The snow had softened, drifting down in delicate spirals. It clung to every branch, muted every sound, until the world felt hushed and waiting that caught in Alinda's silver hair, clinging like frost to silk. The wind had fallen still, and with it came a deep, crystalline quiet. Only the occasional distant groan of ice shifting beneath winter's weight disturbed the silence. It was the kind of stillness that settled into the bones too soft to call peaceful, too heavy to ignore.
Fall stood at the edge of the clearing, his frame unmoving, cut from shadow and silence. He faced the tree line with his back to her, his cloak hanging in folds that brushed the snow without rustling. He hadn't moved since stepping outside. Not a twitch. Not a breath out of place. The world itself seemed to avoid him, air bending around his presence like light around a black star.
Alinda moved toward him with quiet steps, her boots crunching faintly in the snow, breath briefly clouding the cold air. She stopped at his side. Compared to him, she was small, almost slight, but her stillness was its own kind of gravity. She didn't shrink beneath his shadow. She simply existed beside it. Arms folded, eyes on the same dark trees, she stood with the poise of someone who knew exactly how much she unsettled those who thought she should flinch.
"You're angry," she said, her voice quiet but clear, the words hanging lightly in the cold.
Fall didn't respond.
"You're angry at Thal." Still silence. "You think he abandoned the fight," she continued, not pressing, simply speaking. "Left it in the hands of a child of dust. Someone who wasn't ready." She watched his jaw tighten, stone beneath flesh. It was the only sign he'd heard her. "Neo didn't know what he was walking into," Alinda said. "But he still walked. And he didn't run. That matters." This time, something shifted.
Fall turned his head slightly, just enough for one pale eye to catch the moonlight. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, not raised in anger, not sharpened with emotion just steady and absolute. "An ant can walk toward a flame," he said. "It doesn't make it brave. It makes it flammable."
Alinda exhaled softly, not quite a laugh, more a breath of recognition. That was Fall. Brutal, stripped of sentiment, speaking truth in its most painful form. "That's twisted," she murmured.
"But not untrue." He turned his gaze back to the trees. "He walked into the Rim, yes. However walking into death isn't the same as understanding it. Bleeding a god means nothing if you cannot kill it."
Alinda said nothing for a time. Snow gathered quietly in the folds of her coat, resting against the high curve of her shoulders. She had argued with Fall before. Often. But tonight, her silence was not submission. It was choice.
Eventually, she spoke again, her tone gentler now, laced with something slower, heavier. "Thal didn't make him to fight like you," eventually, her voice gentler now. "Maybe that's why he survived."
Fall didn't answer but he didn't deny it either and for the first time since stepping into the cold, the stiffness in his shoulders eased barely. Just enough to be felt by the woman who had known him longest, but she saw it the slight flex of his fingers, that one brief pulse of motion betraying everything the silence tried to contain. Even without words, it was clear. There was more he could have said. More he wanted to.
Fall didn't look at her when he finally spoke.
The pause before his words carried weight, a sharp contrast to the stillness, making the shift in his tone hit even harder.. His voice was quiet, not soft just stripped bare. Laid down like stone, untouched by warmth or cruelty. Only truth remained. "Him living or dying would matter not." No breath fogged the air before him. The cold didn't seem to touch him at all.
"In a hundred years," he continued, "he'll be dust like the rest. Bones buried beneath snow. A name spoken by no one. A memory lost to mouths that no longer exist."
Alinda turned her head then. She really looked at him, her gaze heavy with something more than disagreement. Her arms folded tighter across her chest not for warmth, but to brace herself against the weight of what she heard.
The wind moved around them, soft and ghostlike, curling through the trees, brushing across the frozen ground and the dark silhouettes of the village behind them. It carried no sound. Only the echo of things not said.
"You really still believe that?" she asked quietly.
Fall didn't answer.
She turned her eyes away, back to the tree line, to the faint light of stars behind gathering clouds.
"You think they're weak," she went on, her voice steady. "But there's something in them that I think you've forgotten. Something we were never meant to understand. They love like wildfire. They hate like it's sacred. They fight even when they know they'll lose, and they protect what they know they'll never keep."
She paused, the wind brushing her hair across her cheek. "That's not strength the way you define it. But it's something." He said nothing, but she wasn't finished. "Thal saw that. That's why he took them in."
At that, Fall's head tilted not fully, just a fractional shift, barely perceptible but it was enough. He was listening.
"Three Kruul children," she said, her voice quieter now. "Neo. Quincy. Lucian. None of them his blood. None of them his burden. But he raised them anyway. Not to be weapons. Not to inherit his war. Just to live." Snow whispered across the field, kicked up by a wandering gust.
"Maybe that's why he sees the world differently than you. Maybe that's why he left. Not because he gave up. But because he believed someone else might rise. Someone like Neo."
Fall's fingers twitched again.
She saw it and this time, she didn't look away. "He believes in them," she said softly. "The children of dust. Maybe even more than he believes in us." A long silence followed.
