directly onto his scorched soul. Leave the burden of a crown of Ash, a legacy heavier than any mountain. Leave the legacy of a Butcher King father and an extinguished mother whose light I can never reignite. Leave the Twin Star bond that only chains Shiro to your inevitable decay, your certain corruption. Leave before the Blight inside you breaks its chains and consumes them all, Shiro first, burning him from the inside out with your poison, then Haruto, Juro, Mira… Ryota. He pictured it with terrifying, serene clarity: trudging into the endless white, the cold fire within finally consuming him from the inside out, cell by frozen cell, until there was nothing left but a silent statue of frost, anonymous and harmless, reclaimed by the indifferent ice. No more failures etched on Juro's skin like a brand. No more terror shadowing Mira's spirit when he moved. No more analytical reassessments from Haruto, calculating his viability as damaged goods, a liability to be managed or discarded. They'd be safer. Lighter. Unburdened. Ryota could rally true warriors, unsullied, unbroken, warriors forged of something other than rot and despair and broken promises. Mira could breathe without flinching at the darkness he carried, the darkness he was.
He looked down at his corrupted arm, the grey translucence pulsing with a slow, sickly rhythm, like the dying heartbeat of some frozen leviathan. This tumour… he thought, the revulsion replaced by a strange, cold acceptance, a surrender to the inevitable. …it ends with me. Out there. In the clean silence. Where it can't hurt anyone else. He pushed himself up, leaning heavily against the weeping mirror beside him. The cold mercury light smeared across his tunic, wet and strangely inert, like the tears of a dead god. He took a single, shuffling step. His boots crunched loudly on frost and grit in the tomblike silence. Not towards Shiro. Not towards the centre of the crypt, the crucible they'd failed so utterly. Towards the archway. Towards the vast, frozen silence that promised the only victory left within his grasp: the end of his contamination. The removal of the flaw.
Who the fuck am I? The question died on his lips, unanswered, unnecessary now. The path was clear. The answer was written in the weeping mercury and the endless white beyond the stones. Someone who finally does the only useful thing left. Someone who removes the infection. Someone who walks into the frost and ends.
The crypt's hum deepened, harmonizing jarringly with a new sound threading through the oppressive silence: the low, mournful HOWL winding through the partially collapsed archway at the far end. It wasn't just the wind of the Razorwind Peaks; it was twisted, distorted, carrying the weight of the void beyond the mountains. Every gust carried a thin, off key WHISTLE, the skeletal, mocking remains of Aki's lullaby, the melody she'd hummed, soft and defiant, while tracing Cassiopeia's tilted throne on the sun bleached plank. Now it snaked through cracks in the stone like a spectral taunt, a funerary dirge played on broken bone flutes by the indifferent frost. It resonated with the grinding shriek in Shiro's wrists and the static drone chewing Kuro's thoughts, amplifying their despair into a tangible, vibrating pressure that pressed against their skin, their eardrums, their very sanity.
Kuro was on his hands and knees, the cold stone biting deep into his palms. The mercury light pooled around him, reflecting his distorted agony, his resolve to end it. The archway called, its dark maw a siren song of oblivion, the howling wind and whistling lullaby its chilling anthem. Just crawl. Crawl into the white. Let the cold fire consume you. End the contamination. End the failure. Spare them. He took a ragged, shuddering breath, steeling himself against the pain, against the pull of the bond, against the faint, treacherous flicker of something else he couldn't name. "Fuck this," he rasped, the sound thin and brittle against the wind's howl. "Fuck all of this." His good hand pushed against the grit strewn floor, muscles trembling. "I was never fucking built for crowns... or stars... or... or this." He meant the weight, the expectation, the constant, losing battle against the rot inside and the monsters outside. "Better for everyone..." His voice cracked. "...less of a fucking burden..." He moved an inch forward, towards the archway, towards the whistling void promising release. One shuffling knee, then the other. The static roared its approval. Go. End it.
His knuckles dipped into a shallow puddle of mercury light as he moved. The viscous fluid rippled, distorting his reflection. He caught it. Not the panicked prince, the corrupted liability crawling towards escape. For a fleeting, heart stopping second, he saw her. His mother, Queen Kaya Oji. Her storm grey eyes, fierce and kind, impossibly clear, looking back at him from his own face in the reflection. The eyes he'd inherited. The eyes that held the starlight legacy he'd failed. Her gaze held no judgment, only a deep, unwavering love. Then, the reflection CONTORTED violently. Those same eyes widened in silent, eternal horror. The skin around them peeled back, revealing raw, glistening muscle and scorched bone beneath. Not plague decay. Ryo's handiwork. Carved away. Extinguished. Forgotten. A monument to failure.
