The road to Veridia was a pilgrimage through a graveyard of someone else's war. They passed the husks of Sweeper transports, picked clean by scavengers and time. They saw the makeshift graves, the scars of plasma fire on the landscape. The oppressive, active malice of the Gloaming was gone, replaced by the grim aftermath of human conflict. The monsters had receded, leaving people to face the monsters they had become.
Finn drove, his silence a testament to the horrors he had witnessed. Kaelen sat in the passenger seat, her gaze constantly scanning the ruins, not for Manifestations, but for ambushes. The Schrodinger rifle lay across her lap, a stark reminder that the greatest threats had shifted.
Leo sat in the back, watching the broken world go by. He practiced holding a new, subtle application of his talent—a wide-angle, low-level empathy. He let the sorrow of the land wash over him without drowning in it. He felt the lingering fear, the desperation, the bitter anger. Veridia wasn't just broken; it was traumatized.
They were stopped a day's journey from the enclave by a ragged checkpoint. It wasn't official. It was a barricade of rusted cars and debris, manned by haggard men and women with haunted eyes and mismatched weapons. Their leader, a woman with a burned face and a military bearing, leveled a rifle at their transport.
"That's far enough," she barked. "Turn back. There's nothing for you here but a grave."
Finn brought the vehicle to a stop. Kaelen didn't reach for her weapon, but her posture became a coiled spring.
"We're not here to fight," Leo said, his voice calm, projecting it through the open window. He focused his empathic sense on the woman, feeling the bedrock of duty beneath her fear. "We're here to help. My name is Leo O'Connor."
The name meant nothing to her. "Good for you. Now turn around."
Then, a younger man next to her, his arm in a sling, squinted. "O'Connor? The one Valerius was obsessed with? The… the anomaly?" A superstitious fear crossed his face. "They said you died. That you caused the breach."
"I didn't cause it," Leo said, his voice still even. "But I was there. I saw Valerius's last stand. I know what happened."
The woman's eyes narrowed. "And what did happen? All we know is the sky fell, and the Captain died, and the things outside stopped trying to get in, but the people inside started trying to kill each other."
Leo met her gaze. "Valerius chose to fight a war with the only tools he understood: force and control. In the end, those tools broke in his hands. The Gloaming wasn't an enemy to be defeated. It was a sickness. And the fever has finally broken."
He gestured to the quiet landscape around them. "The fight he taught you to fight is over. The question is, what will you build now?"
The woman stared at him, the barrel of her rifle dipping slightly. She was a soldier without a war, a defender without a wall. It was a terrifying void.
"Let them through, Lira," the younger man murmured. "If he's who he says he is… maybe he knows something we don't."
After a long, tense moment, the woman named Lira signaled her people. The barricade was grudgingly pulled aside.
Their arrival at Veridia's main gate was met not with ceremony, but with a brittle, watchful silence. The great barrier walls were scarred and dark, their generators silent. The air, once buzzing with energy, was still. People moved through the streets like ghosts, their faces hollow. They saw the transport, saw Kaelen in her Sweeper gear, and their eyes held not hope, but a deep-seated suspicion.
Finn led them to the central command tower, now a shell of its former self. The lobby was crowded with refugees, the air thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and despair. The authority of the Sweeper Corps had evaporated, replaced by a grim struggle for resources.
They were directed to a makeshift council chamber—what had once been a strategy room. Inside, three people argued over a map. A hulking man with a crude tattoo on his face represented the remnants of the military. A severe-looking woman in a stained lab coat spoke for the engineers and technicians. The third was a civilian, a community organizer named Elara, her eyes bright with a desperate, pragmatic intelligence.
The arguing stopped as they entered.
"Finn," the military man grunted. "You're back. And you brought… guests." His eyes locked onto Kaelen with recognition and distrust. "Sergeant. Heard you went rogue."
"Captain Valerius is dead because he saw people as tools," Kaelen stated, her voice cutting through the room. "I chose to see them as people."
Elara's gaze, however, was fixed on Leo. "You're the one," she said, her voice soft but clear. "The one from the reports. The one he called the 'Hundredfold Apprentice'."
All eyes turned to him. The weight of their expectation, their fear, their hunger for a solution, pressed down on him. This was Valerius's legacy: a people conditioned to look for a savior or a scapegoat.
"I am," Leo said. He didn't amplify his voice, but he let his calm certainty fill the room. "And I'm not here to lead you or to fight for you. Valerius is gone. The war he waged is over. The Gloaming is no longer your primary enemy."
"Then what is?" the engineer snapped. "Starvation? Disease? The gangs carving up the lower sectors?"
"Those are the symptoms," Leo said. "The sickness is the story you've been telling yourselves. The story that survival requires a strongman, that safety comes from walls and weapons, that power is the only thing that matters."
He looked at each of them in turn. "That story is a lie. It broke Valerius, and it broke your enclave. The world outside is different now. It's wounded, but healing. It can be lived in. But you won't survive out there, or in here, until you learn a new story."
He told them then. Not everything, but enough. He spoke of the Cradle not as a battle, but as a sickbed. He spoke of his power not as a weapon, but as a medicine. He spoke of the choice to build rather than break.
When he finished, the room was silent.
Elara was the first to speak. "A new story," she murmured, looking at the fractured council, at the broken city beyond the window. "It's a fragile thing to build a future on."
"It's the only thing that ever has," Leo replied.
He had brought them no food, no weapons, no grand plan. He had brought them only a truth, and a choice. The same choice he had faced in the white room, at the Stillness, in the heart of the Cradle: to remain a prisoner of the old world, or to take the first, terrifying step into a new one.
The fate of Veridia would not be decided in this room. It would be decided in the streets below, in the hearts of its people, one fragile, hopeful choice at a time. And for the first time since the fall, that choice was finally theirs to make.