Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The city stank of oil, smoke, and something sweeter, fouler—like ripe fruit left too long on a corpse. The acidic rain of this cruel planet had come and gone, leaving puddles slick with rainbow shimmer and filth with the way it chewed through the concrete. The Signless kept his hood up and his head down, the way all things that wished to live did in these sorts of areas. His senses felt dulled with the dreary weather, on edge from having been separated from his clade just a tick or two too long. The Signless knew they were worried, as they often were about a mutant-blooded troll wandering on his own for too long.

He didn’t mean to take the alley.

It was instinct, not intention, that led him off the crooked main road and between the buildings where old walls leaned like the drunken soldiers for the empire against one another. There was something here—an unease that had settled into the notches of his spine before he even saw the blood.

It wasn't a startling scarlet red, like his own. It wasn’t even at the least, lower in the hemospectrum, no, it shimmered dark like oil in the half-light, like violet wine laced with something dangerous, running in irregular spatters along the stone. Some of it had dried, forming sticky constellations. The rest was still wet. Still fresh. Still bleeding. Seadweller.

He crouched and touched a finger to the puddle. It clung to his skin, too thick, too cold, too alive.

Another few steps of following the irregular splattering, some yellow and bronze tinted hues mixed in along the way– though they led another direction– brought him to the source. A large, still body slumped against the far wall, half-covered in shadow, limbs tangled, breath ragged and wet. At first, The Signless thought the man might already be dead—until the figure stirred, as if sensing him, and turned a ruined, bloodied mess of a face toward him.

Two long, jagged wounds tore through the other’s face, nearly spanning it entirely. One eye was swollen shut. The other glinted faintly, but not with recognition. The lips moved—dry, cracking—uttering something senseless. That glint in his eyes was dangerous, something wild, unsurprising of a troll recently attacked, and if the mutant's suspicions were correct: outnumbered at that.

The Signless stepped closer, quiet as a prayer. His hand brushed the seadweller’s shoulder, and the body jerked. Not in pain. In warning. Even this close to death, the stranger bristled like a wounded predator.

“Easy,” the Signless murmured, voice soft, soothing. “You’re hurt. I'm not here to harm you.”

No reply. Just another rasping breath through clearly damaged gills and a slow collapse as the Orphaner sagged under the weight of consciousness. Beneath the blood and bruises, the Signless could see the hint of something stranger—armor half-burned into flesh with the telltale pattern of what could only be psiioniics, and then finally the marks carved along the other’s face. This wasn’t an ordinary wounded troll, this was the previously chosen Orphaner, the one that volunteered, no less.

Which meant he was in more danger than he knew.

The Signless looked over his shoulder. Voices echoed down the alley’s mouth, just out of sight—laughter like beasts stalking in the dark. Patrols. Or worse.

He turned back to the wounded troll. The violet blood was everywhere now, soaking through the hem of his own lovingly made robes. If anyone saw, if anyone recognized it...

He hesitated. All of Beforus help him, he hesitated.

But then he moved—arms under the other troll’s, lifting him slowly, carefully. The tall stranger hissed, but didn’t fight. He didn’t have the strength, gills half closed with injury and the rapid pooling of blood.

“You’ll go blind if I leave you here,” the Signless said quietly, more to himself than the seadweller. “Or worse. That is a nasty injury, inflicted with a common poison in the forest near here, no less. Your armor seems to also be trying to melt into your skin.”

With one last glance at the alley’s mouth, he dragged the broken, bloodied body into the dark with him.

The Orphaner was heavier than he looked, taller too, nearly dwarfing the mutant-blood even in this state.

Not just in weight—though the armor, even melted and seared into him, held the density of a lifetime of violence—but in presence. His blood thrummed against the Signless’s skin with every step, like it remembered the throne he served.

They didn’t have much time.

The Signless moved quickly, ducking through winding alleys and rust-slicked tunnels beneath the city’s waking heart. The trail of violet blood left behind them was damning, a beacon. He kept his head low, body hunched to shield the wounded troll from the open air.

Above, the world had begun to pale.

Not in the way it did before a storm or a moonrise, but with that awful, empty stillness that came just before the light of dawn. The Signless felt the pull of it in his bones, a tightness behind his teeth. A wrongness.

The suns were rising.

He risked a glance upward as they rounded a corner. Twin slivers of gold and white light began to cut across the horizon. One sun bled harsh amber—hungry, unfiltered. The other was smaller, paler, but cruel in its own way. They moved in tandem, crawling over the buildings with unbearable precision. The moment they rose in full, the city would ignite in heat and skin-melting madness.

The surface would blister in a haze, along with anything that dared be caught in its ruthless path.

And the Orphaner, in his state, would die before his vision failed entirely.

“Almost there,” the Signless whispered, though his breath came hard and ragged. He shifted the taller troll’s weight, arms straining beneath the blood-soaked robes. “Stay with me."

They passed through the crumbled remains of a chapel, long abandoned. The shadows there were long, but thinning fast. The creeping fingers of daylight reached through shattered stained glass, too bright for comfort. Already, the outer walls began to hum with heat.

Another corner. A rusted gate. A hatch hidden behind old stone where the undercity broke through. He had been caught in bad weather once or twice in his time here.

The Signless dropped to one knee, yanked the hatch open with both hands. It shrieked, metal grinding against metal. Beneath, a spiral stair dropped into cool darkness—old servant corridors, half-forgotten. A place untouched by the suns.

He dragged the Orphaner inside, just as the first slant of twin sunlight struck the wall behind them. It sizzled against the blood trail, lighting it up like embers in oil.

He slammed the hatch shut behind them. The light vanished.

Only the sound of the Orphaner’s breath remained—wet, shallow, struggling. His bruised gills twitched with every inhale. His less injured eye fluttered but did not open. The fever was rising fast.

The Signless laid him gently against the wall, crouching beside him in the dark. He pressed the back of his hand to the other’s brow. He could only pray the seadweller’s vision was bad enough to not pick up the telling signs of his mutant caste.

“Poison’s deep. I’ll need to treat it before it takes your vision.” he murmured. “You picked a bad night to be gutted, my friend.”

The Orphaner didn’t respond aside from a wheezing sort of gruff sound, but he was alive.

For now.

Above them, the twin suns climbed higher, bathing the city in blinding light—while the duo of fugitive and planet-beloved conqueror sank into the safety of shadow.

The mutant rested, ever observant of his unwilling patient, with his back against the furthest wall. One glance at the armor and the claws of the seadweller reminded him far too quickly that this was indeed a dangerous endeavor, that even injured this other troll would be capable of a devastating amount of damage. Only when the Orphaner began to settle and rest, did he dare move close enough to begin to create a makeshift bed or survey and dress wounds more accurately.

The Orphaner stirred again near the end of the day cycle, just as the heat from above began to ease and the twin suns dipped toward the edges of the sky.

The Signless had been watching him all day, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the makeshift cot of old blankets and scavenged canvas. He had tended the wounds, wrapped the gills in cooling cloth to keep them hydrated, whispered soft things in a lower-blooded language the other might not understand—though he suspected he did.

The Orphaner didn’t say much.

Until now.

The violetblood stirred, slowly at first, then all at once — pushing himself upright on shaking arms, muscles clenched. He winced, jaw tight, then froze.

His one visible eye did not move. It stared straight ahead.

“...You're awake,” the Signless said, leaning forward, hopeful. “You're lucky to still be breathing. The poison—”

“I can’t see.”

The words were quiet. Too quiet.

The Signless blinked. “What?”

“I can’t see.” Louder this time. Not a shout, but something closer to a growl barely held back by exhaustion. “It’s black. Everything’s black. You—”

He turned his head toward the sound of the voice, but his eye didn’t track. It remained fixed and useless.

The Signless reached out. “The poison. It’s reached your nerves. This was expected—if I don’t counteract it soon, it could become—”

“Permanent.” The Orphaner’s voice was hoarse. “You should have left me in the street.”

“And you’d be dead in the street. Or cullbait for the next troll to come along.”

Silence.

Then, quietly: “Perhaps that would be preferable; I cannot do my job like this.”

“No,” the Signless said, standing. “No. I won’t let you say that. You’re not dying down here. I’ve seen this kind of poison before. It's native to the lowroot forest—rare, fast, but not final. I can find what’s needed to cure it nearby.”

He pulled his hood over his head once more and slung a makeshift pouch he had sewn over his shoulder. His hands trembled. He hated the idea of leaving, but the suns were setting. He knew all too well the window for a cure would be short.

The Orphaner didn’t respond. His jaw had tightened, fists balled into the fabric of the cot. Vulnerable. Furious. Ashamed.

“I’ll be back before the second moon rises,” the Signless said, softer now. “Don’t move too much. Your body’s working hard just to keep your blood from turning on you.”

He hesitated at the door.

“I’ll return. I swear it.”

The Orphaner didn’t look at him. Couldn’t.

The hatch closed with a whisper of metal and rust, and the wounded troll was alone in the dark that now stretched both inside and out.

Chapter Text

The hatch groaned open with a metallic force. The Orphaner was already moving before the sound finished echoing—slow, deliberate, predatory. His finned ears caught the scrape of boots against the stone. His body remembered threat before it remembered pain.

A shadow passed over him.

And he lunged.

He moved like someone used to killing in tight spaces, but his coordination was off—his depth misjudged. One hand caught cloth. The other raked through air.

Then: contact.

But the hand he grabbed with a brutal force didn’t strike back, it didn’t even struggle against the grip that must be horribly bruising.

It held him, firm but steady. Not cruel. Not afraid.

“It’s me,” said the Signless, voice low, breathless from running. “Easy. It’s just me.”

The Orphaner froze, claws twitching where they dug into worn fabric. His gills flared with panic. The dark behind his eyelids didn’t shift. His mouth opened—then shut. His coldblooded fingertips slowly unwound from the significantly warmer flesh they held as pain bloomed in his side like a forgotten tragedy.

“I told you I’d come back.” The Signless eased him down again, setting the pouch of supplies aside. “You’ve been alone too long in your head. That’s all. It messes with you. I am sorry for leaving as long as I had to, but the forest is quite a walk from here.”

The Orphaner didn’t speak, these apologies and niceties foreign to him. Just breathed. Shallow. Tight. As if his chest were refusing to relax.

The Signless crouched beside him, uncorking one of the vials. The scent hit immediately—sharp and clean, like pine resin scorched on hot metal.

“This is going to sting,” he said gently. “But it will draw the poison out. I need you to trust me.”

The Orphaner gave a dry, humorless and hollow laugh. “I can’t see you.”

“Then don’t try,” the Signless said, calmly, as he soaked a cloth and reached toward the wounded gills. “Start with hearing. Smell. Pressure. Presence. Feel where I am, as a hunter would.”

He paused just before contact.

“I’ll never strike you. If I touch you, it’s to help. You’ll learn the difference.”

Silence.

Then, a shallow nod.

The cloth touched the delicate flesh surrounding those injured gills that were torn and battered.

The Orphaner flinched—hard, but didn’t retaliate. The pain was bright and immediate, followed by a spreading, twisting sensation just beneath the skin, like fire uncoiling in his blood. He bared his sharp teeth, jaw clenched, but said nothing.

The Signless worked in steady silence. Every movement precise. Every breath careful and measured, as if to give his position away.

“You’re doing well,” he said after a time. “The poison is stubborn, but it’s lifting. If I were cruel, I’d say you’re lucky.”

The Orphaner let out a hoarse breath, something between a scoff and a growl. “Cruel doesn’t suit you.”

“No,” the Signless agreed. “But I’ve lived among cruel things long enough to learn how to survive them.”

He wrung out the cloth in a bowl, stained with diluted violet. The treatment had begun. But the road ahead was long. There would be more pain. More silence. But for now—

“Rest,” the Signless said, pressing a gentle hand to the Orphaner’s shoulder. “You’re safe. You don’t have to see me to know I’m here.”

The Orphaner didn’t answer.

But he didn’t pull away, either.

The days blurred, or maybe it had only been one. Time lost its shape when there was nothing to measure it by. No changing light, no visible sky — only pain and sound and the muted textures of another presence nearby. The Signless moved quietly, like a habit, like he had spent a lifetime learning to be quiet, but never too far. Never so far the Orphaner couldn’t hear the rustle of cloth or the slow rhythm of the breathing that was not his own.

He hated that he’d begun to depend on that sound.

He hated needing anything.

The poison still lingered in the marrow of him. It burned less now, but his vision had not returned. Instead: blackness. Distant flickers of violet behind the eyelids, imagined light that meant nothing. Every time he tried to force his eyes open, they answered with silence.

He was learning the space by other means.

The cot creaked beneath him as he sat upright. Tentative fingers reached outward, feeling for the edges of the stone wall. There. Cold, pitted. Rough. A shape he could measure. He inhaled—slow, deliberate. A trace of the disinfectant, some bitter herbal salve. The Signless’s scent was always faint, warm in a way that made him uneasy.

“You’re awake.”

He froze. Of course the other troll would be watching.

“And moving,” the Signless added. “Good. You should try.”

“You always watch me?” the Orphaner asked, voice low and half-gone from misuse.

“When you’re unconscious, yes,” the Signless replied, not flinching from the truth. “When you’re awake… I try to give you space, as to not suffocate you.”

“Mm.”

He moved again, reaching this time toward the sound. His fingers passed through empty air.

“No—don’t look for me. Listen,” the Signless said gently. “You’re too used to relying on your eyes. But those are the loudest senses, not the strongest. You need to go softer. Slower.”

The Orphaner’s lip curled. “You sound like a clown priest.”

“Not quite,” the Signless replied. “Priests don’t save forgotten soldiers from alleys.”

He heard the faint clink of ceramic. A bowl being lifted. The slow drip of water. He listened. Tried to map the shape of the room in his mind: stone, fabric, metal, breathing. Each thing had a sound, and the Signless seemed to move between them without disturbing their rhythm.

Too quiet.

“Why do you live like this?” the Orphaner asked finally.

There was a pause.

Then came the reply, soft and measured: “Like what?”

“In the dark. In the forgotten spaces. Like a coward. You speak like a jade, why do you hide?”

A beat passed, heavy with unspoken things.

“Because I shouldn’t exist.” The Signless said plainly, though not quite answering the question head on. “And those who know I do… usually want to put an end to my life.”

The Orphaner tilted his head, as if turning toward the voice would let him see the words better.

“You’re powerful. I can feel it when you touch me. When you walk.” A grimace passed across his face. “Why not use that?”

The Signless didn’t answer right away. His movements stilled.

“Because power doesn’t matter when no one listens,” he said finally. “And I don’t want to become the kind of thing people fear. That’s how they justify killing you.”

The Orphaner considered this. His fingers found the rim of the cot again. The stone wall. He tried to trace the space — to learn it, claim it — but he kept brushing against the edges wrong. His body still remembered movement as a thing bound to certainty. That certainty was gone.

“I could kill you,” he said aloud, more a test than a threat.

“You could try,” the Signless said, not unkindly. “But you wouldn’t. Not anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re tired,” the Signless replied. “Because I gave you water when you couldn’t lift your head. Because I sit with you, even when you’d rather I didn’t.”

He stood then, quietly crossing the floor. The Orphaner felt the shift of air before the gentle pressure of cloth touched his brow.

He didn’t flinch this time.

“You’re not a coward,” the Orphaner muttered. “You’re worse.”

A soft breath of laughter, one that the violet could feel down to his chest, rather than see it.

“I’ll take that as progress.”

There was something in the air that next night. The Orphaner felt it before he heard it — a shift, subtle and wrong, like a pressure drop before a storm on the seas.

He lay still, gills twitching as they fought to take in more stale air. The stone beneath him was cool from his body, but the air above had gone sharp and thin and warm. Not the Signless. He could tell the difference now.

This was… something else. Something that had his senses on fire with worry...

“Someone’s here,” he said, hoarse. “Outside.”

A pause, then the sound of the door’s inner latch being slid quietly into place.

“You’re not wrong,” the Signless replied, voice lower than usual, too calm to be casual, as if he was already expecting this. “Something moved above. Roof level. Either a scout drone or a stray with a death wish.”

“You said this place was safe.”

“I said it was hidden.” A soft rustle — the sound of fabric being gathered and the scolding tone of something almost condescending if not for their caste circumstances, a way the seadweller was not often spoken to. “That’s not the same.”

The Orphaner pushed himself up, hands braced against the floor. His limbs still trembled from the poison’s slow retreat, but the predator in him surged awake. Old instincts, cruel ones.

“I can fight,” he said, gritting his teeth.

“You can barely walk.”

“I don’t need to walk.”

The Signless was beside him now, guiding him back down with a warmed hand against his shoulder. The touch was firm, steady. Unapologetic.

“You don’t need to die, either,” the Signless said. “If it’s a drone, it’ll scan for movement. If it’s something worse, we don’t want to give it a reason to check below.”

Silence stretched.

Then, bitterly, the violet spat the words: “I’m helpless.”

The Signless didn’t deny it. He just sat with him, shoulders squared as if to share the weight of the admission.

“Yes, for now,” he said. “But not alone.”

The words lodged somewhere between the Orphaner’s ribs. He hated them. Hated how they calmed him, like this was some cheap knockoff moirallegiance– something he was never luxurious enough to get.

He drew a sharp breath through his nose, those still bruised gills wheezing with the effort. “What do you need me to do?”

“Nothing,” came the reply. “I’ll handle it.”

He turned to leave — a soft sweep of air and cloth, far quieter than usual when he wished to make his presence known — but the Orphaner’s hand shot out, finding him without sight, gripping his wrist.

“Wait.”

The Signless paused.

“If you die out there,” the Orphaner muttered, “I’ll be blind, bleeding, and alone in this hole.”

“You’ll survive.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” the Signless said quietly. “Because you’re already trying to hold on to something you hate.”

That made the Orphaner let go, stunned by the words and the warmth that slowly faded from the palm of his hand. Too warm, he realized, to be a jade.

The Signless left with the silent precision of a shadow, closing the hatch behind him. The Orphaner listened until the last sound of footsteps faded into silence.

Alone in the dark again, he sat back, tense and still.

Then — from the other side of the wall — a distant clang. The scrape of metal. A voice he didn’t recognize barking something guttural. Another voice, one he did recognize spoke up in a jarringly calm way, despite the circumstances. Almost as if the Signless was trying to disarm the other with mere words, though the Orphaner could not make out the words no matter how he strained to listen.

He hated this.

Not the darkness. Not the poison. Not even the sting of a body refusing to heal fast enough.

He hated needing anyone.

But he waited anyway.

And for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t waiting for a kill.

He was waiting for someone to come back.

Chapter Text

ACT 3: Blood in Still Water

He didn’t hear the Signless return. What he heard was that horribly rusted, underused hatch, easing open like a breath held too long. Then the weight of a body coming down the steps — slower and far louder than usual. Labored. Not enough to be dying.

But enough to be bleeding. He was hit all at once with the smell of it, something deep and rich, making his pupils flare not unlike the beasts of the deep he fought to keep at bay.

“You’re hurt,” the Orphaner rasped.

“Not badly.”

That was a lie. He could tell. The way those now familiar footsteps faltered. The quiet hiss of pain as the Signless set something down. A small ceramic jar — or maybe a tin — sopor. He’d smelled it before, once on a battlefield where a hive full of young had been too badly burned to scream, and the other time each night before he crawled into his own recuperacoon. It hit him then how much he missed whatever semblance of a home he had, be it seafaring or not.

The Signless moved toward him again, and though he couldn’t see, he reached — slowly — and his hand brushed the other’s robes. Damp, sticky, warm…so warm.

“Why didn’t you use the salve on yourself?” he asked, quietly.

“Because your eyes still don’t work.”

A pause, as if contemplating for just a moment.

“...and because I don’t need mine to keep you alive.”

The Orphaner flinched. Not at the words — at the way they were said. No pride. No leverage. Just a plain fact. The Signless knelt beside him, warm and dull-clawed fingers so unlike his own gently tilting his head up, and then the cool and comforting sting of sopor was pressed to the corner of his ruined eye socket and the long gashes that ran along his skin around them.

The Orphaner hissed. Muscles tensed, hand twitching toward where a weapon should’ve been, that trusty rifle he left behind. But he stilled.

“I warned you it would sting,” the Signless said, with the shadow of a smile in his voice, but he sounded tired in a way that tugged deep in the Orphaner’s ribcage.

“You talk too much.”

“You listen too little.”

More silence. The salve worked into the wounds slowly, methodically. The Orphaner felt pressure, heat, then something else — a tingling, almost magnetic sense of return. His nerves itched. His skull throbbed. But beneath that all: light.

Faint, blurry. But real.

He blinked.

First came outlines. Then the vague shape of a face. Cloth around it. Unhooded now, and the unkempt dark curls it often sheltered. Blood had soaked through the shoulder of his robe, a color so saturated it shimmered like garnet under oil light.

Not rust, not brown. Not blue, or green, or violet.

Candy red. The same candy red that belonged to those gentle eyes that continued to watch him, a crease of concern as those nearly sun-warmed fingertips continued their work.

His stomach turned.

“You,” the Orphaner said, voice a whisper of realization.

The Signless paused in his work, thumb still brushing sopor across his brow and into the deepest section of the cut. 

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re…”

“A mutant.” The Signless’s tone did not change, still in that uncanny jade-like manner. Parental, even. “Yes.”

The Orphaner stared. One eye half-shut, the other still healing. But enough to see at last, to see the face that had been helping him . The blood on the Signless’s robes was unmistakable. Bright, rich, and wrong.

“You’re the one they said can’t exist. The one doing sermons for caste equality in this area.”

“Clearly I do exist, and yes, that is me.”

The Orphaner tensed — not out of fear. Something colder. Older. The echo of orders drilled into him by empire-old sweeps of instinct. If you see these mistakes, you end it. No hesitation.

The Signless didn’t flinch. He simply finished applying the salve, then sat back on his heels, light in his movements in the way the Orphaner could hear before.

“I should’ve left you,” the violet said. “At any point. Even before I knew what you were. Could hand you over, like the others that have tried.”

“Why don’t you?”

The Orphaner looked at the blood again. That red.

“I was trained to kill things like you.” He said, instead of answering.

“I know.”

“You were trained to survive.”

A pause, again.

“No,” the Signless said softly. “I was taught to hide. ”

He glanced down at the bloodied sleeve of his clearly hand-stitched robe. Something passed behind his expression — not pain exactly, but remembrance.

“My clade taught me. Taught me how to disappear when I needed to. How to move quietly, how to wait, how to endure. How to deal with this cursed blood.”

His voice dropped, warm as his blood with memory. “It’s not something most are given. But I had them. Still do.”

The Orphaner stared. The word clade sat oddly in his mind, like a sharp bone caught in his teeth. He knew the concept, having heard it from slain heretics before — a tangle of loyalty and kinship and shared blood — but had only seen it firsthand twisted into something cruel: warborn units, hunter circles, quadrants, breeding dens. Not… this.

“Your clade let you live,” he said, unsure whether it was accusation or awe.

“They made sure I could.”

The Signless said it without pride, without shame. As if it was simple truth. As if anyone would’ve done the same, as if he himself would have done the same. As he gazed at him, he knew that to be true, that he would do the same, if he would extend his hand to a stranger that easily could kill him.

The Orphaner didn’t speak again.

Not out of fear. but because, for the first time since he could remember, he didn’t know what to say.

The salve stung less now,  whether in comparison to this yawning silence or the fact he was actually getting better. That was an odd feeling that seemed unlike the Signless, in the short time the seadweller had come to know him. Though, the longer he sat in this silence, the more he realized he didn’t know him at all, did he?

The Orphaner lay still, one eye blinking into cloudy vision, the other still crusted shut with violet blood. Dim shapes flickered in the periphery. The ceiling above him — unfamiliar. Stone, cracked, with a single dangling rope. This wasn’t akin to a den or a holding cell or any of the other places he’d woken up bloodied in before.

It was quiet.

Not the sharp kind of silence, the kind before someone pulls a trigger.

Just… quiet.

And then he heard it again: the faint shuffle of footsteps, too deliberate to be casual. He turned his head slightly. The Signless was limping still.

The robe on his left side was still stained with red, though it had darkened to something almost passable for rust. He hadn’t changed it. Hadn’t even cleaned the blood away.

“You’re still bleeding,” the Orphaner muttered.

“It’s stopped,” came the reply.

“That’s not what I said.”

The Signless didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he knelt near the cot and began sorting herbs beside the sopor jar, fingers deft but slowed.

“You’ve been blind for nearly four cycles. You’re just starting to see again. My limp is the least urgent problem in the room.”

“That limp could kill you.”

“And your eye could rot from the inside out if I don’t keep applying this poultice.”

A tense pause.

“Hold still.”

The Orphaner obeyed, reluctantly. The salve was cool again, and the hands working it into his skin were steady. Gentle. More practiced than they should be.

To fill the silence, the Signless spoke again. His voice softened, not quite distant — nostalgic.

“Someone in my clade taught me how to make this blend. She was old, but not with age — she’d lived too many lives for one name. You may know her as the Dolorosa.”

“You have a different name for her?”

“We all do. That was the point. She liked names more than titles. Said names were earned. Not inflicted. I suppose you’d have to earn that knowledge as well, by this logic.” His voice was lighter, teasing almost.

The Orphaner didn’t respond. Not at first.

Finally: “What was she to you?”

“Everything,” the Signless said, without hesitation. “She taught me how to hide. How to lie without looking like it. How to keep my voice calm when I wanted to scream”

He dipped a cloth in warm water and dabbed the edges of the Orphaner’s eye.

“She’d hum, too. While working. Not any song I knew. Just... little threads of sound, like something she was remembering. I think it kept her steady. She made the robe I am wearing and several others like it, since I like to ‘get into trouble’ as she says. I think she’s just worried.”

“Are you quadranted to her?”

The question came out too quickly.

The Signless didn’t flinch.

“It’s not that simple, with any of us.”

That answer sat strange on the Orphaner’s tongue. Heavy. Fondness without a quadrant, that was a foreign concept in and of itself. He’d longed for others before, but always too late or too unnoticed — after they were gone, or entirely unobtainable. After the knife was already in his hand, sentenced to a life of war and the cold seas.

The silence stretched again. The Signless reached for another bundle of herbs, but winced as he leaned — just enough for the Orphaner to notice.

“You should let me bind that leg,” the Orphaner said, voice low.

“No need.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you get your vision back and you try to kill me, I’ll need to be able to move.”

It was a joke, light on the other’s tongue in a way that it should not have been, given the circumstance of the subject.

But only partially.

The Orphaner didn’t answer. He turned his face to the ceiling again, vision flickering.

“…Tell me more,” he muttered.

“About what?”

“Your clade.”

The Signless’s hands stilled for a second.

Then, he smiled. Something soft, warm. His teeth were slightly duller than the violet’s own, made less to kill, yet another stark contrast between the two of them. Something the seadweller almost felt he shouldn’t be seeing, with the conflicted pull in his pusher of his orders to kill and his want to return the gesture of the given aid.

“All right. There was a time the youngest in our group, the Huntress, found a baby purrbeast in the ruins by the salt flats. Tried to raise it like a pet. You’ve never seen chaos like a pack of frightened fugitives trying to hide a screeching, young carnivore from patrols of trolls wishing them all dead. Rosa let her keep it, of course. Said even monsters need a lusus sometimes, and how we had similarly chosen to keep the Huntress. I suppose that is what she is to all of us, or the closest word in our language I can find: a lusus. She raised me young, and takes in others who need her.”

The Orphaner breathed, quiet and sharp, like he might laugh.

But he didn’t dare let it escape and ruin the moment.

He just listened.

And the Signless kept speaking, soft and steady, words carrying through the quiet like the hum of something half-remembered — a thing both living and those long gone who had lended a hand before. His practiced hands too, returned to being soft and steady in their motions, but he continued to speak long after the wounds were dressed, voice low and staying close to the seadweller as he recounted tales of his clade.

The Signless’s stories lingered in the stale air, its edges soft as sopor smoke. The Orphaner hadn’t said anything since, but he also hadn’t turned away. He’d just… listened. Let it settle in him. Let it stay and make its home deep in his chest.

Now, it was dusk again. Light slanted a stunning pink hue through the cracks in the roof. The Signless stood, slowly, and began putting the supplies back into that stitched satchel. His limp was worse now — enough to make the Orphaner’s jaw tighten.

“Let me.”

The Signless paused his motions, sounding almost irritated. “Let you what?”

“Help.”

A raised brow, a quick falter in his misplaced irritation. “Help me limp across the room? Or help me stop bleeding out on the floor?”

The Orphaner ignored the tone. “Just— sit down. Before you fall down.”

Something flickered behind the Signless’s scarlet colored eyes, something unreadable. With an ounce of hesitation, he obeyed, lowering himself onto a cushion with a low hiss of pain.

The Orphaner struggled upright. Still half-blind, still sore, but stronger. His balance teetered as he crossed the few steps between them, one hand out to keep track of where the other sat waiting.

He crouched — a little too fast, a little too awkward — and reached for the injured leg. The Signless didn’t stop him. Just watched, quiet, curious.

“I’m not good at this,” the Orphaner muttered.

“You don't say.”

“Shut up.”

He tore a strip from a blanket that looked less important with far too much ease, folding it roughly into something like a compress. His hands were large, too used to heavy weaponry, and not meant for bandaging or delicate tasks. Yet, he wrapped the cloth around the Signless’s calf as best he could, tying it tight, and noting all at once those same large hands could easily wrap around the widest part of the mutant’s calf. He pulled it just a bit tighter, wanting his worn hands away as quickly as possible.

“Too tight?” he asked, not looking up.

“No,” the Signless said. “It’s good.”

Another silence. Not tense — just new. Uneasy in a different way.

“You could’ve let me die,” the Orphaner muttered. “Let the poison finish its work. Left me there.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you? Few care for the work of an orphaner.”

The Signless was quiet for a long moment, as if contemplating his answer.

“I believe if someone falls into your path bleeding, that’s the world trying to change something.”

“Change what?”

“I don’t know yet,” the Signless admitted. “But… I believe every act of mercy bends the world a little more toward something better.”

The Orphaner stared down at his hands. Then at the wound he’d bandaged. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad. It seemed to be, at the very least, slowing the bleeding.

He sat back on his heels.

“I don’t know how to bend anything,” he said. “Not without breaking it.”

“You’re learning.”

It wasn’t said like a compliment. Just… a fact.

And for the first time, the Orphaner didn’t cringe at the idea.

Chapter Text

ACT 4: Something Almost Like Kindness

The Signless dozed against the wall, brow beaded with fever sweat. The salve had slowed the worst of the wound’s ache, but infection clung like smoke around the edges. He was still too pale. Too quiet. His pointed ears, though hard to find in such messy dark hair, stayed drawn close to his head.

The Orphaner paced the little room — not in agitation, but in thought. The cot creaked with each of the Signless’s shallow breaths, and the Orphaner felt them like ripples on a too-calm sea. He’d never known what to do with silence like this. The sea was always changing, always active, he felt the need to be the same.

His hands twitched at his sides.

Then he moved.

When the Signless stirred at the sound of cloth rustling and metal being shifted, the Orphaner was already near the door, signature violet cloak thrown over one shoulder, hair pushed back messily. His still-blurred vision scanned the corners of the room, gaze catching briefly on the face of the sleeping troll and the angling beacon of brightly colored, dull, and short horns in his generalized direction.

“You’re not going out,” the Signless mumbled hoarsely.

“I am.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I’m not you,” the Orphaner said, turning slightly. “I don’t come back with stories and slaves.”

The Signless made a rough sound — something like a laugh, or maybe a cough, or the worse third option of it being something in between.

“Where are you going?”

“Foraging. Scavenging. Raiding, if needed. Your supplies are low. You haven’t eaten in a few cycles, who knows how much longer with how thin and sickly you look.”

“Neither have you.”

“That’s why I’m going.”

He stepped into the threshold of that dark and narrow spiral staircase, pausing when he felt the Signless’s eyes on his back — heavy, warm in a way he still didn’t know how to bear. They felt nearly burning, like something he did not earn nor deserve. 

He turned, one war-worn hand braced against the doorframe, creaking from his weight.

“I’ll come back,” he said. The words felt foreign in his mouth, a promise rather than a threat. It was alien to him, but he had charted unknown waters before. “Same as you did.”

The Signless’s expression softened, surprise hidden under the fever haze, but face nonetheless flushed that mutant cherry red as he dared to look hopeful.

“You promise?”

The Orphaner hesitated, nearly caught off guard by something looking at him quite so…vulnerably. He was trusted by a sea crew of killers, sure, but not a mutant he was ordered to cull. It felt wrong in more ways than one, to give this smaller troll hope.

Then he nodded once — short, sharp.

“I promise.”

And then he was gone.

The hatch creaked shut behind him, and the quiet remained, but something had changed in it.

It waited now, quieter than it had ever been before for those who dared to listen. As if, it too, was listening for footsteps to return.

The Signless had never thought of himself as someone prone to pacing, but tonight, the habit had taken him. He limped tight circles around the room, jaw tight, breathing shallow. The wound on his leg ached like a pulse trying to remind him of things he couldn’t afford to forget — weakness, mortality, cost. These things were always in his mind, but he could not honestly have let the seadweller brave that city alone.

He stared again at the doorway leading to the stairs. Still it offered no sound. No footsteps. No deep, deliberate voice, tilted in that seadweller accent rising in the stairwell.

He sat down, tried to meditate to ground himself as he had been taught. Failed.

He tried again.

Still failed.

His eyes slid once more to the corner of the room.

There it lay: the armor.

What remained of it, anyway.

Once grand — layered with lacquered plates in the unmistakable pattern of highblood elite — now warped, splintered, and blackened at the edges, where telekinetic burns had half-fused it to skin. He remembered peeling it away, careful as a knife, hearing the Orphaner hiss but not resist. Frankly the highblood was likely too out of it to stop him from the task, but it was no less laboring for either of them.

He remembered the smell. The air thick with blood and char.

And now?

Now the Orphaner was out in the dark wrapped in nothing but stitched linen, a spare tunic too small for his broad frame and a traveler’s cloak once belonging to the previous resident of this chapel, the sleeves still a little too long. It made him look…

Not soft.

But stripped down.

There was a difference.

The Signless stared at the armor like it might rise and speak — like it might accuse him of being guilty for these changes.

What are you doing, it might’ve said.
That is the monster who should’ve killed you.

But all it did was rust quietly in the dark, waiting for its owner to claim it again.

He looked at the doorway again. Still nothing. Still silence.

And then—

A shadow across the lower glass.

A clawed, battle worn hand.

The door creaked open.

Oh, and the Orphaner, still in threadbare clothes, still taller than the room could hold without bending a little to accommodate his lightning-jagged horns, stepped inside, eyes sharp and jaw tense, holding a satchel of stolen bread and strange fruit like a peace offering.

The Signless exhaled a breath he was not certain he had been holding to begin with. Was he really that worried sick and becoming like his Rosa?

“I said I’d come back,” the Orphaner muttered.

“You were late,” the Signless replied, voice too thick to be teasing.

“Only by a little.”

“You had me worried.” He whispered the words, harsh like they were a confession between the two of them in this shared space.

The Orphaner tilted his head. “Worried I’d be dead again?”

“No,” the Signless said, meeting his eyes. Crimson meeting violet in an almost surreal way, as if the world may stop around them at such a guilty pleasure. Lowbloods often dared not look higher castes in the eye directly. “Worried I wouldn’t see you again.”

Something passed between them — raw, unspoken.

And for the first time, the Orphaner looked briefly at his discarded armor too.

He didn’t go to it.

He didn’t shy away from the mangled sight of it, either.

He just turned back, sat down near the cot, and offered bread like it wasn’t a hard-won thing. Like it wasn’t a gift meant to be shared between two who should not share a single common thing. Like this was not the very thing the Signless had been wanting for the world they shared.

They ate in near silence, save for the soft snap of fruit, and the distant hum of the city’s traffic far above them.

The bread was dry but fresh. The fruit sour, but not poisonous. The Orphaner didn’t look at the Signless while he ate — as if afraid of what might be written there. The Signless only watched him for a moment before turning his gaze to follow the cracks in the stone wall the seadweller had become familiar with while recovering. He figured it must be grounding, in a sense, something akin to what meditating was for himself.

First came the sound.

Soft, at first.

A rising electric hum, low in the walls — like the structure itself of the building was vibrating, molecule by molecule.

The Signless froze, as the intense smell that was only comparable to the ozone burning around them joined the electric hum.

The Orphaner felt it a heartbeat later: the way his teeth ached slightly, how the pressure shifted behind his eyes like an all too sudden altitude change. He looked up sharply, instincts to fight thrumming in his veins. A battery, that’s what the empire called them, and a strong one at that.

“We need to move.”

The Signless didn’t respond right away. He stood, leaning against the wall as though grounding himself, though he didn’t look shaken in the slightest. The Orphaner wasn’t sure if that concerned him more than the approaching goldblooded troll with dangerous kinetic energy abilities.

“He’s close,” he murmured.

“Who?”

The Signless didn’t need to say it.

The Orphaner felt the name before it was spoken — like static in the spine, like a storm approaching over dead water.

“The Psiioniic.”

A beat. Then the Signless added, almost gently, “He’s within my clade. My diamond.”