Kuro RECOILED as if physically branded, scrambling back, mercury light splashing onto his tunic, cold and slick like spilled blood. A choked sound escaped him, half sob, half retch, torn from a place deeper than pain. The static in his head spiked into a physical jolt of agony, a white hot nail driven into his temple. He slammed his fist onto the stone again, not in rage, but in shamed, desperate denial. "NO!" The word tore from him, raw and ragged, echoing briefly before being swallowed by the wind's howl. He stared at the puddle, the horrific afterimage of his mother's mutilated gaze seared onto his vision, overlaying the dark archway. "I promised..." His voice dropped to a venomous whisper, thick with tears he ruthlessly suppressed, the taste of copper sharp in his mouth. "I promised her ashes..." The image of her pyre, the stolen urn, the oath sworn in smoke and grief. "I'd pull his fucking crown through his teeth..." He looked towards the archway, the whistling lullaby now sounding like a cruel mockery of his cowardice. "If I walk now... if I just leave..." The crawl towards escape froze. The burden wasn't lifted; it was reforged in the image of his mother's mutilated eyes, heavier, hotter, an anvil of shame strapped to his soul. "...she stays... a forgotten ember. Forever." Oblivion wasn't escape; it was the ultimate betrayal.
Shiro flinched as Kuro's cry, that raw, wounded "NO!" echoed in the confined space, momentarily piercing the wind's howl and the lullaby's ghostly whistle. He'd been hunched, staring at his scarred palm, the Polaris scar pulsing erratically against the cold mercury glow bleeding from the nearest mirror, the grinding a constant, nauseating counterpoint to the external cacophony. Just walk. Spare them. Spare her. Let the frost have you. It's clean. It's simple. He braced his good hand on the freezing floor, knuckles white, preparing to push himself towards the archway, towards the silence where his unstable power couldn't hurt anyone ever again.
Then he heard it. Clearer than Kuro's cry, sharper than the wind's moan. Amidst the dissonance, a fragment of the whistled tune resolved. Not the whole melody, but a specific, slightly off key trill, the exact inflection Aki used when tracing Cassiopeia's central curve. It pierced the static of his despair, the grinding in his wrists, the seductive whisper of surrender.
The GRINDING in his wrists STUTTERED. HALTED. For the span of a single, stolen breath, the world fell silent except for that haunting, familiar note.
A flash frame memory detonated behind his eyes, vivid as the day it happened: Aki's fingertip. Frail, trembling with the early, insidious tremors of the plague that was stealing her strength, her future. Yet, pressed firmly against the rough grain of the sun warmed plank they'd scavenged. Guiding his clumsy finger along the groove she'd started for Cassiopeia's throne. Tilted west. Her touch, though weak, was STEADY on the star line. Unyielding. Defiant. Not carving for some distant, hopeful future, but carving against the dying of her light, etching defiance into wood as her body failed. "Defiant. Like us," her voice, thin but unwavering, echoed in the memory.
The breath ended. The GRINDING SHRIEK slammed back, louder, angrier, a furious protest against the intrusion of hope, of memory, of purpose. Shiro gasped, doubling over, clutching his forearms as fresh bolts of agony lanced up to his shoulders. He looked down at his scarred palm, the crystal pulsing chaotically, then towards the dark archway, the whistled lullaby twisting back into a taunt. The image of Akuma lowering the flaying knife onto that plank, onto her defiance, superimposed itself over the dark opening, the knife poised over Cassiopeia's heart. His voice scraped out, a raw, broken rasp, echoing Kuro's despair but laced with a different, more familiar kind of fury, the fury of the Warrens, the fury of the powerless witnessing desecration: "I swore... I swore to her stars..." He slammed his fist onto the floor beside where Kuro had struck, the impact jarring his ruined wrists, sending white hot shards of pain through his arms, but the physical agony was secondary. "...I'd bring them home..." He choked, the words fighting past a throat tight with shame and a rage that refused to be extinguished, a rage that suddenly felt like the only thing holding him together. "...Can't... can't do that..." He forced the words out, each one a struggle. "...if I'm too fucking weak. Broken. And just... fucking pathetic." Walking away wasn't protection; it was the ultimate surrender. The final, complicit flaying of everything Aki had tried to carve. Surrender wasn't in his Warrens bred bones. Not truly.
