The bunker had no name. It didn't deserve one anymore.
Concrete walls bled condensation. Emergency lights flickered the colour of old bruises. The air tasted of rust, salt, and the particular kind of silence that only happens when gods realise they are mortal after all.
Twenty-three Namolas sat, stood, or curled in the dark.
Lya was in the centre of the floor, knees drawn to her chest, hoodie pulled over her head like a shroud. The hood still smelled faintly of 05's detergent (lavender and ozone). She hadn't moved in four days.
Aze leaned against the far wall, arms folded so tight his knuckles had gone white hours ago. His eyes were fixed on nothing.
Namola-02 sat cross-legged on a crate, neon jacket dimmed to funeral grey, spinning a single dead holographic patch between his fingers (the one that used to play a looping clip of a girl break-dancing on Mars). It wouldn't turn on anymore.
Others were scattered in corners:
Namola-16 (barely twelve in appearance) hugging a cracked tablet that still showed a frozen frame of 05 smiling.
Namola-7 tracing the same crack in the floor over and over with one finger, like he could erase it if he just tried hard enough.
Namola-23 quietly crying into the sleeve of someone who wasn't there to hold her.
No one spoke above a whisper.
Because every time someone said her name, the walls seemed to press closer.
Lya's voice finally broke the quiet (small, cracked, younger than she had any right to sound).
"She promised she'd teach me how to make the redwoods laugh," she whispered. "She promised...."
Aze closed his eyes.
02 stopped spinning the dead hologram.
Somewhere in the dark, a single drop of water fell from the ceiling and hit the floor with the sound of a gunshot.
They all flinched.
No one answered Lya.
There was nothing left to say that wouldn't break them worse.
02's voice was barely louder than the dripping ceiling, but every Namola turned toward it like it was the last light in the world.
"You all think 05 was born old," he started, neon jacket still grey. "She wasn't. Her name was Tyara. Human. One hundred percent breakable."
He flicked the dead hologram patch; it sparked once, showed a ghost of colour, then died again.
"Fifty years after Jack burned himself out saving the last circus elephant, there was a birthday party in a refugee camp outside old Kraków. Tyara was turning fifteen. Her father (some mechanic who hadn't eaten properly in months) had spent a year melting down scrap copper and aluminium just to make her a crown. Cheap metal. Looked like gold if you squinted and were desperate enough to believe in fairy tales."
02's fingers traced the air where the hologram should have been.
"He put it on her head in front of thirty starving kids and said, 'Now you're a princess, little star.' She cried. Everyone clapped. Someone found half a bottle of vodka to toast with."
He paused. The bunker seemed to lean in.
"Then the GOE fragment came. Not one of the big ones. A splinter. Wild. Looking for a host. It saw the crown (saw the only piece of beauty left in that camp) and decided that was the way in."
Lya's hood slipped back. Her eyes were huge.
"It melted," 02 said, voice flat. "The crown liquefied the second the fragment touched it. Ran straight into her skull like it belonged there. Tyara screamed. The other kids screamed. Her father tried to pull it off and burned his hands to bone."
He looked around the circle of silent, broken gods.
"Thirty seconds later Namola-05 opened her eyes for the first time. Still wearing the remains of that melted crown fused into her hairline. Still fifteen. Still crying."
02 finally met Lya's gaze.
"She kept the hoodie because it was the only thing that ever hid the scar where the crown went in. Every time she pulled the hood up, she was fifteen again, and her dad was still alive, and the world hadn't ended yet."
The drip from the ceiling was the only sound for a long time.
Then Lya whispered, so quietly it hurt:
"She never told me his name."
02's voice cracked on the answer.
"Because she couldn't say it without breaking."
02's voice dropped even lower, until the bunker itself seemed to breathe the words.
"Zero-One found her three hours later.
He'd been hunting that rogue fragment for weeks.
Seventy years old in a twenty-year-old body, white suit already spotless, already carrying the weight of what they were all going to become.
He walked into the refugee camp and saw the aftermath.
Thirty kids. One melted crown. A father with his hands fused into blackened claws, still reaching for a daughter who wasn't there anymore.
Tyara's body was on the ground, crown-metal fused through her skull, eyes burned out, little fingers still clutching the scrap-fabric dress she'd worn for her party.
Dead. Properly dead.
But something inside the corpse was screaming.
01 heard it first.
He knelt in the ash and blood and did the one thing no one ever expected from the first Namola.
He cried.
Big, ugly, human tears rolling down a face that wasn't supposed to feel anything anymore.
Because he recognised the scream.
It was the fragment trying to keep the girl alive and failing horribly.
It had killed the host on entry. All that was left was pain wearing a dead girl's skin.
