The love did not leave their eyes.
That was the worst of it. It remained, a deep, settled well of sorrow in his father's familiar purple gaze, a patient, aching tenderness in his mother's summer-blue. They were perfect. They were his. And they were the final door, and he held the only key: a violence he had never learned in this sun-drenched dream.
His father stood before him, not as a carpenter but as a king from the old songs, his stance a poem of balanced power. His mother beside him, a goddess of the hearth, her spindle a needle of frozen, perfect light. They did not advance. They did not threaten. They simply were. The fact of them was the argument. The love in their eyes was the plea. Stay. Be loved. Be safe.
The realization was not a lightning strike. It was a slow, cold tide filling him, chilling the marrow of this dream-bone. There was no trick, no secret word, no logic that could unpick this knot. It was not a puzzle to be solved. It was an altar. And laid upon it were the two most precious vessels of his heart.
To leave, he would have to break the vessels. He would have to be the hand that spilled the wine.
A soundless cry built in his throat, a pressure with no release. He remembered his mother's hands, flour-dusted, teaching him to knead dough. You must be firm, Ezra. Gentle, but firm. Feel the resistance give way. This was the opposite. He must be firm to destroy. To make the giving-way permanent.
His light—that stubborn, weary star at his core—stirred. He called it forth, not for warmth or guidance, but for an edge. He asked it to become a blade. The light recoiled like a wounded animal. It was made for illumination, for pushing back the dark, for gentle persistence. To turn it to this purpose was a sacrilege that sickened him to his soul.
"Do not," his mother whispered. Her voice was the sound of a breeze through ripe wheat, sweet and final. "Lay it down, my heart. There is no shame in rest. We will keep watch."
His father said nothing. He only watched, and in his eyes was a sorrow so vast it seemed to hold the echo of every lost child since time began. He did not lift a weapon. His very presence was the weapon—the immovable object of a love that would rather see its beloved preserved in amber than risk the bruising, breaking world.
Ezra's hands trembled violently. The first tears were hot and silent, cutting through the golden haze. He was not a warrior preparing for battle. He was a son preparing for a slaughter. His own.
He could not summon a brilliant, righteous flare. That would be a lie, and this place tolerated no lies. He pulled his light in, not as a sun, but as a dying star collapsing in on itself. He compressed it, with a will that felt like tearing his own tendons, into something small, and sharp, and honest. A dagger. A simple, unadorned thing. The kind of tool his father might have used to carve the head of a toy horse. It gleamed in his hand, not with glory, but with a dull, guilty sheen, a shard of stolen, painful daylight.
He looked at his father's face. He memorized the lines that laughter, not grief, had made. "Forgive me," he whispered, and the words were not a plea, but a burial shroud.
He lunged.
It was not the clean, efficient strike of a soldier. It was the desperate, graceless motion of a drowning man clawing at the hands that try to save him. He could not aim for the heart. That was a metaphor this reality would not allow. He drove the light-dagger into his father's shoulder, into the very muscle that had carried him on its strength, that had pulled him from nightmares, that had held him steady as he learned to stand.
There was no cry of pain. No shout of betrayal.
His father looked down at the wound. From it, a light like liquid honey welled and spilled, falling in slow, heavy drops that vanished before they touched the nothingness below. It was not blood. It was essence. Memory given form. He looked back up at Ezra, and the sorrow in his eyes did not harden into hate. It softened, deepened, into a fathomless understanding. A father recognizing the terrible, adult calculus in his son's tear-streaked face.
He lifted his hand—not to retaliate, but to touch. His fingers, warm and solid, brushed Ezra's wet cheek. The touch was a blessing and a farewell.
"Ah," his father breathed, a single syllable that held the weight of a lifetime. "My son. So it must be."
And he began to come apart.