The Orphaner’s jaw tightened at the recognition. “The escaped prisoner. The fleet-bender.”

“Not escaped,” the Signless corrected him. “ Freed. By force. By blood. And not without cost.”

“I know what he’s done.”

“Do you know what was done to him ?”

Silence.

The humming grew louder — nearer. Somewhere beneath the floorboards, tiny flecks of metal and other loose objects in the room began to drift an inch into the air, as if gravity itself was being rewritten by the mere force of the goldblood who commanded it.

The Orphaner stood now too, tense, not from pain for the first time in a while — but from the adrenaline. His breath sharpened, violet gills flaring from the threat.

“Should I run?”

The Signless turned to face him fully, looking more coherent than he had previously. “He wouldn’t kill you.”

“Wouldn’t try?”

“Not if I ask him not to.”

The Orphaner barked a quiet laugh — not unkind, just incredulous. “You’d put yourself between me and that? ”

“I already did,” the Signless said.

The humming paused, though the smell did not lessen.

The air stilled, sudden and intense all at once, like it was a threat poised in the quiet.

The moment passed.

And somewhere outside, two floors down, a burst of static audibly cracked up the wall — deafening though brief, like a flicked switch of thunder — and then silence fell again. As if the goldblood was going room by room to eliminate threats in his way at a moment’s notice.

They both knew he was near, although one seemed more rattled by the threat of it than the other. The Orphaner was no stranger to these sorts of things, but never had he faced one empty handed, promises of peace or not. The seadweller knew based off of the blast beneath them, this was not the type of troll to ask questions first.

“I’ll speak to him,” the Signless said at last, quietly.

The Orphaner didn't respond. Just looked again at the armor in the corner. At the half eaten meal in front of him. At the room he hadn’t meant to survive in.

And waited.

The clearing in the chapel, at the mouth of the hatch, was colder now. Still damp from that acidic, dangerous rain. Still clinging to rot and soot and the reek of a world that had long since stopped pretending to be kind.

The Signless stepped out into it, pulling the hatch shut gently behind him. A flicker. Then a hum like distant thunder.

And he was no longer alone.

The Psiioniic stood where no one had been a breath before — tall, tense, radiating barely leashed power. The light glowing from his eyes was unnatural. The ground under his feet cracked slightly, pebbles lifting and trembling, as if gravity itself couldn’t decide what to do around him.

“You kept me waiting,” he said. Flat. Icy. Unlike himself, when greeting the Signless usually. The static in his voice rising and almost providing interference around the letters as he spoke in a way that felt all around unnatural, yet the mutant continued to gaze at him like a friend and not a rising threat.

“I was busy ...”

“With a violet. ” The Psiioniic spat, viewing the splotches of color littering the mutant’s robes where he was stained old violet and fresher red.

The Signless met his gaze. Unrelenting. “Yes. He is injured.”

A twitch at the Psiioniic’s temple as his eyes flickered again. “He is injured.” He echoed, almost in a disbelieving sort of tone.

“He is.”

“That is the Orphaner, with a blood color like that . ”

The Signless didn’t reply.

The Psiioniic stepped closer, voice low, venomous. “Do you know what he did to trolls like us? What he was built for? What he was taught ? ”

“Yes.”

“Then why, by all the dying stars, is he under your care?”

“Because he wasn’t carrying a weapon,” the Signless said, voice rising with heat as he struggled to keep it calmer. “Because when they came for him, he didn’t fight. Because he bled in the dark and waited to die, not to kill.”

“That doesn’t make him safe. ”

“No,” the Signless snapped. “It makes him tired. How is that any different from us?”

The Psiioniic narrowed his dual colored eyes, like an unspoken challenge.

“Every lowblood this side of the water wants him dead,” the Signless continued, stepping forward now. “Every patrol. Every loyalist. Every scavenger who recognizes violet blood in the mud. And he didn’t lift a hand to stop them.”

“So?”

“So maybe he wanted to die there. Maybe he is sick of this system, what weight it puts on him, the same as we are. His blood color does not define him as different, is that not what I have been preaching? Do you not listen to me?”

Silence.

The Signless’s voice softened, but only slightly. “That wasn’t an orphaner in that alley. That was a troll with nothing left to fight for.”

The Psiioniic laughed once — bitter, sharp. “You think that makes him innocent?”

“No,” the Signless said, calm now. Fierce. “It makes him like us. ”

“You sound like you’re starting a sermon again.”

“Then listen. Because mercy is not weakness. Compassion is not surrender.” His voice echoed now, fuller, as if it carried on something deeper than breath. “I believe trolls can change. Even him. Especially him. Because if they can’t … then what the hell are we even fighting for?”

The Psiioniic’s hands flexed at his sides. The biotechnology that no longer held him still seemed to weigh on his arms, on his skin.

“He’s dangerous.”

“So are we.”

“If he turns—”

“Then I’ll face him myself.”

“That’s not good enough, you know you would not last a single moment against him.”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Another pause. The chilled wind scraped grit across the stone.

“You’re going to die for this,” the Psiioniic said, almost gently. “For him. ”

“If I do,” the Signless whispered, “at least I die believing I was right.”

The goldblood looked at him long. Hard. “Think on this, I’ll be back with the others soon.” And then, with a burst of static, he vanished.

Pressed against the narrow stairway, close to the hatch in the dim lighting, the Orphaner had heard everything. His fingers pressed against the cold stone. His throat was tight.

And for the first time in many cycles, he felt ashamed to be alive. Like for one blissful moment, he had forgotten all that weight upon him, all the danger he carried, and now it was time to bring it back.

The hatch creaked softly as the Signless stepped back inside. The air had cooled during his absence, the long fingers of dawn curling through the space of the hatch and laying silver light over the stone floor as he closed it behind him. Dust drifted slowly through the beam that struck the far side of the room, as if suspended in time. It was quiet.

Too quiet.

He stood just beyond the threshold, waiting for something to greet him. A breath. A rasp. A soft scuff of movement from the figure on the bedroll. No heavy breathing, no low growl of discomfort from the makeshift cot. No irritated huff from a wounded predator unused to softness. No glint of violet eyes peering through pain.

Just stillness.

And an empty room.

His gaze flicked across the room — first to the nest of blankets he himself used in the corner, half-shadowed. The place where the Orphaner had lain, where violet blood had stained the floorboards and dried in cracked constellations. It was empty. He moved through the room in slow, deliberate steps, searching for some trace — but there was nothing. No scent. No blood. No footprints in the dust.

The robes — plain, homespun, soft despite their patches — were gone. Taken with him. A choice. Not a theft. Not a flailing attempt at escape.

A departure.

The armor, half-melted and left behind in disgust, still sat in the corner, untouched. A last rejection. A symbol of what the Orphaner had been. What the world had once feared.

And he’d left it behind.

The Signless stood frozen in the center of the room, hands slack at his sides.

He told himself to stay calm.

Maybe the Orphaner had just stepped out. Just gone to the stream nearby. Or to clear his head. He did that, sometimes — hated being watched, hovered over. Maybe he was coming back.

Maybe.

The ache began behind his sternum, stronger than the pain in his shoulder or his leg in the way it demanded his full and complete attention.

Dull. Low. Familiar in the way that old wounds are.

He put a hand to his chest and didn’t know why. Didn’t know what he was feeling. Only that the room suddenly felt smaller. Hollower. Like it had been emptied of something vital.

He sat on the edge of the cot he had made for the Orphaner. Elbows on knees, hands clasped, breathing slow like he’d been taught. 

He’d been so sure — so sure that if he believed hard enough, if he offered his hand without flinching, that the Orphaner would learn to take it.

But monsters rarely trust kindness, especially when they've never known it before.

He looked at the doorway to the stairs. He should go after him. He should search the woods. The town. Every alley, every ruin.

But that ache in his chest said: Too late.

Something bad was going to happen.

That ache that had begun behind his sternum — subtle at first. A dull, low pressure that spread slowly outward. He pressed his fingers to his chest and held them there, like it might anchor him to the moment.

It didn’t.

He moved through the rest of the room on instinct — a brief, futile search, as if he might have missed some sign, some clue to prove his thoughts wrong.

But there was nothing.

No note. No blood trail. No sign of a scuffle or of a forced hand.

Just… the feeling of something missing. Something vital that had only just begun to grow roots here, and was now ripped free.

The ache deepened, unfamiliar in ways, but familiar only in the sense that it felt like something being carved out of his ribs with no warning.

It wasn't panic. Not exactly. He knew what panic felt like. It was sharper. Hotter. This was colder. Heavier. Like grief trying to name itself, and for the first time, the Signless realized the fear curling under his skin wasn’t about losing a stranger. It wasn’t about some abstract soul or ideal.

His eyes dropped again to the armor in the corner. That cursed remnant. That hated secondary skin no highblood with any respect was complete without.

He remembered the way the Orphaner had looked when he wore it — not proud, but hollow. Like something half-dead walking on memory alone. A creature more feared than understood.

He was clothed now in kindness. Nothing more than plain cloth and threadbare fabric. A body once meant for war, wrapped in something soft.

He left the armor behind.

That mattered.

So why did it still feel like losing him?

The Signless leaned forward and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, gritting his teeth against a pressure that had nothing to do with headache or strain.

He didn’t know when it had changed — when watching over the Orphaner had stopped being a burden, or a mercy, and become something else.

When care had crept in through the cracks.

But now… he felt it.

That ache with no name.

The shape of absence, echoing like a physical wound.

And worse — the sense that something terrible was coming. That this wasn’t just a wandering soul in the dark, but a storm pulled loose from the moorings.

Not because he feared the Orphaner would hurt someone, but because someone else would hurt him.

And for the first time in a long while, the Signless feared what that would do to him.

Not just as a false healer.

Not just as a rebel against this empire, but as someone who had begun, slowly, quietly, to hope.

It was about him.

The Orphaner.

The troll who bled violet. Who shied away from comfort. Who listened more than he spoke.

Someone the Signless was beginning — helplessly, dangerously — to care for.

And now he was gone, as if nothing had ever happened here.

Chapter Text

ACT 5: The Name We Choose

Time passed.

How long, exactly, was impossible to measure. The cycles on this planet bled into each other, days carved apart only by the brief grace of double dusk — that singular hush before both suns vanished below the mountains.

But he had healed, with the faintest streak of grey through his windswept hair. A mark. A privilege of being able to age.

The poison that had burned through his veins was long gone now, reduced to a memory and two thick lines that tore through his often scowling face like a warning. The internalized version of himself in his highblooded armor had never been quite reforged. He no longer needed it — not for protection, and not for fear. 

In its place, the name remained.

Dualscar.

A title earned not on a battlefield, but in stillness.

The jagged wound across his face had never fully faded. Though his violet eyes remained sharp as ever, they were quieter now. Measured. He had kept the name as a warning — not to others, but to himself. A reminder of what he had once nearly done, and what he had chosen not to.

He wore plain clothes now, fine in cut and adorned — a nod to his old caste without shouting it, a bigger nod to all the battles he had won since. His hair was swept back, his gait still proud. But he carried himself like a blade half-sheathed.

He heard the whispers before he reached the square.

“The mutant speaks tonight.”
“He walks through patrol lines like they don’t exist.”
“They say he heals. That he forgives even murderers.”

Dualscar stood at the edge of the crowd.

It was vast. Packed. A hundred trolls at least, some perched on ruined stone, some crouched in alley mouths, silent but attentive. All turned to the raised platform at the center.

And there he stood, flanked at either side by what he presumed were members of that clade he had spoken of. The Dolorosa , his thinkpan supplied him. That made the other, smaller oliveblood, the Huntress. 

The Signless.

His hood was drawn up, covering all but his horns and the unnatural glow of his eyes. 

A disguise.

He wore robes not unlike the ones he’d stitched himself in that small house so long ago — but these bore the marks of travel, of dust, of salt. The quality was higher, and perhaps it had simply been made by another hand. His hair was longer now, larger curls that did not quite have the luxury of being tucked away under that soft worn hood. His horns had grown slightly too, though no sharper — the little things one noticed, when time had once been shared.

He stood with his hands open and his voice steady, speaking not down to the crowd but into them — as though they were kin, not merely listeners. Like he carried the very sun behind his head, but kept each word warm enough to keep from burning the crowd at his own expense.

Dualscar watched the crowd part for him, heard the soft inhalations as trolls leaned closer, their long held hostility softening into awe. Reverence.

They made way for him like a tide split by moonlight.

Not for fear. But for faith.

He had never understood it before, the rumors, the whispers. Not until now. Not until he saw the Signless again — and felt that magnetic pull in his gut, low and unspoken, like a tether caught in his ribcage.

So this was what it looked like. Why they followed. Why they stayed. Why years of tradition boiled away for some and they began to change.

He had parted crowds too, of course. As the Orphaner, they'd stepped aside for him with bowed heads and trembling hands. Not out of love. Not even duty.

Out of terror. The pure terror of a higher caste being capable of even more terrible things, whether those things benefitted the masses or not.

He clenched his hands behind his back.

And yet now, he felt that same hush settle over this crowd — but it wasn’t fear.

It was him. The Signless. This fragile, foolish, soft-voiced thing who had once bled red into his hands and whispered, "You’ll go blind if I leave you here."

A voice like a blade turned sideways.

A warmth that not all of the water in the vast seas could kill.

The Signless looked up as if sensing him. And their eyes met.

Only for a breath between words, but it was enough.

A jolt — quick and low in the gut, not pain, not quite comfort either. Something between recognition and longing.

The Signless didn't smile like greeting a friend.

Neither of them did.

There was too much between them for that.

But in that moment, in that silence, they saw each other.

And for the first time since that night in the alley, Dualscar felt seen in a way that didn’t burn.

The sermon wound down with the slow hush of a prayer for change in a desolate sort of world built on violence, it was not spoken but felt.

As the Signless stepped from the low platform, the crowd didn’t scatter. They stayed. Trolls of every hue and horn length lingered, as if hoping proximity might preserve the warmth he left behind.

And he went to them — all of them.

One by one, he touched their hands.

No grand gesture. No display.

Just fingers curling gently around theirs — a lingering, deliberate hold that said I see you. I see that you are alive, that you are here, and it matters to me.

In this world, where touch was often a transaction of violence or dominance, this was something else entirely.

A gift.

Some trolls broke into tears. Others gripped back too hard. A few trembled and couldn’t meet his gaze. The Signless didn’t pull away from any of it.

He met them all the same.

And then, wordlessly, he made his way through the crowd. No bowing, no whispering now — just parted silence, and every eye trailing after his form as it moved… steadily… directly… to him.

Dualscar stood as still as a statue. Not because he meant to. Because he didn’t know what else to do.

The Signless didn’t speak. Didn’t hesitate.

He simply stepped close, reached up — and wrapped one hand around Dualscar’s arm.

A firm, sun warmed grip. Not tight. Not demanding.

But full of intent.

It took everything Dualscar had not to recoil from it.

Not from pain. Not from pride.

But simply because no one had touched him without expecting something in return since he was young enough to believe he deserved it.

The Signless didn’t wait for permission, taking his silence as enough.

He turned and began to walk, his hand sliding lower to rest at Dualscar’s wrist, guiding him gently along the edges of the crowd, past scattered whispers, mixed of fear and awe, and widened eyes. The mass of trolls fell behind, and a narrow hallway of stone ruins opened up at the far end of the space.

Before they could disappear into its shadow, a sharp voice cut through the quiet.

"You didn’t tell me you were expecting him. "

The air seemed to split at the sound of it — static gathering like a storm.

The Psiioniic.

He leaned at the hallway’s mouth, arms crossed, red and blue gaze hard as steel and flickering like the steel was being welded together with intense heat. His sleeves were rolled up casually, but his arms still bore the ridged scars of his escape, and his every breath crackled faintly with that telekinetic hum. His twin horns seemed to spark, just twice.

He didn’t raise his voice.

He didn’t need to.

“Don’t do this,” he said lowly, his eyes never leaving Dualscar, as if gauging his reaction more than the threat ahead. “Not again.”

The Signless stopped. His hand was still around Dualscar’s wrist.

“I’m not doing anything,” he replied. “He came here on his own, or he would have stopped me.”

“He shouldn’t have come here.”

“That’s not your call to make, Psii, it is his.”

There was a tension between them — old, well-worn. The kind born not of hatred but fear. Fear for each other. Fear of what the world could still take if they were not entirely cautious.

The Psiioniic’s jaw worked. “You trust too easily.”

The Signless exhaled, but didn’t look away. “No. I trust with intent.”

Then, still without looking back, he gently pulled Dualscar through the broken archway.

And the Psiioniic let him, but heaved an over the top sigh, as if to signal to the Signless that he was neither far nor happy with this decision to meet.

The makeshift meeting place fell away behind them. The last echoes of soft-spoken mercy and the gentle rustle of parting robes faded into a silence so sharp, it felt alive. It made the seadweller feel on edge, moreso with that warm hand that couldn’t even close around his wrist entirely. It reminded him of how fragile this rebellion was, how small.

The room they entered was a half-collapsed storage hall — what once might’ve held offerings or tools now strewn with dust and old stone. A broken window let in a wash of dying light, both suns low on the horizon, painting Dualscar's looming silhouette in pale gold and crimson.

He turned, finally, to speak—

And the Signless turned on him first.

“What the FUCK were you thinking? You said you would come back.”

His voice cracked like a whip, sudden and furious — nothing like the warmth he’d given the others, nothing like the soft-spoken rebel leader who touched strangers’ hands like sacred things. This was all fury and the fire of twin suns.

Dualscar stiffened. He hadn’t expected this. Not from him. He nearly felt like drawing the rifle that had made a permanent home on his hip at the change, if only to make quick work of masking the flicker in his gut. Before he got a chance to respond, the mutant nearly half his standing height continued.

“And you didn’t,” the Signless snapped, red eyes burning like embers as he launched into a full rant. “You disappeared. No word. No trail. No body. For nearly a sweep I searched for you. Do you have any idea what that was like—?”

He caught himself, like the force of his own emotion startled him. Like he had forgotten how to temper his anger. A long breath shuddered from his chest, and his shoulders slumped under it.

“I thought I would find your body in a ditch somewhere,” he said, quieter now, but no less raw. “Or that someone else would, and I’d never hear of it.”

There was a weight in the words that didn’t come from panic alone, and the Orphaner stayed stunned silent, unknowing what exactly to say as the Signless worked through his emotions. Though, a part of him reveled in the fact that this mutant that had to crane his neck to make eye contact, felt not a shred of fear towards him. At any rate, not enough to not verbally berate him.

The Signless looked away, hands curling into loose fists at his sides, blunt claws catching on his palms like he was trying to ground himself.

“I hated that you left before I could talk you into staying with us,” he murmured. “But more than that, I… I couldn’t stop thinking that you hadn’t even made it out of the city. That maybe—maybe something got to you before the poison ever could.”

Dualscar said nothing for a long moment. The heat of the Signless’s fury still lingered in the air, but it was evaporating fast—burned out by something gentler, heavier.

“Why?” he asked at last. A simple word, not cold, not mocking—genuine, if wary. “Why would you care if I was gone? I’m nothing to you. I left. ”

The Signless met his eyes again, though they looked tired rather than angry now.

And for a moment, Dualscar saw the grief he hadn't dared name the night he walked away.

“You’re not nothing to me,” the Signless said simply. “You never were.”

There was no flinch, no fanfare in his voice. Just quiet, solid truth — spoken like everything else he ever offered: freely, with intent.

The silence stretched between them.

And for the first time, Dualscar didn’t look away. Instead, the violetblood let out a short, humorless laugh. “You don’t even know who I am.”

The Signless’s brow furrowed, teeth baring like he had been intimately wronged.

“You think you do,” Dualscar went on, stepping away from the dim light pooling in through the broken window, “but all you’ve ever seen is a half-dead beast bleeding on your floor and a title.”

He paced a few slow steps, gesturing with a sharp-clawed hand that trembled slightly despite his practiced poise. “You think because I didn’t gut you in your sleep that makes me a miracle of reform? That maybe a–” He nearly fumbled for the grasped words, having not felt his blood boil like this in a long while. “A little charity was all it took to fix me?”

The Signless said nothing. Not yet, though he looked no less bristled at the words.

Dualscar stopped, facing away as the heat in his cold blood dulled to a simmer.

“You have no idea what I’ve done,” he said, lower now. “What I’ve ordered. What I’ve ruined. You think you were worried ?” He scoffed. “You should’ve been relieved.”

The room was silent.

“You were better off.”

Still, nothing from the Signless. Not for several heartbeats.

And then—

“I don’t believe that.”

That softer, soothing voice was back again. But not weak. Never weak.

Dualscar tensed.

“I know what you are,” the Signless continued. “Not because of your title. Or your blood. Or the way you held a gun once, or didn’t.”

He stepped forward, slow and careful, voice firming like stone smoothed under years of tide. Like Dualscar’s own personal storm approaching.

“I know what kind of pain leaves someone to die in an alley without even trying to defend himself. I know what kind of isolation turns armor into skin. I know what it means to wake up and not know if today is the day someone finally makes you stop breathing. Because that’s the day you finally stop deserving to. I know how you hate. How you hate your work, but do it anyway. How you hate yourself.”

A breath caught in Dualscar’s throat, nearly wheezing out of the closed, scarred gills around his neck. A reminder of the very work the Signless had done to keep him alive and breathing at all.

“I’ve felt all that,” the Signless whispered. “And my clade— my family —they taught me that doesn’t have to be the end of the story.”

Silence again, heavy and close.

Dualscar didn’t dare look at him. Didn’t speak.

His jaw clenched. His hands opened, then closed. There was a tightness in his chest he couldn’t shake — a twisting, stupid ache he didn’t have the language capacity for.

“I’m not asking for penance,” the Signless said, softer now as he moved just a little closer. “Just… presence. Just stay.”

A long pause.

Then, quietly, bitter as seawater:

“I did. Once.”

The Signless didn’t flinch at the tone this time. “Then do it again.”

He shifted his weight like the silence itself made his bones itch. The shadows along his jawline deepened. And for the first time since they’d been alone, he didn’t sound sharp when he spoke—just low. Just tired.

“I heard the rumors.”

The Signless blinked, caught entirely off guard by this change of topic.

Dualscar’s eyes stayed fixed on a crack in the floor between them, voice slipping like a blade sheathed too late. “That there was a mutant preaching mercy. That he made tealbloods cry and even indigo castes listen, and that no one could look him in the eye for long without wanting to change the whole damn world.”

He glanced up for just a breath—just long enough to catch the softer look in the Signless’s face before he looked away again.

“I came to see if it was true,” he said. Then, hastily, “That’s all.”

The words hung in the air like ash after the warfare they were both so used to. So tired of.

And then, before the Signless could answer, Dualscar was moving again—turning to the doorway, voice clipped and businesslike:

“I can’t stay.”

The Signless faltered. Just a little.

Dualscar didn’t look back.

“But if you’re going to keep poking around outside, you need to know which ship is mine. What to look for. Just in case.”

He paused. Fished something from the pocket of the gold-adorned fabric overcoat he wore—something small, hard, metallic—and held it out without turning.

“A shard coated in the hull’s paint. It’s an older tint. Violet base with a near-black trim, matte. Looks like spilled oil in the right light. Most wouldn’t notice it. You will.”

The Signless took the shard gently, like it might burn him.

“Thank you,” he said, quietly. He knew what risks an Orphaner was taking, offering something like this. Something tangible, something real.

Dualscar nodded once, still facing the broken door. The dusk was nearly complete now, two suns vanished and the stars and moons creeping in.

“I mean it,” he added. “Don’t come close unless you’re sure. I won’t always be the one on board. The others won’t hesitate.”

Another pause. This one longer.

“And if you see the navigation lights flash twice before liftoff…” He hesitated for just a breath. “It means I’m waiting, but it won’t be for long.”

Something about the way he said it landed like an apology dressed in smoke.

And with that offering, he stepped through the doorway, swallowed by shadow, leaving the mutant behind cradling a shard of metal in dull claws, marveling at the shifts of color in the light.

And with the seadweller’s departure, the quiet swallowed everything else.

The Signless stood there far longer than he should have, still holding that shard of hull paint in his hand like it might explain something to him if he stared hard enough. It gleamed faintly in the low light—deep violet edged in something darker, matte like ash, rich like the blood that had stained his cloak when he had first met the Orphaner.

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

So that was it.

He had come looking. He’d heard the sermons. The stories. The whispers that drifted like pollen across the cities and ports and gutters.

And he came back.

Not to kill him. Not to stop him.

Just to see.

And then he left again.

The ache in the Signless’s chest grew sharper. Not the piercing kind, but the dull weight of something incomplete. It wasn’t heartbreak. It wasn’t even quite loss. It was the feeling of something unfinished—like a word caught in the throat, like an embrace pulled back too soon.

He turned the shard over in his fingers.

It means I’m waiting.

He would come back, even if his sermons took him elsewhere. The Signless had to believe that. 

Because if he didn’t…

He ran a hand over his face. Sat down on the worn stone step near the back exit. The pain in his chest still hadn’t healed right. Neither had the one just beneath his ribs—the one with no visible wound.

Above, the stars blinked into place one by one, as the colorful moons lifted higher into the sky.

The bay doors shut behind the Orphaner Dualscar with a hydraulic hiss.

Inside the ship he called his home, all was cold metal and low light, exactly the way he’d left it. Efficient. Controlled. Empty, save for the crew bustling around the deck at his command.

Dualscar stood at the threshold to the captain’s quarters for a moment, breathing like he’d just run miles uphill, even though he hadn’t done more than climb a few stairs. The silence pressed in around him—not like a friend, not anymore, but a reminder of his isolation. What his job brought him on a gold plated platter.

You’re not nothing to me.

He gritted his sharp, dangerous teeth as that warm voice echoed inside him.

He didn’t mean to say it. That he came looking. That he listened. That he cared.

It had slipped out like a fish from a net.

He moved through the ship in slow, practiced motions, not unlike the seabeasts he hunted—checking the nav systems, making sure the auto-pilot was set to drift for a while, just in case. No lights flashed. No alarms. No reason to stay.

Still… he didn’t take off yet.

He poured himself a drink instead—thin, sharp, marine alcohol that tasted like cleaning fluid—and stood by the observation panel. His reflection looked back at him, older somehow, more worn. He studied the faint gleam of scar tissue tracing his cheekbone, the one that caught the sermon room’s light when he stepped too close.

He’d watched the crowds part for the Signless.

They parted for him , too—but for very different reasons.

He took another drink. The burn helped.

It had been easier when the mutant was just a voice in his head, a ghost of a kindness he’d tried not to believe in. Easier when he was lying on a mat in the dark, blind and bleeding and held together by stubbornness, stories, and lullabies he pretended not to hear.

Dualscar sat down in the captain’s chair.

He should leave.

He would leave.

Soon.

But not yet.

His hand hovered near the console. He could flash the lights twice. Just once. Just to—

No.

Not yet.

Chapter Text

ACT 6: A City Under Siege

The city burned like it had always meant to.

Spires cracked and bled smoke. Flames poured from temple towers and civic halls, sweeping down to choke the streets. Bodies—some still alive, some long past it—littered the stone, blackened or crumpled or silenced in the name of mercy.

Yet above it all, banners bearing the Empress’s seal flapped in the heat like the wings of beasts here to feast on the charred carrion.

The Signless stumbled through the alleyways, half-blind from soot, blood smeared down one side of his face. His robes were torn, and the voices on the wind—metallic, cruel, shouting orders in the tongue of conquest—told him everything he needed to know.

This purge was not random.

It was meant to root him out, no matter which city he ran to, no matter how far.

Another city destroyed in the hunt for one mutant who wouldn’t die.

His thoughts raced to the Dolorosa. The Psiioniic. The Huntress. His family. They’d scattered in the confusion—each capable, yes, each trained to survive—but the last glimpse he'd caught of them was the Dolorosa pressed into a crowd, her tear-filled jade eyes locked on his before a panicked wall of trolls split them apart.

He had no way of knowing if they’d made it out safely or if at all.

His legs buckled near the harbor. His hand hit the ground, wet with something—he wasn’t sure if it was water or blood. Maybe both.

And then—above the smoke— rested a ship.

Large. Sleek. Violet-black trim, looking like an oil-slicked memory. No imperial extra insignias on its hull. No guards posted near the sides. Its bay doors still cracked open in the haze. An orphaner’s ship.

He knew that ship.

He pushed himself up with all the force he had left.

Each step was a prayer made of spite. Of refusal. Of hope .

When he reached the loading ramp, he hesitated only briefly before climbing aboard like a ghost that remembered how to breathe. The corridors inside were dim and quiet. No alarms. No shouting.

He moved past the main deck, staggered into the supply hold, only barely behind a shipment container before he collapsed.

He didn’t remember blacking out, but when he came to, a voice cut through the fog like a blade across cloth. Sharp, certain, but familiar, even in his haze.

“I told you not to board unless you were sure.”

The Signless blinked. His throat burned. The air tasted like copper and smoke.

And there—half-shadowed, leaning against a bulkhead—stood Dualscar. Those lightning shaped, bright horns a jagged, but comforting sign of their own.

He wasn’t wearing armor this time. Just a long coat, dark gloves. Hair tied back roughly. No indication of rank.

Just him.

The Signless sat up slowly, wincing as he did so. “I was sure.”

Dualscar’s eyes narrowed. “You smell like the city.”

“It’s burning.”

“I know. ”

The words hit like gunfire in a closed room.

Silence.

Then Dualscar stepped forward—slowly, like one approaching an injured animal, or an old god returned from the brink.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” His voice was lower now, rougher. “You walking through my ship like you belonged here?”

“I didn’t know where else to go.”

“You’ve got a habit of bleeding on things that belong to me.”

The Signless drew back, teeth bared, but not from fear. “So stop pulling me out of the fire.”

“And now you’re back.” A pause, as the seadweller very blatantly looked him over. “Again.”

“I saw the hull,” the Signless said. He met Dualscar’s gaze through the smoke-laced artificial light. “You said if it flashed twice, you’d waited.”

“I didn’t flash it.”

“Then why were you docked?”

A beat.

“Because I knew,” Dualscar said finally, voice like thunder turned brittle. “I knew if they started burning cities, it’d be for you. ”

Another pause.

“You’re not subtle, Signless.”

“No,” he said softly. “I never wanted to be. I had to be taught to be quiet, subtle.”

Dualscar didn’t move to help him up. But he didn’t stop him either.

The Signless rose slowly, every joint screaming protest. Smoke had seared his lungs. A gash above his hip wept blood freely, soaking the tattered hem of his robe. He tried to steady himself against a bulkhead.

“You need that treated,” Dualscar said.

“I’ve had worse.”

“You say that every time.”

“And yet here I am, still standing.”

The words weren’t defiant—just tired. The kind of tired that soaked through to the bone and stayed there, the kind that came with watching another city die, with watching more trolls die. Often ones that were not even involved with him, simply because the Empress did not care.

Dualscar stepped forward at last, tugging off one glove and tossing it aside. His fingers were still calloused from lifelong battle, but his touch was careful, more careful than he wanted to admit. He helped the Signless to sit, then crouched in front of him, pulling aside torn fabric to reveal the wound.

The Signless hissed through his teeth as the fabric was pulled away from the wound with a sickening sound.

“You’re lucky it didn’t hit any deeper.”

“No,” he rasped, “just deep enough to hurt. They always aim for the ribs.”

Dualscar unscrewed a metal flask and uncorked a vial of something dark and pungent.

“This’ll sting.”

“I’m used to that too.”

The salve burned like fire. The Signless shuddered, gripping the edge of the crate beneath him, biting back a noise between a gasp and a growl. Dualscar said nothing at first, just worked silently—efficient, practiced, but tension brewed beneath the surface.

“You think they’ll stop, don’t you?” Dualscar said finally. “You think if you preach loud enough, hard enough, long enough—these deaths will mean something.”

“They do mean something.”

“Tell that to the corpses.”

The Signless turned his head sharply, meeting his gaze with that same sort of anger he had a sweep ago.

“I am, ” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“You’re dragging them into the flames with you.”

“I never asked them to fight for me.”

“You didn’t have to,” Dualscar snapped. “You exist. You stand in the streets and hope, and that’s more dangerous than any blade. You think your words don’t kill?”

The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was a canyon between them, black and bottomless.

The Signless’s voice, when it returned, was low. Steady. Deadly quiet.

“I know they kill. I know they burn cities. I know they tear families apart.” He shook his head slowly. “But if I stay silent, they do it anyway. To people who can’t speak back. To wrigglers. To the lowbloods trampled in the streets just for daring to live.”

Dualscar’s jaw clenched before he replied, his voice low as a threat. “You think you can change the system with sermons? With gentleness? That you can look a killer in the eye and talk them out of the hunt?”

“I looked one in the eye once,” the Signless said. “And I did.”

 The air between them turned electric and thick, not just from the burning city.

“…You don’t know what you did,” Dualscar muttered.

“I know you were unarmed when they attacked you.”

“I let them attack me.”

“No,” the Signless said. “You didn’t fight back.”

Dualscar’s breath caught.

“You wanted to die in that alley,” the Signless said softly. “You wanted it to be over, not your caste assigned job, your life. And I saw you choose to live, even when everything in you told you not to.”

He reached out—hesitated—and laid a bloodied hand over Dualscar’s, warm and trembling.

“You changed,” he said.

Dualscar wrenched his hand away, standing abruptly. He turned from him, shoulders stiff.

“You changed, one of the most feared Orphaners to exist,” the Signless repeated, quieter now. “So don’t tell me no one else can.”

Later, as the ship rose in the sky and pulled away from the fire-wracked city below, the Signless stood in the observation bay, silent. The lights of the destruction sprawled outward like veins of molten glass. Structures collapsed. Smoke curled like mourning cloth through every crumbling tower, every building that housed a family.

It looked almost beautiful from this high up.

He’d once said that peace was worth chasing through flame.

Now he saw the price.

Behind him, Dualscar stood quietly. He had not offered to take him home. Had not offered to stay, but he hadn’t kicked him off the ship either.

The Signless pressed his palm against the glass, watched a fallen temple he once preached from collapse further in a spume of fire.

Somewhere down there, maybe his family was running. Maybe they were still together.

Or not.

The ache in his chest was hollow and widening, it tasted like young grief.

Beside him, still and tall, the violetblood who once left him bleeding now watched him unravel in silence. The ship groaned beneath them as it broke the stormfront, the city’s smoke still smeared across the sky like an accusation. Inside, it was quiet. Too quiet.

The Signless had barely spoken since they lifted off. He’d cleaned the blood from his robes and retreated to a storage hold with no windows, sitting in the dark with his back to a stack of sealed rations. Meditation, maybe. Or guilt.

He didn't ask where they were going. He didn’t have to. Nowhere would be safe for him.

And the crew knew it.

They didn’t speak to him directly, but they whispered. They watched.

A lowblood, a rust at best, in rags, and still bleeding from his side, taking up space on their vessel.

The rebel. The heretic. The one the empire wanted dead so badly She’d set a city ablaze to smoke him out. Now he was here, on Orphaner Dualscar’s ship. That sat wrong, for all of them.

“Orders?” one of the mates asked. She stood tall, cerulean-blooded, and one-eyed. Her jaw was tight, her gaze flickering toward the hold where the Signless had disappeared.

“Orders are to sail out and keep quiet,” Dualscar replied evenly, hands behind his back. “We’ve done worse for less.”

“He’s the one they’re hunting.”

“I’m aware.”

Her temper flared faintly. “If the Empire finds out he’s on board—”

“Then we make sure they don’t.”

A pause.

“And if we find out what he really is?”

Dualscar’s gaze turned to her. Cold. Dark as the seas below them.

“He’s a passenger under my protection. That’s all you need to know.”

The tension in the corridor coiled tighter, like wire.

“You never took in strays before,” someone dared to mutter behind her. “Not the mutant kind.”

A slow breath. Dualscar stepped forward until the light hit his scars, the two that had earned him his name, the ones that split his face and left him alive and dangerous even in silence.

“You forget yourselves,” he said. Voice low. Steady. “You forget who gave you this ship. Who gave you your rank? You forget who taught you that mercy is not weakness, but a favor to be repaid.”

He leaned in, voice dipped into a dangerous growl that resonated from his chest.

“You forget who I am.”

That shut them up, for now at least. The crew scattered, uneasy. Even blueblooded pride bowed beneath the weight of command. Of the history that came with the title of being an orphaner.

Dualscar stood alone a moment longer, then turned toward the hold, where the Signless was.

The injured mutant hadn’t moved. His eyes were open, though. Clear and coherent. He looked better.

“You heard all of it,” Dualscar said flatly.

“I’ve gotten good at listening.” He replied, almost looking coy.

Dualscar crossed his arms, leaned against the frame as he spoke, far softer than the tone used on his crew to keep them in line. “They won’t touch you.”

“I know.”

“They want to.”

“I know that too.”

“You’re not afraid?”

The Signless’s gaze flicked up, that harsh contrast of red in the dark.

“I’ve been hunted a long time, Dualscar. By louder mobs than this. My entire life, I have been taught to run, to avoid. I am unafraid even of burning cities, for all but the pain of those I care for and those who did not deserve it.”