01 reached in (literally reached through the melted crown, through bone and brain) and pulled the fragment out with his bare hand.
The body went still.
Then the body inhaled.
Namola-05 opened her eyes (Tyara's eyes, but ancient now) and looked up at the monster who was crying over her corpse.
She was fifteen, terrified, and covered in everyone else's blood.
Because in the three hours before 01 arrived, the fragment had made her kill them all.
Every friend who'd clapped. Every kid who'd toasted with dirty vodka. Her father last, begging her to stop while she crushed his skull with hands that weren't hers anymore.
01 wrapped her in his white coat (the one that never got dirty) and carried her out of the camp himself.
He never told her it would be okay.
He just said, "I know what it's like to wake up wearing someone else's murder."
And for a long time after that, the monster who would one day declare war on humanity was the only one who could hold 05 when she screamed herself raw at night.
Because he'd been the one who found her in the ashes of her fifteenth birthday.
And he'd cried first.
02 rubbed the heel of his hand across his eyes, smearing neon tears that refused to fall.
"Tyara never stopped loving him.
From the second she opened her eyes in that burned-out camp (blood on her hands, 01's coat around her shoulders) she decided that monster was the only safe thing in the universe.
She told me once, drunk on fermented starfruit wine: 'I loved him the moment I realised he cried for me before I even knew how to be alive.'
But 01? He looked at her and saw the kid with the melted crown. Fifteen forever. He kept her close (taught her breathing, taught her control, carried her when the nightmares got too loud), but always like a big brother, never anything else.
For fifteen years she waited.
Grew up on the outside, stayed fifteen on the inside, and loved him louder every year.
When she hit thirty in body (still wearing that same damn hoodie), she cornered him in the half-finished biosphere, roots barely knee-high, sky still dirt.
She said: 'I'm not a kid anymore, Zero-One. I've been waiting half my life for you to notice.'
She kissed him anyway.
He kissed her back like a man who'd forgotten he was allowed to want something gentle.
After that, they stopped pretending.
They built the garden together (hand in root, heart in heart).
Every redwood, every upside-down river, every koi that swims through air; planted while she laughed at his terrible jokes and he let her steal his coat on cold nights.
The Dorm wasn't just a hiding place.
It was their love letter to every broken Namola who came after.
A promise that someone, somewhere, had chosen flowers over fire.
02's voice finally cracked completely.
"She used to call it 'our stupid little eternity'."
He looked around the bunker, at the twenty-three survivors huddled in the dark.
"Now the eternity's gone.
And so is she."
02's voice had gone soft, almost reverent.
"After the garden bloomed, the younger ones started calling her Mother. She pretended to hate it, but you could see her smile every time a new kid tugged on her hoodie. 01 never fought the name Father. He just… accepted it. Walked taller when Lya first said it. Carried the weight like it was the only title that ever mattered."
Silence settled again, thick as concrete dust.
Then Lya exploded.
She shot to her feet, hood falling back, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks.
"Stop being foolish!" Her voice cracked the bunker like a whip. "If he loved her—if she loved him—why did he crush her into a fucking marble and start this war?!"
The question detonated.
Namola-16 whimpered and hid behind her cracked tablet. Aze's knuckles went bloodless. Someone in the back actually took a step away from the centre of the room, as if the words themselves might kill them.
02 didn't flinch.
He looked at Lya with ancient, exhausted eyes.
"Only one man has the answer to that," he said quietly.
The temperature in the bunker seemed to drop ten degrees.
No one breathed.
No one dared finish the sentence out loud.
They all knew which man.
And the thought of asking him (of going anywhere near him ever again) made the walls feel suddenly paper-thin.
Lya's knees buckled.
She sank back to the floor, hugging herself, rocking like the child she still was inside.
02 stared at the ground between his boots.
"Yeah," he whispered to no one. "That's what I thought."
The bunker door didn't open.
It simply ceased to exist.
One moment there was reinforced concrete and despair.
The next, a wall-shaped hole framed in molten obsidian, edges dripping slow red tears.
Nerúdium stepped through.
Eight and a half feet of living apocalypse.
Wings folded tight against her back like burning cloaks. Serpent suit barely clinging to the essentials, lava veins pulsing slow and hypnotic beneath obsidian skin. Horns glowing. Tail curling lazy figure-eights in the air behind her.
Every male Namola in the room forgot how to blink.
Aze's arms fell to his sides, mouth open, pupils blown wide. Namola-23's tears stopped mid-fall. Even the ones who had sworn vengeance felt their knees soften.
Every female forgot, for one heartbeat, that they had just buried their mother.
Lya's rocking stopped. Her eyes went huge, reflecting the red glow like twin dying suns.
The air itself seemed to thicken, heavy with heat and hunger and the smell of something that had once been Nero and now wanted worship in forms language had never invented.