The crypt's atmosphere SHIFTED. The hum intensified, vibrating the very stone beneath their knees, sending ripples through the pools of mercury light, transforming them into intricate, glowing fractal patterns that pulsed with the rhythm of their scars. The weeping mirrors seemed to lean in, their obsidian depths shimmering with an internal, watchful light. It wasn't Ryota's command or their own faltering will. The crypt itself, saturated with their amplified pain, the echoes of Elara's starlit defiance, and the charged residue of ancient wards, FORCED the reckoning. The tomb became an inquisitor.
Each time the Twin Star scars pulsed, Shiro's Polaris flaring with trapped stellar fury, Kuro's Polaris mark flickering like a guttering candle, the nearest obsidian pane rippled violently. Not a reflection. A PROJECTION. Silent, looping vignettes, 2-3 seconds long, stark and brutal as shards of ice plunged into their minds. No sound, only devastating imagery.
Kuro's Visions
The crimson scar on his forearm flickers weakly, a dying ember. The mirror directly before him shimmers. A large, weathered hand, calloused and strong, rests gently on the shoulder of a much younger Kuro, perhaps ten years old. The hand belongs to his grandfather, Ryo's father, a face etched with kindness Kuro barely remembers, blurred by time and tragedy. The man isn't looking at the young Kuro; he's looking through the mirror, his eyes holding a quiet, unshakeable resolve that seems to anchor the boy. His lips move silently, the words forming with deliberate clarity: "Kuro. Strength isn't raw power. It isn't being the best swordsman, the fastest runner. It's not giving up. No matter how tough the mountain. No matter what stands against you. You plant your feet. You breathe. And you move forward. One step. Always forward." The image dissolves, leaving the echo of that resolve hanging in the air.
The crimson scar flares again, brighter this time, reacting. The mirror shows his mother, Kaya. Not the mutilated horror from the puddle, but vibrant, fierce, alive. She's kneeling in a sun dappled garden a memory fragment from the palace, perhaps, before Ryo's fire? her storm grey eyes alight with warmth and a fierce, protective love as she looks at a young Kuro, barely more than a toddler, holding a wooden practice sword too big for him. She reaches out a hand, not to take the sword, not to correct his stance, but to offer, encouragement, belief, the sheer force of her presence. Then, the image flickers, replaced instantly, jarringly, by the Butcher, Ryo. Younger, his eyes already hardening into chips of glacial ice, devoid of the later drunken haze. He stands over a war map, fingers stabbing down onto a location, perhaps Kaya's stronghold, perhaps the Warrens, radiating cold, absolute, annihilating purpose. The silent message screamed without words: Legacy of Ash vs. Legacy of Light. Which path do you tread? Which fire fuels your steps?
Shiro's Visions
The crystal in Shiro's palm flares erratically, casting sharp, jumping shadows. The mirror beside him swims, then resolves into a woman's face, his mother. Gentle eyes, crinkled at the corners, a soft smile he can almost feel, a warmth radiating even through the cold obsidian glass, a memory of safety. Her lips form his name: "Shiro..." Then, horrifyingly, the image CONTORTS. The gentle eyes bulge in silent, unimaginable agony. Skin blackens, bubbles, melts away from bone with ghastly speed. Flames engulf her head, soundless but screaming with the intensity of purest horror in every flicker. Ryo's handiwork. He sees the skin slough off, revealing the grinning skull beneath for a split, nightmarish second before the vision loops back to her gentle smile. He HEARS the scream this time, not in the crypt, but inside his skull, a raw, endless sound of burning flesh and stolen life, a sound he'd been spared as a hidden child miles away, but which the crypt's magic now forced upon him. The juxtaposition, love and annihilation, was torture.
The scar throbs, white hot, reacting to the trauma. The mirror shows the charred skull face again, dissolving not into darkness, but into a scene of utter desolation: the simple, burned out shack on the edge of the Warrens where they'd hidden after. His mother's meagre grave marker, just a smooth river stone he'd found, half buried in windblown ash and encroaching frost. Untended. Unmarked by anything but his fading memory. The silent accusation was deafening: Forgotten. Unavenged. Your failure is complete.
The loops stitched together in their minds, a relentless, wordless filmstrip of trauma and legacy, duty and damnation. Shiro couldn't tear his eyes away from the melting face, the charred shack, the accusing grave. The silent scream inside his head became a physical pressure, a vise tightening around his temples, threatening to crack his skull. Tears, hot and shameful, finally welled, spilling over despite his clenched jaw, tracing paths through the grime and frozen sweat on his cheeks. He stared at the mirror showing the burning face, his voice a shattered whisper, raw with the anguish of a child abandoned, a promise broken: "Help me..." The plea was ragged, torn from a place of utter vulnerability. "You were never fucking there... when he... when he..." He couldn't say Ryo's name. "Why?" His voice rose, cracking. "Why show me this now? Why rip it open here?" It wasn't a question for the crypt, for Elara. It was a howl into the void of his stolen past, his stolen vengeance. Why remind me of the debt I haven't paid?