A silence yawned between them in the low lighting.

Dualscar’s gaze turned icy once more as he glanced to one of the reinforced walls rather than those scarlet colored eyes that haunted him. “I didn’t have to help you.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“You came to me. The sermon. The ship.”

“And you pulled me out of the fire. Just like I did for you.”

That landed like a blow from a well trained assassin. Quiet, but sharp.

“I didn’t come to save you,” Dualscar said after a long pause. “I just didn’t want to watch another city fall.”

“I believe you. I didn’t either.”

More silence. But it wasn’t empty.

It ached.

Then the Signless added, voice soft:

“…But you stopped it, didn’t you? You ordered your guns not to fire. You flew in and pulled me out. You stood between me and the crew that would’ve slit my throat in my sleep. That wasn’t nothing.”

Dualscar didn’t respond.

He didn’t know how, which he loathed for being a common theme with this damned mutant.

So he turned away.

But the Signless’s next words stopped him.

“I can see why they part for you,” he murmured. “The crowd. The crew. They follow you because they’re afraid. But you could be more than that, than what your caste decided you are.”

Dualscar’s spine stiffened, as though he had been plunged headfirst in the iced seas of the north.

“I don’t want to be more, ” he said.

“But you already are.”

There was little more that the seadweller could do but turn and leave the Signless there with that, too tangled up in the feelings it tugged from within him. The corridor stretched long and empty as Dualscar made his way below deck later that day again, tray in hand. The crew hadn’t offered to bring their lowblood prisoner anything, and he hadn’t commanded them to. He wouldn’t trust the food to make it down untouched. Not in a ship full of trolls who’d spent their lives taught that candy red was a stain best scrubbed clean. An ideal that he himself had once shared with them.

So he went himself.

He didn’t knock—just ducked into the dim hold, finding the Signless seated in the same spot, cross-legged on a folded tarp. He looked up as Dualscar entered, blinking slowly as if pulled from some deep thought or memory. His robe had been cleaned of ash and dried blood, but still clung to his frame in tired folds, echoing just how small this so-called rebel leader was.

Dualscar set the tray down beside him—steamed ration-meat, root vegetables, filtered water. The best the ship could offer, which admittedly was more than a lower caste’s ship would offer.

“You haven’t eaten,” he said.

“I wasn’t sure it’d be safe,” the Signless replied plainly, not accusing—just stating fact.

“Now it is.”

“Because you hand delivered it to me.”

A beat of silence, their common shared moment.

Dualscar turned back to the bulkhead, and slid down to sit beside him. Close, but not touching. The clink of tin filled the space as the Signless picked up the spoon and began to eat slowly, methodically, as if each bite needed his attention.

“I don’t think they like me much,” he said after a while, politely toned after swallowing, as if he was once a wriggler being scolded for it. Something about that action stuck in the Orphaner’s sternum, thinking of the Signless as having a life before just being a rebellious leader with kind eyes and soft words.

“They don’t like anyone, especially not rebels.”

“You didn’t correct them.”

Dualscar shrugged with one shoulder, dismissive. “They wouldn’t believe me.”

“Do you believe me?”

That got a longer silence, one heavy with nearly guilt.

Dualscar stared ahead at the far wall, jaw tight, eyes like purple tinted glass.

“I believe… you think what you’re doing matters.”

The Signless hummed softly, neither insulted nor pleased.

“That’s more than most give me.”

They ate quietly for a moment. The rhythm of the ship creaked around them as it traveled to places unknown to the redblood.

Then, softly:

“‘The Signless’ isn’t a name,” he murmured.

Dualscar looked over at him, as if to chastise him on such a dumb comment.

“It was the title given to me. A joke at first. A cruelty, maybe, but I kept it. Easier that way. Safer. No name, no past, no caste symbol, and no target. Signless.”

A pause, in which the violetblood realized this was perhaps like it was when he was being treated when they first met, some kind of soothing gesture for them both to ease the tension.

“But I’d rather you know me, if we’re going to keep seeing each other.”

He set the spoon down gently, and turned to meet Dualscar’s gaze.

“My hatchname is Kankri.”

The name hung in the dark like a lit match—small, warm, and terrifying with the power it held.

Dualscar blinked, slowly, his words coming out like more of a question than a statement of a fact. “You’re giving it to me?”

He nodded. “I think you already carry enough secrets, mine is no huge burden to bear.”

Another silence, heavier than the last.

And then, quieter:

“You don’t have to tell me yours.”

“I didn’t plan to.”

A flicker of a warm smile tugged at Kankri’s mouth. Not mocking. Just real.

“But if you did… hypothetically speaking of course, what would it be?”

Dualscar hesitated. A moment passed. Then two. Then before he could quite stop the confession the words tumbled out—

“Once,” he said slowly, “I was called Cronus.”

Kankri nodded, absorbing the word like a kept promise.

“Cronus.” He repeated it just once, as if feeling how it sounded in his mouth, and that was it.

The sound of an older, unused name, from the mouth of his semi-captive, warmed the seadweller far more than just the food settling in him.

No titles. No sermons. No blood.

Just two hatchnames, spoken in the dark, like a truce.

The days and nights in the ship’s hold passed like water in cupped hands—slow, slipping, and impossible to grasp.

Kankri kept his back to the wall most of the time, legs drawn up, ears straining for the rhythmic thrum of engines, or the muffled rise and fall of crew voices beyond the thick door. The scent of salt and rust never left. The cot was thin, the blanket rough, but it was the isolation that pressed hardest. The kind that left thoughts echoing too loudly in a space too small.

He’d grown up hidden. Hunted. He was no stranger to solitude, but this was different.

This was invisibility —the enforced kind. No one spoke to him. No one acknowledged him. And even though he knew it was for his safety, it wore at something inside him. That slow-fraying thread of identity, of self.

He hadn’t seen Dualscar since the day he brought him food, and the silence in his absence had stretched too long. The captain’s quarters were just a level above, just past the ladder and one sealed door; he knew this from overhearing the seadweller up there too often—but it might as well have been a continent away. Still, the mutant leader remembered that brief flicker of warmth, the way Dualscar had read something aloud when no one else was listening.

It haunted him. Because it meant something. Or it could .

So when the evening change in shifts came, and no one was paying attention, he climbed the ladder.

The metal rungs were cold beneath his hands. His heart beat a little too fast in his chest—not out of fear, exactly, but out of uncertainty. Out of hope, perhaps.

He paused at the top, staring at the sealed door.

He knocked.

Not loud. Just once; polite, curt, and quiet.

And when the Orphaner opened the door, brow furrowed and already half-turning to dismiss whoever had dared disturb him—he froze.

Kankri stood there in his worn cloak, quiet, composed.

“I know I shouldn’t be here,” he said, “but I needed to be somewhere.”

Then softer:
“Somewhere not meant for ghosts.”

The captain’s quarters didn’t look like a warlord’s den.

They looked… lived in.

The Signless hadn’t meant to notice. He’d only meant to ask a question or two—about the old sea routes that ran beneath the storm belt, the ones the Empire had long since stopped mapping—and Dualscar had nodded in that slow, unreadable way of his. Then he’d gestured the mutant inside.

The door shut behind him with a soft click.

Inside, the space was warm with the low golden light of a swinging lantern and smelled faintly of salt, smoke, oil, and frankly, the seadweller who lived here. The furniture was old—sturdy, mismatched, and weathered—but well cared for. And unlike the brutal utilitarian design of the rest of the vessel, this room felt almost... nostalgic. Personal.

Books lined the shelves in uneven stacks. Real books, not datasheets—some crumbling at the spine, others marked with pressed leaves and sea-wracked bookmarks. On one table, a delicate design made from scavenged glass was half-complete. On the wall, a weathered chart of constellations hung beside an ancient war banner, its threads faded almost to grey. A variety of cloaks for different occasions seemed to also line a wall, along with quick-grab weapons, some more loved than others. Another section in the corner seemed to house a musical instrument the mutant could not place the name of.

“What is all this?” Kankri asked, voice soft.

The Orphaner didn’t answer at first.

“Things I’ve kept,” he said finally. “Things I wasn’t supposed to want.”

The mutant looked around again. “You have a love for history.”

“I have a fondness for forgotten things.” He smiled crookedly, the first genuine one the Signless felt like he had actually seen. “Seems fitting.”

They sat beside one another at the table, shoulders nearly brushing. Kankri leaned in, tracing a particular shape in the half-finished glasswork with the tip of a finger as he spoke, voice still softened. “You know, I thought you’d keep this room cold. Empty. Like a tomb.”

“I did,” Dualscar murmured. “For a long time.”

It was a strange kind of honesty—barely above a whisper, edged in something brittle. Kankri didn’t press. Instead, he studied the objects around him, the private pieces of a man carved hollow by violence. A ship captain. A killer. And here, in this small room, a collector of broken beauty.

He hadn't meant to spend so long in the captain’s quarters.

He'd simply asked a question—something about old sea routes and which cycles the Orphaner preferred to anchor under—and Dualscar, surprisingly, hadn’t brushed him off. Instead, he'd opened a battered old drawer, pulled out some half-crumpled star maps, and began to explain. Soon enough he was unfolding a long piece of parchment, yellowed with age, his clawed fingers tracing the curl of a sea route drawn by hand.

That had been over a cycle’s tick ago. 

Now the two of them sat too close around another low table, a single lantern casting warm, amber light across the scattered charts. Their knees touched beneath the weathered wood, each tap a surge of temperature difference between their castes like a deadly reminder. The Signless—Kankri, now—studying a line between two coordinates, his head bowed in thought as he asked low questions about the sea. Cronus leaned on his knuckles beside him, the cool fan of his breath brushing too close to the curve of Kankri’s cheek as he answered.

Neither spoke of it. But neither moved, either, both cradled in this warm setting they had made away from others, thick with a sense of safety they had no luxury in feeling.

He hadn’t realized how long they’d been talking until the door opened without warning.

Two crew members stood in the doorway. One of them—a tall, teal-blooded woman with sharp teeth and sharper eyes—froze when she saw them. The other bronze scowled openly. The two stood in the hall, bristling. Their eyes didn’t hide what they thought—disgust, confusion, a little fear. One of them took a sharp breath, and the accusation came hard:

“Didn’t realize the Captain had taken red to the mutant.”

The silence that followed was suffocating.

Kankri straightened first, calm looking despite the red flush in his cheeks. Cronus rose slower to his full height, nearly suffocating in this smaller, personal space with something tight and unreadable behind his eyes.

“You’re out of line,” He said flatly.

“You told us he was a prisoner,” the taller of the two snapped, clearly at what looked like her wit’s end. “We treated him like one. And now you’re—what, letting him sleep in your bed like a kept beast ?”

The silence that followed was heavy, almost fragile. Kankri’s eyes studied the way the Orphaner’s hands tightened at his sides, knuckles pale. The old banner on the wall behind him fluttered in the draft of the ship. The Signless bristled, but stayed seated. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

“You’ll speak with respect.”

The bronzeblood snorted. “Respect? For a mutant? We were told he was dangerous. That he was being watched. But here he is—getting cozy.”

Something cracked in Dualscar’s posture then—tight, coiled, ready. When he spoke, it wasn’t with violence. It was cold. Measured. He stepped forward, the lanternlight catching on the metal edge of a dagger at his hip—one he hadn’t worn in weeks. It gleamed like a threat, just as much as the icy words that growled from his throat. 

“If you ever speak about him again like that… I’ll carve your tongue out myself.”

That was enough. They left. The door slammed.

The rebel leader exhaled shakily. He let out a slower, calmer breath after a moment, running a hand through his hair. “That’s going to spread.”

The Orphaner Dualscar didn’t answer, didn’t move. His purple eyes still trained on the door. He was fixed in place like a tightly wound predator, something the mutant was not often able to see.

“They think I’m making you weak,” Kankri continued, with a quieter tone now. “Or worse—think you’re…”

That violet, icy gaze finally snapped back to meet red. “That’s not what this is.”

Kankri turned his body towards him, as if showing he was no threat, searching. “Then what is this?”

A brief silence. Then—

“A mistake,” Dualscar muttered, sounding bitter. “One I can’t seem to stop making.”

It was meant to sting, but it didn’t. Not the way the seadweller likely expected.

The Signless smiled. Small. Sad, but still gentle with all his ways. “That’s alright. We’ve made worse.” 

He stood at last, entirely silent, and stepped toward the door. As he left, he pulled that telling hood up over his head again, and headed back down the ladder with near silence.

Cronus watched him go but didn’t stop him, listening only to the things he had learned to in their time together: those quiet, retreating steps.

Chapter Text

ACT 7: The Measure of Quiet Things

The ship groaned like it carried its own ghosts, rocked slow and steady in a way that would make most sick. The Signless had grown accustomed to the sway, the noise of the cargo shifting around him.

They’d stopped at a small station moon that hung just outside the fire-scorched borders of the Empress’s reach. It was barely more than a rusted ring of ports and reeking docking bays, built into the porous remains of a mined-out asteroid, where smugglers traded parts and half-dead stars flickered dimly in the station’s sky.

The Signless had not left the ship since he had boarded it, hell, he’d barely left the holding area with the looks that were shot at him from afar.

Dualscar stood with one hand on the ramp lever, the other braced against the bulkhead as the final docking hissed into silence. He turned slightly—just enough to catch Kankri lingering at the top of the ramp, wrapped in a plain, borrowed hat with a coat too large for his narrow shoulders, but enough to conceal him from view to any passerbys that may recognize the rebellion leader.

"Don’t run," He said, gruffly. His voice, around his crew, was always like a roll of thunder. Low and commanding.

“I don’t plan to,” the redblood replied, soft but firm.

The Orphaner studied him for a long moment. Then he pulled a small knife from his belt—not the one he wore in battle, but something old, with a worn leather hilt. He handed it to Kankri without ceremony, simply setting it into a warm and open palm.

“Just in case.”

The Signless looked down at it like the seadweller had handed him something sacred.

“I’ll come back,” he said again, quieter.

The Orphaner didn’t answer. He simply stepped aside and allowed him off the ship.

The market was as chaotic as expected—noise, heat, trolls of all castes mingling in uneasy neutrality, bound by their hunger and the barter economy. Dualscar kept close but not too close, as his crew scattered, preferring to trail the mutant a distance, watching how the other troll moved through the crowd like someone who had never had space before. He touched nothing unless invited. He spoke little. But when he did—when he bent to thank a seller who offered them dried fruit, or gently refused the unwanted touch of a vendor with soft-spoken clarity—there was something magnetic about it.

Not loud. Not assertive.

Just… real.

Dualscar bought dried meats and minerals in bulk for the ship. The lowblooded troll bartered for salves, thread, and herbs Cronus couldn’t name, a few seeds he kept wrapped in his sleeve for reasons unstated.

By the time they returned, the station’s sunset had begun to glow in dying oranges across the metalwalks. The two of them stood outside the ship’s lowered ramp, neither quite stepping aboard just yet.

The rebel leader offered the packet of seeds out that he had bartered for in exchange for some manual labor.

“For later,” he said. “If there’s ever a ‘later.’ You should grow something.”

The Orphaner stared at them, incredulous. “You think I’d be good at that?”

“No,” Kankri replied, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “But you’d try. That’s the difference.”

The seadweller took the packet, reading the odd lowblood scrawled letters and realizing it was some kind of aquatic plant, and slipped it into his pocket like it was forbidden contraband.

That night cycle, as the ship drifted silently in orbit and the station shrank behind them, Kankri joined the seadweller in the captain’s quarters again. Not because he was summoned, but because he knocked.

He sat in the corner again, cross-legged on the floor where books had been laid out—fragments of history, old legends, even naval records Cronus had copied by hand from time-locked archives.

The Signless traced a finger over a passage written in an older dialect. “You collect these, even when you do not know the words,” he said, voice low.

“History’s the only thing I have that doesn’t rot or rebel,” Cronus answered.

Kankri looked up at him then. “It makes sense, you know. That you'd rather remember what’s already dead than risk something living.”

The silence after wasn’t angry. It was weighted. Real.

Cronus sat beside him on the floor, a dull thump of weight joining him on the weathered flooring beneath them.

“You went out today and came back. You could have left easily, hidden among that port until you could return to your clade.” His voice was lowered, inquisitive.

“I said I would come back, so I did.”

“I believed you would. I think that’s the part that unsettles me most.”

The candy red tinted troll tilted his head. “I’m used to being fearful. Not trusted.”

“And I am used to being feared,” Dualscar replied. “Maybe that’s why we keep circling each other like this.”

And then—for a moment—the silence became something else. Familiar. Quiet. Breathing in tandem in the soft amber light while reading passages lost to time. Neither felt the urge to speak more, not even the chatty mutant in all his words of kindness and praise, nor endless questions.

It would not be the last time the smaller troll would find solace in entering this private space.

The captain’s quarters were quiet—lower-lit than the rest of the ship, humming low with warmth recycled through the old bones of the vessel. A shelf ran the length of the far wall, crammed with personal keepsakes and battered data-slates stacked two or three deep. Some were full of logs—captain’s entries. The rest were rarer things: smuggled literature, banned philosophy, the occasional scrap of poetry tucked inside a weapons manual as if he hadn’t wanted to admit to reading it, and those were Kankri’s favorites.

Kankri hadn’t meant to pry. He truly hadn’t.

But when he arrived that evening to find the captain absent—off dealing with crewmates, repairs, or rumors—he’d lingered by the shelf, fingers brushing over the rough edges of unlabeled slates until he found one still faintly warm from recent use.

He opened it.

Not much at first. Just a log.

“Ship’s holdin’ together better than expected. Replaced another coolant line. Dariun might try vweldin’ next time just to spite the crevwmates wvho say he wvon’t. Ship’s seen vworse, but she’ll need repairs from the last attack soon. Little further to next port.”

“That mutant’s still here. Still breathin’. I keep thinkin’ he’ll run. I don’t knovw if I wvant him to.”

Crimson eyes blinked slowly. His clawed thumb hovered over the next entry slowly.

He was so enraptured by the text that didn’t hear the door open like usual—didn’t feel Dualscar enter as he often would have, instincts to flee born from a life on the run—but he did hear the low voice behind him.

“You always this nosy, or am I just special?”

The Signless startled, jolting nearly a full meter in the air and spun, guilt plain on his face as he held the tablet out in front of him like some kind of peace offering.

“I—ah, I didn’t mean—”

Cronus stepped further into the room, shutting the door behind him with a quiet hiss . He didn’t look angry. Just… tired and deflated. Even his earfins were tilted downwards in an unusual way that the other had to bite his tongue about mentioning.

Kankri held the slate out even further, if it were possible, and angled up towards the seadweller who had a good amount of height on him. “I shouldn’t have read it. I’m sorry.”

The Orphaner took it slowly, tenderly, like the mutant would startle further. He glanced down at the screen. Then, after a pause, he reached above the smaller troll to the shelf, tugged out a different novel—older and terribly outdated, wrapped in a faded cloth cover.

“This one’s better reading,” he muttered. “Got banned some good sweeps ago for suggesting lowbloods were capable of godhood.”

He pressed it into Kankri’s hands before the other could respond.

“I was your age when I read it. Thought it was stupid. Thought hope was stupid. Then I kept it.”

The Signless looked down at the offered novel, the worn ink of the title. Then up again, eyes softer, warmer again. “Why are you giving it to me?”

Cronus sat on the edge of the desk, arms crossed, scowling like it hurt to admit it.

“Because you already got your fronds in my head. Might as well know what’s rattling around in there otherwise.”

Kankri chuckled quietly. “You’re kinder than you let yourself be.”

“And you’re bolder than I expected,” He shot back, still looking just as brooding. “Reading a captain’s logs uninvited. That’s near quadrant-bound behavior, priest.”

The mutant flushed slightly, pointed ears turning red, but he didn’t fully deny those claims.

Instead, he sank down to the corner of the room again, cradling the banned data like something fragile.

“Will you be angry if I finish it before the next port?” he asked.

Cronus huffed, a sharp sound almost like laughter, and it was the first the redblood ever really got to hear it. “Just don’t mark the margins. I’ve had it longer than I’ve known how to lie properly.”

And that? That was a promise the mutant could keep, so long as he kept hearing those huffed and held little laughs.

The hold was dim, lit only by a flickering utility lamp and the soft hum of the ship’s wounded systems. The scent of metal, grease, and salted air clung to the space. Kankri sat cross-legged on the floor,  loosely fiddling with the metal grate in front of him — more a bored formality than a threat to escape. He hadn't tried to leave. There was nowhere to go.

The silence had weight.

Until it broke.

A figure stood at the threshold — hesitant, wiry, and clad in a patchy bronze uniform worn thin by sun and sea. He didn’t speak at first. Just lingered. Watching.

The Signless lifted his head.

“I’m not here to fight,” the bronze said quickly. “Just… to listen. If you’ll let me.”

The rebel leader blinked, then offered a small nod, a kind smile, and gestured to the floor in front of him. “You may want to keep your voice low. I suspect your superiors would be less than pleased.”

The large crewman, a mechanic at second glance, chuckled under his breath and stepped inside, settling down on a storage crate, elbow on his knee.

“I overheard you. Last time the Orphaner let you on the lower deck. Didn’t seem to care who was listening then, as you scolded him about treating us fair, even those of us who hate you.”

“He cares more than he admits,” The Signless murmured. “He always has.”

“You mean Captain Dualscar?” the bronze said, squinting at him. “You talk like you know him.”

“I do. Not enough,” The leader admitted, “but perhaps just enough.”

A long pause stretched between them. Then, softly, the Signless began to speak, the ship’s low lighting framing the hair behind his head in a sort of red halo of light—not preaching, not proselytizing, but simply telling stories. Of a life spent on the fringes, hunted not for what he’d done, but for what he was . He described his clade—a found family made of the kind and the fierce, those who taught him that survival did not have to come at the cost of kindness. His eyes were nearly illuminated in that uncanny, candy red, as his voice lulled like a sweet song. 

He spoke of equality as something not granted, but inherent . That blood color was not a measure of worth. That even the highest and the lowest could find meaning in peace, if given a chance, could coexist even.

“I don’t want to rule over anyone,” He said at last. “I only want to show them that they can live without cruelty, and rely on each other without threat.”

The mechanic was quiet. Then: “That’s not what they say about you.”

“I know.”

“They say you’re dangerous. A rebel who will kill all who oppose him. A tyrant.”

“I am dangerous,” The mutant agreed gently, ducking his head away from that halo of light that made him seem so otherworldly. “But only to those who would keep things the way they are, and keep me from spreading these words to those like you, who want to hear them.”

That landed heavy in the air.

Then, after a beat, the bronze leaned forward and whispered, “If I wanted to help you, would you let me?”

The smaller troll didn’t answer immediately. He studied the bronze’s face, saw sincerity etched there, rough with uncertainty but real.

“I would,” he said. “But you have to know, it won’t be safe. It never is.”

“I know.” The bronze stood again, voice low and resolute. “But I think you’re right. And I don’t want to live afraid of saying so anymore.”

And then he was gone, disappearing into the steel-shadowed corridors with something fragile and burning in his chest: belief . In exchange, he had gifted the Signless yet another shard of hope, in knowing that even here, others could believe in what he did.

The ship during daylight was a different kind of creature. It breathed slower. It carried itself softer, as if aware of the weight its crew tried not to name. Most had gone to their quarters by now, leaving only the low thrum of the engine and the occasional hiss of the ventilation.

Kankri laid on his back in the observation alcove, a little glass and sun-repellant barrier tucked near the top of the ship, just off the captain’s corridor. It wasn’t listed on the map—only someone who had wandered the belly of the vessel like a ghost would know it was there.

He liked it for the stars. Or rather, the chart of them. In the black above the dome, they didn’t burn the way they did from planetside. They shimmered like old things, distant and clean and safe, with pretty lines drawn between them with directional guides. He didn’t understand a lick of it, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the shifting sights.

The captain found him there one night. Not by plan. The door opened with a soft hiss, and then he was there, a familiar shape with familiar horns and familiar scars silhouetted in blue starlight.

“You could’ve asked if you wanted to look,” He said, voice low.

“I didn’t want to intrude,” Kankri answered, not getting up. He was still laying against the floor, palms up, and wholly unmoving. Unbothered.

“You didn’t, but it’s dangerous for you to wander about during the day.”

Silence stretched between them again, but this time, Dualscar didn’t fill it with his usual dry remark. He stepped inside. The seadweller sat beside the lowblood, one knee drawn up, shoulder resting against the bulkhead.

They stayed like that for some time, basking in the quiet and watching the star maps shift based on the ship’s autopilot.

“I used to think space was quiet,” The Orphaner said finally.

“And now?”

“Now I know it’s just full of things no one wants to say.”

The Signless hummed as he sat up, taking a similar position but far more balled up, arms resting on both his knees. “You say very little, for someone who commands so many.”

The violetblood glanced at him sidelong, and spoke with an icy tone that he had long learned was more teasing than genuine. “You say too much, for someone with so much to hide.”

Touché.

He didn’t take offense to the comment, just turned his head. “What do you think I’m hiding?”

“That’s the thing,” Cronus muttered. “I don’t know, other than the obvious. But I want to.”

Another silence—longer this time. Thicker. Not awkward. Careful.

Then, softly: “My old captain used to bring me here,” The seadweller said, tilting his head back toward the dome. “Not this ship. But one like it. He was older. First to fight. First to bleed.”

“You admired him.”

“I cared for him. In the way we’re taught not to. I thought he’d survive everything with me, stay part of my crew. He didn’t.”

The Signless didn’t speak. He just listened, gaze calm and focused on the taller troll next to him.

“He was killed when I was still... young enough to think vengeance meant something,” He added, voice rougher now. “So I signed on with the empire. I wanted to be strong. Important. Wanted to be the one doing the hunting, not the one being hunted, and I wanted to gain Her favor by doing it; by being like Her.”

Kankri’s voice was quiet: “And are you like Her?”

The other looked down at his clawed, battle worn hands.

“No. I’m just the one with blood on his palms and no one left to ask why I’m still breathing.”

The mutant’s red gaze turned back to the stars.

“I would’ve asked,” he said, gently, as if the words themselves were the fragile things between them.

Cronus closed his eyes, just for a moment. As if he needed to. As if that one sentence hit deeper than any blade ever could, harder than any troll had the right to hit him.

“You always say things like that,” He muttered. “Like they’re not dangerous.”

“They aren’t,” Kankri replied simply, though no less blunt than he ever was. “You just haven’t heard them said to you before. You feel them, though, don’t you? You feel that ache to be proven wrong, deep between your ribs? I used to, but I don’t now. The quiet, no matter how layered, is a luxury, and a nice one at that.”

It was silent again. Still. Not for the last time since they met, Cronus found himself wanting to stay in that room, in that light, in that quiet longer than he should.

Chapter Text

ACT 8: Beneath the Ribcage of the Ship

The ship had been drifting in low orbit over a mostly uncharted oceanic planet, harvesting drinkable water and repairing minor damages from their last evasive maneuver in avoiding the empire, much as the crew hated to admit to. The stars above were cold, distant spectators. Below, the sea churned with an unnatural stillness.

Kankri noticed it first—not with his eyes, but with his bones. The way the air changed. The sudden silence where there should have been noise, and then that low, deep hum, so often acquainted with a beast of large size.

Then—impact.

The hull screamed. Metal groaned. Red lights bathed the corridors like fresh blood. The Signless slammed into the bulkhead as the ship lurched, alarms bleating like dying beasts.

From the port windows, he saw it. A shape rising from the planet’s sea, impossibly massive. The water foamed around it in spiraling whirlpools. No real form—just tentacles, teeth, bioluminescent scars across its hide, a leviathan sized beast dredged from deep myth and even deeper time.

Kankri barely had time to rise before the crew ran past him, shouting orders in a mixture of panic and precision. In the chaos, the Orphaner appeared—cloak half-torn, clad in full armor not unlike the one they had met in; already shouting orders, already wielding command like a blade and brandishing a powerful looking rifle that was often kept on his person instead.

“It’s breached the hull! Get to the cannons—NOW!”

His crew responded like an extension of his will. They moved with deadly coordination. He didn’t look back, didn’t hesitate.

The mutant however, was ushered below deck. Locked in. Not unkindly—but deliberately. A mutter from a goldblooded gunner: “You’re valuable to the captain, please stay down.”

He stayed as the ship jostled more and more, but he watched through a small viewport near the lower gunnery access. He watched Dualscar stand on the upper deck, shouting defiance into the void, barking commands as the crew moved like a singular living weapon beneath him.

The leviathan struck again—tentacles snapping like whips, hammering into the hull. The ship’s metal screamed again in protest of the battery.

Then fire.

Cannons lit up the black.

The lowblood watched that captained seadweller move through smoke and gunfire like he belonged in it, drawing his harpoon cannon with the ease of long practice. His voice didn’t rise with fear, but with power—clear, confident, compelling.

A tentacle surged toward the deck.

The Orphaner didn’t hesitate. He lunged. Sank the harpoon attached to his rifle into it, locked the tether, and yanked with a searing burn. The creature roared its pain.

It was horrifying.

It was beautiful.

It was everything the rebel leader had sworn not to become, no matter how many followed him.

He couldn't look away from the violent displays. 

The sea turned nearly black with blood. One by one, the leviathan’s limbs were severed. The final shot came not from Dualscar, but from his crew—a synchronized volley, ordered with ruthless timing, that cracked the beast’s core to pieces to sink into the great below.

When the final spasm passed through the tentacles, when the waves began to still, only then did the captain sag even faintly, violet blood spattering across his shoulder where a tentacle had grazed him.

He stood over the wreckage, smoke curling around his silhouette, a perfect image of a god at his work, this is what he was made for surely.

Kankri pressed a palm to the window, breath coming in shallow bursts that heated the glass, finding that he cared just as equally for the creature that had been slain. Not the creature, but the fact one had to be slain at all for survival, that there was a name for a job like this: orphaner.

And he realized, as the monster’s corpse sank back into the sea beyond recognition—

There are things Cronus can kill without blinking.

And things Kankri cannot watch without breaking.

The ship groaned under its own weight, hull scorched and still weeping water through ruptured seams. A greasy stench of a leviathan’s ichor clung to the vents, settling over everything like a second skin. The crew staggered down blood-slicked corridors, bruised and blistered, not all of them victorious, not all of them grateful.

No one cheered.

They looked at their captain with sidelong glances, tight-lipped and fuming. Some nodded at him, but more than one muttered behind a hand. They had seen the mutant watching from the lower deck during the chaos. They had seen their captain look to him first, before them.

Cronus ignored them. Or tried to.

He sat alone near the munitions hold, cape discarded and torn, shoulder hastily bound in a wrap already soaked through. His breathing was shallow. Controlled. A man trying not to show how deeply something had shaken him. The beast’s corpse still steamed in the waters outside.

The mutant they all spread rumors like fire about stepped into view like a silenced shadow.

The crew didn’t stop him. But they watched. They watched the way the light caught on his hooded form like a halo; the way he could nearly move without a whisper of sound, no matter how they strained for it.

“You came out,” the Orphaner muttered, looking entirely unsurprised at the fact. “Risky.”

“I figured I was safer among the wounded,” the Signless replied, voice clipped. “You were bleeding.”

“I’m always bleeding.”

A beat.

“You fought like it was personal,” Kankri said quietly, so that only the seadweller would hear. “Not just survival, like you hated it.”

Dualscar gave him a slow, cold look. He looked frightening, with nothing behind his gaze, like something the Signless had never quite seen from him up close and personal. “Wouldn’t you, if a creature had claws around your ship?”

“You kill like someone who doesn’t question it anymore.” The mutant responded, crossing his arms over his chest almost defiantly, despite his calm tone of voice.

Cronus stood. His wounded shoulder twitched, but he didn’t flinch, rather he leaned down and into the mutant’s space with a viciously icy tone.

“I kill to live. I kill to keep them alive,” he snapped, jerking a thumb back toward the main deck. “You think that’s easy for me?”

“I think it used to be,” Kankri said, voice soft but cutting. “And I think the only reason it isn’t now… is because I’m here.”

The words landed like a spark in dry brush.

A few feet behind them, a low voice muttered: “Listen to how he talks to you, Captain.”

Another crewman replied, just as low: “Maybe we should’ve let the seabeast take care of this entire ship, the way they act.”

The Signless turned his head at the sound, looking considerably more heated. So did the Orphaner, gaze still full of ice.

But their captain didn’t reprimand them.

He said nothing.

And that silence cut deeper than the words spoken aloud.

“Let me see your shoulder,” Kankri said after a pause that consisted of him cooling his temper. “You’re dripping onto the floor.”

“What, now you care?”

“I never stopped. You just stopped letting yourself believe it.”

The Orphaner scoffed, but didn’t resist when the lowblood stepped forward, undoing the blood-soaked wrap. The crew didn’t look away. They watched as the mutant rebel leader touched their captain’s skin , quiet and firm, bandaging him with efficient, familiar fingers. Like he had done so a thousand times before, like their captain had let him do so, a thousand times before.

Someone spat on the floor and walked out.

Someone else didn’t, some lingered to watch the display while others fanned out to make what repairs they could manage.

The landing was rough. Emergency protocols had to be activated manually. They docked in a fringe port station orbiting a desolate water-world—a haven for smugglers, exiles, and the forgotten. Exactly the kind of place where word traveled faster than currency and secrets were a form of currency themselves.

Repairs were underway, slow and grudging. These mechanics didn’t like the crew. The crew didn’t like them. And they really didn’t like the half disguised lowblood among them.

Whispers moved through the halls like a scuttling plague of insects.

“He’s still here? Why?”
“You saw the way he touched the Captain.”
“That mutant’s red for him. I swear it.”
“And the Captain lets him walk around like he's in the crew, like a medic. Like he belongs. ”

Dualscar heard it. He just didn’t address it.

He shut himself in his quarters more often. Took meals privately. When he did emerge, it was often to check on that very mutant, who remained quietly confined to the lower levels, away from prying eyes, and on his own. To any curious ears though, the two seemed to often stay entirely silent, which only made rumors worse.

One early night, long after repairs began, Cronus brought food himself, stepping down into the hold with a simple tray of reheated rations and something that might have once passed for wine.

The Signless looked up from his cot. He was paler than usual, as if faded from disuse the same as his surroundings. But not soft. Not broken. Never any of those things, in spite of everything. 

“You didn’t have to.”

“I didn’t trust anyone else to,” Dualscar said simply. “They’re… talking.”

“They’ve always been talking.”

Cronus sat against the opposite wall, watching him eat in silence for a moment.

As the mutant set the plate aside, he straightened up his posture and his eyes almost looked like they were catching the dim light. His voice broke their silence, as it so often did: “You’re going to have a problem soon, and it will force you to choose.”

The violetblood looked at him, sharp, and entirely unfond of the way the hair at the base of his neck rose.

“Between what?”

“My safety, by leaving me somewhere,” Kankri said, simply tilting his head as he spoke. “And the ones still loyal enough to the empire to kill me the second your back is turned.”

The Orphaner for once, looked shaken for a moment before he could entirely school his features. They ate the rest of their meal in silence, while the seadweller avoided the gaze of the other, preferring to instead stare towards the door with something cold in his eyes.

The next cycle, the Signless sat cross-legged in the hold still lightly steaming and saddened from their previous encounter, wrapped in that signature threadbare shawl; stitched in red, that smelled of home and old oil. He read by the low flicker of emergency lighting that bathed the room in a rusted red. He’d already read the text front to back three times in his boredom, something Dualscar had loaned him a few cycles ago, before the beast struck the ship, even before their repairs. It was History of Pre-Alternian Maritime Warfare; a Treatise on Alternian Naval History, heavy with imperialist spin and margin-notes in Cronus’s hand. Sharp, critical, and corrective, written in a deep purple elegant ink. 

Kinda romantic, he had thought, once, but he’d never said so aloud. He even considered teasing the violetblood to ultimately decide against it and take the gift for what it was. He had realized that the Orphaner favored his left side in combat, yet somehow had not pieced together just yet that he was entirely left handed when he wrote as well, indicated by the direction of the smeared ink.

He ran a thumb along a phrase he'd reread at least twenty times:

“Power is not legacy. It is only ever a choice, made visible.”

A scrawl beside it, lightly smeared: doubt that’s wvhat they meant, but it’s the only thing vworth underlinin'. wvhat a dumb idea like blood castes don't come vwith enough of it.

The Signless closed the book gently, with a smile. Ever the bitter cynic, wasn’t he? He wanted to know when this had been annotated, if he got the chance to ask. He wasn’t expecting any company for a long while, but something felt—off. The silence of the hold, usually steady and breathing like a deep lung, had gone still. Suspended.

Over Kankri’s head, the tension had reached a boil. It started with a slammed fist, overlapping angry voices began to break out, the crew turning inward like a strong tide swept them.

Above, in the narrow mess hall where rust kissed the ceilings and the sea always felt one crack away, the Orphaner stood in the mess hall like a statue grown from sea-metal and blood. His shoulders were hunched, not in defeat, but in anticipation—like a fighter in a ring waiting for the bell to signal his turn.

He’d seen it coming. He always did. He just never wanted to name it.

“You’ve changed, you’re soft, ” the jade quartermaster said, eyes narrow. “You don’t bark. You don’t command. You disappear. You keep him fed. You’ve brought him books of all things, like a prized little pet you keep in a cage.”