Then Fall spoke. His voice didn't shake, and it carried no edge but something in it had changed. A weight. A fracture, perhaps. Not visible. Just felt. "The moment Quincy died," he said, slow and low, "Thal broke."
Alinda froze and Fall's eyes didn't turn toward her. They stayed locked on the snowline ahead, unfocused and distant, like he wasn't looking at the forest, but through it. As if he saw something that hadn't yet arrived or something that had never truly left. "He burned the forest she died in," he said.
His voice was low, each word slow and deliberate. Not a memory, but a carving, drawn from something older than grief.
"Tore it from the roots. Slaughtered the ones who killed her. Then the ones who stood beside them. Then the ones who looked like them. He opened the skies with that cursed sword and brought death like a curse to both sides of that dust war. Monster. Dust. Mortal. Beast. It didn't matter."
His tone sank even lower, cold and smooth as frost drawn across steel. "He left no survivors." Alinda's breath hitched. She didn't speak.
"He raised them," Fall said. "Yes. Loved them, maybe. But they weren't meant to be reasons." He turned now, slowly, his face still shrouded beneath the folds of his hood. Only the pale gleam of his eyes caught the moonlight. "And Nephilim," he said, "are not meant to be ruled by pathetic reasons. Not grief. Not guilt. Not love. That is their burden. Not ours."
She didn't answer. Couldn't. The words sat like stone in her chest, anchoring every breath. There were no clever retorts. No teasing deflections. No sarcasm to soften what had been spoken only silence.
The wind shifted, carrying fine flakes of snow between them like ash through a battlefield. For a long moment, Alinda didn't move. Her eyes stayed fixed on the trees, lips pressed tight, her jaw clenched with the pressure of words she couldn't yet form.
She didn't need to reply, and Fall didn't expect her to. He had spoken what needed saying. For a moment, it seemed he might simply turn and leave. The kind of ending only he knew how to deliver. Wordless, absolute but his voice came again lower now, less distant, less grand, more personal.
"You speak like one of them," he said. "Because you were one of them." Her gaze flicked toward him, and he didn't stop. "You weren't born into eternity. You were given it. Pulled from death. Dragged across the threshold and made into something you never truly understood."
Now his eyes met hers. Pale and unwavering. "You wear immortality like a second skin. But it doesn't fit. You speak of love. Of choice. Of pain. You defend weakness. You mourn it. Preserve it." He paused for a moment, then flat and final. "But you don't know the weight of permanence. You weren't born carrying the burden of forever." with that, he turned.
No dramatic exit. No sound of power surging through the snow. Just footsteps heavy and deliberate, pressing into the white like time itself had decided to walk away.
Alinda didn't follow. She remained where she stood, the wind curling softly around her coat, snow climbing around her ankles, breath held tight in her lungs. She watched him go, eyes narrowed, but not in anger.
Because beneath all her pride, beneath her poise and dangerous elegance, he wasn't wrong.
The door to the hut closed behind her with a soft click. She didn't glance back, and she stepped into the quiet.
Inside, the air was warm and still. The hearth burned low, casting soft, restless shadows across the wooden walls. Firelight flickered over fur rugs and old beams, kissed the worn edges of the table tucked near the back. Thal's home untouched by the storm, untouched by the gods.
Alinda stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary. Snow clung to the hem of her coat, melting slowly, each drop falling onto the floorboards with the faintest sound. Her hands hung loosely at her sides, fingers relaxed, but her shoulders carried the weight of something unseen. Her gaze swept the room, and for a flicker of a moment, her fingers curled slightly at her sides, a brief tension in her jaw.
Neo lay where she had left him, cocooned in quiet pain, his chest rising and falling with slow, uneven rhythm. The bruises had deepened beneath the blanket she'd pulled over him earlier, shadows blooming beneath his eyes. He didn't stir, he barely moved. If not for the fragile sound of breath, he could have been carved from stone.
Tor lay nearby, half-curled, one massive arm stretched outward like she'd fallen mid-reach, still trying to protect someone even in unconsciousness. Her chest lifted and dropped with the steadiness of deep, exhausted sleep.
She stepped forward in silence, boots muffled against the rug. She moved like memory quiet, inevitable. When she knelt between them, the motion was fluid, instinctive, the kind of grace honed not through practice but through time itself. Her cloak whispered against the fur, folding gently around her legs, she looked at Neo then at Tor, then back to the fire.
Her hand reached out, slow and deliberate, fingers brushing the edge of the blanket. She pulled it gently up, tucking it closer to Neo's shoulder. Her knuckles grazed the curve of his collarbone. Then her hand stilled and for a while, she sat like that, motionless, the firelight dancing in the reflection of her eyes. Her expression didn't shift. She didn't speak. Didn't sigh. Didn't frown.
She simply stayed. Outside, the wind howled low, curling through the snowdrifts and the bones of the sleeping village. Somewhere beyond the trees, Fall walked alone into whatever came next.
Alinda leaned back against the wall, her body settling with the soft creak of leather. Her eyes half-closed, lashes lowering beneath the flicker of flame. Her breath was steady. Controlled. Almost peaceful.