Kuro had unconsciously reached out towards the cold stone lintel of the archway, drawn by the renewed siren song of oblivion after the harrowing visions. His fingers were inches from the freezing rock, the whistling lullaby promising numbness, promising an end to the torment of choice and memory. Then, another pulse. His mother's face, vibrant and fierce from the garden memory, filled the nearest mirror. Not smiling this time. Solemn. Regal. Her storm grey eyes locked onto his reflection in the glass, seeing him, the broken man, not the child. And then, impossibly, subtly, the reflection of her eyes within the mirror... BLINKED. Once. A silent, phantom gesture. Not forgiveness for his despair. Not absolution for his near flight. PERMISSION. Permission to fight. To carry her light, not Ryo's ash. To choose the harder path. His outstretched hand trembled violently. Then, slowly, deliberately, fingers curling away from the cold promise of the lintel, it dropped away, hanging limp and empty at his side. He didn't look at the archway. He looked at the mirror, at the ghost of his mother's resolve, a silent question forming in his own storm grey eyes: How?
Shiro's broken whisper, "Why why why why now?", hung in the charged air, absorbed by the weeping obsidian. He heard Kuro shift, felt the focus shift away from the arch like a physical current changing direction, but the crushing weight of his mother's death, the image of that forgotten grave, held him paralyzed. He stared at the mirror showing her mutilated corpse, the charred skull superimposed over the frost heaved mound near the shack. The image wasn't just loss; it was UNFINISHED. A searing brand of shame ignited in his gut, hotter than the phantom pain in his wrists, hotter than his fear. His voice, when it came, was low, guttural, scraping over gravel and grief: "This... this can't be how it ends." He looked directly at the melting face, at the charred shack in the mirror. "Not here. Not like this. Not without..." He swallowed hard, the words thick. "...without having ever avenged you." Then, cutting through the memory of her scream, another sound surfaced, not from the mirror, but from the deepest, most heavily guarded vault of his mind, unlocked by the crypt's relentless pressure and the sight of her forgotten grave. A woman's voice, strained but fierce, whispering urgently to a terrified child hidden in a root cellar as bootsteps thundered above, the smell of smoke thick in the air: "Shiro. Listen. Whatever happens... whatever you see... remember the stars. Remember us. Our defiance. Our fire." A pause, filled with the sound of splintering wood above. Then, the command, etched in desperation and love: "Burn the sky if you have to, little ember. Burn it all down." Her final words. Not just a plea for survival. A command to RAGE. Burn The Sky. The words reverberated in his soul, igniting a spark long buried under fear and failure.
This wasn't resurrection. It wasn't triumph. It was the raw, animal REFUSAL to lie down and die today. The mercury dripping from the mirrors hadn't just pooled; guided by the crypt's unseen resonance, by Elara's lingering touch, by the desperate focus now crackling between the twins, it had traced the unmistakable lines of a constellation across the frost rimed floor: CASSIOPEIA. The proud, tilted throne, defiantly west. But one star was missing. The central point, the heart of the queen's seat, the star Aki had guided Shiro's finger over, was a shallow depression of bare, dark stone amidst the frozen mercury light.
The crypt hummed, a lower, purposeful note now. The wind howled through the archway, Aki's lullaby still a thin, off key whistle, but the obsidian mirrors seemed to dim around the edges, their weeping slowing, their focus LASERED on that empty point in the constellation. The crucible was set. The choice was made. Now came the forging.
Shiro: He understood instantly. The image of Aki's trembling finger tracing the lines, her steady touch on the central point, flashed in his mind, merging with his mother's final command: Burn. Not unleash. Not detonate. CONTROL. A controlled, focused emission. Just... HEAT. He focused on the memory of Aki's fingertip, her unwavering pressure on the line. He visualized the trapped stellar fury in his palm not as a bomb, but as a SPARK. A tiny, focused ember. He crawled forward, each movement sending the GRINDING SHRIEK into fresh paroxysms of protest, the phantom thorns tearing at his scars, the fused fragments threatening to vibrate into dust. He ignored it, focused only on the depression. He knelt before it, raised his scarred palm. The scar pulsed erratically, sensing intent. He pressed his palm flat against the freezing stone. He pulled on the scar, not to release the supernova, but to draw out a single, hair thin filament of its latent, searing heat. It was AGONY. Like forcing molten lead through a pipe lined with shattered glass. He felt the fused bone fragments in his wrist VIBRATE at a dangerous frequency, a sickening internal scrape. Sweat beaded on his brow, freezing instantly into icy pearls. He held. Ten seconds. Twenty. Focusing on the ember, the spark, the point. Thirty seconds. One degree of warmth leaching into the stone. A faint, almost imperceptible HAZE rose from the point where flesh met rock. A tiny, sharp CRACK sounded deep within his wrist ligament, a price paid. He hissed, a sharp intake of breath, but didn't pull away. For her. For the fucking stars She believed in. Burn, you fuck, BURN.