“And?” Dualscar replied, those sharp teeth bared.

“You said we’d scour entire oceans to find the mutant. You burned a city, Captain.”

He flinched at that. Just slightly.

“You promised us war,” another crewman said. “You gave us a sermon like your little preacher shouts.”

A silence passed between them, salt-thick and dangerous. A few knives rested on the table, too close to too many twitching, dangerous hands.

“I said,” Dualscar replied, low and even, “we’d find him. And I did.”

A beat.

“He’s unarmed,” someone hissed.

“He’s wrongblooded, a mutant!” Some of them jeered at the term.

“You’re protecting him.”

And there it was—the ugly heart of it.

“Why do you care?” The once proud captain of this crew asked, voice heavy. “He’s in the brig. He’s reading books and drinking broth. He hasn’t said a word to any of you.”

“You care. That’s the problem.”

“You’re feeding a traitor,” another growled. “You’re shielding him. You’re red for him! ” 

Someone’s blade scraped the floor as they stood. Others followed. A standoff. A test.

For a moment, Dualscar considered it. The weight of his title, his legacy, the blooded oath he swore to Her empire. He looked like he might play the role expected of him. The feared captain. The Orphaner who burned cities, not mourned them. The Orphaner who slaughtered any who stood in his way, not sheltered them.

Then he breathed, slow and strong, not unlike a meditation. After just a moment, he said, “If you're going to raise blades on my ship, do it now.”

Silence. Tension spun into a taut, painful string.

No one moved.

“Cowards,” he muttered—without venom. Just disappointment.

He turned on his heel and left them there. Walked down into the belly of the ship with the weight of his title like the entire sea of the planet rested upon his shoulders.

The corridor outside the hold had grown quieter in the last few hours, but Dualscar knew better than to think it meant peace. Suspicion didn't fade that quickly. Not with a crew that had blood in their teeth and orders burned into their marrow.

A flicker of movement made him pause—one of the deckhands loitering outside the brig. A bronze, broad-shouldered mechanic, and younger than he should’ve been to carry the look of weariness in his eyes. His name escaped Dualscar’s mind, but he remembered the deep scar over the troll’s temple, like an old cautionary tale.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he muttered.

The bronze startled, but didn’t back away. Instead, he glanced toward the locked door beyond which the Signless waited, voice low and earnest. “He was speaking again.”

The Orphaner stiffened, fingers itching towards the rifle on his belt. “What did he say?”

“Not what I expected,” the bronze admitted. “I thought he'd spit fire. Preach uprising. Instead, he talked about... quiet things. About how every caste shade bleeds, just different colors. That grief doesn’t care if you’re rusted red or violet. That maybe the Empire’s fear isn’t of what he says, but what it makes us feel. ”

The captain didn’t reply, and the bronze realized these were things he may have already known.

The bronze’s eyes stayed forward, unreadable. “I didn’t think someone like him would look at someone like me and speak to me. Not at me. Not around me. Just to me.” He swallowed. “And I listened.”

“You’ll regret it,” Dualscar said, voice flat. “If you haven’t already.”

“I’m already a target,” the mechanic said with a tired smile. “May as well choose something worth being shot for.”

When the captain finally stepped away, keys clenched in one hand, he didn’t speak again, but something in the line of his shoulders had shifted.

Cronus slammed the door to the hold harder than he meant to, locking it behind him with the keys only he carried. Salt shook loose from the seams from the force of the slam. Kankri was already on his feet, gazing at him with nearly cautious eyes. A small pack half-slung over one shoulder, as if he'd known it would come to this. As if he'd waited for Dualscar to see it too. 

Having grown accustomed to listening, the Signless heard it all. So many voices. Too many. They weren’t shouting yet, at first. That would come later. Now was the tension part, the part he was good at navigating: the quiet of things held too long.

The dim light caught him in a strange way. Not like prey. Like someone expecting to be chosen and left behind all at once.

“They’ll come back stronger,” Cronus said. “More certain, they want you dead.”

“I know.”

“You should’ve run when we landed here for supplies.”

Kankri tilted his head, dark hair falling into his eyes. “Would you have let me?”

Dualscar opened his mouth. Closed it. His purple eyes flicked over the little bundle of books, the cloak pulled tighter around too-thin shoulders, the way the Signless had packed in silence, expected abandonment in silence, and never once asked for more.

“I’m not… good at this,” He muttered.

“I don’t expect you to be.” Came the teasing sort of reply.

“I told them we’d find you.”

“And you did.” A pause. “Though, you said nothing about handing me over.”

That cracked something in Cronus’s face—barely. He looked younger for a moment, like a freshly molted wriggler made to inherit violence before he ever had a chance to question it.

“I should’ve been the first to put a blade in you,” Cronus said softly.

“You were, to an extent.” Kankri smiled without mirth. “But not the last, and not the worst.”

A silence bloomed between them, though it was warmer than most.

“I didn’t ask you to change your mind,” The Signless said. “But I’m grateful you did.”

Another silence. This one was heavier. The kind that made choices collapse under their own weight.

Then—distant. Above. Shouting.

“We don’t have time,” he said.

“I can put them down,” The Orphaner replied, low. “I can make them obey.”

“You could.” Kankri stepped closer, fingers splayed out wide in a nonthreatening gesture. “But what would you become if you did?”

It wasn't condemnation. Just curiosity. A gentle thorn in an older wound.

Cronus stepped forward. For a moment, the heat between them flickered too close to something volatile. Then Cronus reached out—one hand on Kankri’s arm. Clawed, worn fingers curled around the mutant’s arm—not tightly. Just enough.

“Come with me,” he said. “Through the engineering shaft. There’s a launch sled.”

“You don’t need to follow me, you just need to let me go.” Kankri said quietly.

But Cronus urged him in the direction anyway, “I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m following you, to keep you safe.”

They didn’t look back.

The lights had already been killed by the time they reached the maintenance corridor. The space was narrow—built not for bodies, but for conduit and pressure valves, crawling with heat and the hum of residual energy. The walls were nearly too hot to handle with bare skin. The air reeked of rust and salt, metallic and marine, like the last breath of something ancient left to rot in a forgotten cage.

Cronus ducked through first, holding an abandoned wrench in one hand like a blade, his other outstretched behind him to guide Kankri. The corridor was too narrow to walk side by side, but the mutant knew better than to get too far away from the violetblood leading him. Highblood darkvision was also simply better, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

They moved in silence, their breaths loud in the space between bulkheads. The sound of boots striking metal rang from above—his crew, scattering through the levels like bloodthirsty patrols the Signless had encountered previously.

“I thought they’d obey me, at least a little longer” Dualscar muttered over his shoulder.

“They did,” Kankri replied just as softly. “Until you stopped giving them someone to put a death warrant on.”

“...Fuck.”

They kept moving.

Cables brushed their arms like seaweed in a tidepool. The heat pressed against them with the weight of a beast’s breath. At one point, the Orphaner had to stop, letting the Signless press close behind him as they waited for a patrol to pass directly above. The footsteps were slow. Measured. Listening. Someone who didn’t need to sight to know what betrayal sounded like.

In the silence, Kankri’s hand drifted unconsciously to the seadweller’s torso in the dark—steadying himself with a quiet grip at his waist. Cronus froze at the fingers that radiated heat like the sun holding him. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t breathe, but he didn’t push him off either.

“They’re searching the hold,” Cronus whispered. “I told them I left you there.”

“I know.”

The redblood’s fingers flexed slightly against the fabric, grounding himself.

“I used to think hiding was foolish cowardice,” he said, voice low and close to the fin of the seadweller’s ear. “But it’s also survival. My clade taught me that.”

The Orphaner swallowed something hard in his throat. “You never told me much about them.”

The Signless was quiet for a moment, almost teasing. “I didn’t think you wanted to know.”

A sound echoed behind them—clattering, too close. A door opening. Voices.

Cronus turned sharply, catching Kankri’s arm, and yanked him into a side alcove barely large enough to crouch in. His hand covered the mutant’s mouth before he could speak, the other pressing them tight together in the dark. His chin nearly rested over the mutant’s shoulder like this, folding them completely into each other’s spaces. The heat from the walls and the blood coursing through the veins of the smaller troll against him was almost too much to take for long.

Footsteps.

So close.

The smaller troll’s back hit the curved wall, muffling a low sound from the warmed powerline against his lower back. The taller braced over him, arms locked in place by Kankri’s head to keep them both hidden, lightly burning at his own arms to keep the other’s head safer, bodies pressed in tight proximity. His breath was in Kankri’s pointed ear. Cool. Shallow. Furious. A hard contrast to the hot breath fanning against the gill slits along his neck that he struggled to read the emotions of.

The Signless didn’t struggle. He just closed his eyes and waited it out.

A familiar, bronze voice outside the alcove lied: “He’s not here. But the access panel’s closed.”

“Fan out. If we find the Captain with him, we drag them both to the brig and take them to Her Imperial Condesencion.”

Silence. More footsteps. Fading.

Only when the pressure receded did Cronus finally loosen his grip, pulling back with something akin to shame. Kankri exhaled slowly, calmly.

“You were always good at hiding,” Cronus said.

“I had to be.” A pause. “You were always good at being found.”

That stung, but the seadweller didn’t argue. He simply helped the smaller troll up in a hauling sort of motion and whispered, “Just a bit further. The sled’s near engineering. Once we’re clear, I’ll destroy the launch logs.”

They moved again—this time side by side in the tighter spaces, Dualscar using his own body to shield the Signless when vents hissed steam or tools clattered above. Pure adrenaline was pounding in his head as he attempted to get them both free.

Near the end of the corridor, a panel was loose. Behind it, a crawlspace barely wide enough for a single troll, a lowblood at that. It would be a tight squeeze for the large stature of a seadweller.

Cronus looked back. “You go first.”

“I’m smaller,” Kankri replied dryly in resigned agreement.

He slipped in, and the violetblood followed—on hands and knees, crawling through the guts of his own ship like a traitor. The sound of his crew yelling orders filtered through the walls. Kankri crawled ahead of him in silence, only wincing when his knee hit a sharp corner, or when a pipe steamed near his face, whereas he could faintly hear the Orphaner struggling to wiggle through behind him.

When they finally emerged, it was into the dim engineering deck—quiet now. The sled was prepped and waiting. A sleek escape pod used only by officers in case of emergency breach.

Cronus punched in the override. The hiss of the airlock was too loud.

Kankri turned to him, voice soft, forgiving.

“Are you sure?”

“They’ll never follow you if they think I hate you.”

“And do you?”

Cronus looked at him for a long moment, pupils widened. Then came the simplest reply:

“No.”

And that, somehow, was worse than a confession of love.

The escape sled opened, sterile and humming. A mutant traitor climbed in. A captain who abandoned his title followed.

Neither spoke as the ship peeled away from the dock and dove toward the abyss—toward exile, or death, or something like sanctuary.

Chapter Text

ACT 9: The Wild Does Not Bow

The escape pod hissed violently as it touched down, skidding over soil and shale before settling into silence. Outside the viewport: no city. No soldiers. No smoke. Only endless green—a tangle of overgrowth and feral trees, thick with vines that bloomed like open mouths, and shadows that crawled at the edges of vision. The planet was one of the old ones, uncolonized and left nearly untouched by the Empire’s reach. It was beautiful, and it was entirely untamed.

Cronus stepped out first. The gravity hit harder here, and the air was thick, humid, spiced with rot and nectar. The foliage towered, curling in twisted loops. He had seen planets like this from maps. From windows. Not like this. Not underfoot, clinging to his boots and staining his coat in green.

“This isn't what I expected,” he muttered.

Behind him, Kankri emerged more slowly. He looked around, brows furrowed not in confusion but in assessment. He was already scanning for water. For shelter. For patterns.

“You’ve never set foot on a world like this?” he asked.

“I’ve conquered them,” Cronus said. “But we don’t… stay. We burn and leave.”

The Signless calmly crouched beside a root system, brushing his fingers across a patch of moss, testing its give, not even looking over at him. “That’s not surviving. That’s erasing.”

He didn’t say it cruelly. Just plainly. Like someone who had lived in the spaces left behind.

They spent the first night sheltering inside the open pod, with a makeshift canopy stretched taut over the roof in case the rain was also acidic here. The violetblood was restless. He’d removed his cape, but the heat was unbearable. His hair clung to his skin, sweat dripping down his spine. Seadwellers were built for cold, for durability, not this dreaded heat. He watched the mutant lowblood from across the dim-lit space—how easily he moved through it, how quiet his hands were as he stitched a tear in his own sleeve, how calmly he began carving small notches into the soil outside their door to mark the passing days, not even looking shaken in the slightest.

By dawn, Cronus had tried and failed to hunt three times.

He returned empty-handed, sharp teeth grit, wiping a smear of mud off his cheek.

“You’re favoring your left side when you walk,” Kankri noted gently, rising to his feet. “It’s making your depth perception off. Let me show you how to–”

“I’m not incompetent,” was the reply that snapped at him, the heat and combined sting of failure making him irritable.

“I didn’t say you were.”

But the Signless’s voice didn’t rise, even then. And later, when the self-exiled Orphaner found him pressing his forehead to something before gutting the very same fruit looking creature with surprising efficiency, he swallowed his bitter pride and crouched beside him.

“You said it wasn’t incompetence?” He prodded the conversation, unused to such still silences.

“It’s inexperience, and you weren’t raised to know any better. I was raised in spaces like this.”

There was no venom in it, as there rarely was. Just fact.

Kankri gestured to the creature. “The liver seems safest to eat raw. Try.”

The seadweller looked at it, incredulous. The texture. The shine…the slime. “You’re kidding.”

The other, smaller troll simply tilted his head. “You’ll pass out by sundown if you don’t. There were no rations in that pod, you know.”

And so, for the first time in his life, Cronus took an uncooked, unknown piece of beast flesh into his mouth and didn’t spit it out. He gagged once, faintly, mostly at the texture. Then forced it down. The Signless didn’t comment aside from a steadying hand on his upper arm and a patient expression.

That night, the Orphaner lay on a bed of woven branches and soft grass the fugitive lowblood had built in silence. The heat had not abated, but the sky had cleared. He stared up at twin moons that reminded him of home cresting through the trees. They weren’t talking.

Then:

“You’re good at this shit, Signless.” Dualscar muttered.

The Signless shifted beside him, looking like he was getting comfortable on the bare grass alone beside him. “No need for titles here, you can call me by name. I was taught by people who knew they wouldn’t always be there to protect me.”

“Kankri then…and mine only taught me to command others to do it for me.” A pause. Then, uncharacteristically self-aware, he added, “They never expected me to fail. Not like this.”

The other, smaller troll didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into the satchel they’d salvaged from the pod and pulled out a small dried flower, pressed in cloth.

He handed it over with delicate claws. “Smell it.”

The overheating seadweller obeyed, taking it gingerly, like the item would break.

“It’s bitter now. But if you boil it with the right ingredients it becomes something like tea. Turns sweet. Helps with focus.”

He blinked at it. “You carry this with you?”

“Always. I have some of your books as well, actually.”

Cronus looked at the odd flower again, then at the troll who handed it to him. “You think we’ll live through this?”

“I’m alive,” The smaller troll said simply, laying on his back with no intention of taking the flower back. “That’s enough to start with, is it not, Cronus?”

Cronus woke disoriented, head sticky with heat and the dull ache of unfiltered air pressing against his lungs. His body ached from the uneven bed of packed grass and twisted vines beneath him, but it wasn’t the discomfort that made him sit up sharply.

It was the cloak.

Heavy, familiar, and unmistakably not his own, it had been soaked in water, laid over his chest, shoulders, and neck while he slept to keep him cool. The weave was slightly scratchy against his skin, yet not in an uncomfortable way—threadbare in some places, mended in others with uneven, practical stitches. It smelled like brine and ash and something fainter underneath: wildflowers crushed underfoot, something like home.

He looked around. Kankri was seated just beyond the mouth of the pod, cross-legged, back to him. A sickle sat in his lap, something the seadweller never even knew he carried. His head was tipped forward, curled hair slightly damp and sticking to his face from the humidity, his breath soft and even. Asleep, but not deeply. Notably, he seemed to be wearing what looked like a really long bodysuit, marked in that deep candy red striped up the sides against a stark black contrast, and scars and softer, natural marks littered his face like stars. He had to tear his gaze away for a moment. It was interesting, to say the least. The violetblood realized he had never seen Kankri quite so bare before.

Cronus stared at him for a long moment, then looked back down at the cloak that had now shifted to hanging half in his lap. He didn’t move to take it off.

Instead, he settled it more securely over him to take any of the remaining moisture.

By mid-morning, they’d packed up their temporary camp and begun making slow progress through the thick underbrush. The Signless led, occasionally pausing to test the resistance of moss or check the alignment of vines—reading the wilderness like some long-forgotten scripture. Dualscar followed, rifle sheathed comfortably on his back, own cape tied around his waist, silent for once.

The forest was alive with too many sounds. Some were familiar, he thought. Others… weren’t.

“We should be looking for higher ground,” The mutant said after they cleared a gully choked with roots, sickle in hand. “If anything on this planet hunts with scent or sound, we’re too exposed near the pod, and with this humidity, it likely floods.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Dualscar asked, brushing a biting insect from his neck where it buzzed around too sensitive gills.

“Then we’ll be safer anyway. Elevation gives us vision.”

“Unless something else has it already.”

The Signless didn’t argue. He just kept walking, slow and measured, like he had the whole forest memorized and was waiting for it to speak in a language only he understood again.

It did.

Near dusk, they found the claw marks—five gouges deep in the bark of a tree twice the seadweller’s height, which was considerably large. Each one was as long as his hand, raked through to the pale underwood, sap dripping from them like spilled blood.

The smaller troll crouched beside them, looking dwarfed in the size of it. “This is fresh.”

“Real fucking fantastic,” Dualscar muttered, already set on edge. He stepped back, letting his hand drift toward his rifle. “Seen anything that size before?”

Kankri didn’t answer right away. His fingers hovered near the grooves, but didn’t touch. “Yes,” he said. “But not here.”

That didn’t sit well.

That night, they didn’t make a fire to cook with.

Instead, the Signless packed ash from their last burn into a pouch and spread it around the new camp in a thin circle. Dualscar didn’t ask what it was for. He didn’t need to.

He could feel it now too. Something was out there.

The trees were too still. The normal clicks and chirps of the forest had fallen quiet—like the whole wild surrounding them was holding its breath.

The Orphaner was already pulling that trusted rifle when he heard it: a soft chitter. Barely a whisper. Then another.

He stood immediately, eyes scanning the shadows.

The Signless followed suit, already backing toward him carefully, close enough to touch. “Put the gun down.” He spoke low, soft.

“It’s close.”

“I know.”

A rustle in the brush. Something slithered, then paused. The chittering returned, a different tone now—curious. Like mimicry. Like memory.

Dualscar moved to step forward, but the mutant grabbed his wrist firmly. “It’s watching. But it’s not charging.”

“Yet,” Cronus growled low in his chest at the impending threat. The warm hold on his wrist was grounding, but not enough.

“Don’t provoke it.”

The sound shifted again, and Dualscar’s pulse hammered in his entire body.

“I’ve heard that before,” The Signless murmured as he continued. “Old world designs. Biomech scouts, organic processors. They learn through sound. Through fear.”

“You’re telling me that thing is Empire-made ?”

“I’m telling you it used to be .”

The chittering stopped. Silence stretched long and hard between them.

And then, as suddenly as it came, the presence slipped back into the trees—no noise, no rustle. Gone.

Dualscar stood stiff, scanning the trees just in case. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his rifle, but he didn’t move.

Beside him, Kankri finally exhaled, squeezing his wrist just once before letting it go.

Later, after the tension had eased and they sat with their backs to a tree trunk, Cronus glanced at him. “You knew what it was.”

“I hoped I did.” Kankri tilted his head, eyes half-lidded as he spoke. “There are a lot of things like that out here. Made for war. Left behind when the war moved on. Like me.”

Cronus didn’t know what to say to that, only fiddled with the cloak’s fabric that he still had not returned, running his thumb along a delicate seam where it was tied with his.

They sat in silence for a long time, listening to the wind stirring the trees, listening for something that might return.

When sleep eventually took either of them, it was shallow and dreamless.

And both of them kept one hand on their weapons.

Cronus woke with a start, muscles aching from sleep he hadn’t meant to fall into. His hand went instinctively to his rifle’s handle—but the forest was still. No chittering. No mimicry. Just mist.

The dawn was soft and grey, not quite golden. The sun hadn’t risen above the canopy yet, but the world was beginning to bloom in shades of blue and violet—cool, soft hues that cast the wild into something gentler than it had any right to be.

He sat up slowly. The cloak was still wrapped around his shoulders, placed in a delicate way to keep him shielded from the heat. It still smelled like a piece of home.

Kankri was already awake, crouched a few paces away near a natural run-off where water pooled clear between two stones. He was rinsing his hands. His sleeves were rolled up. His posture tight and tense, like he was ready to move at less than a moment’s notice. He seemed to always hold himself that way; quiet, controlled, contained.

For a while, Cronus just watched him quietly.

It was a strange feeling—this silence, this absence of orders, of duty, of performance. Just the sound of trickling water and a figure shaped by patience, worn into the ritual of survival. He supposed they were similar in that way.

“You always wake this early?” He asked at last, voice still rough with sleep.

Kankri didn’t look back, indicating he had heard his companion awaken. “Someone has to check if we survived the night.”

Cronus dragged a hand through his hair. Damp. Knotted, much to his displeasure. “Well, good news, I guess.”

A beat. Then Kankri spoke again—soft, like he hadn’t slept in the slightest:

“It didn’t come back.”

Cronus stood and joined him by the water, kneeling to splash some on his face. It was cold, enough to make a pleasant rumble resound softly through his teeth.

“It will,” he muttered. “Things like that don’t just leave.”

Kankri’s expression remained unreadable, though he glanced over at the faint purr sort of noise the seadweller let out, but he didn’t disagree with his words. He resumed staring at something in the mud—a set of small, deep impressions that weren’t there last night.

“Tracks?” Dualscar asked as he carefully stepped closer, once again placing the damp and lent cloak over his own.

Kankri nodded once. “It circled us.”

Cronus’s jaw clenched. “Why didn’t it attack?”

“I don’t think it wanted food,” Kankri said quietly.

That sat too heavy in his stomach to speak on. Instead, Cronus knelt and studied the tracks. Clawed. Lightweight. Large. Too even.

“It’s not hunting. It’s learning,” he said aloud, voice laced with disgust.

“Yes.”

They packed up camp quickly after that. No fire. No tools left behind. Dualscar insisted on taking point this time. The Signless didn’t argue, though he still corrected his posture with kind hands when he moved too loudly, or pointed out poisonous growths in the underbrush he’d have otherwise brushed against. At times those unbearably warm hands would steady him as he moved, always calculating.

Around mid-morning, they found a clearing.

It opened like a wound in the green—a half-collapsed outcrop of stone, water trickling down from a high bluff, pooling below in a spring clear enough to drink from. Vines draped over its edges, and a single sunbeam split the space like a blade of gold.

“Good place to refill,” Kankri murmured, already slipping off his satchel.

Cronus dipped his canteen and drank. The cold water felt almost unreal after days of sweat and tension, immediately soothing the dizzying thirst he hadn’t known he felt.

And then, something strange. The light noise of metal hitting stone.

He looked up and saw Kankri, just a few feet off, standing on a slab of stone that had caught the sun. His sickle lay near the start of the slab, within reach but not too close. The redblood had pulled his sleeves higher, his bodysuit undone at the throat and cut clear to his stomach, exposing that thin grey line of skin. His skin, usually half-hidden beneath fabric or shadow, was marked—faint lines of old scarring, clustered mostly near his ribs and arms. Not the kind you got from a single battle. The kind you got from a lifetime of being hunted.

Dualscar didn’t comment. But he didn’t look away either.

Kankri, noticing, offered no shame as he turned towards him. “This is the first time I’ve been warm without danger in... a long time.”

Cronus grunted. “And we’re calling this ‘without danger,’ are we?”

The corner of Kankri’s mouth ticked up. “Everything is relative.”

The smile was not returned, as it often wasn’t, but he did, very slowly, sit beside him on the stone. Not touching. Just there, soaking up the warmth that indeed was being provided. It was…nice, much as he hated to admit it. He cast his own weapon, similarly aside.

“Do you miss them?” he asked finally. “Your clade.”

Kankri was silent for a long while.

Then: “Every day.”

The words weren’t raw. They weren’t even fragile. They were simply true.

Cronus looked at the spring. “You ever think they might be out here? That they could find you?”

Another pause. Then: “Sometimes, I think everything would be easier to find if I just stopped running.”

The words were heavy.

But Cronus, to his own surprise, didn’t respond with anger or argument. He just leaned back against the warm stone, the borrowed cloak still clinging to his shoulders, and said quietly:

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Kankri didn’t answer.

But he didn’t move away, either, if anything he leaned just a bit closer, their shoulders brushing faintly in the warmth they basked in. The Orphaner realized all at once, that the warmth wasn’t only skin deep, but it was radiating deep in his chest as well.

They stayed near the spring longer than planned. 

It wasn’t strategy. Not survival logic. Just the simple fact that the light filtered softer here, and the forest's breath wasn’t as loud. The predator that circled them hadn’t returned—not yet. And the water, cold and untouched, seemed to sing lullabies to a part of them both that had forgotten how to rest.

Dualscar had taken to stripping his boots and coat at the edge of the spring in the late afternoons. He’d wade in knee-deep, rolling the sleeves of his tunic up past his elbows, dunking his face, letting water cool the places battle and sun had burned. Simply, the seadweller missed the water, missed the cold. The cloak always lay nearby now, folded carefully, not returned.

The shorter mutant watched the first few days with something unreadable behind his eyes. He never said anything. Never asked.

But on the fourth day, Cronus caught him looking. Not just observing— looking , like someone reaching without moving, like someone drawn to the water while standing on the shore.

Cronus didn’t call him on it. He just walked back to shore, water still dripping from his hair and down the bare skin of his neck, gills flared open, and sat beside him on the stone slab. Kankri’s eyes flicked away, but didn’t stay gone for long.

“Have you ever tried it?” The violetblood asked slowly, attempting to sound subtle.

Kankri blinked, like he had been startled. “What?”

“Swimming.”

A small pause. Then the soft and nearly sheepish reply: “No.”

Cronus cocked his head slightly, as if the very thought never occurred to him. “Never?”

“There wasn’t exactly an abundance of clean water where I grew up,” Kankri muttered. “And anyway, it’s not exactly encouraged. I have no gills, no safety net.”

“What, because you’ll drown?” He scoffed at the idea, smiling though. “You can’t drown in a spring this shallow unless you’re trying.”

“Because I’m not meant to enter places that belong to blood higher than mine. Also it may be shallow to you, but in case you haven’t noticed, I am half your height.” His voice was even, matter-of-fact, but his hands were closed too tightly around his knees, knuckles lightly flushed.

That sharp smile faded right off the violetblood’s face.

He stood again, brushing moss and sand from his knees. Then he held out a hand—not commanding. Not impatient. Just… offered.

“Get in.”

Kankri looked at it like it was dangerous, pupils narrowed to points like a purrbeast. “I’ll sink, you know that, don’t you? You’re finally trying to kill me.”

“You won’t.” He smiled again, easier this time, flashing those sharp teeth, amused at how rattled this made the so-called brave leader of a whole rebellion. As if he had not faced anything scarier in the last sweep than water .

“And if I do?”

“Then I’ll pull you out.”

The mutant didn’t take the hand. But slowly, cautiously, he stood.

The spring wasn’t wide, but it was deep enough at the center that even the seadweller couldn’t touch the bottom when he swam there. The edges sloped gently. Kankri stopped at ankle-depth, staring down at the water like it might turn hostile if he moved wrong.

“You’re not afraid of bloodshed, or running, or war,” The violetblood said from further out. “But you’re afraid of this?”

The mutant didn’t respond. He just peeled off his outer tunic with the same reverence he gave to every act of survival—quiet, methodical, unceremonious. The scarring across his back caught the light.

When he stepped forward again, it was with the delicacy of someone crossing a line too long drawn in the sand, though the footing he took was wrong, inexperienced, and he slid in deeper than intended with a panicked sort of scramble.

The cold hitting his skin through fabric made him hiss. “You didn’t say it was freezing.”

“It’s not,” Cronus half-lied, realizing it must be much colder to those lower on the hemospectrum than him, unaccustomed to the icy depths of the sea. 

He held out his hands again as Kankri waded forward. Waist-deep now. Shivering. Breathing fast and too shallow.

“You’re alright,” Cronus murmured. “Don’t fight the water. Let it hold you.”

Kankri glared straight fire up at the violetblood, holding his gaze. “Water doesn’t hold. It devours. You are cruel.”

The seadweller stepped forward despite the biting words, close enough now to guide his hand gently beneath the other troll’s arm, supporting him just enough that he couldn’t slip under.

“It’s not the water,” he said softly. “It’s just… trust.”

The look Kankri gave him then was unreadable. Wet, dark hair plastered to his forehead. The muscles in his shoulders were tight with restraint, but he didn’t pull away.

Cronus lowered him slowly, hand beneath his back. “Lean back. Like this. I’ve got you, Kan.”

“I feel ridiculous,” Kankri muttered, pointed ears nearly flat against the side of his head, face tinting that cherry red from more than the sun. A nickname? Now of all times?

“You look ridiculous,” Cronus agreed, warmly. “But you’ll float.”

He did. Unevenly. But he did, true to the other’s word.

The surface tension caught him like silk. Just enough to cradle the slow curve of his spine. His limbs twitched with the instinct to tense, but Cronus’s large, clawed hand was still there, firm beneath his shoulders. The same hand felt oddly delicate, like he was scared he was going to break the redblood.

“It’s loud,” Kankri whispered.

“What is?”

“The quiet.”

The taller troll didn’t respond to that. He just stayed there, waist-deep in the spring, one hand beneath a troll who didn’t know how to rest, watching the way the light touched his throat and the tight lines around his eyes slowly unwound. The way the water beaded and slowly pulled down the lean muscle built on his torso.

He didn’t let go, and he let himself look for a few moments longer than he needed to for once.

Kankri stayed afloat a short while.

When he finally stood again, albeit shakily, excess water trailing from him in shining golden lines, he didn’t speak. Just clumsily climbed out and reached for the cloak where it lay on the stone and shook it once, careful not to let the wet touch it.

When Cronus stepped out after him smoothly, the temperature difference finally setting in, not just the loss of cold water but the loss of the warm body beside him—it was Kankri who draped the cloak around his shoulders again. No words. Just the simple, silent ritual of care returned.

They didn’t speak the rest of that afternoon, both caught in tasks apart.

Later, when they sat beneath the low curve of twilight in the shelter of hanging vines, Dualscar murmured without looking over:

“You didn’t sink.”

And the Signless, after a long pause, answered:

“No.”

Then, quieter:

“Because you held me up.”

Chapter Text

ACT 10: Currents Beneath Still Water 

It was early. Pale light filtered through the heavy canopy, casting green shadows on the forest floor. The air was already warm, damp with morning breath, and thick with the hum of unseen insects. Wing-beasts—if they were that—cried like distant knives.

Dualscar woke first, but didn’t make a sound.

The mutant was already up and moving.

His cloak had been left folded by his bedside again, forgotten or cast aside. In the growing light, Cronus could see him for what he was underneath that symbol, underneath that pressure of leader—not soft, not fragile, not something precious wrapped in threadbare warnings, but lean and balanced and scarred from a thousand quiet victories.

He had the sickle in hand, that previously concealed weapon that the seadweller had never even thought to check him for when putting him in holding, as he had never assumed him brave enough to fight. He realized then, how easy it would have been for Kankri to hurt rather than aid in any instance on the ship, had that been his intention. The difference between how he was brought up versus what the empire wanted of them all. The blade in his hand caught the multicolor light with every breath of movement as he walked calmly through the overgrowth, cutting a small firebreak ring into the clearing.

Not violently. Not even quickly.

Just… deliberately . Controlled. Precise.

The blade made a gentle, rhythmic sound— hush, hush, hush —as he sliced through the tall wildgrass, clearing a circular bed of soil and scattered pebbles. He crouched at intervals to sweep the shorn stalks aside with his dull clawed hands, checking for dry thatch and small creatures that might ignite when they lit the fire later, or meet the curved edge of his blade.

He moved like someone who had done this a hundred times, lean muscles pulling in his arms at each measured swing. There was a moment where he took a young and small creature into his hands, letting it fly away of its own volition from his very gentle palm before he continued his work.

Cronus watched from where he sat, arms resting on bent knees. Watched without speaking. He didn’t want to break the spell.

There were many kinds of silence in Kankri’s presence. Some of them tense, fragile things ready to shatter. This one wasn’t. This one was full.

Cronus didn’t know what to do with the sudden pulse of admiration that rose in his chest—this warm, unsettling pressure. He’d seen Kankri in pain. In anger. In survival mode. But this?

This was ease .

The mutant looked up once, briefly, red eyes focusing in with what could be considered a deadly precision under any other circumstance but this was just enough to confirm the violetblood was awake and well. Then he turned back to his work, curls sticking to his brow in the damp heat. He didn’t offer words. Didn’t explain himself.

He didn’t need to.

Cronus shifted, elbow braced to his thigh, and said lowly, half to himself:
“You really don’t stop, do you.”

Kankri’s voice came, quiet but dry: “You want to sleep on the harder ground instead?”

“…Point taken.”

He meant it as a joke. But it tasted more like awe.

He watched a little longer.

How careful the slices were. How gentle the strength hidden there.

How nothing about it was for show.

As for the fire: it took them a while to learn how to build one that lasted. The air was damp and the wood heavy with moisture, and Dualscar had scorched his fingertips three times before giving up and watching the Signless coax life from the coals like it was second nature. He leaned and breathed into it in the same way he spoke at the one sermon he did see, like it was alive, like it mattered, like he wanted it there, and so there it was.

They had settled into something like routine. It was not soft. It was not domestic. In a way it was survival, but it was real.

Cronus had taken to fetching ingredients. Kankri would sift through what he brought back, identifying which plants could be boiled, which fungi would kill them, and which roots needed to be roasted to be safe. There was something strangely grounding in it— having to listen to someone else or die.

This night, Cronus crouched beside him, watching as Kankri split open the ribcage of a wingbeast with practiced hands, seeming to be muttering sweet apologies and thanks as its blood stained his careful hands. It was never more suffering than necessary, yet he seemed to feel for the creatures here, the ones he had never quite known.

“You ever think about eating something that wasn’t skittering or raw?” he muttered, nose wrinkled at the sight.

Kankri pointed at him a stripped, tiny bone. “Then don’t undercook it.”

“Harsh.”

“You want parasites? Voidrot to take your sight after I worked so hard to keep it safe?”

The seadweller rolled his eyes between signature twin scars, but took the meat to the fire as instructed. He speared it on a whittled stick and lowered it over the flames. He was careful this time. Watching for blistering skin, not just blackened edges.

The redblood glanced over, watching him. “That’s better.”

“You’re an exhausting teacher.”

“You’re an exhausting student.”

The words lacked bite, as they so often did. When Kankri sat beside him and passed him a leaf-wrapped bundle of something that smelled earthy and sharp—Cronus took it without question.

It tasted like nothing he knew; herby and rich, but it filled the hollow of his stomach in a way that didn’t hurt.

The silence between them had changed. Not gone. Charged.

Cronus could feel it, like a cord drawn taut between them, waiting for something to give.

He caught himself watching Kankri longer than he should. Not for suspicion. Not for threat. Just watching. How his hands moved. How he sat with his legs folded under him, spine straight, as if bracing for invisible pressure. How he seemed to always be carrying something on squared shoulders, how his eyes always seemed dark underneath and he was always up earlier than the seadweller without even trying to be.

“You’re always thinking,” Cronus said once, during one of their more wordless meals. “What is it? Counting how long we’ll last?”

“No,” Kankri said. Then added, “Not anymore.”

A long pause.

“I’m watching how you adapt.”

“Is that supposed to be flattering?”

The Signless looked up at him. Those bright red eyes unreadable. “You want it to be?”

The Orphaner opened his mouth to reply, but the fire cracked sharply, and the lowblood turned his attention back to the pot balanced over the flame, began tending to it with a practiced ease. 

Cronus sat back in the dirt, hands braced behind him with his claws dug into the soil, and stared into the trees.

Something was shifting.

He wasn’t sure what to do with it yet.

They snuffed the fire not long after the shifted dark cycle began, and shared a quiet meal cooked in the embers—small lizard meat rubbed in powdered bark Kankri insisted wasn't toxic, and boiled fruit pulp sweetened by roots Cronus had once mistaken for kindling. It was their final meal of the day.

The wilds had their own rhythms. The seadweller was learning to hear them—more by watching the other troll than listening to him preach his words of nature.

Later, the embers burned low, nearly fizzling out and casting flickering shadows across the small ring the Signless had cleared for them. Cronus found himself sitting close, forearms resting on his knees, gaze half-lidded and unguarded in the dim light.

Across from him, Kankri had finally gone still.