Nerúdium took one step inside.
The floor blackened beneath her talons.
She smiled (slow, terrible, beautiful).
07 moved first.
He lunged across the room, wrapped both arms around Namola-16 from behind, and clamped one large hand over her eyes.
"Don't look," he hissed, voice shaking. "Whatever you do, don't look directly."
16 struggled for a second, confused, then went very still when she felt him trembling against her back.
Somewhere in the ceiling, a small maintenance drone that had survived the apocalypse whirred to life.
Red scanning lines swept across Nerúdium's body (horns to tail, wings to claws).
A flat, mechanical voice crackled from the speaker:
<
Then the drone melted mid-air and fell in burning pieces.
Nerúdium's smile widened.
"Hello, family," she purred, and every syllable felt like fingers dragging down spines.
"I've come home."
The melted drone's core sparked once more on the floor, voice glitching through burning circuits.
<
Every Namola froze.
Even Nerúdium tilted her head, curious.
<
The drone's voice warped, stretched, almost reverent.
<
Silence.
Then Lya made a sound (half sob, half laugh, all heartbreak).
"Mom…?" she whispered, reaching one trembling hand toward the eight-foot demon-goddess who used to tuck her into bed with terrible jokes and warm hoodies.
Nerúdium's lava eyes flickered (something ancient and gentle passing behind the inferno, gone before anyone could name it).
She took another step forward.
The temperature in the bunker rose ten degrees.
07's hand was still clamped over 16's eyes, but his arm shook so hard the little girl could feel it.
Aze found his voice first, hoarse and cracked.
"You ate her," he said. "You ate them both."
Nerúdium's tail curled, amused.
"No," she answered, and her voice carried three layers now (Nero's sarcasm, 05's softness, and something vast that had never needed a name).
"I kept them.
We just… stopped arguing about who gets to steer."
She spread her wings slightly, and every light in the bunker dimmed in involuntary respect.
"Three hearts. One furnace.
And all of them are very, very tired of crying."
The bunker lights flickered once, twice, then steadied on Nerúdium's face.
For the first time since she stepped through the wall, the lava in her veins slowed.
A single pulse (slower, deeper, almost human).
Lya took one stumbling step forward.
Then another.
07's hand fell away from 16's eyes. He didn't stop her.
Lya stopped an arm's length away, small and trembling in her oversized hoodie, staring up at the eight-foot goddess who wore fire for skin and death for jewellery.
"Mom?" she whispered again, voice cracking on the word like it was made of glass.
Nerúdium's wings folded tight against her back.
The tail that had carved rivers of molten stone stilled.
Something ancient and gentle (something that had once been a fifteen-year-old girl with a melted crown, something that had once been a sarcastic human who hated the taste of air) surfaced behind the furnace eyes.
She knelt.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Until her burning forehead was level with Lya's.
The heat rolling off her should have blistered skin.
It didn't.
It felt like sunlight after a very long night.
Lya's hands rose, shaking, and cupped Nerúdium's cheeks (talons and all).
"You're warm," Lya sobbed. "You're so warm."
Nerúdium's voice came out cracked, layered, three souls speaking at once but perfectly in tune:
"I promised I'd come back for you, baby star."
Lya crashed into her.
Arms around the goddess's neck, face buried in obsidian skin that didn't burn, hoodie catching fire at the edges and not caring.
Nerúdium's massive arms wrapped around the tiny girl like she was the most fragile thing in the universe.
16 broke next.
She ran, bare feet slapping concrete, and threw herself against Nerúdium's side.
Then Aze.
Then 23.
Then every single Namola who had been mourning a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend (twenty-three broken gods piling into the arms of the monster who had eaten death itself and come home wearing it).
Nerúdium knelt in the centre, wings curled around them all like burning shelter, tail coiled protectively over Lya's back.
The serpent suit loosened, stretched, grew (until it became a living blanket of black scales that wrapped every crying child in warmth).
For the first time since the garden burned, someone laughed (small, wet, disbelieving).
It was 02.
He was on his knees, neon jacket finally flickering back to life, rainbow colours bleeding down his face.
"Welcome home, you impossible, terrifying, perfect disaster," he choked out.
Nerúdium rested her chin on top of Lya's head, eyes closed, lava veins dimming to a gentle ember.
"I kept them both," she whispered to the room, to the family, to the dark. "Tyara's heart. Nero's fight. And every promise I ever made you."
She pressed a kiss (gentle, burning, careful) to Lya's hair.
"I told you I'd never leave you orphans."
The bunker lights stopped flickering.
Somewhere far above, the war still raged.
Down here, twenty-four Namolas and one impossible goddess held each other like the world wasn't ending.