The air still smelled of burnt ice where the shadow flame had died. One moment Selene had been a hollow figure of frost and glass; the next a dark flare had cut the night and something living had stepped through it.
Elira barely had time to think before the man in the black cloak moved forward. He did not run. He walked as if he had rehearsed exhaustion a thousand times.
"Darius." The name landed heavier than she expected. He answered with a half-bleached smile. "Still breathing. Barely."
Mira's staff hummed. "Who—?"
"No time," Darius said. He did not look at them long. His gaze went straight to Selene, and something like pain broke open in his face. "I came to free her."
The words were simple. The shadow at his palms twined, slow and obedient.
Mira barked, "Shadow Flame, it's forbidden magic, that power kills you."
"I know." He turned to meet her, and his voice was not loud—only certain. "She's not whole. Necromancy holds her. She is...already dead. The rites that bind her make a body move, but not a life, still her soul's trapped inside the body. Only a shadow cut from myself can slip behind the weave and tear the strings. To reach the strength to break that magic, I must give everything. I will burn out."
Elira's hand flew to the hilt as if she could stop the tide with metal. "There must be another way. We can seal, we can—"
"There is no other way," Darius said, and for the first time his voice shook. "I helped make a thing that bound her. I made choices before I learned the price. I cannot undo it by bargaining. Only by answering it with the opposite." He held his palms up; the black flame coiled, a living hush. "Shadow answers necromancy. It tears what light binds."
Selene's head turned. A faint, stuttering awareness crossed her face—like a candle blown and almost relit. For a split second she found them: her mouth shaped Elira's name, but no warmth came.
Darius moved first. He did not rush—he walked like someone accepting the length of a sentence. The shadow at his hands unspooled into knives of living night. Selene's body convulsed as if cut by a wind. She raised a hand, and ragged, cold energy lanced out—necromantic sigils uncoiling, rotten and sharp.
The fight was ugly and brief. Shadow met dead-light. Darius did not shout spells; he called names in a low, steady cadence and poured his being into each syllable. Every time Selene struck, the black flame bent to shield him and to answer—stabbing at the sigils grafted to her like rusted pins.
"Elira—hold the line," Mira shouted, voice breaking with the strain of her own spells. She braided water and frost into walls that swallowed stray shards. Kael drove his bulk forward to wedge gaps, Draga's plates singing.
Selene hit like cold iron. Her strikes were precise, uncaring. But each cut tore at something that was not bone. When Darius's shadow found a knot of necromancy at her throat, it coiled and braided itself through the rune like a key through lockwork. He looked at Elira then, and something impossible and steady rose in his face.
"I will not leave you this," he said, and stepped closer.
Selene's voice came like a wind through bones. "You were one of them," she said—only one word, but full of accusation and memory. "You helped."
"I helped keep her from killing who she loved," Darius answered, as if confession might save nothing but truth. "Then I fed the chain. I gave my hands to the wrong order." His fingers found hers for a bare moment, then left. "I will cut it so that it cannot be used again."
He took Selene's face between both hands. For a blink she looked like a living girl—the years peeled away, grief and pain and something soft. He leaned in and kissed her as if that motion could stitch a crack in the world. The kiss was neither long nor gentle; it was an offering and a penance.
Then he poured everything outward.
The Shadow Flame unleashed like a bell toll breaking. It struck the necromantic knots and burned through the echoes of the rites. The sigils screamed—soundless and terrible. For a moment the ground itself seemed to remember sorrow and then forget.
When the blaze finally dimmed, Selene sagged into Darius's arms. Her eyes cleared as if someone had wiped mist from glass. She smiled—small and real—and mouthed "thank you" to Elira. Then she laughed once, purely, at something only she and Darius remembered.
Darius smiled back with a tired, broken thing. "Go," he whispered. "Find the Dust Ruin. Look for the threads tied to your parents." He reached into his cloak with a hand that trembled and dropped a small, cracked pocket clock into Elira's palm—its hands ticked stubbornly despite the cold.
"And… I followed you," he added, voice thin but honest. "I sent a familiar. It watched from the first night."
Elira opened her mouth, but no words came. She clutched the clock while Darius pressed his forehead to Selene's. "I will not ask for forgiveness," he said. "I only ask that you live."
They kissed again—this one softer, full of apologies no speech could carry. The shadow wound inward like a closing bell. Darius's shoulders loosened. He let out a single, short laugh and then—
—he was gone. Selene's head dropped into his chest like a blossom falling. She breathed once, then twice, and then stillness sealed her.
Elira screamed, a raw sound torn from the center of her.She looked up. Mira and Kael stood as if the night had weighed them down. The field smelled of char and iron and the faint perfume of a life given back.
"You idiot," Elira whispered, half laugh, half sob.
A small, dry sound—the faintest of chuckles—seemed to ride the breeze, or maybe it was only the way the fire's embers sighed. When she closed her hand around Darius's clock, the ticking inside felt like a new kind of promise.
They wrapped both bodies as best they could. Before dawn they buried them on a low knoll where wind would wash names clean and the sky would keep watch.
Elira held the pendant until her fingers cramped. She would follow its clue. She would go to Dust Ruin and pull at whatever thread Darius left for her. For now, there was grief and a list of debts the world had forced them to take on.
Selene had been freed. Two had paid with the only things they had left. The night kept its long, cold silence—then, like an answering bell, the clock inside Elira's palm ticked on.