His head rested against the thick root of a tree, curls mussed, expression slackened in the rare softness of sleep. The sickle still sat loosely near one hand, but his fingers weren’t curled tight like usual, they were lax and looked nearly gentle. His breathing was deep, even. Shoulders loose. The kind of exhaustion that meant safety had finally registered somewhere in the bones.

He was close. Close enough to touch, if Cronus just—

The thought halted there.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t let himself reach out.

But his dark violet eyes lingered. Too long. Longer than was reasonable. They drank in the half-lit shape of Kankri’s bare arm, the slope of his collarbone where his bodysuit was undone from the heat, the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Close. Too close . And yet—never enough.

He didn’t know how long he sat like that, aching with the quiet ache of want that had nowhere to land. He hadn’t realized how his chilled fingertips had slowly touched the bare skin of the other’s arm, soaking in the mutant level warmth until Kankri, still half-lost in sleep, stirred. The faintest twitch to his body like he was waking.

A small movement. A sound in his throat. Then—

Cronus startled, slightly at the next words. He felt guilty, ashamed, berated; all at once before the mutant even spoke properly. He wasn’t sure when this…hunger had overtaken all sense in him.

Kankri’s lips curved—not a smile, but something adjacent. “You’re always braver when I’m asleep,” he murmured.

Dualscar didn’t answer. He hadn’t realized how close he’d leaned, how much of his once violent hand was resting on bare skin.

Then came the words, soft, so close to vulnerable they rang in the chest like truth.

“You don’t only have to have your hands on me when I’m asleep.”

It wasn’t a complaint. Just… a permission.

An opening.

And that, somehow, was more dangerous than silence.

He swallowed. His voice, when it came, was barely audible. “You weren’t supposed to notice.”

“I always do.”

A beat passed.

Then Kankri shifted again, curling onto his side near the fire in the softer grass trimmings he had cut earlier, one hand pillowed beneath his head. This time, he didn’t turn away.

And Cronus didn’t dare move again.

He just sat beside him, eyes open in the dark under the guise of being watchful, burning with something he didn’t yet dare name. Despite the lack of name, his body knew that ache.

They were on the pond’s bank again, waist-deep in cool water that had finally become familiar enough that the redblood could stand in it without flailing too much. The swimming lessons had eased to make way for something more ritual, just simply cooling off. A way to pass time. A way to keep close to each other in a desolate space.

In this time together, the violetblood had learned that the Signless had a playful side along with his temper, that was rarely shown in his haste to be on the run, to be protected, to be safe. And equally, in this time, Dualscar had learned just how to push these buttons right to get the reactions he wanted. It was an odd dance they’d been doing for the last couple of nights, to get an unusual and childish rise out of a revered leader. Today was no exception.

Cronus flicked droplets at Kankri lazily, watching them arc through the sunlit air and hit the mutant’s skin. “You know,” he drawled, looking almost bored as he continued, “I’ve never seen you in a real fight, Kan.”

Kankri raised an eyebrow, unfazed at the cold water on this particularly warm day, though his face still reddened at spontaneous nicknames it seemed. “You have.”

“No,” Cronus grinned, shark-like. “I’ve seen you survive. Adapt. Talk things to death. Stitch up wounds. Forage things that don’t kill us. But fight? No. I’m still not convinced you could take me.”

The redblood didn’t smile.

He just waded closer, slow, deliberate.

Cronus watched him approach and felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, even as he smirked. “Gonna prove me wrong, preacher boy?”

Kankri didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

He moved.

No weapon. No war cry. Just sudden precision. One arm hooked behind Cronus’s knee, the other pressed briefly to his chest, and before the seadweller could even react, he was underwater— swept clean off his feet with a gasp and a flail. The move was so quick that his gills had to nearly wheeze open to react to the sudden intrusion of water.

He surfaced coughing, soaked, his mostly well-kept hair a dripping mess. Kankri was already crouched beside him in the shallows, face infuriatingly calm, calculating with those red eyes.

“Point taken,” Cronus spluttered, combing his hair back between those lightning shaped horns as he steadied himself.

“Really?” The redblooded troll said softly, something like pity creeping into his tone despite the lack of movement. “Because I thought you wanted to see a fight.”

Cronus didn’t have time to respond before Kankri surged forward again—this time faster, water sloshing around them as he tackled Cronus back with the full, braced weight of his body. Not cruelly. Not with an ounce of rage, but with a control so absolute it was infuriating . Kankri knew exactly how to shift his weight, to keep Cronus off-balance, to pin a wrist just so without hurting it, dull claws scraping skin without ever breaking it in the absolute measure of control he had.

By the time Cronus’s spine hit the pebbled riverbed, the mutant was over him, straddling his hips to keep him grounded, their faces inches apart as he leaned in dangerously close to gloat. He was right about one thing; the scars cutting through those birthmarks that could be mistaken for stars, the way water droplets bunched on his lashes.

Cronus breathed hard. Not from exertion.

“…You’ve done this before,” he muttered, knowing his stellar and ultimately embarrassing defeat.

“I told you,” Kankri said quietly, those eyes glittering with something playful, hair dripping into his face. “I was taught by people who knew they wouldn’t always be there. That includes how to end something before it begins.”

Cronus tried to twist out from under him, and the mutant rebel let him, just barely—then shifted again, and pinned him better, as if expecting exactly that response.

“You’ve got weight on me,” Kankri murmured, mouth even closer to his, where the seadweller could feel the hot fan of it against his lips. “Height. Reach. Strength, in abundance. But you’ve always relied on strength over sense, timing.”

“Is that what you think of me?” Cronus whispered.

Kankri’s mouth twitched—not a smile. Something more fragile. His voice dropped with it.

“No,” he said. “I think more of you than I should.”

They stared at each other, just as close as they had been and realizing it all at once. Still as stone. The river moving around them like it didn’t care that the air had changed, thick with something between a held breath and a heartbeat.

The seadweller’s dangerously clawed hands were free now. He didn’t raise them.

“You gonna let me up?” he asked.

Kankri looked at him a moment longer, those crimson eyes of his flickering lower for just one second, like he realized where exactly he was finally, then pushed off him by his chest rather than his wrists—not harshly, just enough. He stood, water pouring from his clothes as he grimaced.

“I already did.”

Cronus sat up slowly. The sun glittered on the surface between them. His chest rose and fell with quiet deliberation.

“…I liked you better when you were quiet.”

The mutant cast him a sidelong glance. “You mean when I was easier to underestimate.”

The tension stayed between them. Crackling, unspoken.

Later, Cronus would tell himself it was the soreness of bruises on his back from this moment—not the words or actions—that stayed with him longest, even as the lowblood apologized but claimed he was ‘asking for it.’ 

The sun had crept higher through the alien canopy, casting rays like golden needles through dense green leaves. The forest buzzed with life—chirps, clicks, and the soft rustling of unseen movement. Down a steep embankment and through a narrow cleft in the rock, a spring-fed pool waited, deep and clear.

Cronus had found it days ago, tracing a trail of hollowed insect husks and claw-marks in the bark. He'd said it was safe. Deep, but clean. The spring fed into an underground stream somewhere too small for them to follow. The water was cold enough to burn, and still enough to reflect every ripple.

Today, for the first time, it was Kankri who asked for a lesson.

He gave a grunt of surprise, adjusting the strap of the scavenged and rebel-mutant hand repaired satchel across his shoulder. “You sure?” he asked.

Kankri only nodded. “I don’t want to just watch anymore. Not if I can learn.”

So they went. Down past roots and fern, to where the deeper water waited. It smelled of minerals and green things the seadweller couldn’t quite name. Dualscar stripped down with the fluid ease of someone unbothered by being exposed, tossing his outer layers aside and glancing at the smaller troll with an arched brow.

The mutant hesitated. But he peeled off his clothing as well, folding his cloak carefully onto a rock. He stood at the edge barefoot, his skin pale from lack of sun, marked by old scars and callouses earned in ways most highbloods would never understand, but he knew this one did.

“Don’t think too hard,” Cronus said. “The water's clearer and calmer than most oceans. If you panic, I’ll pull you out. You trust me or not?”

The Signless met his gaze evenly, crimson eyes holding there without wavering for even a single instance as he replied. “I do.”

Cronus blinked. Something faltered in his chest at the way he said it, pulled at his pusher hard—not as if offering a compliment, but a fact. A truth as steady as the moss underfoot.

The water was biting cold. Kankri gasped as it reached his waist, but the seadweller was already moving ahead of him, graceful even in wildness, like someone returning to his element. When the redblood finally stepped fully in, it took everything in him not to flinch and leave immediately.

“Remember you float if you stop fighting it,” Cronus said quietly, voice closer now, guiding hands reaching out. “Your body's denser, sure, but not enough to pull you under unless you want it.”

Kankri’s breath hitched as Cronus’s fingers found his wrist—firm, but careful. 

“Try, like you’re clawing your way up,” the seadweller murmured. “I’ll hold you just in case.”

And Kankri let himself learn, supported and calm. He took to corrections like he took to everything, with rapid success. 

The water cradled him. Cronus's palm stayed beneath the small of his sternum, a tether that kept him from sinking, a safety net even if he didn’t need it. For a moment, all was quiet—just breath, and water, and the feeling of being suspended between drowning and peace.

“I never thought I’d try this,” Kankri admitted as he stood, eyes shut against the sun. “I didn’t think I was meant to.”

“You were,” Dualscar said. “You just didn’t have anyone who could show you.”

Kankri’s voice was soft as he gazed up at the violetblood, admiring how his fins were fully flared and flushed that purple color he too had learned to fear. “And now I do.”

That made Cronus flinch almost imperceptibly. His fingers twitched against Kankri’s sternum, claws catching on skin—but he didn’t pull away.

Then the water rippled. Faint, but sudden.

Cronus’s head turned sharply. “Don’t move,” he hissed, voice low as he pulled the lowblood closer with a surprisingly quiet force. Where the Signless had learned to be quiet on land, this was a predator built for treading water just as silently.

Kankri obeyed instantly, heart in his throat as he pressed in closer to the colder chest to avoid having to noisily swim, clinging almost uselessly for a moment. From the treeline, shadows broke. Not a predator. Not the empire.

Voices.

A blur of color—a glint of metal. Three bodies.

Kankri was halfway to climbing Cronus himself when the first voice called out, frantic and unmistakable, tinged with static beyond his control and that approaching smell of pure burning ozone:

“KK!”

The Psiioniic crashed through the brush, breathless, wide-eyed, and absolutely real, twin horns sparking like there was a threat.

The water shook with Kankri’s lurch forward as he messily clawed towards the edge of the pond, strong enough to pull himself out despite all his prior panic. Dualscar could almost be proud if not for the circumstances.

“Psii—! How did you—”

They collided at the edge of the pool, soaked through as the taller troll grabbed him by the shoulders, the sheer force of relief shaking both of them. Behind him, others followed— the Dolorosa, expression unreadable but eyes shining; the Huntress, wide-eyed and stunned, but a sharp smile splitting her face in her glee.

Cronus backed away slowly and silently, watching the moment from the shallows like a ghost. Kankri’s laughter—real, unguarded—broke something in him.

The mutant clung to his clade, surrounded by ones who cared for him, overwhelmed and alive in a way Cronus hadn’t seen him since recent days.

He turned.

He was almost gone—half-dressed and headed for the brush—when that voice stopped him.

“Wait.”

He did.

Kankri, dripping, barefoot, and still half in shock, stepped away from the others. The others let him go, although slowly. 

“Aren’t you coming?”

Silence.

The Psiioniic stood tense in the background, multicolor eyes narrowed. The Dolorosa said nothing while the Huntress held her tail awkwardly, looking away. 

Dualscar finally looked over his shoulder, sharp and scarred profile half in shadow. “You’re safe now. That was the goal.”

“That was your goal,” Kankri said, stepping closer, soaked and shivering but steady in both his voice and his steps. “Mine changed.”

Dualscar didn’t answer at first. The forest buzzed. Behind Kankri, his clade watched—uncertain whether they were witnessing something private or something sacred.

Kankri’s voice dropped to something softer. “I trusted you. I still do.”

The Orphaner’s shoulders tightened, jaw set. “Don’t.” His voice was quiet. Tired. “Not like that.”

The Signless took another step forward, water still dripping from his hair and it clinging so messily to his constellation freckled face. “Why not?”

“Because you’re not like me,” Dualscar said, tone harsh and cold. “You weren’t made to break things just to see if they’ll forgive you.”

“You didn’t break anything,” The mutant said, slowly stepping closer with one palm reaching out, delicate like the seadweller was the one who was breaking apart.

But when Dualscar finally turned, there was something in his eyes—sharp, glittering, desperate to retreat. “I almost did . Every day with you, I kept waiting for it to happen. Kept expecting to ruin it. I still might.”

The wind moved through the trees. For a moment, the world held its breath.

Then the redblood said, softly but surely, “I never felt safe before you.”

That stopped the highblood cold, blood running impossibly colder.

And for a heartbeat, it looked like he might come back, that brief flicker of longing. Might speak. Might touch his shoulder. But instead, he pulled the wet clothing tighter around himself, like armor, and stepped back.

“You’re surrounded by people who love you,” he said, voice quieter now. “Don’t waste it trying to love someone who doesn’t know how to hold it.”

He turned away again.

Stunned, for once the mutant didn’t follow this time.

He just watched as that silhouette disappeared between the trees, like a wave pulling back into seafoam—leaving the air sharp with salt and something unspoken.

Chapter Text

ACT 11: Close Enough to Break

In the days that passed, he’d gone too far. He knew he had gone too far, somewhere deep down, like the stars that guided him in the sea had disappeared entirely. He did not know how long he kept pushing forward.

The trees grew tighter the deeper he moved, slick vines crossing like sharpened claws above his head, and the light grew dim beneath the thicketed canopy. The Orphaner had stopped tracking direction long ago. Just kept walking. Kept breathing. Kept not looking back.

Branches tore at his clothing and skin, beading thin lines of violet on his arms. The heat clung to his gills, choking, overbearing, and moist. Every step forward was a refusal to turn around. He wouldn’t go back—not until the knot in his chest stopped tightening every time the Signless looked at him like that.

Like he saw something worth saving.

The longer he walked, the more the air was slick and sweet with decay, damp with the weight of things that had died underfoot and grown again. It clung to his lungs like guilt.

He didn’t know where he was going.

Only that he needed to be away .

From the camp they had made together. From the sound of the Signless’s breath at night. From how close it had all started to feel, like their skin knew each other’s temperature before either of them could speak it aloud. How badly he had wanted to close the distance between them, despite how warm the air had felt and how much warmer the mutant was. 

Branches slapped against him. Roots caught his boots. But still he moved, his clothing growing heavier with sweat and sap, his hands and arms scratched raw from pushing through the underbrush. He didn’t want to linger and admit just how much he wanted to hear that droning, preaching voice, calm and gentle, advising him what was dangerous and what was not.

He stumbled down a slope slick with moss, catching himself on a root—but not before something beneath the underbrush lashed out. A sting—not deep, but sharp. His hand jerked away. A shallow gash cut across his knuckles, quickly turning violet-blue with a tinge of pink.

He swore. Checked for movement. Nothing.

Just the silence of something old and dangerous hiding where it couldn’t be seen.

He kept walking. But the world started tilting, that wound started burning.

At first it was just the heat. He told himself that. Sweat beading beneath his collar, the buzz of insects growing louder. But then his foot caught again, on a stone he should have seen. Then the shadows began to double. Then his vision narrowed to a tunnel, and everything swayed.

He dropped to one knee.

The earth spun.

His hand trembled as he reached for a tree trunk to steady himself—but it slid off uselessly. His fingers were already going numb. His pulse rang in his ears, louder than it should’ve been. He could taste iron. Something acrid. Wrong.

“…Shit.”

His body gave out, slow, heavy, and graceless. He hit the ground hard enough to startle the canopy’s creatures above into startled flight. The forest around him pulsed with heat. He tried to rise again and managed a breath instead. Another heartbeat. Then nothing.

The world went black.

He didn’t know how long it was, but the Signless had found him on the fourth day.

He had followed prints through mud and snapped branches for miles , sleeping in trees when he had to, rationing food he barely had, and drinking from rain-caught leaves to stay upright. He’d marked bark with dull claws when his own sense of direction failed him.

And when the tracks grew erratic—stumbling, unsure—he knew he was close.

He found Cronus collapsed in the shade of a leaning stone, one hand curled against his chest, the other twitching faintly, his gills fluttering weakly from heat or fever or both. His clothing was lightly torn. His breathing was shallow.

The cut on the seadweller’s hand had turned an ugly shade of violet-black.

Kankri was already at his side, pulling open the small cloth satchel he’d packed days ago. Antiseptic herbs, soaked gauze, water. He chewed a root bitter enough to make his teeth ache, crushed it into a paste, and smeared it gently over the wound. He cooled Cronus’s skin and gills with damp moss. 

The seadweller only stirred when he felt that something heated was pressing against his forehead, and dulled claws—not pain, not vines—brushed against the pulse in his neck.

“-nus,” someone was saying. Soft. Urgent. His hatchname that few more than one used.

He opened his eyes slowly. Shapes above him, flickering. A blur of red. A hand stroking back sweat-damp hair. A warmth that had no right to soothe him in this heat.

“…We can’t keep meeting like this,” Kankri murmured. “With one of us hurt.”

His tone was dry, but his hands were steady—so much steadier than he had any right to be after days of chasing a man who wanted to disappear.

Those careful hands were pressing a salve into the wound that had clearly already been dressed once before, then wrapping the arm in careful strips of cloth torn from his own bodysuit, striped in that mutant red. He didn’t look angry. Just tired. Worried in that quiet way that always caught Cronus off guard, when this mutant said it like it cost him nothing.

Like it wasn’t still breaking something open in the quiet between them.

“I told you to stay with them,” Cronus rasped. His throat burned.

Kankri smiled—small. “And miss this charming reunion?”

He checked his work, then placed a foraged water skin near Cronus’s lips. “Sip. Not too fast. It’s not just dehydration—something poisonous got you. Barbed plant, I think.”

“…In the brush,” Cronus muttered. “Didn’t see it.”

“I did,” Kankri replied. “When I came looking. You were lucky it wasn’t a fangbeetle or a deathspore vine. Even this one’s going to take a few days to purge. I’ve already started the antivenin.”

Cronus blinked slowly. “You… found me?”

“Tracked you.” Kankri didn’t elaborate on how long, or how far. Just added, “You bleed loudly.”

A pause.

Then—quiet again. Kankri didn’t pull away. His impossibly warm hands still rested near Cronus’s wrist. His knees folded in close with his posture built around martyr-like protection, as if he was ready to bear the weight of the very sun in order to protect him, no matter how long. He hadn’t let go since he found him.

“…I meant what I said,” Cronus muttered, barely audible.

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“I know that too.”

Another pause.

“But I’d rather drag you out of the forest than stand by and pretend I don’t care whether you come back.”

Cronus turned his face away from the admission, but didn’t resist when Kankri adjusted his position—settling the seadweller’s head in his lap, shielding him from the sun filtering down in burning spots. Kankri ran fingers through his damp hair, slower now. Gentle. He didn’t move from Kankri’s lap. He didn’t flinch when fingers brushed the side of his temple again. He didn’t ask for space.

“You should sleep,” the Signless said. “Your body’s got work to do. I’ll keep us safe here.”

Cronus didn’t reply, but his breathing began to slow as his body finally gave in to the pure exhaustion and knowledge of a safer space.

Kankri stayed with him through the night.

When the forest screamed around them and the beasts howled from beyond the trees, he didn’t look up. Just carefully fed Cronus, gave him water, eased his temperature down, and whispered steady things into the dark.

They were safe. For now.

He would make sure of it.

Cronus woke to warmth.

Not sweltering forest heat— warmth . A hand at his temple. The weight of woven fabric drawn up to his shoulders. Something earthy in the air: smoke and moss, crushed herbs and sun-warmed bark. A fire burned low beside them, smoldered into near-invisibility, but its embers painted that rebel leader’s face in soft, moving light.

He must’ve passed out again. For hours. Maybe longer.

His throat felt raw. His limbs heavy. But his mind—his mind was floating just close enough to clarity to know he wasn’t alone, that he was safe .

“You’re still here,” the violetblood rasped, barely louder than a breath.

Kankri didn’t look up right away. He was sharpening that sickle made of scrap metal into a better edge—quiet, calm, methodical. The fire flickered in his already red eyes.

“Of course I am,” he murmured. “You scared the hell out of me, running off like that, you know.”

“…I didn’t mean to.” The seadweller blinked slowly. “Didn’t mean to get cut with something dangerous. Just… needed space.”

“I gave it to you,” Kankri said gently, still working the blade of that long trusted weapon of his. “You just didn’t stop running.”

Cronus managed a faint, crooked smile despite his exhaustion, how it weighed heavy on him. “That sounds like me.”

“It does.”

A pause. The wind pushed softly through the trees outside, making the leaves hum.

Then—a snap. A wrong noise. Too deliberate.

Kankri froze in his motions, muscles drawn taught.

He looked up sharply. Cronus saw it happen in real time—the way his whole posture shifted, from caretaker to something protective and wired with quiet, violent instinct. Without a word, Kankri eased the blade into his belt and rose to his feet. He had never seen him quite like this.

“Stay down,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“What is it?” Cronus muttered, eyes narrowing, trying to rise.

Kankri reached down and touched his chest, just briefly—firm, not unkind. “Still poisoned. Still healing. Don’t be an idiot.”

Then he was gone—into the dark brush surrounding their little firelit hollow. His light and already quiet footsteps vanished as quickly as the light had when Cronus passed out days before.

The forest exhaled. Then it screamed.

A low, inhuman snarl echoed out—a beast, big and far too close. Something territorial and hungry. Cronus pushed himself upright with a hiss of pain, one arm trembling beneath his own weight. He heard the struggle more than he saw it—the crash of undergrowth, the snarl of something wounded, the sound of someone being knocked off their feet.

His heart raced.

“Kan—!”

Before he could try to stand again, a new sound split the air. Not a creature. A piercing sort of growl. Familiar. The Signless. This was not the talking sort of event, it seemed. It was a noise far louder than he assumed the mutant was capable of as he was usually the type for softspoken sermons, firm scoldings, delicate words spun into something prettier than they were.

Then another sound joined it—higher-pitched, warlike. The unmistakable crack of kinetic force slamming something into a tree, the intense smell of the entire planet’s ozone converging in.

Silence fell fast and heavy, the same as the smells disappeared.

When the brush finally parted, Kankri pushed through the trees back into view, a scratch torn across his arm, mutant blood smearing the cloth like warpaint. He looked breathless. Wired. Alive. Otherwise unaffected.

Behind him, two shapes emerged briefly through the foliage—tall, one glowing faintly in red and blue, the other crouched low like a hunter; only yellow lights of glowing eyes could be seen.

Then, just as quickly, they disappeared again, as if he had never seen them at all.

Kankri knelt beside Cronus, panting. “You’re alright?”

“You’re bleeding,” Cronus said hoarsely. “What the fuck was that? Are you—”

“Something territorial. Bigger, no, heavier than it looked.” He winced just slightly, in a sadder sort of way. “But we got it.”

We.

Cronus blinked at him. “That was them, wasn’t it.”

Kankri didn’t answer directly. He only reached for his bag, pulling it closer to dig through the poultices and salves inside. “They’re not far, but they won’t intrude. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“They said I needed time.” He glanced up, those scarlet eyes soft and kind. “With you.”

Cronus’s chest tightened in that all too familiar sort of way. He couldn’t look at him for long.

“So they found you .”

“They were looking long before I knew I was lost.”

He wrapped his own wound tightly. The fire cast more shadow than light now, and the shape of him bent in close again.

Cronus reached out without thinking—fingers brushing Kankri’s knee, grounding himself in the only warmth that hadn’t left. Kankri stilled, but didn’t pull away.

“You shouldn’t have come after me,” Cronus murmured. “Should’ve stayed with them. With safety.”

“I am safe,” Kankri said. “When I’m with you.”

The silence that followed wasn’t comfortable, but it was full. Charged. Full of everything they weren’t quite saying, and everything they’d already said with bruises, stitches, and the cracked silence of bodies dragged through poison and back again.

Kankri glanced toward the trees. “They’ll be nearby, close enough to help should I need it. You’ll meet them properly soon, but they’re giving us space.”

Cronus let out a breath that felt a lot like surrender. “We don’t deserve that.”

“Maybe not,” Kankri replied. “But it’s ours anyway.”

He leaned back, resting his weight on his hands. Cronus followed the motion with his eyes. Tired. Feverish. But something in him was cooling, too.

The world was still trying to kill them.

But not tonight.

Tonight, there was only this clearing. This fire. This moment.

And the steady presence beside him that, somehow, kept coming back. Kept coming back even in his admittedly half-baked attempts to escape it. Even like this, in his pained hazes, he couldn’t help the pang of guilt at the darkness returning underneath the mutant’s eyes; like he couldn’t afford to sleep again with something to guard.

The world returned slowly. Pain first. Then heat.

The seadweller tried to move. Couldn’t.

His body ached from the inside out—slow venom chewing through his veins, burning at the joints. The fever had broken once. Then risen again. Time was difficult. Sound more so. Wind through the canopy. Something pacing nearby. Something snarling.

Then—voices. Not many. Just one. Steady. Familiar.

Kankri.

The sound wasn’t panicked, but it wasn’t calm either. It was taut. Clipped. The way someone speaks when they’re standing between danger and something they can’t afford to lose.

Another sound: movement. The impact of something heavy thrown to the ground. A growl. A cut-off cry. Leaves rustling hard.

Cronus turned his head fractionally. His skin felt wet. His throat was dry as sand. He caught only fragments of the clearing—moonlight on roots, the shadow of Kankri’s silhouette with arms raised, unarmed. Still fighting.

The beast—he couldn't see it fully. But it had bulk. Claws. Spines maybe. Something not meant for close quarters.

Kankri didn’t back away. He stepped forward instead, pressing his weight into a low crouch. Defensive stance. Familiar.

Cronus blinked once, slow. And the memory came back unbidden:

A river. A joke. A blur of movement.

The moment Kankri had taken him down without breaking a sweat. No weapon. No fury. Just quiet knowledge of where to place his hands, his body, his intent.

He’d thought it was a fluke. A lucky move. He’d told himself the lad wasn’t built to fight, not really.

But now—watching from the edge of lucidity, Cronus saw it for what it was.

Kankri had always held back.

He hadn’t needed to overpower Cronus that day. He could’ve humiliated him, hurt him. But he’d chosen not to, he’d chosen to pull his punches and inflict as little harm as possible. The same way he did with those teasing words of his.

And now, with no one watching, Kankri fought like a thing born to it. Like he belonged like this.

He dodged sharp, efficient, even. Redirected weight. Used leverage over brute force. At one point he grabbed a branch from the ground—not to strike, but to jam between the beast’s jaws as it lunged. It snapped the branch in half, but the moment of pause was all Kankri needed to slip behind it and shove its center of gravity sideways. The beast went down hard, thrashing. It didn’t rise again.

Not from a killing blow.

But because others emerged.

Just as Cronus's vision blurred again, he caught the glint of psychic multicolor—the crackle of telekinesis flaring across the clearing, lifting the beast off its feet and pinning it to the earth like it was nothing . A shadow blurred through the trees, fast, precise, wielding speed and fury like a blade.

Kankri didn’t flinch when they arrived.

Didn’t call out.

Rather, he turned toward Cronus, shoulders still braced. As if he expected to be attacked from every side, and wasn’t afraid to meet it.

Voices murmured in the dark. Familiar ones. A woman. A younger voice. The faint echo of golden laughter.

Then—they faded.

Not far. But away. Giving space, that’s what their leader had said.

Kankri dropped to his knees beside Cronus, one hand immediately checking his temperature, the other reaching for the damp cloth across his brow. Cronus winced.

“You’re safe now,” Kankri said.

His voice was low. Frayed at the edges in something like exhaustion.

Cronus forced his mouth open, rasped: “You’re terrifying.”

Kankri let out a breath that could’ve been a laugh. Or could’ve been relief.

“You said I couldn’t hold my own,” he said gently, brushing strands of damp hair from Cronus’s brow, unafraid for the backs of dull claws to meet the equally frayed edges of scars too deep.

“Didn’t say I didn’t like it,” the violetblood mumbled, eyes fluttering. “Remind me not to spar you again.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, though the mood may strike me.” His tone was kinder, warmer again.

A pause, and Kankri’s touch gentled again. The tension drained from his shoulders. Slowly. Carefully.

“…I don’t like seeing you like this,” Kankri murmured, eyes down. “Half-dead.”

Cronus’s vision was swimming. But not before he caught the shape of Kankri’s expression—half a smile, half grief.

“Then stop saving me,” he managed.

But Kankri didn’t answer.

Just stayed there, kneeling beside him in the wilderness. Guarding him. Watching over him. A sentinel, a ghost, a promise.

He woke to the sound of something boiling — not just the hush of heat against metal, but the purposeful rhythm of someone tending it. Kankri, no doubt. Cronus stirred, grimacing at the stiffness in his limbs, the low fever still lingering just beneath his skin.

Everything ached. Everything tasted of iron and rotten undergrowth.

He made a sound, half cough, half breath. That was enough. Kankri turned at once.

“You’re awake,” the mutant said softly, relief settling into his voice. “That’s good. You’ve been drifting in and out for a while.”

Cronus swallowed, throat dry. “You stayed.”

“I always stay.”

That should have been simple. But Cronus felt it — the weight behind those words. The truth he didn’t know how to hold in his hands without breaking it. 

Kankri moved closer with a water flask, kneeling beside him with those near silent actions that felt so painfully familiar. “You’re still recovering. Drink, but slow.”

Cronus obeyed. The first sip burned going down. Still, he drank more than he meant to — not just because he needed it, but because Kankri’s hand was steady on his back and holding him there.

They sat like that for a moment, and Cronus found his gaze drifting, tracing the line of Kankri’s wrist, the scar near the knuckle, the way exhaustion softened his brow but never quite dimmed his attention.

“I don’t—” Cronus started, then stopped.

Kankri didn’t fill the silence. He just waited, watching.

Cronus glanced away. “I don’t… really know how to do this.”

Kankri tilted his head. “Do what?”

“Say thank you. Or… acknowledge that you carried me out of the brush with your own two hands and didn’t drop me in a ravine even though I—” His mouth twisted into a frown. “—probably deserved it.”

“You didn’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I didn’t say you hadn’t made things harder. I said you didn’t deserve to be left.”

Cronus looked at him then. Really looked. And he saw it again — the unflinching, unfaltering way Kankri always showed up, even when he didn’t have to. Especially when he didn’t have to.

“I’ve been a righteous bastard to you,” Cronus muttered. “And you keep coming back.”

“I’m not ‘ coming back .’ I never left.”

That silenced him entirely. 

Kankri reached for the cooling pot and poured a small cup of whatever he’d brewed— sharp, green-smelling, astringent, and grounding. He handed it over without comment.

Cronus took it. Cradled it in both hands, but his eyes were elsewhere.

“I didn’t think anyone would ever do what you did,” he said quietly. “Come after me. Not just because they should; out of some sick or twisted case of obligation, but because they wanted to.”

“You don’t have to thank me for surviving,” Kankri replied. “But if you want to… you can stay. And keep trying.”

Cronus met his eyes, violet meeting that terrifying red. There was no judgment there. Just the open, terrifying possibility of being known.

“I don’t know what I can give you,” he said, honestly.

“I don’t want anything you can’t give freely.”

A beat passed.

“Then I’ll try,” Cronus whispered. And for now, that was enough.

The moonlight caught in the fronds of the makeshift shelter, ghost-pale and dappled. It was built to shield them better, keep the violetblood cooler, and keep them safer. Somewhere far off, something called through the trees — not a predator, Kankri knew. Just sound and life. Still, his body remained tense from the threats unknown that paced the forest.

Cronus was breathing evenly beside him now, deeper and steadier than before. The worst of the fever had broken. That should have brought relief.

Instead, Kankri sat with his knees drawn up, arms loosely clasped around them, staring out toward the dark underbrush where he’d found Cronus crumpled two days earlier, barely conscious, pale, cold as death.

The memory twisted in his stomach.

He’d seen blood before. He’d seen death. But this—this had felt different.

The redblood looked back at him now, at the faint lift and fall of his chest under the blanket. There was a smudge of ash on his jaw from the earlier fire, a healing welt just beneath the collarbone. Bruises and scratches everywhere, but he was alive.

Still, Kankri hadn't let himself rest, not even for a moment.

He was still in that liminal state between alert and undone — too wired to sleep, too drained to move.

Without meaning to, he’d inched closer sometime during the night, close enough that his shoulder now nearly brushed Cronus’s arm. Just watching. Listening.

“I’ll try,” Cronus had said earlier.

Kankri hadn’t answered aloud, but the words had sunk deep into the space beneath his ribs.

And now, with no one awake to hear the words, he whispered back:
“I was so afraid I was too late.”

He blinked hard. Leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he carried on, softly.

“I kept thinking I’d find you already gone. That I’d have to carry your body out the way I carried you living. And I didn’t know if I’d—” He cut himself off, jaw tight with a tension he had been holding for far too many days and nights.

“You infuriate me,” he murmured, voice low. “You test every ounce of my patience. But I never wanted to see you broken, not like that. Not over something I could have prevented if you had just let me.”

There was no reply, of course. Just the soft hush of night and Cronus’s breathing.

Kankri let himself fold a little further down, forearms resting on the edge of the bedroll. His head bowed. The weight of too many hours without sleep finally took him.

When Cronus next stirred — drawn awake by the faint shift of air and the mutant warmth beside him — he found Kankri fast asleep, slumped partway across his makeshift bedroll, the discarded cloak acting as a blanket. His brow creased faintly even in rest, one hand near Cronus’s own, splayed wide where a few of their fingers overlapped.

The other was still curled around the hilt of his sickle, half drawn as if to save even a few moments of time in an emergency.

Even asleep, he’d been guarding him.

Cronus stared at him for a long time. Then, slowly, he reached up and brushed a few strands of hair back from Kankri’s face, the pointed tips of his claws barely grazing his temple.

Kankri shifted at the touch, into it even, but didn’t wake.

In a voice so quiet it was barely breath, Cronus murmured:

“You don’t have to only touch me when I’m asleep, isn’t that something you said to me?”

Then, unsure what to do with the surge in his chest, he lay back, eyes on the canopy of leaves above — and let himself feel it. All of it. That the Signless was a tether, and for all that the seadweller could think, is that he was the sailor lost at sea, needing that blinding northern star to bring him home.

Chapter Text

ACT 12: Frayed at the Edges

It had been just over a week since Cronus had walked again, full strength still distant but returning in pieces. Kankri had made him walk the ridge lines and helped him gut their dinner. The days were hot, the nights brutal. But they were surviving together again in that easy, comfortable quiet. 

Cronus had watched Kankri from the edge of their makeshift shelter: bare arms, bodysuit unzipped entirely and tied at the waist, cutting back brush with a sickle in calm, practiced arcs. He hadn’t noticed he was staring until Kankri turned, eyes glinting with dry amusement. He stopped his motions, shifting his weight into something comfortable and with ease as he called out to the violetblood.

“You’re supposed to be foraging.” He said, voice playful.

“I’m admiring,” Cronus shot back before thinking. “I mean. Assessing your technique.”

“Oh?” Kankri asked, stepping closer with the sickle still in hand, blade down. “And how do I rate on your war scale there, captain?”

Cronus gave a slow grin, feeling more like himself than he had in weeks at their playful bantering. “Could use polish. Spar with me instead.”

Kankri arched a brow, but said nothing. Instead, he reached for the bright red sash at his belt—one he'd often used to bind foliage together or hold his sickle in place—and stepped forward.

“I’m not going to break you again,” he said quietly, but his voice was firmer, the voice of a rebel leader. “But I’ll prove a point.”

“What, that you’re faster?” Cronus asked, scoffing.

Kankri didn’t answer. He moved suddenly—smooth, practiced—and in one breathless instant, the sash was over Cronus’s eyes, drawn taut, tied just enough to obscure his sight in all of that forbidden candy red without hurting.

Cronus tensed—but didn’t resist.

He felt breath near his cheek, a ghost of a smile if he had ever felt one so close.

And then: tap .

Right on the top of his head, between those jagged lightning horns in so meticulously styled hair.

Kankri stepped back, barely suppressing the smile in his voice. “Too slow.”

Cronus pulled the sash down, and away from his eyes, blinking at him.

“You think this is fair?” he asked.

“Real threats don’t fight fair.” The mutant was still smiling, head still cocked to the side in that charming way of his that made him so much less of a threatening shape in a world where things were made to kill, things like the Orphaner.

“You’re not a real threat.”

Kankri’s smile faltered, just slightly. “You’re still alive, aren’t you? I’m not a threat to you. ”

They stood there too long. Too close.

The forest hummed with sound. Heat hung like breath between them.

The seadweller swallowed, unsure what to do with the space—so he filled it by stepping in closer, leaning down just slightly to close even more of it. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” The mutant asked, like he already knew the answer.

“Get so close.” The seadweller fell for the bait.

