Nhilly took the hand.
Vaen's palm was warm and dry, calloused in the places Nhilly's were, as if the same mistakes had been made with slightly better form. The moment their skin met, something thin and innumerable slid out of the dark—threads, hair-fine, colourless—and sank into the joining.
They went up his arm like cold fire.
Not into muscle, not into bone—past them, through them, hunting the centre. He felt them gather around his heart and cinch, not tight enough to hurt, just enough to be noticed. Each beat answered with a new echo, as if something far above Tartarus had decided to clap along.
His pulse grew loud. Too loud. It filled his neck, his ears, the hollows behind his eyes.
"Oh," Vaen said mildly, as the mountain of corpses and the dark walls grew a shade further away. "You're going to wake up soon. Annoyingly punctual. I hoped for more lecture time."
Nhilly tore his hand back on instinct.
He didn't get far. The threads did not snap; they simply stretched, invisible and real, humming inside him. His knees hit the corpses. He folded around his own chest, fingers digging into bandages and bruises, not from pain but because the body needs a gesture for this sort of thing. His heartbeat felt wrong now—not singular, not private. A drum being tested in an empty theatre.
He tried to speak. Air left his lungs in a startled, voiceless bark.
"Natural reaction," Vaen assured him, watching with fond curiosity. "Think of it as… being added to the guest list. I'll make it quick, then. Before the curtain decides you go topside again."
Nhilly's breath came in fast, shallow pulls. The threads pulsed with each inhale, each exhale, confirming the rhythm. Somewhere above Tartarus, something tugged back, gentle and inexorable.
"Listen carefully," Vaen said.
He stepped closer, the armour whispering against itself, and for a moment he looked less like a doppelganger and more like an older brother giving dangerous advice behind a school.
"When you clear this Scenario—and you will, Number Sixty-Six—return to Yarion as fast as the script allows. Then you keep walking. Keep clearing. Keep climbing. Grow stronger than any of my previous attempts. Take everything they offer you—blessings, titles, cheap applause—and turn it, later, into a knife. Never sign a contract." His mouth twisted. "Paper is how gods cheat."
Nhilly tried to say why; the word died in the back of his throat under the hammer of his pulse.
"When you're strong enough to kill a Black Dwarf-class monster," Vaen went on, as if they were discussing a difficult but inevitable promotion, "seek out the Fallen Witch of Pride. Astraea. Northernmost point of Yarion, where even the maps get shy."
Astraea. White mist, red cut, the way she had looked up at the heavens and told them no. The memory flickered through him like someone else's electricity.
"She is not your friend," Vaen said. "Nor your enemy. She is a tool. Use her as you see fit. She will try to do the same with you. It will be adorable."
Nhilly's vision started to smear at the edges, the dark of Tartarus bleeding in toward the centre. The threads in his chest thrummed faster.
"And because I am not entirely ungracious," Vaen added, almost lightly, "I'll give you something now."
He reached out and placed two fingers against Nhilly's forehead.
The touch was soft. The effect wasn't.
Clarity did not arrive like light; it arrived like someone rearranging the lenses in his skull. Something slipped behind his eyes and began to weave, pulling tight and letting go in patterns too fast to track. It was not pain—not in the way Overload was pain—but it made pain look honest by comparison. Pressure mounted in the sockets, in the hinge of his jaw, in the tiny muscles that moved his pupils. The world blurred—not because it grew unclear, but because it tried to show him more than he had vocabulary for.
He fell onto his side, rolling on the warm, yielding dead, hands clawing at his face without quite touching it. A strangled sound forced its way out of him, half scream, half breath. His heart pounded harder, faster, as if trying to outrun its own echoes.
"There we are," Vaen said, smiling like a craftsman watching a difficult mechanism catch. "The Blessing of Clarity. You will see the world how the Constellations see it. Edges sharper. Colours honest. Motions… instructive. Very useful when you want to cut the puppeteer instead of the string."
Nhilly's lungs started to hitch; each inhale felt like a decision he had to sign for. The pressure in his eyes changed from pushing to pulling, threads knitting themselves into the shape of sight.
His vision split, for a heartbeat, into layers.
He saw Tartarus as it was: dark stone, dead flesh, dust. Overlaid on it, thinner and paler, he saw something like notation: faint lines running from Vaen's armour up into the unseen, a glimmering, angular script carved in the air above the mountain of corpses, symbols hanging over each dead face like labels. He could not read the script, but he understood with a sick instinct that it could be read.
He squeezed his eyes shut. The overlay stayed.
"That will settle once you're in a simpler room," Vaen said kindly. "For now, consider it orientation."
Nhilly gasped, chest shuddering. The drum in his ribs hurt, now. Not physically. Conceptually. As if every beat had to pass inspection before it was allowed to leave.
"And one last thing," Vaen said. "In case you get lonely."
He snapped his fingers.
The sword appeared between them, point-first in the dead, as if it had been there the whole time and only now decided to be noticed. Draco's Shroud, grown long and solemn, the calligraphy along its fuller bright as fresh gold leaf.
From the blade's shadow, something climbed.