It was not a violent dissolution. It was a gentle unraveling. He faded from the edges inward, like parchment held too close to a candle. He did not turn to mist or shadow, but to the very substance of the golden air around them. He became the scent of fresh-cut pine from the workshop. He became the low, steady timbre of a story told at bedtime. He became the secure, encompassing feeling of being small and utterly safe. Each memory peeled away, bright and vivid, and then dissipated, leaving the air momentarily sweeter, warmer, as if haunted by the ghost of his presence.
Finally, only his eyes remained, two pools of gentle purple light hanging in the void. They held Ezra's gaze for one last, infinite moment.
Then they, too, winked out.
The dagger of light fell from Ezra's nerveless fingers, dissolving into motes before it vanished. He stood, empty, in the ringing silence his father had left behind.
He turned.
His mother was waiting. She had not moved to attack, to flee, to mourn. She simply stood, her serene face now streaked with silent, silver tears that flowed without end. She let her spindle fall. It dropped, a shaft of captured starlight, and was swallowed by the gold without a sound.
Then, she opened her arms.
Not in a fighter's stance. In an invitation. In an embrace.
A sob tore from Ezra's chest, raw and animal. He stumbled forward, his legs buckling, and fell into her. He buried his face in the hollow of her neck, crushing himself against her, inhaling the lavender, the flour, the sun-on-cotton scent of her one last, devastating time. Her arms came around him, strong and real, holding him with a force that spoke of eternities. She cradled his head, her fingers in his hair, rocking him slightly as she had when he was a child with a scraped knee.
"Shh," she murmured into his hair, her voice thick with a love that transcended flesh and memory and this terrible, golden trap. "My brave, beautiful boy. My heart. My only heart."
He could not speak. He could only shake, great, wracking tremors that came from the core of his being. He clung to her, this phantom, this manifestation of his deepest solace, and he wept. He wept for the loss he was about to inflict. He wept for the child he would have to murder again to let the man live. He wept because he loved her, and love, in this place, was the sharpest blade of all.
He held her, and time lost meaning. It could have been a second or an age. But the cold stone of the real world, the desperate cries of his living companions bleeding through the golden walls—they were a distant drumbeat. A summons.
With the last fragment of his will, a will that felt flayed and bleeding, he reached for the guttering core of his light. Not to shape it, but to let it answer. He did not push her away. He let the light within him, the truth of who he was now—the scarred bearer, the reluctant leader, the man who belonged to a broken cohort in the dark—simply be. He let that truth radiate from him, a gentle, final pressure against the cradle of her perfect, loving arms.
She stiffened for a fraction of a second. Then she understood. He felt it in the way her hold changed, from desperate keeping to a bittersweet release. She leaned back, just enough to see his face. Her tears fell onto his cheeks, mingling with his own.
She smiled. It was a smile of unbearable pride and loss.
"Go," she breathed, the word a kiss against his forehead, a benediction and a curse.
And she, too, dissolved.
But not into light. She unraveled into sensation. The lavender scent lingered, a fragrant ghost. The faint hum of her lullaby hung in the air, a melody with no beginning or end. The warmth of her embrace lingered on his skin for a heartbeat longer than was possible. Then, there was only the quiet. A quiet so absolute it was a new kind of sound.
The golden haze began to leach from the world, like color draining from a dying flower, revealing the stark, black granite of an enormous chamber beneath. The light did not vanish; it retreated, seeping into the stones as if ashamed.
Ezra collapsed.
He did not fall onto stone. He folded onto it, his body a vessel suddenly too small for the void inside it. He was on his hands and knees, back in the real, the cold, the dark. The trial was over.
He had passed.
He had killed his parents to do it.
He was an orphan again .
Around him, the chamber echoed with the distant, fragmented sounds of other battles—the snarl of a wolf, the crackle of defiant flame, a whimper of shared pain—as his cohort fought their own perfect ghosts. But within the hollowed-out cathedral of his own chest, there reigned a silence more profound than any the temple could devise. The silence of a home chosen empty. The silence of a love murdered with a knife forged from its own memory.