Kankri hesitated, looking down for a moment before looking back up at him, holding his gaze steady and unafraid. He closed even more distance, pressing their noses in close enough that the violetblood could feel the hot fan of his breath. “I don’t know. You let me.”

A pause. Kankri looked down at his own hands. “Maybe I’m trying to prove something. Maybe it’s... selfish.”

Cronus’s throat tightened, gills lightly opening against the hot air in his sudden struggle to breathe. “It’s not…selfish.”

“I shouldn’t want this,” the redblood added, almost as if speaking to the trees. “It’s not the point of any of this if I am to…”

“What if it is?” Cronus asked, barely above a whisper. “What if—” But he couldn’t finish it. Couldn’t let it rise.

Kankri met his eyes. He looked exhausted and sun-drenched and torn open. Like he had been gutted right there, for all the world to see.

Then he stepped back, voice clipped. “We have to start the fire before dark.”

Just like that, the thread was cut, but neither of them forgot how close they’d come to speaking those few words that would have drawn them closer.

The frayed fabric of a candy red colored cloth was still in Cronus’s hand, and he gazed at it for just a moment before he found himself being drawn to keeping it rather than handing it back. The Signless watched him do it without saying a single word, instead turning to gather supplies for the fire.

After their meal—shared in companionable quiet, a silence dense with all the words they still hadn’t said—they began to settle in for the night. The fire crackled low, casting soft shadows against the leaves they’d hung for shelter, their makeshift camp slowly surrendering to dusk.

Cronus watched Kankri move about the space, smoothing the bedroll he'd woven days ago, laying his outer cloak aside with careful hands. He looked tired. Not just from the day’s labor, but from the weight he always seemed to carry with such calm endurance.

Something in Cronus twisted at the sight, it was too familiar for the both of them it seemed. He cleared his throat, not meeting Kankri’s eyes.

“You don’t… have to sleep all the way over there.”

Kankri stilled in his motions, red eyes glancing towards him.

Cronus gestured vaguely with his wide, war worn hands toward the patch of softer grass beside his own bedding, then looked quickly away, feigning his indifference. “I mean. There’s more room here now. If you want.”

It wasn’t graceful. It came out like a throwaway comment, gruff and too casual. The mutant heard it for what it was.

A quiet offering. A door nudged open.

Kankri didn’t smile, didn’t tease. He only nodded—slow, thoughtful—and crossed the small space between them. When he lay down, close enough that their arms might brush if either of them shifted, Cronus felt tension he hadn’t realized he was holding bleed slowly out of his shoulders. Something about that quiet proximity that he had missed while he was ill and recovering. Something he needed but would never say, that steady warmth radiating off the mutant in something that could not be natural.

They lay in stillness for a moment. The fire popped. Insects had started their chorus. The world outside breathed around them, vast and untamed.

Kankri’s voice was soft, but it cut clean through the quiet.

“You never let yourself ask for anything.”

Cronus didn’t answer right away.

“I don’t like needing things I can’t keep,” he said, voice rough with sleep or something close to it.

Kankri turned his head toward him, eyes open in the dark. “I’m not a thing.”

“I know,” Cronus murmured. He did. That was the problem.

They fell silent again. Not distant—just resting in the tension that lived between honesty and restraint. And somehow, even that felt like closeness, warm like the body heat of the one next to him.

Later, long after Kankri's breathing evened out, Cronus lay awake beside him, staring at the dim shapes of branches overhead.

He didn’t reach for him. Didn’t dare. But the presence—real, uncanny warm, steady beside him—settled something jagged in his chest.

It was terrifying, how much lighter it felt.

Not to be alone.

Not to be unguarded, exactly—but to be seen and not flinch away from it.

He closed his eyes. Not to sleep, not yet. Just to hold the moment in place. Just to remember what it felt like.

Just in case he lost it again.

The forest was still in the gray hush before dawn, dew painting every leaf with pale silver. Birdsong stirred, hesitant and scattered. A breeze passed low through the trees like breath.

And Kankri woke to warmth.

Not the usual press of the fire still smoldering, not the close, insulating heat of the shelter they’d built—but something else. The company of someone else.

He’d shifted in his sleep. He knew it even before he fully opened his eyes. The weight of his own body was tipped inward, his knees curled slightly toward the center of the space where Cronus lay. And there, not quite touching but close enough to feel the shape of him, was Cronus himself—still asleep, brow smoothed in a way Kankri rarely saw.

His first instinct was to pull away. Give space. Apologize, maybe, even if it was unconscious.

But he didn’t.

He stayed there, breathing slow, the quiet between them almost reverent. A part of him wanted to move closer still, to press his forehead lightly to Cronus’s shoulder, to close the distance not just of bodies, but of everything else they'd kept apart.

Instead, he reeled back just slightly and studied Cronus’s face in the early light—the dark lashes against his cheeks, the subtle tension even in rest. The two jagged scars that crossed his face that could only ever remind him of their meeting. The man had only just begun to let himself ask for anything. Kankri wasn’t going to be the one to take it away again.

So he stayed. And after a few minutes, when Cronus stirred slightly and murmured something incoherent in his sleep, Kankri exhaled—quiet, warm.

They were both still learning what this was. What it could be.

And for now, this quiet nearness was enough.

Then, softly, barely audible, Kankri whispered—not a sermon, not a lecture, just truth:
“You could have reached for me.”

He didn’t expect a reply. Didn’t need one.

But he thought, maybe, Cronus’s breath caught just slightly at the sound of his voice, and he was right. A dull, unused sound rattled from the seadweller’s chest. With the pitch, he could nearly mistake it for a growl, but it could never be named for something so gruesome with how it sounded like a siren call built with careful hands just for a certain mutant. Kankri could not help the crackling, answering purr from his throat as he rested there as he drifted back to sleep in their quiet morning.

Cronus woke slowly, the way you do when you’re not quite ready to be awake.

For once, he wasn’t dreaming of salt or steel. No screams, no fire, no ship creaking. Just the low thrum of something soft and steady, vibrating faintly through the space between them.

He blinked.

At first, he thought it was a sound in the forest. A low insect hum, maybe, or some beast’s quiet chittering in the brush.

But no.

It was closer. It was—

He turned his head, and there he was.

That all too familiar mess of dark curls, dull horns, and mutant heat. Curled just a little closer than he’d been when they laid down, one hand relaxed near Cronus’s elbow where his dull claws lightly touched the cooler skin of the seadweller, the other was tucked beneath his own chin. His breathing was deep, slow, even—and unmistakably threaded with a gentle, unconscious purring.

It was quiet but rhythmic, like a heartbeat not quite his own. Cronus froze, like if he made too much noise it would stop. Like if he shifted too quickly, the spell would break.

Kankri was purring. At him.

The revelation hit him harder than it should’ve. Not because of the sound itself—it was subtle, unassuming—but because of what it meant. How safe someone had to feel, how unguarded, to make a sound like that in their sleep. Pale or red sorts of safe.

He stared.

The urge to reach out was immediate and terrifying. To trace a line from Kankri’s temple to his jaw, to memorize the softness of him like this. Cloakless. Open.

But Cronus only watched. Lips parted slightly. Breath caught between sharp teeth.

He didn’t deserve this.

He didn’t know how to stay still in a moment like this without ruining it.

Then, barely a whisper of a voice—Kankri shifted, and murmured something that might’ve been his name. Not a command. Not a complaint. Just: Cronus. And with his shifting, he nestled in closer to the violetblood’s chest, forehead just lightly brushing against the space.

He exhaled, slow and quiet, not to wake him.

And when the next sound from Kankri’s throat was another soft, involuntary purr, Cronus let his eyes slip shut again.

He didn’t touch him.

But he let himself drift closer. Just a breath's width. Close enough to feel it, the sound vibrating faintly against his ribs where the redblood’s forehead was pressed against his sternum.

“…Stars, you’re gonna kill me,” he murmured under his breath. For the first time in what felt like his entire lifespan, he meant it in the sweetest possible way.

When Kankri stirred again, he did so slowly, like someone who had—for once—allowed himself a full night's sleep. No frantic breaths. No flinch at waking. Just the soft flutter of lashes against his cheek and a low sigh, like the weight of rest still clung to his bones.

Cronus was already awake, still lying on his side, watching the canopy above them filter morning light in slats through the trees. He didn’t speak. Didn’t even turn toward him. But he could feel the nearness again—how Kankri had gravitated even closer sometime in the rest they shared and had not, notably, moved away.

There was a silence between them that felt dense with meaning. A fragile truce. Or maybe something gentler than that. Something not needing a name.

And then, faintly, like it had returned with the rising sun, that soft thread of purring resumed again—Kankri’s, quiet and instinctive. Unthinking.

Cronus didn’t comment. He didn’t smirk or tease or even glance sideways. He just lay still for a beat longer, listening.

And then, so low it could have been mistaken for the rumble of distant thunder, his own purr answered.

It was rougher. Lower in pitch. Less a sound from the throat than something dredged up from the chest, from marrow, from the dark pressure of old oceans. A seadweller’s purr —weathered and strange, echoing more with memory than ease. A sound born not of comfort but of survival, of storm-drenched longing and quiet depths.

It was the closest he could come to saying I heard you last night.

Kankri stilled for a moment. Then he stretched, careful not to touch the violetblood beside him—but not moving away either.

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t make a face. He only let the sound continue between them, two rhythms converging at the edges, like tide meeting shore.

They sat up slowly. Shared a half-stale piece of dried rootfruit between them, passed wordlessly back and forth. Kankri examined the perimeter of their camp without speaking; Cronus snuffed the remnants of the fire. Their movements were easy. Familiar.

They didn’t speak of sleep. Or closeness. Or the strange, unnameable way they had softened against each other in the night.

But when Cronus reached to hand him a slice of rindskin, Kankri’s fingers brushed his deliberately, holding for just a second longer than necessary. Warmth meeting cold, like blood meeting the iced sea.

And neither of them pulled away.

When the seadweller was ready long after their shared meal, when the light filtered through the trees just so; the Signless led him to a clearing to meet his clade. The group landed in silence, the makeshift shuttle creaking into the dry soil like an old ship dragging its bones to port.

Kankri disembarked from the treeline first, shoulders square, jaw tight. The others were already waiting. The Psiioniic stood with arms crossed over his chest, trying to look unimpressed, but the way his eyes caught on Kankri betrayed the worry he hadn’t spoken aloud. Beside him, the Dolorosa—still watchful, still too wise—stood with her cloak fluttering faintly in the dusty wind. The Huntress, younger and feral-eyed, leaned against a rock with one foot up, chewing on something dried and stringy.

All of them looked past Kankri to the figure stepping out from the foliage behind him.

The silence turned heavier, tenser.

Cronus didn’t wear his coat. He’d left it behind, perhaps to show he wasn’t here as the Orphaner. But his posture was still carved from armor: spine straight, eyes sharp, hands too still.

Kankri stepped aside and let them see each other fully.

“This is him,” Kankri said, not looking at the seadweller. “The one who helped me survive.”

The Dolorosa tilted her head slightly. “We’ve heard many names.”

“I’ve worn many,” Cronus said. His voice didn’t crack. “But not here.”

The Psiioniic stepped forward first. “You’re the one who captured him. Who burned that city.” It wasn’t a question. Not really.

“And dragged him across the galaxy,” added the Huntress, eyes narrowed.

Kankri didn’t flinch. “And kept me alive, day after day, in the wild. Protected me. Waited out the fever. Nearly died of poison trying to keep me safe.”

That quieted them, but not for long.

Cronus stepped closer, keeping his movements slow. “You don’t owe me forgiveness. I wouldn’t expect it. But I came to return him to you in one piece.”

“And what do you expect instead?” the Dolorosa asked gently. “A new name? A new place among us?”

“No,” he said. “Just a moment. And a choice.”

The Psiioniic eyed him warily. “You have one hell of a way of showing up for a talk.”

Cronus huffed faintly. “I didn’t come here heavily armed.”

“No,” the Huntress muttered, “just blood on your hands.”

That stung more than he let show.

Kankri moved between them. “He’s not the one who razed our people. Not anymore.”

“Does that erase what he was?” Psiioniic asked.

“No,” Kankri said quietly. “But we don’t erase. We change . Or we try. We’ve all done things we regret, have we not?”

There was another silence, one less bristling.

Finally, the Dolorosa stepped forward. She looked Cronus over like one might appraise a broken sword, deciding whether it could be reforged. Then she nodded once.

“If he’s earned your trust,” she said softly, “he’ll have our civility. For now.”

Cronus gave a slight bow. “That’s more than I deserve.”

They shared a fire that night.

Kankri sat beside his clade again for the first time in what felt like lifetimes. The Huntress kept throwing glances at him—appraising, like he might vanish. The Psiioniic had stopped glaring at Cronus, but only barely, leaning in close to their leader to whisper things. The Dolorosa passed around rations and warm tea without a word.

Cronus lingered outside the firelight, perched on the edge of the gathering like a beast no one had told to sit. Looking for all to see, an outsider amongst a family. A killer among civilians.

“You can come closer,” Kankri murmured, when the mutant passed near the logs.

Cronus only glanced at the others. “You sure that’s wise?”

“No,” Kankri said, “but I’m tired of being wise all the time. I am often the first to throw a chance out, even with the other two.”

They sat side by side after that. Cronus’s knee brushed Kankri’s, just briefly. A signal showing he was present. He was here.

“So,” the goldblood said eventually, too loud, “you just live in the woods now? You two playing hive in a poison pit?”

“No house,” Cronus muttered. “Just shelter. Food. Fire. Breathing.”

“Sounds like peace.”

“It was the closest I’ve ever had.”

The Psiioniic didn’t answer, though his jeering stopped for a moment.

Later, when the others drifted into sleep, Kankri and Cronus stood at the edge of the shuttle, watching the horizon bleed with stars.

“You could come with us,” Kankri said. “We’re going farther now. East. New city. The message matters more than ever.”

Cronus looked down at his hands. “And you think they’d let me stand beside you?”

“Eventually,” Kankri said, with a rare softness. “They’ll follow if I lead.”

He turned toward him. “And what do you want?”

Cronus looked at him long and quiet, and said, “I want you to live for more than just this.”

Kankri smiled, faint and sad. “That’s not what I asked.”

A pause. Then—

“I want to see you again,” Cronus admitted.

“You will.”

Cronus handed him something: a small piece of silver, etched with a sigil. Imperial, but altered. Not allegiance—protection. Something to get them by. 

“This will make your routes safer. I’ll do what I can to reroute patrols. Nobody will stop you from moving.”

Kankri turned it over in his fingers, eyes stinging at the gesture. “You’re using what’s left of your name to protect us.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

Kankri stepped forward. For a moment, Cronus thought he might say something reckless. Something dangerous.

But instead, he said, “The revolution doesn’t wait for red-flushed feelings.”

Cronus gave a hollow smile. “No. It doesn’t.”

Kankri touched his wrist, guiding it closer to turn it over in his hands, looking fond at even the lightest touch as he spoke again:

“I hope it finds room for them anyway.”

Briefly, he gazed at the seadweller as if he had more to say, and then he stepped back.

His clawed hands trembled only when the rebel leader’s eyes glanced away from him.

The psiion’s vessel hummed low, patched together with stolen tech and defiance. Kankri’s clade stood in a loose half-circle near the edge of the clearing, where the canopy broke and the stars showed their sharpest. They had returned in fragments—the Psiioniic with engine grease across his cheek as he pulled it closer with telekinetics and sheer will, the Huntress dragging half a solar powered unit on her back, and the Dolorosa silent with something in her emerald eyes she hadn’t spoken aloud as she watched them all work.

Cronus stood off to the side. Not part of them. Not anymore.

“I hotwired something fast,” the goldblood had said, grinning sharp with dual fangs like he used to. “It’ll carry us out of here, but there's something else. One of your bronzes picked the wrong fight. He took your old warship for a spin. Didn’t make it out of orbit, heard the whole thing went up in a horrible blaze.”

Cronus didn’t speak. His fins fluttered slightly with the weight of the implication, of knowing exactly what bronze that had been. Of knowing that was far less than an accident.

“They think you're dead,” the Psiioniic added, voice lower now, kinder. It didn’t suit him at all. “You could walk away from all of this. Back into the Empire. Clean. Start over.”

It was a kind offer, by their standards. Not a test. Just a hand held out like a careful offering.

He looked at their leader then.

The redblood stood beside the Dolorosa, the only lusus he had ever known as if seeking her comfort, arms loose at his sides. A bruise darkened his temple from the fight they’d weathered days ago, a remnant he hadn’t commented on. He didn’t say a word now either. But he looked back at Cronus, open and steady, as if he knew already.

Cronus turned toward the ship instead of answering. Stepped forward once. Touched the metal hull, still warm from travel.

Then he said, “I’ll walk you to the edge of their systems. You’ll pass safely. I’ll give you my clearance codes, ones only the dead would still know.”

The Dolorosa inclined her head in a slow nod. The Huntress muttered something like thanks, stroking her tail in her hands like she wanted to say more.

Kankri didn’t move.

“I’m not going back,” Cronus said, eyes fixed on the distance now. “Not all the way. But I can’t stay here with you either. Not yet.”

Kankri stepped forward. “Then where does that leave us?”

The silence that followed wasn’t angry. It was heavier than that. It was mourning a future neither of them could yet reach.

“I told them I hated you,” Cronus said quietly. “I told them I left you for dead.”

“You didn’t.”

“No.” He almost smiled, but it didn’t quite form. “And they’ll figure that out eventually.”

Kankri’s breath hitched—just once, like the pain of it surprised him.

“You’re going to disappear again,” he said. “Into their cracks. Into their shadows.”

Cronus nodded. “For now. I can do more good watching from the dark.”

“And later?”

“Later,” Cronus repeated, “I’ll find you again.”

Something flickered in Kankri’s throat, a sound swallowed. He stepped closer, near enough to touch, but didn’t reach out.

“You don’t need to vanish just to protect us.”

“I don’t know how to stay without ruining everything,” Cronus admitted. “But I can clear your path.”

A pause. The forest wind shifted.

“I still have work to do,” Kankri said then, his voice soft and deliberate. “I’ve spent too long on the run. There are camps gathering again. Old safehouses. Old voices. I have to go to them. I have to speak. Even if you stayed…”

“I know,” Cronus interrupted, quiet. “The revolution doesn’t wait.”

Kankri looked at him, pain threading behind his resolve. “And neither does the Empire. They’d slaughter us both.”

Cronus’s throat worked, gills flaring at the strain. “It hurts.”

“It does,” Kankri admitted. “But this was never just about what we wanted.”

The psion’s ship hissed low as it primed its engines. The Huntress called for supplies to be loaded. The Dolorosa touched Kankri’s arm, but he didn’t step away.

The threadbare cloak around his shoulders fluttered in the exhaust.

Cronus reached for him then—not to pull him close, but to rest one hand briefly on his shoulder. The pressure was cool like his blood. Familiar. Grounding to them both.

“You’re safe now,” he murmured, echoing the words he’d once heard whispered to him.

Kankri nodded, eyes never leaving him. “You still don’t understand,” he said, quiet and aching. “It’s never just about safety.”

But he didn’t ask him to stay.

And Cronus didn’t ask him to wait.

He simply turned, his own sharp cape flicking like seafoam behind him, and walked up the boarding ramp as the goldblood prepped for launch. When the door closed behind him, the clearing felt colder.

Kankri stood unmoving, the ship’s heat fading from his skin, until only the sounds of the wild remained.

He stared up at the empty stars where the vessel vanished—and whispered, to no one:

“I’ll be here.”

Chapter Text

ACT 13: Something Like Prophecy

It had been sweeps since that exchange on that poisonous planet. Sweeps since he had seen the Orphaner who carried the world like the weight of an ocean on his back.

The sermon was short, as they always were these cycles. Too long and the guards got suspicious. Too fiery and the audience vanished before the second stanza. But Kankri had learned to wield brevity like a blade. He spoke sharp and sincere with each word, cutting through the crowd like a practiced knife.

He stood atop a broken crate in the shade of a collapsed arcade, sun trickling through gaps in the ruined stone. His voice, always calm, carried across the alley like incense. Cloaked in patched red, dust clinging to his cuffs, he looked less like a prophet and more like a man who hadn’t slept inside for weeks. Despite this, the light of the moons from Beforus always crowned his cloaked head like they belonged there.

They listened. Oh, how they listened.

The crowd—ragged, wandering, hungry for something that might free them—stood still.

“Do not mistake survival for surrender,” he said. “We do not lower our eyes because we lack defiance, but because we still need to see where we’re walking. We keep going. We keep going.”

And that was all.

No names. No open rebellion, not here. Only the kindling of it. Oftentimes that was enough.

By the time the moons were setting, the square had emptied. Kankri’s clade would be listening for patrol patterns nearby, giving him space. Sometimes he needed it. Sometimes they knew better than to ask why.

He stepped down, feeling the dull ache in his legs. His boots scraped soft dirt and old cobblestone. The wind stirred the hem of his cloak as he turned into the side alley. A shortcut. A memory.

The quiet here had a weight to it, like breath held too long.

And then—he wasn’t alone.

A shadow parted from the wall right at the edge of the alley.

The Signless froze.

He knew the way that cape moved, even in half-light. Knew that silhouette, tall and careless, shoulders square like a soldier even when he stood still. Knew the quiet set of his jaw, and how his hand hovered just a little too close to the rifle at his hip—not because he wanted to use it, but because it had become a reflex.

“Long time,” Dualscar said, voice low and quieter than he had any right to speak.

The rebel mutant didn't smile, only visibly ghosted his fingers over his sickle’s hilt as he surveyed what had changed since the time they had shared. The Orphaner was taller, horns and all, though the grey streak in his hair had thickened too.

“You’ve been following me.”

The Orphaner didn’t deny it. His eyes swept the alley behind the mutant in front of him—measuring distance, assessing exit routes. Then they returned to scarlet.

“You’ve been careless, your guard low,” he murmured. “Preaching with your hood down. Getting close to cities under Empire surveillance. You’re not untouchable. Your words will not save you each time.”

“And yet, here you are,” the redblood said, gaze steady as he lifted his chin in a form of defiance; as if it did anything to close the gaps between their heights. “Did you come to stop me?”

A beat passed. Then two.

The seadweller stepped forward. Slow. Deliberate.

For all it was worth, Kankri didn't flinch as the Orphaner reached out, something unreadable in his face—and then, in one smooth motion, tugged the edge of Kankri’s hood over his head and tapped the top of his head as if he was securing it, bordering on slightly too gentle and lingering.

The same gesture. The same quiet, playful cruelty from the forest, all those sweeps ago. A time when poison had nearly taken him, and too-warm hands like these had pulled him back.

Kankri pulled the hood back, baring dulled teeth in fury. “You don’t get to do that now.”

“I know.” Dualscar’s voice was rough around the edges, like he didn’t speak softly anymore, but was trying hard to remember how to. “But I wanted to remember how it felt. To see you and not be...” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You’re here because of the increased bounty on my head. They sent you here.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ll let me go, without putting up a fight.”

A pause. “Yeah.”

Kankri’s hands stayed at his sides, fingertips slowly leaving the hilt of his sickle, the instinct forced from him no matter how staged the fight might’ve been. “Then why draw your weapon?”

“I had to make it look real,” Cronus said. “They’re watching, always. I came in under cover—different name, different rank. They think I want the mark.”

“And do you?”

“No,” he said, more quickly than he meant to. “But I wanted to see you.”

For the first time, Kankri looked pained.

“Then why not come sooner?”

“I’d ruin it. And I think I still will.”

The Signless stepped closer. The alley was narrow. His voice quieted. “You’re still pretending to be someone you're not. Still cloaking everything in shadows. You don't need to save me.”

“I wasn’t trying to save you,” Dualscar replied, smoother. “I wanted to remind myself what it feels like to stand in front of someone who isn’t afraid of me.”

They were close now. Too close.

Kankri’s breath ghosted the front of Cronus’s cape, measuring the thickness of the armor. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“I know,” Cronus said. “That’s what terrifies me, always did.”

Kankri reached up, and for a moment, it looked like he would touch him. But he didn’t. His hand fell onto the thick metal instead, tracing the low ‘w’ shape of it like it would help him find the words that he so rarely was lacking in.

“This isn’t the last time,” he said.

“I know.”

“You can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep finding me like this and not actually killing me.”

“I know,” Cronus said again, voice softer now as a broken, oceanic purr ravaged his chest. He moved to step behind the Signless, leaning down to where his chin nearly met the mutant’s shoulder as he leaned over him, shaken with the force of his own fondness hitting him in this desolate alleyway as the twin moons rose above them. “But I wanted to remember the first time we met. I wanted to see if it still... hurt.”

“Does it?”

He didn’t answer.

Instead, he turned and pulled away. His cape whispered against the walls as he stepped out of the alley, back into the crumbling city. No parting words. No dramatic exit. Just another shadow fading into a world that wasn’t his anymore.

Kankri stayed in the alley for a long time after that. Eyes closed. Breathing in dust and the fading scent of salt and something like a home he could never have.

They found him in the back of a crumbling sanctuary—one of the old temples repurposed into a warehouse for salvaged metal and old food stock. The candlelight barely held against the high stone walls, but it cast enough glow to find him kneeling in the center, signature hooded cloak pooled around him like bloodied silk.

His hands were folded in his lap. His expression unreadable.

He looked like a statue left too long in the acidic rain.

The first to reach him was the Psiioniic, his diamond.

“KK.” His voice cut through the quiet, half-breathless, half-angry. “Where in the stars did you go?”

Kankri blinked. Slowly. “I needed space.”

“That’s not space,” the goldblood snapped. “That’s vanishing. You could’ve been taken. You could’ve—” He caught himself, raking a hand through his wild, too long hair. “You scared the shit out of us.” He was stressed enough that his static laced lisp caught on a few words.

Behind him, the Dolorosa arrived with a softer sound—her steps gentler, but her face thundercloud-dark. She didn’t scold, not yet. She knelt beside him and placed a hand to his shoulder, searching his expression.

Kankri flinched, barely perceptibly.

That was enough to deepen the lines around her eyes. “Tell me what happened.”

There was a silence. Then, without looking up, Kankri said, “He was here.”

“The Orphaner?” the Dolorosa said softly, her tone bridging like words were fragile in themselves.

“Cronus,” Kankri corrected, voice harsher than he often let it be with her.

The Huntress came in last, bounding up the steps with her jaw tight. “I told you I saw a strange ship. I told you. You didn’t believe me, Purrim. Has that same metal thing he gave Kankitty!”

“Enough,” the Dolorosa murmured. Her voice was still calm, but it had a weight to it that quieted the room.

They looked at their leader, waiting.

He still hadn’t moved.

“He let me go,” he said at last. “He always was going to.”

The psiion’s voice came out raw: “Why even come, then? Was it a warning?”

“It was… something else.”

No one spoke.

The Huntress crouched nearby, her gaze narrowing. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Then why do you look like you’ve been stabbed in the heart?”

That silenced the room again, for a short time.

“I saw the ship,” Kankri said, voice low. “I saw him. He touched my hood. Just like before, pulled it up.” His fingers reached from his lap to trace the edge of the fabric, looking distant.

Psii exhaled like he’d been punched. “You let him get that close?”

“He didn’t come as an enemy.”

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t one, KK.”

The Dolorosa’s hand tightened at the mutant’s shoulder. “Did he say anything? Threaten you?”

Kankri shook his head. “He looked tired. Older. But still trying to be clever about how he hides himself.” He looked at his goldblooded moirail then, his voice strained. “Captor—I think he wanted to remember me the way I used to be. And I wanted—” His voice broke. “I wanted to believe that maybe he remembered the right parts.”

The Huntress shifted uneasily, grimacing. “He left?”

“Yes. Without a fight.”

“No such thing when it comes to him,” The psiion muttered, but he didn’t press the issue. Not now. Not with Kankri looking like that. That hollow. He never looked like that.

The Dolorosa stood, her expression unreadable. “Come,” she said softly. “You don’t have to talk more now. But don’t sit here like the world ended. It hasn’t.”

Kankri stood slowly. The candlelight made him look unsteady, pale in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with something deeper—something torn open again.

As they stepped out into the city’s broken night, the Psiioniic moved close, just enough that their shoulders brushed.

“You don’t have to tell me everything,” he said under his breath. “But next time… don’t disappear. Please.”

Kankri nodded in a silent promise.

Above them, the sky was the color of storm-soaked ash. The city curled in on itself like a secret, like a wound. And Kankri, though surrounded, felt the echo of hands he still remembered—ones that once held him like he was something that mattered.

He didn’t look back.

But he carried the weight of it forward with one thought in mind.

The inn was cheap and nameless, tucked between two crumbling tenements with a flickering sign out front. Dualscar had chosen it precisely because it was forgettable. Because he didn’t want to be found.

The bed creaked under his weight as he sat down, peeling off the shoulder plate of his armor and letting it clatter to the floor. The door clicked shut behind him. He let out a breath—sharp, jagged at the edges, like he’d been holding it since the alley. Perhaps he had been, he realized as he ran a hand through his gel-styled hair.

He didn’t notice the presence in the rafters of the room until it moved.

Not a sound, but a shift in the air. A change in the tension around him—like something had come uncoiled.

He stood up fast, eyes narrowing—his hand reaching instinctively toward where he’d laid his rifle, it was already in his hand with a clawed finger on the trigger before the voice spoke.

“It’s just me.”

The voice was soft. Familiar. Unmistakable.

The Signless dropped down in front of him, standing near the edge of the window Dualscar knew for a fact was closed when he left, cloak still damp from the harbor mist, shadows clinging to his shoulders like old grief.

The violetblood gawked at him, looking back up to where he had dropped from and how far it seemed for a troll of such a small stature. “How—”

“You forget I was taught to walk quiet, to move, to survive.”

“You didn’t walk quiet.” His voice cracked on the lie. “You waited. You broke in .”

The mutant’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I knocked . You were too far in your own head to hear it.”

They stood there, across the dim room from each other, the silence stretching like silken string between two hands as the Orphaner slowly placed the rifle back in its rightful place at the bedside. The weight of their last meeting still pressed between them: alleyway shadows, the pull of weapons, the memory of teeth, of a purr that sounded like rolling thunder.

“I should be angry,” Dualscar said eventually. “Or impressed.”

“I’ll take either,” Kankri replied, stepping forward just once. Not enough to close the distance. Just enough to make it known that he wasn’t leaving, the stubborn thing that he was.

“You tracked me.”

“You ran.”

The Orphaner laughed softly. Bitter. “I didn’t run.”

“No?” Kankri tilted his head. “Then what do you call leaving without saying goodbye? Without a word?”

“I thought it’d be easier.”

“For you?” Kankri’s voice didn’t rise, but it cut cleaner than the sickle concealed at his waistband. “Or for me?”

He turned then—toward the bed, the discarded armor, the bare state of the room—and something in his furious expression softened.

“I know why you did it,” he said, more gently. “And I’m still here.”

Cronus sat down again on the edge of the bed, but this time slower. Wearier.

“I don’t know how to keep you safe. Not if I’m with you.”

“I’m not asking for safety.” Kankri stepped forward, and now there was only a few feet between them. “I’m asking you not to vanish, to be where I may find you.”

He knelt then, not out of deference—but as if it made the space more honest. Leveled them even though it dropped the mutant a good foot under the height of a grown seadweller, even seated.

“You said we always meet when one of us is hurt.” His eyes searched Cronus’s face. “So let me find you when you’re not. Just this once.”

For a long moment, Dualscar didn’t move, and just gazed at the mutant that knelt before him like he was something worth kneeling for in a space with no titles.

And then, finally, he let out a breath that had lived in his chest for far too long.

“I wasn’t hiding from you.”

“But you weren’t coming toward me either.”

That landed. That stuck.

Cronus looked away. Then, slowly—hesitantly—reached a dangerous hand forward, resting it just lightly against Kankri’s shoulder, on that threadbare cloak he carried always. Not a grab. Not a pull. Just simple, cool contact.

“…You’re soaked,” he murmured.

“I know.” Kankri’s eyes were darker, like rust, in the lamplight. “I didn’t want to wait until morning.”

The rebel leader with a bounty higher than his age slowly rose to his feet, removing that worn cloak that carried water like sorrow, and hung it up to dry next to the Orphaner’s own cape. That family-enriched violet with luxury gold stitching. He turned to Dualscar in that same dark bodysuit before he spoke again.

“I ordered food for us both, under your alias— hope you don’t mind.” And there it was, that playful gleam back to those red eyes that dragged at that ache in the seadweller’s chest. That mischief he had come to miss so much in these sweeps apart, without having ever realized it.

“No, I don’t mind.” Dualscar replied evenly, in spite of the way the look of the other troll in the room had his blood pressure pounding, watching him approach further. “I’ll pick it up.”

Kankri took a few bold steps forward, eyes alight like he knew all the secrets of the universes combined, and rested one warm hand on the Orphaner’s broad shoulder. He seemed to wait just a moment there, before leaning in to press their foreheads together in a simple press neither of them could get away from. It was a catharsis for them both, sweeps of problems melting away at a simple contact of hot meeting cold.

The closeness was its own kind of gravity. A silent agreement between two people who had spent too long pulling in opposite directions before deciding to just allow it to pull the way it was meant to.

When the lamps were turned out when Dualscar returned with the meals; Kankri stayed. He had taken off his boots by the door, lying on his stomach on the bed. In his hands was a book he was absently flicking through, inn-supplied in one of the boring shelves. He glanced over a freckled, pale grey shoulder when the violetblood entered, but otherwise didn’t stir, just waited for a hand delivered meal.

The meal they shared was quiet but proximal, reminding Cronus of far too many days and nights of care and gentle hands.

He didn’t touch him again. But he slept within arm’s reach. He stayed overnight, curled in his temporary bed just close enough to touch.

And in the hush before dawn, neither of them dreamed of war.

The sky outside the inn window was pale with early sun, the harbor beyond still half-shrouded in fog. One of the wingedbeasts cried low and distant over the water—nothing like the sounds of anything from anywhere else. Just the long stretch of a new day that hadn’t yet chosen its shape.

Kankri was awake before Cronus.

He didn’t move at first—just laid still on the thin blanket he’d dragged near the foot of the bed, back turned but spine still aligned against the chest of the seadweller he had stayed with. The feared admiral of war held no fear here, just a rebel leader as close to his skin as he could. Savoring that he was radiating a heat steadier than either of them. The quiet was a fragile thing. The kind you didn’t want to break by breathing wrong.

He could feel Cronus’s ocean chilled body behind him. Feel the arms that held him closer and tighter. Hear the slow rhythm of his breathing. Steady. Alive.

Kankri closed his eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

He didn’t want to leave.

And yet, he’d already begun to untangle himself from this moment. Had to.

The revolution didn’t wait. Not even for hearts laid bare in rented rooms.

When Cronus stirred—slow, bleary-eyed, his coat still half-draped over the bedframe—he saw Kankri already pulling his cloak back over his shoulders. Already tightening the satchel straps. Already stepping back into the shape of the man the world needed, not the one Cronus had let stay beside him for a night.

“You’re leaving,” Cronus said, voice still rasped with sleep.

Kankri paused. He turned just enough to meet his gaze. And for a moment, his expression cracked— something unguarded flickering through.

“I have to,” he said.

Cronus sat up, pushing one hand through his hair. “You always do.”

“I stayed,” Kankri said gently, “longer than I should have.”

“That’s not the comfort you think it is.”

They stared at each other. Not angry. Just tired. Just… reluctant.

Kankri stepped closer again—just long enough to rest a hand on Cronus’s shoulder again. Warm. Steady.

“You know I’ll find you again,” he said.

Cronus gave a low huff of a laugh. “Is that a threat?”

“A promise.”

There was a beat—held, suspended—where either one of them could have said something more. Reached for something reckless and red and real.

Neither did.

Instead, Kankri leaned down. Pressed his forehead to Cronus’s again for the second time, a whisper of closeness that neither of them could name.

He hesitated for just a moment, before dipping just low enough to press a warm kiss to the seadweller’s cheek in parting. It was the faintest little ghost of a caress before it was gone entirely.

“I’ll carry this with me,” he said.

Then he turned, slipped through the door, and was gone before the warmth of him had faded from the sheets.

Cronus sat alone in the quiet.

He didn’t follow.

But he didn’t stay in the city long, either.

Because paths that split still sometimes curve back around.

And there was work left to do.

Cronus watched the door close behind Kankri and did not move. Not for a long time.

The silence he left behind felt colder than any ship hangar, heavier than the sea's crushing weight. The moon was barely beginning to rise beyond the harbor windows, staining the sky in bruised pinks and purples—too lovely for how this felt.

Their goodbye had been soft. Close. A breath apart. And still not close enough.

He could still feel the brush of Kankri’s sun-warm fingers against his skin, the hesitation before he stepped away. The ache in his chest had no name he would speak aloud. It wasn’t a wound, not like the ones he'd taken in battle. It was the kind that throbbed afterward, when the blood had dried and the armor had cooled.

He moved eventually, out of habit more than need—gathering the few things he carried, keeping the rest. Not much left to pack when you never planned to stay.

By the time he stepped onto the streets, the city was beginning to stir. Dockhands shouting, merchants calling, imperial banners flapping high in the wet wind. He pulled his coat tighter around him and adjusted the saber at his side. He felt the eyes that trailed him. He always had.