Armour unfolded out of absence: joint by joint, plate by plate, like a man being remembered in reverse. Black metal, edges honed to catching light; red diamond facets at chest, knees, and gauntlets; gold script coiling along the arms in the same pattern that lived on Nhilly's sword. And on the shoulders, rising high and back, two sweeping horns that curved like captured lightning.
Last came the helm.
It flowed up from the collar, smooth and inevitable, enclosing an invisible head. The faceplate slanted in clean, predatory lines; a narrow visor slit, the colour of deep ember, cut across where eyes should be. No mouth. No nose. No human compromise. Just a statement of shape.
The figure finished forming and stood, silent, hand resting on the hilt stuck into the corpses. The air around it felt subtly rearranged, like a room making space for a larger presence.
Draco. The Constellation of Ascension.
Nhilly felt its attention land on him.
It was not a look in the human sense. More like being measured. Weighed. Assessed for what he could climb and what he could be made to shoulder.
"Draco," Vaen said, almost fond. "A man pretending to be a god." He looked back at Nhilly, eyes gleaming with script. "And you, Nhilly—a god pretending to be a man. You two will get on. Or kill each other. Either would be entertaining."
The darkness came up like water.
Nhilly's last impression of Tartarus was Draco's still figure, helm tilted imperceptibly his way; Vaen on his throne of nothing, hand lifted in a half-wave; the mountain of his own faces beneath him, receding.
Then nothing.
—
He woke to the sound of a city breathing.
Distant carts rattled over stone. Somewhere, metal rang against metal in a practiced rhythm—smith, drill yard, or both. Voices rose and fell in a cadence he half-recognized as Wyre: clipped vowels, consonants like knife taps. Closer, he heard the soft murmur of two healers arguing under their breath, and beneath that, the steady hush of a fountain, water folding over itself in a courtyard.
It was all… clear.
Not louder, exactly. Just… separated. He could have walked to each sound with his eyes closed.
He opened them instead.
The ceiling above him was dark stone, not plaster; blocks of smooth basalt fitted together in flawless seams. Hairline fractures whispered across them like pale veins, barely there; he saw every-one. A spider's web clung to a high corner, so fine that any other day it would have been a smudge. Now he could see each strand, the tiny knots where the spider had changed its mind.
He lay in a narrow bed with a proper mattress, covered by a light, rough blanket dyed a deep red that had faded to brick at the folds. The fibres were distinct, individual hairs of thread; if he stared too long, he could see the weave pattern, the tiny imperfections where the shuttle had snagged. Bandages wrapped his chest and shoulder, white against the dark of the room, tied in neat, professional knots.
He knew before he looked that his right arm was gone.
The absence was an old fact by now. The stump below his shoulder was wrapped thickly, the bandage slightly darker where seepage had dried. He could see temperature as a faint distortion around it—heat bleeding into the air in slow, guilty waves. His left hand lay open on the blanket, every line of the palm in focus, a callus on the middle finger split and beginning to heal.
He sucked in a breath.
The air tasted like stone cooled after rain, herbs crushed underfoot, and the faint iron of blood that had been cleaned carefully but not perfectly. He could taste which corner of the room the smell came from: the basin, where old wash water had soaked linen; the shelf, where jars of salve sat uncorked; the door, where drafts brought in corridor dust.
Selloris, he thought, before he had proof. The air had the feeling of cities built to endure siege: thick walls, high courtyards, the faint echo of distance in every sound.
He turned his head.
The room was small but well-built, a square cut from the side of a larger hall. The walls were the same black basalt as the ceiling, carved with shallow reliefs: stylized wolves, folded roads, the angular script of Wyre running between them like a border. The lines of the carvings were razor-sharp; he could see tool marks, the slight variance in depth where whoever had done this had gotten tired or angry.
A narrow window set high in the far wall let in a spear of late light. Through it he saw a slice of Selloris: stacked terraces of dark stone, banners hanging from arches in red and bone-white, the city's central road like a slate ribbon leading up toward a distant, heavy-shouldered fortress. Smoke rose in thin threads from chimneys; he could see each plume's twist, guess which burned wood, which burned oil.
People moved along the terrace just below the window. From here, they were insects in a child's drawing. He saw them as clearly as if he stood beside them. A woman carrying a basket, the handles digging into her fingers; a man in officer's leather, a tear in his sleeve stitched up with mismatched thread; a boy running, one shoe half untied, laces slapping the stone.
The world was too sharp.
His heart started to race again, not with Tartarus's echo this time but with the simple animal panic of too much information. Every object in the room announced itself: the quill on the bedside table, a single bent feather; the cup half full of water, surface trembling from the beat of his pulse; the single stray hair on the pillow, not his.
He tried to sit.
Muscles that had been allowed to rest for the first time in days objected violently. Pain rose—clean, localized. He could feel the difference between an overstretched tendon and a bruised rib; he could have pointed to each with his eyes closed. It should have helped. It didn't. There was simply too much of it.
He made it upright by degrees, teeth gritted, left hand clamped on the edge of the mattress.
