Back in Libertatis, the sky had gone a clean, untroubled blue. Surya and Ra hung above the rooftops like two bright lanterns lit in a dark room, and a light wind moved between the buildings, carrying the smell of rain that hadn't fallen yet. The streets were full again—footsteps, wingbeats, the easy chatter and laughter of a city that had decided, for the moment, to forget what it had survived. It rose and fell together the way a crowd at a concert rises and falls for a pianist they love. Vendors had already dragged their carts back out onto corners that had been rubble two days before, and somewhere overhead, wings caught the light and scattered it in bright, moving fragments across the cobblestones.
Achlys and Cryo walked through the middle of it, unhurried, talking as they went, in no particular hurry to be anywhere at all.
"Achlys? Any idea what you want to do now?" Cryo asked, genuinely curious.
"I want to find a library. Read something. Get some of this stress out of my head." Achlys let out a long breath as he said it.
"Stressed about the light, huh?" Cryo already knew the answer before he asked.
"It's about the light. But also..." Achlys caught himself before finishing the thought and shook his head instead. "Never mind."
"I'll go find you a library, then. Stay safe." Cryo shifted into his phoenix form and lifted off, a streak of blue fire trailing behind him as he vanished over the rooftops.
Achlys watched him go, then kept walking—until a young pegaluve woman stepped into his path, hesitant.
"S-sir... you're friends with that blue-haired man with wings, right?"
Achlys blinked, caught off guard. "Blue-haired...? Oh—you mean Cryo!" He said it brightly, glad to have solved the riddle.
"C-can you give him this?" She held out a single red rose with a folded note tied to its stem.
"Sure thing! Anything else I should tell him?" He asked it with an easy smile, taking the rose from her.
"J-just let him know it's from Miharu..."
He looked up at her properly for the first time.
She had short brown hair and a mature figure—fuller through the hips and bust, though her stomach stayed flat and toned. Her wings, brown shading into black at the tips, folded neatly behind her. Her shirt bore an embroidered design of Ra, Surya, and the three moons in careful stitching, and her shorts left her legs bare, the muscle in them faintly trembling where she stood. A small, nervous smile touched her mouth, and her dark purple eyes kept darting away and back again, like she couldn't decide where it was safe to look.
"Will do. Take care, Miharu." Achlys gave her a wave and turned to continue his search for the library.
Behind him, she watched him go for a moment—then spun on her heel and ran off in the opposite direction, practically skipping with the relief of having managed it at all.
"FIRST ORDER!"
Cryo dropped out of the sky and landed directly in Achlys's path in the middle of the street, wings flaring wide behind him. Achlys's hand had already closed around his sword hilt and half the blade had cleared its sheath before his eyes caught up with what he was looking at.
"Yo, yo—easy! It's just me!" Cryo threw both hands up, taking a hasty step back.
Achlys forced his grip open, the red glow already fading from his marking, his pulse still hammering from the half-second where his body had been entirely ready to kill something. "Don't you ever do that again, you misshapen bird."
"The nicknames are really getting out of hand," Cryo said, and to Achlys's genuine surprise, actual tears welled up and spilled down his face.
Achlys sheathed his blade and clapped a hand on his shoulder anyway. "Find the library?"
Cryo sniffed once, recovered instantly, and pointed west across the rooftops. "Small place. But it looked like it'd do the job." They started walking that direction together.
"So who was that woman you were talking to?" Cryo asked, eyes narrowing with sudden interest.
Achlys held out the rose and note without a word.
Cryo took it and stared at it blankly for a second. "...Is this a confession?"
Achlys's fist connected with the top of his skull before the sentence had even finished landing. "YOU IDIOT. Of course it's a confession."
Cryo rubbed his head, wounded, and unfolded the note anyway.
"She wants me to meet her before sunset," he read aloud, "on the Lunray mountain range."
"DON'T READ IT OUT LOUD." Another fist landed in the same spot.
"WHAT WAS THAT ONE FOR?!" Cryo shouted back, and swung a fist of his own into Achlys's head in retaliation.
"You're not supposed to read someone's love note out loud, Cryo. Gods." Achlys let out a long, put-upon sigh, then hit him a third time for good measure.
"WHAT DID I DO THIS TIME?!"
"Felt like it."
.......................................................................................................
Achlys reached the library alone. Cryo had taken the street name and house number in the other direction, wings already carrying him toward the Lunray mountains and whatever waited for him there.
The building was smaller than most he'd seen in the city, tucked between a bakery and a shuttered tailor's shop, its windows dusty enough to blur the daylight coming through them. Inside, the air smelled of old paper and older wood. Time to read some books about time, Achlys thought, and started scanning the shelves for anything useful.
A librarian approached before he'd gotten far—a middle-aged pegaluve, wings smaller than his own hands and a dull, unremarkable gray, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who had nowhere else he needed to be.
"Hello, sir. May your day be blessed by our masters."
Achlys looked at him for a moment. "...Good day to you too. Mister—?" He glanced around, but the library was otherwise empty.
"Is there something I can help you find?" Achlys asked, an uneasy prickle climbing his spine at the way the man's eyes never left him.
"You're the sword, aren't you. Young man."
Achlys's eyes went wide, and he tried, badly, to shrug it off. "What are you talking about? What would make you think that?" His marking flared white beneath his sleeve, and he clamped a book over it on reflex.
"It glowed." The man's smile didn't waver. "You're an Order. The marking of the sword."
"What glowed? I didn't see anything glow!" The words came out too fast to be convincing.