He made it to his ship with no interruption.

The crew—new blood, sharp-edged and silent—saluted him as he passed. He said nothing. They didn’t expect him to. That was the role: grim, untouchable, just enough mystery and menace to silence dissent. He’d worn it before. He could wear it again.

But behind the closed door of the captain’s quarters, he allowed himself to sag—just for a breath. Just long enough to let the cold mask slip.

Kankri had found him in that inn like he always did. Like he always would.

And Cronus had let him.

Let him in. Let him near. Let himself feel, just long enough to forget the war they were both still in.

They’d shared no promises. But something in the look they exchanged had been heavier than any vow.

I’ll see you again.

He hadn't said it aloud, but he would. And he would make it true.

If that meant letting Kankri go first—meant pretending to pursue him with blade in hand and fire in his wake—so be it. If that was what kept the rebellion safer, if that was what kept him safer…

He could be the Orphaner again.

Or at least, the shadow of him.

Let them whisper his name in fear. Let them flinch at the sound of his boots. Let them believe he would tear down every rebel settlement with his bare hands.

So long as they never realized he would burn the whole empire before he let it touch him again.

He stood now in the silence, staring out the viewport toward the sea that surrounded this city. The water stretched long and wide—so much like the world Kankri had first pulled him into, with vines and teeth and soft-spoken courage that washed over him like cold water.

He missed it.

He missed him .

And he would miss him again, for however long it took.

But for now, he turned from the window. Pulled the mask fully back on. And stepped once more into the role the world expected him to play.

Because protecting Kankri meant pretending not to care.

Meant being exactly what they feared him to be. Meant becoming something terrible—so he could preserve something fragile.

Even if he had to do it alone.

In another weeping city, entirely too long later; the crowd scattered when he stepped onto the plaza. That was how Kankri knew he was already too late.

The air stank of scorched banners. Smoke still lingered in lazy curls above the cracked stones where a rebel outpost had once marked safe harbor. Now: ash. Now: silence. Now: soldiers who didn’t speak, standing in too-perfect lines, waiting for orders that followed those that had already been carried out.

He found the trail in the aftermath. Rumors. Footprints. The way frightened locals wouldn’t meet his eyes but couldn’t stop whispering:
Orphaner’s returned.
Like a seabeast, all teeth and shadow.

He found the feared Orphaner ticks later, outside a shattered doorway. Alone, lit by the last red dregs of sunset, overlooking the water. His cape flapped violently in the wind that carried embers of a fallen city in it.

For a moment, Kankri just stood there and watched him.

He saw the mask immediately. The straight shoulders. The stillness. The precision of presence. He knew it well. It had kept him alive once.

But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t him.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Kankri said quietly.

The seadweller didn’t turn, gaze fixed on the water. “Then why are you here?”

“Because you don’t fool me,” he said, voice low and firm. “Not anymore.”

Dualscar turned at that—sharp-eyed, bristling with pretense—but the Signless didn’t flinch.

He stepped closer, boots echoing over broken stone, past where a banner had been burned into the dirt.

“You told me once that they only taught you to command,” he said. “But you chose to protect, chose to be kind towards me in a world that did not make you. Even on that first day you realized what I was, you chose to turn a blind eye because I was kind to you.”

The violetblood scoffed. “I chose to terrify them.”

“You’re doing that now. And it’s costing you.”

Another step closer. Those crimson eyes didn’t leave his. Not once.

“You’re not the Orphaner. Not really. Not anymore. And I think you know that.”

Something flickered in Cronus’s face, then. A crack at the edges. A shadow behind his eyes, deeper than any war wound.

“Then what am I?” he asked, the question too raw to be rhetorical.

The Signless looked at him. Really looked. The same way he had in the underbrush, half-hidden in vines, when Cronus had been too fevered to keep the act up. The same way he had when they’d shared silence on jungle beds of leaves and twined breath in the dark, the same way he had when he had found him half dead in an alley all those sweeps ago.

He reached forward, careful, and touched the edge of his sleeve. The warmth from the touch settled into the seadweller’s clothing quickly and ghosted over his skin with something that made his chest ache with something ugly like want.

“You’re the one who always returns to me,” Kankri said softly. “Even when it hurts.”

Dualscar looked down, voice low. “Like a cruel star that guides me on rough seas, you are, but cruel never suited you.”

“I’m afraid it never quite has.”

Kankri stepped back—not far, but enough—and let the silence stretch again, this time thick with things understood.

“You don’t have to stop being feared,” Kankri added, quieter now. “if it helps protect us. Protect you , but don’t lose yourself in it along the way.”

And with that, he turned and sat by the oceanside in a city that was left burning. They sat in silence for longer than they should, the mutant close enough that his shoulder brushed the other’s chilled arm. Neither of them pulled away, too exhausted by their circumstances to bother fighting. It wasn’t until the Signless felt that static lacing up his spine in knowing his clade was close enough to warrant leaving.

When he left, he didn’t wait for Dualscar to follow.

He didn’t have to, he knew the air between them had shifted again, that it bore the weight of something new. Of something changed.

The Signless didn’t need to keep tabs, he knew they would meet again. Another place. Another time. A place that didn’t reek of war. A time when they were not constantly pulled apart by unseen forces.

Chapter Text

ACT 14: The Edge of Shorelight

The city was ancient—weatherworn and salt-stung, its harbor coughing rust into the air like a breath held too long. Stone buildings loomed like tired sentinels, their faces worn with centuries of sea wind and whispered rebellion. The Signless stood at the edge of the square, his voice hoarse from hours of preaching beneath the brittle light of the twin moons. He wore the same threadbare cloak he’d traveled with for sweeps now, patched at the shoulder from a city in flames, wet at the hem from the creeping ocean fog. Sand clung faintly to its edges, mixing with dust from dry sermons and quieter deserts.

He hadn’t eaten since the cycle before. He hadn’t slept longer than a nap in three.

And yet the crowd gathered—small, quiet, aching. Not for blood, but for change. For something that didn’t turn them into weapons, or workers, or waste.

“Even if you forget the cause,” Kankri said, steady despite the rasp in his throat, “your hands remember. Your spine remembers. You were built for more than servitude. You were not born to be silent.”

A young jade wiped tears from her cheeks. A rust murmured thanks in a voice like smoke. Kankri stepped back from the makeshift platform with a slow breath that shuddered on the way out. His clade was scattered again—keeping distant for safety, even now. Too many eyes, too many quiet disappearances. This part of the work was his alone tonight.

He was turning toward the alley, his feet already tired from the long night, when he saw it.

A ship.

Sleek. Unmistakable.

No insignias. No banners. No armed guards. But still—he knew it instantly, the way your body knows a scar even after years of healing.

It was violet like dusk, its form pressed into the harbor mist like something remembered more than seen.

His ship.

He blinked. Once. Twice. His breath caught and didn’t quite return.

The gangplank was down.

He moved without conscious thought. The wind tugged at his cloak. Salt stung his lips. But his feet found the metal ramp like they’d never forgotten its shape.

The door was unlocked.

Inside, the ship had changed.

Where once it had been harsh angles and hard metal, it was now softened at the edges—quiet, almost warm . Corridor lights hummed low. The air smelled of salt and sage, and something else layered beneath it: memory and worn fabric and something just slightly sweet. There were woven mats where once there had only been cold grating. Cloth draped from the bulkheads like half-forgotten festival banners.

He stepped slowly forward, the quiet cradling him and guiding him forward.

Then—

A worn hand fell gently over his eyes.

Fabric. Slightly frayed. The scent of oil, salt, and skin he hadn’t let himself remember for too long.

Then a tap—just between his dull horns amidst messy dark curls.

Kankri exhaled, breath catching in a way it hadn’t in perigees. The contact pulled something loose in his chest. Something careful. Something he'd buried.

“You—”

“You’re still too off guard,” came the voice behind him. Familiar. Tired. Amused. Soft in a way it never used to be.

Kankri turned slowly, hands raised in a peaceful gesture. The Orphaner himself was already stepping back, one hand stuffed in the long coat’s pocket, the other holding the edge of a cloth he recognized—one of his own candy red sashes, faded from sun and time, creased at the edges like it had been carried more than worn. He was smiling like something warm, all sharp teeth with no threat to it.

“You remembered,” Kankri murmured, stunned by the sight.

Cronus shrugged. The smirk faltered, like he’d tried to play a lighter role and forgot how heavy everything had become. “Didn’t think I’d get the chance to do it again.”

Kankri’s eyes traced the sash. “I thought about that moment more than I should have. You—didn’t flinch.”

“You didn’t give me time to.”

“I could do it again,” Kankri said, stepping just a little closer. “No blindfold this time. Just… contact.”

The heat in the air had nothing to do with the sea breeze.

He stepped in, closing the distance slowly. His eyes searched Kankri’s face with something like reverence. Cronus looked at him— really looked —and stepped closer to the mutant as they took each other in. The seadweller gazed down at the hellfire preacher with a temper he knew too well, seeing more scars in places they hadn’t been and even more of those freckles than before from time spent under the light. How tired and stretched thin he always was, carrying all the world’s burdens with gentler hands than most knew how to handle.

“I’d allow it,” the violetblood said.

Kankri noted the changes in a quick sweep of his red eyes—damp hair combed back from a recent wash with something that smelled sweet like honey, paired with longer fins now more violet than ever. That color everyone was taught to fear now inspiring a gentle feeling akin to comfort. A scar under one eye that hadn’t been there before. And taller. Somehow taller. And even more tired.

“You… you look like hell,” Kankri said.

Dualscar gave a soft, private laugh. “So do you. Do you know how short you still are?”

“You grew,” the rebel leader replied with a dry huff. “Unreasonably.”

They stood there a moment, close enough to touch. Close enough to feel the unnatural warmth the mutant’s blood carried like a warning, but still not quite touching.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d come up the ramp,” Cronus said.

“I wasn’t sure you’d open the door.”

“I always would.”

There was a quiet pause. Then—

“Come in. Sit. Let me cook.”

They moved through the galley together. Dualscar notably still sliced vegetables wrong. Kankri corrected him once. Then again. Then didn’t bother the third time. The silence stretched out between them, comfortable in its weight.

By the time the meal was done, neither had eaten. They sat at the edge of something larger than hunger.

“You’ve changed it,” Kankri said, running his careful fingers along the reshaped paneling with his eyes looking unreasonably soft.

“Didn’t want to live in a mausoleum,” Cronus said. Then quieter, “You’ve changed too.”

The redblooded troll looked over at him with that challenging tilt of his head.

“You still bleed for everyone. But your hands don’t shake.”

“They still do. Just not where anyone can see.”

“Am I anyone?”

Kankri stood. Walked the short distance between them, steps light and quiet. Familiar.

“I wasn’t sure I’d see you again.”

“You could’ve asked.”

“I couldn’t,” came the whispered reply. “If I’d known you were alive, I would’ve left everything to find you. And I couldn’t risk that.”

“You’re here now.”

The Orphaner raised his clawed hand. Not touching—hovering just over the mutant’s chest.

Kankri nodded. “Just for a little while.”

Cronus moved his hand, just as achingly slow—knuckles brushing the edge of that signature cloak, thumb grazing the sickly pale grey skin beneath it. “I’ve wanted this for a long time.”

“I know.”

And finally, Kankri leaned in.

Their mouths met with no ceremony. No rush. Just relief . The kind of kiss that isn’t about hunger but about recognition. About two people still alive after all this time, still standing—still reaching for something.

The Signless gripped Cronus’s collar tightly. The violetblood held him close to his chest like he might vanish again.

It was the answer to a question neither of them had been allowed to ask.

When they parted, Kankri didn’t step away. He rested his forehead against Cronus’s, his voice a breath against violet-tinted skin.

“You should lock your ship.”

“You’re the only one I was waiting on.”

“Then let me stay. Just until morning.”

“Stay,” Cronus whispered, voice almost breaking. “Stay until you can’t anymore.”

Outside, the mist thickened. But inside, the warmth stayed.

Their silence said the rest.

They sat at the small table for a while longer, the half-eaten meal between them cooling with the sea air. The ship rocked gently in the harbor, creaking in the way old vessels did—alive, but too proud to admit it.

Cronus poured them each something faintly herbal. The tea smelled of dried citrus peel and brineweed—local, likely bartered from someone off the main market routes. He held his mug in both hands as if savoring the warmth against his chilled skin, spine loose against the chair, one leg stretched out beneath the table in a posture of accidental vulnerability.

Kankri stirred his drink slowly, gazing down at it thoughtfully.

“This is better than what I used to make you,” he said after a moment.

Cronus snorted softly. “You mean boiled sadness?”

“It was herbal.”

“It was grass and you know it.”

Kankri’s lip twitched in a rare smile. “You drank it anyway.”

“I was poisoned,” Cronus said, feigning gravity. “I needed something. Even if that something tasted like misery steeped in mud.”

Kankri exhaled through his nose, quiet but amused. “You were impossible then.”

“You’re one to talk. You were this high—” he held a hand up just above Kankri’s head, “—and thought you could lecture me on moral righteousness while I was dying.”

“I was right, though.”

“Yeah,” Cronus said after a moment. “You were.”

That softened something. Kankri looked down into his mug again. The steam caught on his lashes. He didn’t speak right away, and the silence was companionable enough to hold them.

“I heard you nearly got yourself killed again in Hirros City,” Cronus murmured after a while, tone casual—but his eyes didn’t leave Kankri’s face.

Kankri didn’t flinch. “I’ve nearly gotten myself killed in most cities. What’s one more?”

“That one was worse than most.” A beat. “I heard they sent in drones. Gas. You walked straight into it.”

“I got out.”

“I know.”

Their gazes met across the table. Cold, deep violet meeting candied, sweet red. Cronus’s claws drummed once against his mug, then stilled.

“I check sometimes,” he admitted. “More often than I should.”

Kankri blinked. “On me?”

He nodded. “And your clade. Quietly. I’ve got ways. I just... needed to know.”

Kankri swallowed and didn’t answer immediately. Then: “We watch for your name too. Every time a ship moves under a false flag or something gets smuggled past the lines that shouldn’t… we wonder.”

They didn’t say what they really meant: We missed each other every day.
They didn’t need to.

As the hour grew late and the sky outside the porthole turned the yellowing color of old bruises, Cronus stood and stretched, the long line of his coat shifting as he moved.

“You’ll sleep here tonight?” he asked, not quite looking at Kankri.

“Just until morning,” came the reply again—familiar, like a refrain.

The bunk was small. It always had been. Designed for efficiency, not comfort. But Cronus had modified even this—a softer pad, a real blanket, something stitched with care and smelling faintly of wildflower resin.

Kankri hesitated near the doorway as Cronus began tugging off the layers of his coat and gear. His undershirt clung in places, salt and sea damp. A faint old scar traced one shoulder where a blade had once slipped beneath his armor.

“You’ve kept the blanket,” Kankri said quietly, approaching the edge of the bunk.

Cronus nodded, not meeting his eyes. “One of the only things that didn’t feel like war.”

They lay down side by side in the cramped bunk, not touching at first. The hum of the ship nestled around them like a heartbeat—steady, low, warm. The kind of sound that made people drowsy if they felt safe enough to hear it.

After a few minutes, Kankri shifted slightly, his hand brushing against Cronus’s.

The violet didn’t dare to move.

So the other troll laced their fingers together comfortably.

“I hate goodbyes,” Kankri said, voice barely above a whisper.

“Then don’t say one.”

They lay in silence for a long time.

And then, quietly, Cronus murmured, “I tried to hate you once.”

Kankri’s grip tightened. “Did it work?”

“No. Not even close.”

The silence stretched again—deeper, but not empty. The hush between them was made of things that had survived too much.

Then, almost too soft to hear:

“I saw you,” Kankri whispered, like the words were the most dangerous thing he had ever disclosed. Like he hadn’t been preaching about revolutions and rebellion for sweeps.

The seadweller turned his head slightly, cheek brushing the pillow. “You’re looking at me now.”

“No. I mean… I saw you. Elsewhere. In dreams, maybe. In visions. I don’t know what to call them. Flashes. Glimpses.” His brow furrowed faintly. “Other versions of us. Lives I can’t have lived, but still feel like I remember. We were different. We were closer. You smiled more.”

He hesitated, then confessed, voice thick with quiet honesty:

“I think… it’s what made me keep going, when I wanted to stop. I’d see us—not fighting. Not bleeding. Just… in the same place. Hands touching. Lives shared. No war in sight.”

Cronus didn’t speak for a long while, letting the thoughts sink in of exactly what this entailed.

Then: “You believed in that?”

Kankri nodded, even though the other couldn’t see it. “I think part of me thought—if it could be true somewhere, maybe I could make it true here. If I just kept trying. It’s why I know something good can work in this world, I’ve seen it. I was so lost in it when I was young, so fascinated in worlds where we weren’t so different.”

A beat.

“I saw you hold my hand in one,” Kankri said, quieter, but his voice was full of warmth. “You weren’t afraid.”

Cronus turned his face fully toward him. His eyes were dark, unreadable, but softer than they’d been in years. “You really are impossible.”

“You drank my terrible tea,” Kankri murmured, echoing their earlier teasing.

“I didn’t want to die.”

“You didn’t want to leave.”

That landed between them heavier than either expected.

After a moment, Cronus reached over and took Kankri’s hand again—not gently, not roughly. Just firmly. With intention.

“I still don’t,” he said.

The ship rocked faintly with the tide. A buoy clanged somewhere out in the night.

Kankri let his head rest against Cronus’s shoulder, their hands still clasped between them.

“You still slice vegetables wrong,” he mumbled, sleep already tugging him under like a tide.

Cronus gave a breathy laugh. “Shut up and sleep, sermonboy.”

Kankri did. He slept better than he had in likely a perigee or more.

Outside, the harbor fog thickened. Inside, the lights dimmed, and for the first time in a sweep, neither of them slept alone.

The sea was quieter in the morning. It lapped at the harbor in slow, sleepy rhythms, softened by fog. Moonlight filtered into the ship through the small viewport, pale and drowsy, tracing the floor like spilled oil with its colorful rays.

The mutant woke first.

He didn’t move at first—didn’t need to. One arm was curled under his head, the other draped loosely over the broad chest beside him. Cronus’s breath was slow and even, ruffling Kankri’s curls where they’d fallen across his face sometime in the night. Their legs were tangled beneath the thin ship blanket, fins and knees brushing. He could feel the thrum of Cronus’s pulse against his temple. It steadied him more than it should have.

For a moment, he didn’t feel like a preacher or a revolutionary. Just someone who had shared a bed with someone he loved.

He closed his eyes again.

A minute passed. Maybe more.

Then Cronus stirred, a slow blink into the pale light above before looking down at him. The former Orphaner didn’t speak, didn’t jolt away. He just stared for a long moment, eyes still heavy with sleep, and let out a low hum that laced with that rattled, oceanic purring.

“You’re still here,” he murmured, voice rough with sleep.

Kankri nodded, shifting just enough to look up at him properly. “You’re cold. It’s nice.”

Cronus cracked a faint smile, slow and crooked. “Careful. You say something soft like that again and I might get ideas.”

Kankri rolled his eyes but didn’t pull away. “Would that be such a terrible thing?”

“…No.” The admission came quieter. “No, not really.”

They lay there for a time, not needing more words. The silence between them held weight—but no tension. Just shared breath, and the softness of knowing.

Eventually, Cronus moved, careful not to disturb him too much. He stretched, yawned, and let his clawed fingers lightly graze over Kankri’s hip before rising from the bed. The blanket slipped down his back. The once-brutal seadweller now looked out of place in the softness of this light—almost too gentle in the way his shoulders slouched, in the tiredness still clinging to him.

Kankri sat up slowly. “You said last night that you’d let me stay until I couldn’t anymore.”

Cronus paused mid-reach for his shirt. He didn’t turn right away.

“Will you still mean that,” Kankri asked carefully, “when it’s your turn to follow?”

At that, Cronus looked back.

There was no jest in his expression this time. No smirk. No posturing. Only the weight of something long-carried finally shifting in his hands.

“I do,” he said. “I meant it then. I mean it now.”

Kankri’s fingers tightened slightly over the edge of the bed.

“My clade is heading east. There’s a safehold—in a city. Quiet. Hidden. If you… if you want to come, they’ll allow it too.”

A beat.

Cronus stepped closer, feet still bare on the floor, and crouched beside the bed. He placed a hand over Kankri’s where it gripped the blanket.

“I’ll meet you there,” he promised. “Give me three cycles. If I’m not there by then—”

“You will be.”

Their eyes locked, the tension between them warm, not sharp.

Kankri leaned in. This time, the kiss was gentler, less desperate than the one before. A confirmation, not a plea.

They broke apart slowly.

“I’ll see you soon,” Kankri murmured, lingering in the closer space where their breaths were just as tangled as the two of them had been.

“And I’ll follow,” Cronus said. “This time… I’ll follow.”

It sounded like a promise, laced red with want and adoration.

Chapter Text

ACT 15: Where the Light Finds Him

The old building looked like it had once been a place of worship—maybe even long before the Empire had swallowed such places whole. The stone was pitted and pocked by time, the windows tall and narrow, open to the salted air. Twin moons bled colorful light through the tallest arch, painting the floor in soft, glimmering lines. The back wall, crumbled and half reclaimed by local crawling plants, opened the space to the sky. And through it all, the crowd pressed forward—jades, rusts, olives, even a few highbloods in plain clothes. Listening so intently that any disturbance would be heard long before it approached.

And at the center of it—

He stood as though he’d been carved from the same stone as the pillars behind him.

Kankri.

The Signless.

His hood was up, casting part of his face in shadow. But the moons framed him, just-so—catching on the edge of his curls, on the fold of his cloak, casting a thin rim of light behind him like a halo. Cronus had to blink once. Then again. Not because he couldn't believe what he saw—but because it hurt, almost, how much he could.

The playful boy who’d once pressed fabric over his eyes in a forest clearing was gone.

This was a figure cloaked in reverence. All of them listened like they would die for him. Some already had, more would continue without question or fear.

The sermon was nearing its end, with the Signless’s warm voice thanking many of them for risking their lives for even coming to see him. The seadweller lingered at the far edge of the space, just out of view, standing in the shadow of the arch.

“He doesn’t know you’re here?” The Psiioniic’s voice murmured low beside him. The escaped prisoner’s eyes glinted their dual colors even in the dim light.

“No.”

The clade had contacted him through the usual coded drops, a certain irritated goldblood intercepting him between ports. He hadn’t needed to say much—just the way he’d looked when he said, “We’re moving again, and he needs someone watching the way he won’t admit.” Dualscar had followed.

Now he stood among curious strangers, watching the one person who didn’t fear him at all.

Oh, but the crowd did.

They saw him before the rebel leader did. The murmurs began in low currents, some recoiling as if from a monster. A young and freshly molted troll yelped. A tealblood whispered “Orphaner,” and the sound echoed like a curse. Someone reached for a weapon. The violetblood didn’t move. He kept his hands down, palms open at his sides, expression unreadable.

Let them be afraid. That’s what the Empire wanted. This was nothing short of a normal process he faced in any space like this.

The words came as they always did—spoken in the tongue of the people, quiet and worn like stones smoothed in the surf. He had not slept more than a few ticks. The Signless, his voice had long since turned ragged. His shoulder ached from the cut he’d taken two cities ago. But this was the work. It was what he had chosen.

“I do not ask you to rise in blood. Only to rise at all,” the mutant said softly, and the breath of the people trembled with his own. “The chains you bear are not your shame. They are the proof you lived. And that you still can ; that you are capable of change and becoming what you want to be . ”

But even as he spoke, the world shifted. Something— the Orphaner —changed the rhythm in the room to something tense and furiously drawn. Heavy as tidewater. Sharp as salt. It washed through the crowd and made them draw back, parting around a central weight like fish from a predator.

But Kankri—Kankri looked up, up from where he had been holding the hand of an indigoblooded troll while he praised her bravery towards the cause.

And his whole expression changed the moment those red eyes met those of the most feared troll standing in the room. He was standing just beyond the threshold, still as a marble statue—but the violet eyes were the same ones that had met his across firelight, across wilderness, across ship decks and scars and time.

The Signless paused in his speech. He tilted his head. And then, slowly, without flinching, he smiled, all duller teeth and wonder. He lifted one hand and motioned toward Cronus—just once—beckoning. 

Come closer.  I don’t care what they think.

No fear. No shame.

Cronus could’ve shattered under the weight of it.

He stepped forward.

And the crowd parted for him like a riptide split the sea.

He watched Dualscar step through the parted sea of bodies, watched the fear ripple and shift in every jaw that clenched and every shoulder that tensed. But he also saw something else: curiosity. Caution. Wonder.

The preacher’s lips barely moved, but Cronus would see it.

Let them look.

He stepped down from the platform. When they met in the middle of the open hall, it was not with words. Not yet. Just breath shared in close space.

“I’m not armed,” The Orphaner murmured, voice low and even.

“I wouldn’t care if you were.”

“You’re more dangerous than me now.”

“I always was,” Kankri replied, tone dry. Something playful glinted in his eyes like it had back in that jungle so long ago now.

They stood close enough for their shadows to tangle beneath the moonlight through the open wall, the proximity wanted despite the difference in their height making them have to crane their necks to speak.

“You’ve built something here,” Cronus said.

Kankri glanced back at the quiet, watching crowd. “They built it. I just gave them permission to keep going.”

“Is it safe?” Cronus asked.

“Not remotely.”

Cronus’s voice dipped. “Then let me help.”

“You already are.”

They didn’t embrace. It would’ve broken something open. But Kankri let his hand brush Cronus’s sleeve. Just once. Just to make sure he was real. That he was here.

“You came.”

“I said I would.”

“You’re late.”

“Wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t.”

And at that, Kankri let out a breathless huff of laughter—too small to be a laugh, too warm to be anything else.

The crowd didn’t know what they were seeing. Not yet.

But the light behind Kankri’s shoulders kept painting him in silver. A pair of moons crowned his head like a saint from a forgotten myth, and the monster they feared was the one he had summoned.

Cronus looked up at the image. At the preacher. At the boy who never stopped.

And felt, all at once, like he might finally believe in something holy.

The stone hall had quieted. The last of the congregation had left. The sky outside the window stained a pale pink now, with the twin moons drifting lower as false-dawn approaches. Dust hangs in the air, illuminated by the faded light. A cold wind curls through the ruins, tugging faintly at threadbare fabric and long, seaworn capes.

They hadn’t spoken again right away.

Kankri remained near the old stone window, eyes half-lidded in thought, the light turning his curls to copper red. He looked exhausted—truly, deeply—but he stood like someone who hadn’t yet given himself permission to rest.

The seadweller lingered a few steps away. Watching him.

The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable. But it was full.

“…You could’ve told me,” Kankri said at last, without looking up.

Cronus didn’t pretend not to understand. “Told you I was coming?”

“Told me you were still following me.”

A pause.

“I wasn’t sure I’d earned the right.”

Kankri turned to face him then. His eyes were lined with fatigue and brightness both. “You did. Even when you didn’t want to.”

The words sat between them for a moment like driftwood in the tide.

“I didn’t come sooner,” Cronus said, “because I didn’t want to be something you had to carry.”

“You are something I carry,” Kankri said quietly. “But not like a burden.”

He stepped closer, footsteps soft against the broken flagstone floor. He was shorter by far too much distance, but when he looked up at Cronus, the difference meant nothing.

“You didn’t see yourself, standing there,” he murmured. “The whole room recoiled. But you didn’t. You didn’t raise a hand. You didn’t bare your teeth. You let them part and came to me like you always would. I’m not blind to what that cost you.”

Cronus looked away, jaw tight.

“I don’t know how to be something… good,” he said eventually. “Not the way you are. I was never built for that.”

“No one is built for it,” Kankri said. “We choose it. In moments. Again and again. Even when it hurts.”

Cronus was silent.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Kankri continued, softer. “And I was more afraid you would, and I’d still be the only one who saw you for who you are now. But you walked through a crowd that wanted your head. Just to stand at my side.”

“I said I would.”

Kankri touched his wrist—fingers gentle and warm. “You always do.”

A breath passed between them.

Outside, the wind shifted. The first hints of wingbeast songs broke faint across the far cliffs.

“…You spoke like someone used to being believed,” Cronus said. “Did that come with time, or pain?”

Kankri smiled faintly. “Both.”

“You looked—” Cronus hesitated, as if the word would betray something. “Holy.”

That startled a breath of laughter from the preacher. “You’re the only one who would say that.”

“I’m the only one who sees you when you’re not preaching.”

“Exactly.”

Cronus studied him again in silence, eyes flicking down to his hands. “They listen to you.”

“I’m just giving words to what they already feel.”

“That’s what power is.”

Kankri’s expression gentled. “You’re not afraid of it anymore.”

“I’m not afraid of you anymore, what you’re capable of,” Cronus corrected. “That’s what changed.”

Kankri reached up then, brushing one hand just briefly against the sharp line of Cronus’s jaw—dulled claw tips soft against scarred skin.

“Thank you,” he said. “For coming. For standing with me. For letting them see it.”

Cronus caught his hand, gently, and held it between both of his. “I’ll keep coming. Wherever you go.”

Kankri looked at their joined hands. “…You’ll follow me to the clade?”

“If you’ll have me.”

“We always would have,” Kankri said. “Even before you changed.”

Cronus leaned down—enough to press his brow to Kankri’s. “I want to stay. I want… this .”

“You will,” Kankri whispered. “Soon.”

For now, that was enough.

The wind stirred their cloaks, pulling strands of hair loose. The light from the fading moons bathed the stones in their colorful glow.

And for a brief moment—standing together in the ruins of the old world—they felt like the beginning of a new one.

The mutant’s hand remained warm between his.

Cronus didn’t let go.

But after a moment—quiet, slow—he lifted their joined hands slightly, looking down at the callouses on Kankri’s palms, the faint burns, the wear and weather of a hundred sermons delivered beneath moons and firelight both. The scars of a life on the run.

“You said once… you kept going because of visions,” Cronus said, voice low, nearly drowned by the distant sounds of the city at the end of night. “Of other worlds.”

Kankri looked up at him, brows drawing together, faint but not cold. “I did.”

“Do you still see them?”

The shorter troll hesitated, and the air seemed to still around them.

“Yes,” he said softly. “More often than I used to. Especially when I’m tired. Especially when I’m alone. Often after events or injury, as well. Some cruel gift to mock me.”

Cronus's expression flickered at the words. “And what do they show you?”

The rebel leader breathed in slowly—then stepped away from the ruined arch just enough to lean against a low stone ledge. “I see places where none of this happened. Where the empire fell early, or never rose at all. Where blood colors don’t matter. Where I—” he swallowed, then laughed faintly, like he knew how absurd it sounded “—where I get to rest.”

Cronus watched him. “And me?”

Kankri’s eyes found his again. That startling red he could never seem to get used to.

“In almost all of them… you're with me.”

Something in Cronus’s expression cracked open. “That doesn’t sound like a vision. That sounds like a fantasy.”

“I used to think that too. I used to think they were just dreams—wishful, impossible things. But I’ve seen them too many times. In too many different ways. As a wriggler, I was obsessed with them more than the world around me; before I realized I could show them. You—” he took a breath, steadying “—you always find me. Other worlds, other places, other times. Sometimes we look entirely different, but I always know it’s you.”

Cronus lowered his eyes. His voice was rough when he spoke. “You don’t have to make me out to be something noble. You know what I’ve done. You know who I’ve been.”

“I don’t think the point is whether you’re worthy,” Kankri said, voice quiet and firm. “I think the point is that you try. That you’re trying now.”

Cronus looked at him again—really looked, like the sight was a salve and a wound at once. “You fight so hard. Even for trolls like me.”

“Especially for trolls like you,” Kankri murmured. “Because if someone like you—someone trained to crush rebellion, someone who wore the crown of cruelty like it was a birthright—can choose to change, then the system doesn’t win. Then it can’t be inevitable.”

Cronus’s throat worked. He looked away again, ashamed.

“I don't deserve that kind of hope.”

“You think I fight because people deserve it?” Kankri stepped closer again, the edge of his cloak brushing Cronus’s boots. “No one does. And everyone does. That's the paradox. I fight because I have to. Because if I don’t, then who will?”

He reached up on his toes, brushing a stray and stubborn curl back from Cronus’s forehead.

“I fight because I’ve seen what the world could look like if I stop. And I’ve seen what it could be… if I don’t try.”

“And in those worlds,” Cronus whispered, “we get to be something.”

“We already are.”

Their eyes met—equal parts haunted and alive.

“I want to believe that,” Cronus admitted.

Kankri smiled, tired and kind. “Then stay long enough for me to show you.”

And Cronus, after a pause, nodded. Overwhelmed with the weight of it all, he turned his gaze back towards the brightening sky as they sheltered from the burning suns.

They returned by the next cycle’s moonlight.

Not because it was safest—though it helped—but because the quiet suited them both. The night softened the hard lines of the path and gave cover to everything unsaid. Kankri walked ahead with steady steps, cloak catching the breeze like a banner left too long in the sun. Cronus followed half a pace behind, hands tucked deep into his coat pockets, the edge of the shadow of his tall horns brushing the preacher’s heels.

The safehold wasn’t much—an abandoned field station carved into the stone of an old, crumbling cliffside. It smelled of moss and old weldwork, and it hissed faintly when the sea mist reached its sun-warmed paneling. A place meant for silence and survival, not comfort.

But it was home, at least for a little while.

Inside, dim lanterns flickered. Someone had boiled tea recently. The smell of dried herbs clung to the corners like memory. And when the door creaked open, it was the Psiioniic who turned first—eyes sharp, wide—and then widened more when he saw who came in after the Signless.

Cronus hesitated in the doorway, letting the tension gather like a storm in his shoulders. He braced for the resistance. For the anger. For something like fear.

But the goldblood said nothing at first. Just looked to Kankri, who gave a small nod.

That was all it took for the tension in his shoulders to ebb.

“…Didn’t think you’d actually drag him back,” The Psiioniic muttered after a moment, crossing his arms. “Thought you were just hallucinating from exhaustion.”

Kankri only smiled, tired but warm. “He followed me.”

Cronus stepped in carefully, shoulders hunched like he expected the walls to push back. The Huntress peered around a corner, eyes narrowed but not hostile. The Dolorosa, half-asleep in the far alcove, blinked and sat upright. Her emerald gaze landed on Cronus with the weight of a thousand unsaid things.

He didn’t meet her eyes. He looked at the floor.

“I can make myself useful,” he said, voice low, rough like a reef scraped raw by a damaging ship passing through. “You don’t gotta trust me. Just… give me something to do.”

There was a silence. Not long. But long enough for him to regret saying anything.

Then Kankri, still at his side, added gently: “He’s not here to lead. Only to walk with us. If that changes, I’ll be the one to handle it.”

The Psiioniic gave a half-snort, half-laugh. “Fine. You wanna haul crates or scrub out the generators, be my guest. Just don’t get in the way when things get real.”

“I won’t,” the new violetblood said.

And he didn’t.

Over the next few days, he kept to the edges—never too far from Kankri, but never in the center of anything either. He helped boil water. Hauled fresh supplies from the city. Tuned the half-broken radio with hands steadier than he let on. The Huntress didn’t speak to him, only watched closely, but she didn’t snarl either. The Psiioniic tossed him a wrench without looking once, and Cronus caught it mid-air without comment.

The Dolorosa gave him a single nod when he returned one night with scavenged bedding and new medical supplies from a too-expensive trade. It was more grace than he expected.

But it was the quiet evenings with Kankri that anchored him.

They sat near the cliffside at night when the wind was calm, wrapped in shared silence. The others rested or busied themselves indoors. And Cronus would sometimes ask, soft and strange, “You sure I should be here?”

And Kankri would answer every time, just as soft, “You are.”

One evening, Kankri passed him a chipped cup of lukewarm tea, hands brushing. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. But I see the effort.”

Cronus gave a short, brittle laugh. “That’s the problem. You see too much.”

“And still I don’t turn away.”

The sea breathed below them. The stars blinked quietly overhead.

Cronus looked at him then with searching purple eyes. Kankri, warm-shouldered and thin, with all the fire in him barely banked. He’d never stopped fighting. Never stopped believing, even when the world gave him every reason to.

And here Cronus was, trying to unlearn a lifetime of violence with nothing but bruised hands and half-meant apologies.

He didn’t know how to stay. But he was learning.

Tentatively. Slowly.

And the Signless, as always, made room.

The city they passed through now was smaller than most—crumbling walls overtaken by wildflower and vine, paint peeling from signs long abandoned. Some of the buildings still stood proud despite it all, with shutters clinging to windows like eyelids refusing sleep. In the morning, the air smelled of old rain and coal. By afternoon, of spice and dust.

They’d stayed the night in a half-collapsed barn, tucked behind a vineyard long since turned to bramble. The wind whistled through missing boards, and the stars came in clear through the open roof above their heads. And still, despite the ache of distance traveled and weight of work ahead, the Signless had preached—first to the wild air, then to a few wanderers, and by the end of his speech, to a full circle of gathered strangers.

Now, they moved again.