Kuro: He saw Shiro's agony, felt the strain through the bond, a wave of searing heat mixed with desperate focus. He knew his part. The corruption. The poison. Not as a weapon, but as... FUEL? CATALYST? The antithesis to Shiro's fire? He shuffled forward on his knees, the dead drag of his corrupted arm threatening to pull him off balance, the static screeching at the movement. He stopped beside Shiro, facing the same depression, the heart of Cassiopeia. He looked at his corrupted arm, the grey translucence pulsing beneath the stretched skin like a sickly, captive heartbeat. Feed it. A thimble sized pulse. The smallest possible fraction he could isolate. The risk was immediate, visceral: one inch more grey translucence crawling up his biceps. One inch closer to his heart. One inch further from being human. He remembered his mother's blink. Permission. To fight. To use even this. He focused, not on the storm of cold fury, not on the Blight's hunger, but on the barest, coldest trickle of the invasive energy, the still point within the rot. He extended a single, trembling finger of his good hand towards the depression Shiro was warming. He didn't touch Shiro; he touched the freezing stone beside Shiro's palm, where the mercury light met bare rock. He pushed. A minuscule thread of sickly, cold light, tinged with void darkness, slithered from his fingertip. It felt like tearing off a piece of his own rotting soul, a violation deeper than the Blight's touch. The grey translucence in his forearm FLARED, a visible surge of cold fire, and he felt a distinct, icy CRAWL slither upwards past his elbow joint, burrowing deeper into his bicep. He gasped, a sound of pure revulsion and sacrifice, but held the connection, feeding the cold point into the constellation's heart. For her. For the light. Even with poison.
The tiny pulse of Kuro's void tinged cold met the thread of Shiro's focused stellar heat in the stone depression. For a second, nothing. Just the opposing energies hissing against each other in the stone, Shiro's heat fighting Kuro's invasive chill. Then, deep within the rock, where the energies met and mingled in the shape of the missing star, a faint VIOLET light ignited. Not bright. Not triumphant. Dull, bruised, and struggling, like a dying ember glimpsed through thick, choking smoke. It pulsed once, weakly, a heartbeat of defiance against the overwhelming darkness.
The crypt didn't brighten. The obsidian mirrors still wept mercury, though slower now. The GRINDING SHRIEK in Shiro's wrist and the STATIC DRONE in Kuro's skull remained, constant companions.
But the HOWL of the wind through the archway... DROPPED. Just a semitone. The change was subtle, almost imperceptible, but profound. The thin, off key whistle of Aki's lullaby... STOPPED. Cut off mid note. The Razorwind archway no longer sang its mocking dirge. It only moaned the wind of the indifferent peaks. The taunting spirit of surrender was silenced.
A new silence, thick and charged with potential, filled the space where the lullaby had been. Shiro and Kuro remained kneeling, hands near the faintly pulsing violet star point on the floor, Cassiopeia's heart, reignited not by starlight, but by pain and poison, defiance and sacrifice. They didn't look at each other. Their gazes were locked on the dim violet light, the first thing they had built together that wasn't destruction or despair. A single, bruised ember in the vast, weeping darkness.
Their voices, raw, exhausted, stripped bare by their ordeal, scraped out simultaneously into the heavy air. Not through the bond, but born from the same bone deep understanding forged in the crucible of the crypt, echoing the impossible synchronicity Ryota had demanded but they had never truly achieved until this moment of utter, shared refusal to surrender:
"One star at a time..."
"...or not at fucking all."
The violet light pulsed once more, weakly but persistently, against the vast, weeping darkness. The wind moaned a neutral note outside the arch. The episode ended not on victory, but on the fragile, agonizing cliff edge of a decision made in blood, bone, corrupted light, and the faint, defiant glow of Cassiopeia's reclaimed heart. One star. Barely lit. The next one awaited. The ember of the Twin Stars, forged in the tomb, had ignited.