The shift in perspective made the room lurch. Shadows moved, not because the light changed but because his mind did, recalculating angles. He saw, suddenly, that the stone blocks of the floor had been laid with the slightest inward tilt toward a central groove—a hidden drain for blood or wash water, cleverly disguised. Had that always been there in every infirmary? Had he simply never seen?
"Clarity," he whispered, and the word came out like a curse and a blessing in one.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
The floorboards in Lydia had been wood. Here, cold stone waited. His feet touched down, and the sensation shot up through his bones: the chill of it, the faint roughness, the tiny chips where boots had worn paths. The difference in temperature between where his left foot stood and where his right should have been felt obscene. Phantom fingers twitched on an arm that wasn't there.
He tasted bile and forced it back. The world did him the courtesy of letting him see the exact colour his face turned while he did it, reflected faintly in the polished metal of a hanging basin.
This is how they see, he thought, almost hysterical. Everything. All at once. No wonder they think we're toys. Who could live like this and still take any one thing seriously?
His mind went, briefly, to Celeste.
If she had seen him now—wobbling on bed-bruised legs, one-armed, eyes wide and wild at the way dust motes moved—she would have laughed first, then worried, then made him breathe on fours until the world shrank back to a manageable size.
He found himself counting without meaning to. In—two—three—four. Out—two—three—four. The rhythm calm and borrowed. His heart listened. The drum eased.
The city's sounds filtered in again, cleaner for the gap.
Somewhere below this room, in the belly of Selloris, men trained. He could hear it: the synchronized stamp of boots on a packed yard, the crack of wooden practice blades meeting, the bark of a sergeant's orders. Out beyond the wall, carts rolled. Hooves struck stone. A child cried once, short and offended, then stopped.
He realized that if he paid attention, he could map it all. Every heartbeat in the corridor, every footstep on the stair, every mutter in the rooms to either side. The knowledge was as terrifying as it was compelling.
"Too much," he said, more calmly than he felt. "One thing at a time."
He focused on his own hand.
Left, whole, palm open. He stared at the skin until the lines became landscape and then background. He noticed, distantly, that the tremor in his fingers matched the faint vibration in the cup on the table. Then he took a breath and looked up again, prepared this time for the flood.
Still too much. But marginally less drowning.
He eased himself to his feet.
The room tilted, then steadied. The drain line in the floor pointed toward the door. The door herself was heavy wood bound in metal; the grain warped slightly near the bottom where damp had gotten in over years of washing. On a peg beside it hung a folded Wyre robe—deep red, trimmed in muted steel thread—not Lydia cut. Of course. He'd lost the army, the cliff, the field. Waking here meant someone had decided he was worth the cart space.
His first step sent a small cascade of details through him: how the bandage tugged on his skin; how the blanket fell from his lap, each fold landing with its own tiny sound; how his shadow cut across the carved wolves on the wall, briefly giving them moving fur.
He took another.
His knees unlocked more willingly this time. His stump throbbed with a heavy, even ache. The world resolved into something like habit.
Third step.
The third step was too much.
His foot came down not quite where he expected; his balance, still used to two arms, adjusted wrong. The stone was less forgiving than wood. His vision, already crowded with edges and lines, sparked as the change in height combined with exhaustion.
He went down sideways.
The bed's frame caught his hip; the floor caught his shoulder. The sound of impact rang through him, a double-tap he could have sketched on a score. The breath punched out of him in a sharp, ugly wheeze. The basin on the table chased the noise with a bright metallic clatter as it toppled, water splashing, droplets spinning in the air long enough for him to see each one.
He lay there, stunned, cheek pressed to cold stone, watching a single bead of water roll toward the drain groove. It left a dark trail that took longer than it had any right to dry.
That was what saved him: the ridiculousness of it. The knowledge that he could see a drop evaporate.
He started to laugh, soundless at first, then in little huffs that hurt his ribs.
The door slammed open.
Footsteps skidded to a halt on the threshold.
"—sir?" a voice blurted, half-boy, half-man. "Healer, he—"
Nhilly turned his head.
Jiren stood there, breathless, one hand braced against the doorframe as if he'd come at a dead run. He wore a Wyre tunic hitched too high on the wrists, a bandage peeking from under the collar where an old cut had tried to become a scar. There was grime on his cheek and a new hardness at the line of his jaw, but his eyes were the same—too serious for his age, too bright for this city.
Those eyes went wider when they met Nhilly's.
Nhilly saw everything in the boy's face at once: the tiny healing split in his lower lip; the faint tremor at the corner of his mouth; the way his pupils jumped, not from fear but from the sudden adjustment to seeing a man walking who should by all rights be part of the story the scouts had brought back.
"He's awake," Jiren said, but not to Nhilly. His voice tore down the corridor like a thrown stone. "He's awake!"
The words echoed along stone, down toward the stairwell, toward whoever waited to hear whether the Great Hero Nihilus was a corpse, a miracle, or something in between.
Nhilly lay on the floor of Selloris, heart beating in time with threads he could not yet see, the world too sharp around him, and tried to decide which answer he preferred.