Achlys yanked the nearest book open and began reading from it at random, voice too bright. "...The blanket wavered in the air like a blossom that held the fabric of their lives together—" He glanced up. The man's expression hadn't changed at all.
He flipped to another page, undeterred. "The light of the summoning circle glows and shines a pillar of light that pierces the heavens of the gods—" He looked up again. Same smile.
"You're a poor liar. Same as all the ones before you."
Achlys let the book fall shut. "...Others? You know about the others?" The librarian only shook his head and beckoned him forward with one hand.
"I've been waiting for you. The one before you have been waiting for you too." He turned and started down a hallway lit in a soft, faded yellow, and Achlys followed, looking around at the shelves without really seeing them.
"How long has it been since the last one who held it?"
The old man chuckled and glanced back over his shoulder. "Three hundred years ago. He fought endless waves of the Radiant Dawn, and a group they called the Red Tide."
He stopped in front of a plain door at the hallway's end. "He died in that war—killed the last of the Red Tide with his final breath. But before he went to that battle, he wrote a book. For whoever came after him."
He drew out a small key and a lockbox, fit the key into it, and used a second key drawn from inside to open the door in front of them.
"I can't go in there myself. Only you can."
Achlys studied him for a long moment, then nodded and stepped through. The door closed behind him without a sound.
.......................................................................................................
Outside the city, Lecia looked back over her shoulder at the walls receding behind them. "Those are massive. I'd guess a few tens of meters, easy."
Lisare turned to look too, and nodded. "Longet!!"
"No, they're gray. Not black," Lecia answered without missing a beat.
Lisare stopped walking and stared at her, confused. "Longet sisi dop?"
Lecia smiled, warm and a little smug. "Of course I can understand you. I can nullify curses—at least on myself."
She kept walking. "Well? You coming or not? I'm not carrying you. I only carry my husband."
Lisare grinned and ran to catch up.
.......................................................................................................
They arrived at an empty stretch of mountain range, broken and scarred—splintered trees scattered everywhere, whole peaks sheared off at odd angles, and in the lower reaches, patches of stone still glowing faint with old, cooling lava.
"Sisi longet longet dop!" Lisare said, sweeping an arm across the whole ruined landscape. Lecia nodded along.
"This is a training ground, then. Somewhere for you to let your feelings out and get a handle on them?"
Lisare nodded again.
"Longet!"
"You want to fight me? Why?" Lecia asked, more curious than concerned.
"Dop dop!" Lisare answered, drawing her swallow-blade out of a portal that opened and closed at her hip.
"Because I look strong—hah! I like that." Lecia laughed hard enough to wipe tears from the corner of her eye. "Fine. I'll fight you."
She crouched and closed a hand around a loose stone, gravity bearing down on it in a slow, grinding pressure until it compressed into something dense and unnaturally hard, its surface glowing faint where the weight of it had nearly turned it molten. "Weapon—gravity creation!" She slammed her free palm against the forming shape, and the shockwave that followed rattled every dead branch still clinging to the broken trees around them, sending a scatter of loose bark and dust into the air.
She lifted it—a spear now, its stone haft threaded through with glowing purple lines of dense, heavy mana, humming faintly where her fingers gripped it. "A spear of stone, infused with weight itself."
Lisare studied it for a moment, watching the lines pulse along its length. "Dop sisi dop!" She swept her swallow-blade down toward the earth, and the paired blades tore free of the haft, spinning loose into the air around her in a tight, singing orbit.
"Three against one?" Lecia grinned and settled into a stance, weight low, spear angled across her body. "No magic—only mana flow between the weapons. Fair's fair." She dashed forward, leapt, and drove the spear down toward the spot where Lisare stood.
Lisare tracked the strike the whole way in and sidestepped a heartbeat before it landed, deflecting it wide with her blade. The spear buried itself in a nearby tree instead—and the moment it made contact, the tree simply ceased to exist. A wide bite of ground disappeared with it.
"Ultimate devastation," Lecia said, pleased with herself, hefting the spear back up. Lisare's grin matched hers exactly.
Lisare surged forward. Lecia brought the spear up in front of her, bracing.
"Dop longet sisi dop dop!" Lisare called out mid-charge, and whatever it meant, it wiped the good humor clean off Lecia's face.
"Don't you dare tease me about that mistake of a bird. I'm the only one allowed to bully him."
She was right—Lisare had closed the last of the distance and driven the spear's haft into the ground, using it to swing herself past Lecia's guard and seize the weapon by its shaft. Behind them, the mountainside opened into a string of massive craters, each one large enough to have swallowed a building whole.
"And now what? You've got my spear—" Lecia caught herself mid-sentence and wrenched it back by force, the motion alone enough to slam Lisare into the mountain behind her.
Where Lecia had been standing a second before, the ground was carved with hundreds of fresh scars, the freed blades swirling in around her from every direction they could find. She met each one with the spear, batting them aside as fast as they came.
She was already turning to block the next pass when Lisare appeared directly in front of her instead—no warning, no wind-up, close enough that Lecia's own reflection showed in her eyes for half a heartbeat.
"Longet!"
The punch connected clean, knuckles driving square into her jaw with the full weight of the swing behind it.
Lecia went backward through the air and straight through the face of the nearest mountain, then the one after it, and the one after that—an unbroken line of collapsing stone and rolling dust marking her path—before her body finally came to rest in a wide crater at the base of the last peak, unconscious.
The spear she'd made landed in the dust beside her a moment later, its purple lines already fading out, the mountain range gone quiet again around the two of them.