The clade walked in an uneven group—no uniforms, no ranks, but something like rhythm nonetheless. Kankri led the way with the same quiet certainty he always had, his patched cloak stirring behind him. The Huntress trailed near the back, scribbling furiously in a leather-bound book with charcoal-stained fingers. Her writing was often slanted and messy, but she never missed a word when Kankri spoke.

She murmured bits of it aloud now and then, testing the weight of his phrasing.

“‘You were not born to obey, but to become,’” she echoed under her breath. Then, thoughtfully: “Hm.”

Cronus walked somewhere between the center and the fringe of the group—not behind them, but not fully within them either. He kept his clawed hands in his pockets, gaze flicking from rooftop to alley, always alert. His cape still bore the sheen of someone feared, even if he no longer carried himself like a warden.

He noticed when the Huntress’s gaze lingered on him again.

She wasn’t subtle.

“What?” he asked finally, not unkindly.

She blinked up at him. “You used to command ships.”

“I did.”

“And now you carry Kankitty’s bedroll.”

Cronus arched an eyebrow. “Jealous?”

She grinned, all sharp teeth and mischief. “Curious.”

He chuckled—low, genuine. “About?”

“How someone like you ended up walking beside us instead of hunting us.”

The previous orphaner didn’t answer right away. His eyes wandered to the preacher ahead of them, speaking softly with the Psiioniic as they passed under a bridge, his hands gesturing nearly as quickly as his mouth was moving. The way their leader moved now was nothing like the first time Cronus had seen him—a fevered flame in a ruined alley. There was clarity in his steps now. Control. Even exhaustion couldn’t dim that light.

“I suppose I got tired of pretending I believed in anything else,” Cronus said.

The Huntress tapped her charcoal gently against the page. “And do you?”

“I believe in him.”

She studied him for a moment more, then nodded like she was recording that too. A warmer smile tugged at her mouth.

That evening, they found shelter in a crumbling old hive where vines broke through the windows, and the old glass still caught the moonlight in fractured blue. While the Signless addressed a small gathering of locals beneath the broken archway, thanking them for their bravery in helping them while the rest of the clade prepared food, posted lookouts, and unpacked.

Dualscar helped where he could. He was awkward at first—his firepit stones too wide, his seasoning too heavy—but the Dolorosa quietly shifted the stones closer, and the Huntress offered him different herbs with a wordless nudge. They never mocked him. Never pushed him out. The tension was there, but it wasn’t sharp. It was the kind of discomfort that could be eased with time.

He had long since learned that though the Dolorosa was quiet, she was kinder than she let on. Her words were stern, but it was clear how much she cared about her clade. Equally clear how much they relied on her. 

Later, as Kankri sat by the hearth rereading some notes, Cronus brought him tea—spiced and bitter, just the way he liked it. The smaller troll looked up at him, weary but warm, and patted the space beside him. Without hesitation, Cronus sat.

The Huntress, watching from across the room, dipped her head and began to write again.

The rebel leader noticed it in the way Cronus’s shoulders didn’t tense so sharply now when someone asked him for help. In the way he passed the food bowls around without needing to be told. The way he kept watch at night without complaint.

It would never be simple. But it didn’t need to be perfect.

They’d come far.

Kankri watched the Huntress scribble by candlelight, her fingers smudged dark and her jaw set in concentration. “You’re going to run out of paper,” he said gently, as if guiding her.

She didn’t look up. “I’ll steal a new ledger from the next city.”

He smiled faintly. “You’ve been writing everything I say.”

“Everything worth remembering,” she said. Then, more softly: “Some things he says too.”

Kankri followed her gaze. Cronus, halfway through mending a blanket, scowled at the needle. His fin twitched as he concentrated, and his sharp teeth gnawed at an abused lower lip slightly in his frustration.

Kankri looked away before he smiled too obviously. “I’m glad.”

The Huntress tilted her head. “That he’s here?”

“Yes. Even if it’s complicated. I think… it always will be.”

The Huntress grinned, sharp and all too knowing. “He’s trying.”

Kankri nodded. “And that’s enough.”

Their cooking fire had burned low to embers, flickering soft orange against the cracked stone walls. Most of the clade had turned in— the gold and the jade curled in corners beneath patched blankets and side by side on borrowed cots. The Signless had fallen asleep near the door, ever the last to rest, his head tilted slightly, a half-written sermon curled beneath his hand.

Cronus lingered outside the ruined building that stood as a testament to time, one shoulder propped against a pillar overtaken by moss and moonlight. The twin moons rode high above the city, their silver glow pooling in puddles between cobblestones, painting him in violet and frost.

The Huntress found him there—quiet as a shadow, though he’d sensed her approach anyway. He got the feeling that she was allowing him to sense her on purpose rather than by his own skill. She leaned beside him, her satchel at her hip and the ever-present ledger tucked under one arm. Her hood was down. For once, her hair was loose and tangled, catching the wind.

“You’re always awake,” she said.

“Old habits,” Cronus murmured. “You too?”

She nodded. “I used to be worse.”

For a while, they just stood like that—two silhouettes against an old world, watching the wind tug at weeds and broken shutters.

Then she spoke again, her voice low and almost too even. “I was sent to kill him, you know.”

Cronus’s head turned, slowly.

“Kankitty,” she clarified. “I was young. Stupid. Fast. Someone high up liked the idea of a poet preacher dying in the middle of his sermon. It was supposed to be easy.”

He didn’t answer right away. His breath rose in a slow mist between them. “And?”

She smiled, bitter and small. “I listened. Just for a moment, I told myself. Just to confirm it was him, but he gave me pause...”

She looked at her boots. “And then I stayed. I… I couldn't do the job.”

“Because he convinced you?” The seadweller asked quietly.

“No. Not at first. Because he saw me.”

Cronus blinked.

“He was preaching to a whole square, and somehow—he looked right at me. And he said, ‘You don’t have to carry what they gave you. You can put it down. You can be more than this.’ Like he knew . Like he’d always known.”

She looked up again, olive eyes catching the moonlight. “That was the first time anyone had ever said I had a choice.”

Cronus was quiet for a while. The wind moved through the eaves of the old structure above them.

“Did you ever tell him?”

The Huntress gave a small laugh. “Once. He said, ‘Then it’s good you missed,’ and handed me half his bread. He doesn’t hold things the way most people do.”

“No,” Cronus said. “He doesn’t.”

The Huntress glanced at him sideways. “You carry guilt like armor. But he doesn’t want you to.”

“I know.”

“You don’t believe you deserve to be here. But that’s not your choice anymore, is it?” She smiled faintly. “It’s ours.”

Cronus looked at her, really looked—this sharp, clever thing who had once stalked through blood-soaked orders and now filled books with someone else’s dreams.

“You could’ve killed him,” he said.

She shrugged. “You could’ve left him behind.”

They stood in the hush again, both quieter than before.

Then she added, more gently: “We all came here from somewhere bloody. You’re not the only one walking out of who you were.”

Cronus exhaled slowly.

“Thanks,” he said at last.

She bumped his shoulder lightly with hers, the faintest purr tainting her voice. “Don’t mention it. Ever. Or I’ll deny the whole thing and claw out your throat while you sleep.”

A faint, sharp grin tugged at his mouth in return. “Understood.”

And when they returned inside, together, the last of the firelight still glowed across Kankri’s resting face. Cronus paused just long enough to watch his chest rise and fall, slow and steady, like something in the world had finally found peace—even if just for the night.

They traveled by foot that week—too many eyes on transit routes, too many patrols scanning the skies. The cities had grown dangerous, but the winding stretches of countryside were still kind. Tall grass swayed like whispering waves, and the air tasted of dry leaves and distant sea. The clade moved together, quiet and familiar, with Kankri always near the front with the Psiioniic and the Huntress, while the Dolorosa trailed somewhere behind, shepherding gently without seeming to.

Cronus walked at the rear, a habit too deeply rooted to break. This placed him in near constant proximity to the tall jade.

He hadn’t spoken much to the Dolorosa. She was... watchful. Kind, yes, but with an edge like tempered steel beneath the silk of her voice that matched the blade she carried. Not cold. Not cruel. Just careful.

That cycle, they paused for rest beneath a shade-thick grove. The Huntress passed out dried fruit she had found while scouting. The Signless disappeared toward the river to refill canteens. Dualscar stayed back, half out of place, half pretending not to be.

She came to sit beside him on the ridge.

No warning. Just the slow creak of old boots and the rustle of her coat—the darkest green, patched, weather-faded.

“I thought you’d have more questions,” she said.

Cronus glanced at her. “You’ve got a reputation.”

“Do I?” She smiled faintly. “And what kind?”

“Guiding,” he said carefully. “But the kind people don’t cross.”

Her lips twitched into something almost like a smile. “Fair.”

She offered him a piece of fruit with a delicate, practiced sort of posture. He took it, though it stayed in his hand.

The silence between them was companionable, not strained. She sat with the ease of someone who’d done this a hundred times. One eye always tilted toward the others and their idle chatter.

“He was small when I found him, Kankri,” she said suddenly, tone thoughtful as she recalled. “Not loud. Not like now. He barely spoke. Just clung to my coat and followed me through a half-dead city like he’d already decided I was his home.”

The seadweller looked at her, brow lifting. He could feel the same cadence of her words in Kankri, and knew these words to be true as he had once mistaken him for a jadeblood as well.

“He used to be shy. Skittish. Thought the world would punish him for every word he spoke, every glance he gave.”

She plucked a blade of grass from between her boots. “But even then, he had that spark. The kind you only see in children who’ve already lost too much. He asked me once if his blood was broken. I told him the world was, not him. I thought myself selfish for telling him that then. Selfish for bringing him into a world that wasn’t ready for him to exist. His visions were difficult to shake then, but evolved into this resolution of his. I can’t say I always agree with it, for his safety, but I was never going to be strong enough to stop him from this path.”

Cronus swallowed, unsure of what to say.

“Then he brought the others. An escaped prisoner with an awful temper, a well trained assassin sent to hurt us, and made them feel at home with no hive in sight. Proved to me that there were others out there with something to give, that they had something to fight for too.” She glanced at him sideways. “He talks about you too, you know. Not often. But enough.”

Cronus shifted slightly, uncertain how to take that.

“He listens to you,” she said simply. “Even when he disagrees. That’s not something he gives easily.”

He cleared his throat. “He shouldn’t. I’ve done things—”

“ We’ve all done things,” she interrupted, voice quiet but firm. “You carry it with you. I can see it. But don’t you dare think guilt is the same as atonement. It’s what you do now that matters.”

Cronus looked down at the fruit still in his hand, the rough rind of it against his palm. It was scarred and misshapen, though no less edible for it.

“I was never taught to belong anywhere,” he said, voice lower. “Never thought it’d be offered.”

She smiled gently, something softer lighting behind her eyes. “We’re not in the business of asking what people were. Only what they’ll be.”

A pause. The wind stirred the branches overhead.

Then, with a slight smirk: “But if you hurt him again, I’ll break your ribs and send you limping back to your warship.”

Cronus barked a laugh—quiet, startled, though no less amused.

“Understood.”

She stood, dusting off her coat with careful and steady hands. “Good. Come help with the firewood. If you’re staying, you’ll pull your weight.”

Cronus stood too, falling into step beside her. She didn't look back, just trusted he’d follow.

And in that small, firm gesture—he understood. The Dolorosa wasn’t just the lusus of the Signless.

She was the backbone of them all. That steady, guiding hand that trusted them to do well. Protected them with all the fierceness of a galaxy born of war and wrath. She loved them.

And outside the broken walls, stars blinked down through the holes in the ceiling like curious eyes watching rebels become something like a family.

Chapter Text

ACT 16: Faultlines Along the Pathway

The sermon had started as they always did—beneath crumbling archways, where the stone remembered revolutions older than them all. The Signless’s voice rang steady against the cracked acoustics, rising like incense through the haze of lamplight and coal smoke. His words moved with practiced cadence, threading hope through a crowd wound tight with fear. Beneath the twilight haze, the air tasted of soot and something else—something about to snap.

“We are not born with chains,” he said, “but we are taught to wear them like skin.”

A roar of agreement met his words, hands raised—some trembling, others clenched. A rustblood wept openly into her palms. Somewhere toward the front, a young indigo stood still, eyes sharp and unsure.

Dualscar lingered near the edge of the square, sharp-eyed and silent, trying not to look like he was scanning every rooftop, every alley. His hand never strayed far from the hilted rifle at his hip. He didn’t hear the screams until it was already too late.

Something sharp cracked through the air.

A shattering.

Then—chaos.

The crowd split like water struck by stone. Soldiers had slipped into the gathering, waiting for the perfect break. Smoke bombs rolled through the square in a low hiss, releasing a thick fog that burned. From rooftops, nets were launched into the crowd. Someone screamed, and the voice caught Cronus by the chest—too familiar to be ignored.

He lunged forward, but the crowd surged the other way.

“Kan—!”

Too late. He was swallowed in the flood of bodies.

A shove to his side. The intense smell of something burning with energy flooded his senses. A flash of gold fabric caught his eye— the Psiioniic, breathless, eyes wide as his horns crackled with that electric energy he carried.

“They’re scattering us!” the telekinetic growled, grabbing Cronus by the coat and pulling him toward the side street. “Come on, we’ll draw them off!”

“I’m not leaving him—!”

“You won’t help him by getting caught! Move!”

The Psiioniic yanked him down a back corridor just as a blast of compressed light from a rifle shattered the storefront behind them in a blaze of fire and glass. Dualscar flinched, grabbing for his rifle instinctively to return the fire, but the goldblood already had a shield of energy flickering up between them and the chaos, throwing something heavy into the narrow space to block any advancements. Cronus had no choice but to follow.

They ran.

Through old tunnels and locked doorways, through courtyards still slick with the blood of old protests. They didn’t stop until the city sounded distant again, reduced to sirens and smoke.

Finally, they collapsed into an abandoned warehouse, breathless, hearts hammering like drums beaten out of rhythm.

Cronus stood doubled over, sweat slicking his brow. He looked up, eyes burning, and met the Psiioniic’s equally strained gaze. His eyes flickered with that telekinetic energy still, as if waiting for another threat.

Neither spoke.

The silence dragged long.

“I didn’t mean to leave him,” Cronus muttered, voice rough.

The Psiioniic leaned against a cracked support beam, wiping his forehead with a shaking hand. “We didn’t leave him. We regrouped. He’s not stupid—he’ll do the same. This happens all the time.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No,” The Psiioniic said quietly. “It doesn’t.”

They looked at each other across the dust and half-light. Both exhausted. Both furious in different directions.

“You still don’t trust me,” Cronus said flatly.

“I don’t have to,” the psiion replied as he crossed his arms over his chest. “He does.”

The violetblood bristled, but didn’t answer. Instead, he sat down hard against the wall, head tipping back with a slow sigh.

After a beat, the Psiioniic joined him. Not close—but not distant either. He pulled out a piece of broken railing and began tinkering with it, hands working out nerves in the only way he knew how. The static, burning energy slowly faded from him as he fidgeted with the metal scrap.

“Was this the plan?” Cronus asked after a while.

The Psiioniic scoffed. “We don’t get plans anymore. Only moments.”

They fell quiet again.

It was uneasy.

But not unhopeful.

The silence between them stretched, full of old tension and fresh exhaustion. Somewhere in the streets outside, a distant flare lit the sky—a signal, maybe. Or just more fire.

Dualscar’s fingers tapped restlessly against his knee.

“You ever think,” he said, voice low, “that maybe he’s wrong?”

The Psiioniic didn’t look up from the bent metal in his hands, though his twin set of fangs bared as he scowled. “About what?”

“About them.” A sharp gesture to the outside, to the riot-split city. “About us. About any of it.”

That earned him a flick of dual toned eyes, tired and unreadable.

“Every day,” he said, after a moment. “Doesn’t mean I stop believing in him.”

Cronus gave a dry laugh. “That’s loyalty, huh?”

“No. That’s faith. They’re not the same.”

There was a brief pause.

Then Cronus asked, “What’s the difference?”

The Psiioniic finally set the scrap down and looked at him fully, like he was weighing whether it was worth answering. He seemed to suddenly lack his usual brand of hostility as he spoke the words. “Loyalty says you stay even when you don’t believe. Faith says you believe even when you can’t stay.”

The seadweller’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t reply. His eyes had gone distant—drawn somewhere between Kankri’s voice and the fire that scattered it.

The Psiioniic leaned forward, elbows on knees. “He believes in you.”

“I know.”

“He shouldn’t, ” the goldblood said sharply. “But he does.”

That drew Cronus’s gaze again, and for a moment the heat in his eyes could have lit another war. “You think I don’t know what I’ve done?”

“I think you don’t know how to forgive yourself for it.”

That silenced him.

Not because it stung—but because it hit too cleanly. Dualscar sat in it, sharp teeth clenched. Then, quietly:

“Why’d you stay?”

The Psiioniic blinked. “What?”

“With him,” Cronus clarified. “All this time. You’re a target like he is. You could’ve slipped the net and vanished.”

There was a long, long pause.

Then Psiioniic said, “Because he saw me before the collar.”

The violetblood turned his head.

“Before the Empire turned me into a battery, a weapon,” he said, voice low, even. “Before my name was a warning. He just… saw me. And he never stopped.”

Cronus was quiet.

Something behind those red and blue eyes softened.

“I wasn’t always this,” the Psiioniic added. “I was loud. Fragile. Not… this angry all the time.” He scratched at the side of his neck, where faint burn marks still wove beneath the skin. “He didn’t flinch when I broke like everyone else would with this power of mine. He just held the pieces. That mattered.”

“…he held mine, too,” Cronus said, almost inaudible. “Back when I was poison and spite and nothing else.”

The Psiioniic studied him.

Then slowly offered, “You love him.”

It wasn’t a question, though it didn’t sound aggressive either.

Cronus didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

The quiet between them shifted. Not easy. Not warm. But lighter. Less armed.

“You’re not who he used to know,” the Psiioniic said, looking thoughtful.

“I’m trying,” Cronus muttered. “I’m trying not to destroy what’s left.”

The goldblooded telekinetic nodded once, something almost like respect settling into his posture.

Then, without fanfare, he said:

“Mituna.”

Cronus blinked.

“…What?”

“My hatchname,” the Psiioniic said again. “Not many still get it. But I’m giving it to you.”

The silence that followed was reverent in its own way. Cronus looked at him with the strangest expression—caught between disbelief and something sharper, closer to guilt.

“You sure?”

Mituna shrugged. “If KK’s going to keep inviting you in, we might as well stop pretending you’re temporary.”

“…Cronus.”

“I know,” Mituna said. “But it’s good to hear it from you.”

They shared a long look—neither warm nor cold, but settled. A truce, if not trust. Something beginning.

Somewhere in the distance, a series of wingbeast song-like whistles broke the dark. One, then two. A signal. Safehouse location, maybe.

Cronus stood first, brushing dust and ash from the burning city from his coat.

“Think that’s him?”

Mituna stood beside him. “Let’s go find out.”

And for the first time in hours, they moved side by side. They moved through a narrow alley, silent but steady, the city still simmering behind them. The violetblood kept glancing sideways, not out of suspicion anymore—but because he didn’t know what to do with a version of the Psiioniic who had told him his true name.

Mituna caught the glance. Didn’t comment.

Instead, as they paused near a crumbling wall to orient themselves, he slowly flexed his fingers and pulled back the sleeve of his coat. His forearm, usually hidden, was pale in the moonlight and marked by deep ridges—scarred lines in twinned rows, some burned, others almost surgical.

He caught Cronus staring. And let him.

“They plugged me in,” Mituna said, voice quiet but level. “Back then. Before my escape.”

Cronus said nothing, but his expression changed—something sharp, guilty in the way his jaw set.

“They had me wired through the spine. Arms too. Couldn’t move unless they wanted me to. Couldn’t think. I don’t know how long I was like that. Long enough to forget how my own voice sounded. Long enough to forget what being alive felt like.”

He rubbed absently at one of the scars. Not to soothe it—just to feel it, to remember that it was real.

“I thought I was going to die like that,” he added. “Eyes open. Brain drained dry. And then the alarms started. Another rebel cell, I think. Or an accident. Doesn’t matter. I broke the wires, burned out half the deck. Got away half dead, hearing whispers of some mutant stirring a rebellion.”

Cronus was silent for a long time.

Then, quietly: “That was… one of our ships, wasn’t it? The one you escaped from?”

Mituna didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

Cronus looked down, clawed hands curling at his sides. “And then you met me. Wearing that title. Commanding ships just like it.”

“You asked earlier why I didn’t trust you,” Mituna said, eyes narrowed, not unkindly. “That’s why. You looked like every hand that ever reached for the switch to shut me down.”

He paused. His voice went softer.

“But you don’t look like them now.”

Cronus exhaled, long and low.

Mituna turned away again, cloak fluttering slightly with the movement. “I hated you,” he said. “You were everything I feared would catch us in the dark.”

“And now?”

Mituna glanced back. “Now you’re just a bitter man who fell in love with a fire he thought he could extinguish.”

Cronus let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You think he’s fire?”

“No,” Mituna said. “He’s what’s left after it. And you keep crawling back to the warmth.”

For once, Cronus didn’t argue.

Mituna let his sleeve fall back over his arm and started walking again. Cronus followed—slower, this time. More thoughtful.

The night stretched on around them, cool and thick with smoke.

They didn’t speak again until the next corner, when the first chirped signal of the Huntress’s whistle echoed faintly across the city.

Then they both moved faster, no longer side-by-side by accident—but on purpose, together.

The wind off the coastline had turned sharp again, peeling back the remnants of heat and dust from the riot like an old scab. Kankri pressed one warm hand to the side of the Dolorosa’s shoulder to steady her as they ducked into the shelter of a half-fallen wall—what was once the upper balcony of a broken hive, now just a ruin crowned in glass and ivy.

The Huntress was already crouched with her bladed gauntlets still drawn, hair tangled with ash and fragments of broken banner silk. She glanced up at him and gave the barest nod.

They were safe. Shaken, but safe.

“All accounted for,” she muttered under her breath, eyes sweeping the alleys. “Except—”

“I know,” Kankri murmured. “Them.”

Mituna and Cronus hadn’t been with them when the panic broke out—when the guards began their false flag, sending agitators into the crowd. Kankri had tried to find them in the chaos. He’d almost run into the charge line himself.

He was about to speak again when the Dolorosa's hand touched his arm, firm and comforting. She turned her face toward the edge of the alley, where familiar light flickered like a returning flame.

Footsteps.

Kankri turned—and saw them.

Mituna came first, stride slow but upright, cloak torn at one shoulder and an unmistakable smudge of soot across his jaw. But his expression was focused, calm in a way that was rare. He looked steadier than Kankri had seen him in weeks.

And then—

Cronus.

Alive. Whole. Dust-smudged and wrong-footed, with one sleeve torn and a blackened scrape down his cheekbone. He had a split lip that hadn’t quite stopped bleeding that dark violet. But his eyes caught Kankri’s like a held breath.

For a moment, Kankri just stared. The rising wind stirred the hem of his cloak.

Then he ran.

His boots hit cracked stone as he crossed the distance—his ribs still sore from the last encounter, but he didn’t care. He collided with Mituna first, grabbing his shoulders in both hands, scanning him for injury.

“You—” Kankri choked, brow pressing briefly to Mituna’s as he tugged the goldblood down from his taller height. “You’re late.”

Mituna huffed, allowing the handling, but not looking entirely pleased about it with the way that faint mustard gold dusted his cheekbones. “Yeah, yeah. We took the scenic route. Seadweller's fault.”

Kankri turned to Cronus next. The violetblood stood there oddly stiff, like he didn’t know whether to reach out or brace for rejection.

Kankri didn’t hesitate.

He surged forward, pulled Cronus into a sudden, fierce embrace—arms wound tight around his waist, cheek pressed to his lower sternum. Cronus inhaled sharply and froze. Then—slowly, deliberately—he returned the gesture, arms wrapping around Kankri like they’d been waiting to do exactly this.

“You idiot,” Kankri whispered, voice trembling. “You absolute bastard. I thought—”

“I know,” Cronus said. “I know.”

Behind them, the rest of the clade watched in varying degrees of stunned silence. The Huntress looked surprised—if only faintly thrilled—and the Dolorosa exhaled a breath she must’ve been holding for half the cycle.

Mituna crossed his arms and muttered dryly, “He followed orders. Eventually.”

Kankri pulled back just enough to look up at Cronus, his face flushed and eyes full of a kind of exhausted joy.

“I’m glad you were with him,” he said to the both of them. “You kept each other safe.”

“We didn’t kill each other, if that’s what you mean,” Cronus muttered, eyeing Mituna sideways. “It was close.”

“Progress,” Kankri said. “I'll take it.”

Mituna smirked and elbowed Cronus lightly in the ribs, high enough to avoid some of the more sensitive gills there. “Told you he’d be mad if we died.”

The safehold was little more than an abandoned merchant’s home on the edge of the old ward—a place reclaimed and half-forgotten, with narrow stairs that groaned like a wounded beast and walls thick enough to muffle the noise from the city. The Dolorosa moved through it like someone returning to an old temple, running her fingers along each beam and testing doorframes for stability.

She called it “shelter enough.”

The Huntress immediately set about barricading the windows, while Mituna vanished up the stairs with a muttered, “Gonna wash the ash outta my teeth.” He didn’t need to say it twice—none of them smelled particularly pleasant.

Kankri lingered downstairs.

The adrenaline had worn off. His limbs ached again. His ribs reminded him of bruises not fully healed, and the weight of worry—that something had gone wrong, that someone hadn’t made it—still pressed behind his eyes. But they were all here. For now, they were whole.

He turned to find Cronus sitting near the hearth, silent and still as stone. The fire hadn’t been lit yet. There was a slant of golden light through the shutters, just bright enough to catch the edges of his face.

Kankri crossed the room.

“Are you hurt?” he asked gently.

Cronus didn’t look up. “You already asked me that.”

“I know. But I want to ask again.”

A beat passed. Cronus looked over at him, a strange tightness to his expression—like he didn’t trust it to stay together. “Nothin’ that won’t heal. Better than last time we ran.”

“I remember,” Kankri said, voice low. “You were worse then. But also more afraid.”

Cronus huffed. “Not afraid this time.”

“No?” Kankri’s tone remained even, tilting into something teasing. “You ran into a riot to find me. I’m not convinced that was purely self-preservation.”

Cronus gave him a look—dry, corner-of-the-mouth twisted. “Don’t flatter yourself, Signless.”

But it fell flat. Kankri saw the real answer behind his eyes, quiet and unspoken.

“I’m still glad you came,” Kankri said after a moment. “And… I saw how you looked at Mituna. How you stayed near him. I won’t pretend you two have solved everything, but it means something that you didn’t leave him.”

Cronus looked away, jaw tightening. “Didn’t have it in me to watch someone else get hurt ‘cause of me. Again.”

Kankri sat beside him, not touching, but close enough for his warmth to be felt. “That’s not what happened. And if you’re trying to prove something… you already have.”

They sat in silence for a while.

Eventually, Kankri stood and moved toward the stairs. But instead of climbing, he turned left—toward the half-room Mituna had claimed, where water dripped from a cracked basin and a broken mirror hung like a forgotten wound.

He found him drying his hair with a torn cloth, the ends of his twin horns dripping.

“Hey,” Kankri said.

Mituna grunted. “Hey.”

There wasn’t much more that needed to be said. Not yet. But Kankri stepped forward and gently set his hand on Mituna’s shoulder—feeling how tense it still was, like it had never really learned how to let go of fear.

“I’m proud of you,” he said, simply.

Mituna blinked at him. “For not vaporizing your matesprit?”

“For keeping yourself and someone else alive. You didn’t have to.”

Mituna rolled his eyes. “Could’ve done worse.”

Kankri smiled. “You didn’t. I’m glad you’re safe.”

The psiion ducked his head. “Yeah, well. Can’t let you burn down the empire without me.”

That night, they gathered together in a single room for warmth and safety. Dolorosa sat in the corner, cross-legged and knitting something half-unraveled. The Huntress curled up like a kept purrbeast near the fire, journal half-written in her lap. Mituna sprawled on the floor with his back to the door like a guardian, though he snored faintly.

And Cronus took a seat beside Kankri again, shoulders brushing. Not quite touching—but just near enough to feel real.

The clade didn’t question his place there. Not anymore.

And when the wind rattled the shutters, it was only wind. And when the sun rose and set again, they departed from the shelter to continue onward as a testament of refusal to let this revolutionary spark die.

The city they’d found each other in next was cracked along the edges—less a city than a monument to what had once tried to become one. Half-built towers leaned into the sky like supplicants; old banners fluttered like discarded dreams on the wind. The streets were crooked with old battle lines, but vines had since begun to stitch the walls shut again. As if the world itself had grown tired of violence and decided to bloom in spite of it.

The Signless stood at the edge of the square again, this time not alone.

He saw them approaching after gathering supplies through the thinning crowd—Mituna first, easy to spot with the unmistakable electricity in his gait, eyes half-shadowed but alert, his clothing flecked with ash from the firebombs they'd avoided prior. And next to him—

Cronus.

His gait was slower. Careful. One hand near his coat's interior, always ready, always guarded. But when his gaze met Kankri’s, the air between them changed. The previous orphaner’s expression didn’t soften, not really—it never did, not for anyone else. But it stopped being sharp. He blinked once, then again, as if confirming the moment between them was real.

Kankri stepped down from the broken stone dais, his bare feet leaving no sound behind, just prints in the dust. The twin moons caught the worn hem of his cloak and cast his shadow long behind him, like something much taller than he was.

“You’re late,” Kankri said, a poor attempt at casual, voice tight with relief and fondness.

“And you're barefoot,” Cronus replied, his voice low and more rasp than charm. “Again.”

Mituna huffed a laugh beside them both, then made himself scarce, ducking off toward the clade’s temporary shelter to take the supplies back, letting the two of them stand there—eye to eye in the half-ruined courtyard, the crowd parting and peeling away like leaves on the tide.

Cronus spoke first.

“Mituna… he said you'd be all right.”

“I said I would wait for you,” Kankri replied, stepping closer.

Their foreheads touched—just a brush, like remembering something old. Neither of them spoke about the separation again. It was already too much.

The days that followed stitched themselves together with tension and heat, the world warm with encroaching summer, the rebellion ripening like fruit on a tree grown from blood and grit.

They moved city to city now, more people joining them—some curious, others desperate. At night, the clade slept in abandoned shrines, quiet corners of sympathetic homes, or camped in fields littered with bluegrass and mothlight. And in each place, Kankri stood before them, his voice hoarse from use, but no less commanding.

Cronus began to help—not loudly, not in the open. But his presence was a shadow they trusted more with each passing day. He lifted beams. He guarded doors. He scouted paths. He cooked quietly, terribly, and always with too much salt. And when he sharpened his blades or cleaned his rifle at night, it was no longer as a weapon among prey, but as a tired sentry keeping watch over something worth bleeding for.

The Huntress was the first to speak to him beyond necessity.

She lingered beside him at the edge of a ruined fountain one morning while the setting suns painted their cloaks gold. She had Kankri’s sermon notes tucked beneath one arm, bound in twine and worn already from her obsessive rereading.

“You don’t speak much,” she said, peering up at him through long, wind-whipped hair.

Cronus looked over at her slowly, raising a brow.

“I was taught not to.”

She laughed—bright, sharp, like wind chimes in a storm. “Funny. So was I.”

A pause, then she extended one of the sermon pages to him. “He writes more beautifully than he speaks. Or maybe I just like how it looks when it’s my ink.”

Cronus took the page without touching her fingers, careful, always careful. But he read the lines there—sermon fragments on justice, forgiveness, the weight of memory—and something in him cracked.

“He dreamed of you,” the Huntress said quietly. “Before we ever met you. Before he even believed you were still alive.”

He looked at her sharply, but she only smiled, full of quiet menace and inherited grace.

“I used to be a killer like you, remember,” she added. “The Grand Highblood himself sent me to silence these sermons once. I stayed instead and abandoned my post like you did. Thought you should be reminded…you’re far from the only one who changed sides. You carry this weight with you, like we all did. It goes away with time.”

One night, Cronus sat beside a fire near the outskirts of the city they’d camped in, sharpening a blade more from habit than need. Across from him, the Dolorosa stirred a pot of something thick and fragrant, the smell of herbs and spice cutting through the cool wind.

“You don’t know how to sit still,” she said mildly.

“I do. Just never learned how to do it without watching my back.”

The Dolorosa made a soft, noncommittal sound and handed him a second bowl.

“You’re trying,” she said after a moment.

Cronus didn’t reply.

“You’re not what I expected,” she went on, ladling herself a portion. “But he believes in you. And I've learned to trust his judgment.”

Cronus’s voice, when it came, was low. “You raised him.”

“I raised all of them.” Her smile was fond, but firm. “But Kankri… he was always more fire than flesh. It’s no small task to hold a sun and not be burned by it.”

He looked down at his bowl. “I don’t want to burn him.”

“Then don’t.”

It was not a threat. It was a gift.

On the seventh night, they passed into the next city under a canopy of quiet stars, and Cronus found himself walking beside Mituna again, near the rear where they could keep an eye on the group.

They didn’t speak much—just matched each other’s pace as the road unfolded beneath them.

Eventually, the goldblood broke the silence, while he rubbed at the ridged scars near his elbow. His voice didn’t waver, but it turned brittle at the edges.

“You used to remind me of them. The ones who smiled while they burned planets, but damn, KK—” Mituna almost grimaced, twin fangs showing as he scrunched his nose a bit. “He never shuts up about you so I guess I have to suck it up.”

Cronus laughed for the first time in days as Kankri's face reddened considerably. It didn’t last long, but it was real.

That dawn, Cronus sat alone for a moment while the others slept, watching the daylight spread across the stone floor. His rifle was beside him, untouched. In his lap lay the next sermon page the Huntress had given him, where Kankri had corrected some of her notes.

He read the words again, scrawled in Kankri’s hand with faintly smeared ink in the margins of a worn page.

We are n9t 69rn in sin. We are 69rn in silence. 6ut we d9 n9t have t9 remain quiet.

He looked toward the room where Kankri slept. The worn door was slightly ajar and barely clinging at the hinges. Inside, faint murmurs of his dreams curled into the air.

Cronus sat very still and let the night fold around him.

There would be more cities. More sermons. More fires.

But for the first time, he felt something blooming in the ash.

Not guilt.

Not even redemption.

Just the quiet possibility that this time, he could stay.

Chapter Text

ACT 17: When the Lantern Burns Low

The city behind them was beginning to dim, its lights curling into the hills like a tide in retreat. Their safehold tonight was a hollowed temple built from veinstone and prayer, its bones older than the rebellion, its silences older still. Outside, the others had fallen into their usual rhythms—the Dolorosa settling the Huntress with a stern glance and a blanket, Mituna half-dozing beside a purring power cell, his arm curled protectively over the Signless’s scattered sermon notes.

Inside the temple’s side chamber, there was only flickering lanternlight and the two of them.

Kankri sat cross-legged on the floor, his hood off, curls tangled from wind and motion, the edges of his robes stained with road dust and ink. Across from him, Dualscar had slouched against one of the stone walls, long legs stretched out in front of him, rifle nearby as always but untouched.

It was the kind of silence that asked to be filled—not urgently, but gently. Like a pool asking for a pebble to skim across the surface.

Kankri broke it first.

“You stayed,” he said softly.

Cronus turned his head, slow, like the movement cost him something. “Yeah.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

He didn’t explain further, and Kankri didn’t push. Instead, he offered a small half-smile of duller teeth, quiet and unsure. “I used to dream of this,” he said. “Not the war, not the blood—just… moments like this. Where it’s quiet. And you’re still here when I wake.”

Cronus’s gaze flicked toward him again, something unreadable in his expression.

“I thought it was just hallucinations,” Kankri continued. “Starvation, stress, too much grief too fast. But the visions kept coming. Different worlds. Different versions of us. Ones where we were kinder, closer. Ones where we weren’t hunted or haunted by our pasts.”

Cronus’s voice, when it came, was hushed. “Did we make it? In those?”

“In some.” A pause. “In one, we lived by the sea.”

Cronus looked down, then back up at him, something tugging sharp behind his eyes. “That why you kept trying? Even when I pushed you away?”

Kankri nodded. “Not because I thought you’d change. Because somewhere, you already had. I wanted to meet him. Or help you remember.”

A silence bloomed between them, this one softer, slower. The kind of silence that wrapped itself around the ribs and didn’t quite hurt.

Cronus shifted, pulling his coat tighter around himself as though for something to do. “Don’t know if I’m him yet.”

“You don’t have to be,” Kankri said. “Just—stay.”

Cronus didn’t answer, but he leaned his head back against the stone and closed his eyes. Not asleep, not relaxed—but present. And that was more than enough.

Kankri watched him for a moment, then shifted closer. Not touching, not yet. Just enough that their knees brushed when the wind stirred the door open slightly.

Neither of them spoke again.

The lantern flickered, casting twin shadows across the wall behind them—one broad-shouldered and tired, the other slight and unbending.

The world was still broken. But here, for the space of a few breaths, they were whole.

And the night held its breath with them.

They didn’t mean to sleep, but eventually the night lowered its voice, and the world stilled.

Kankri had curled near Cronus’s side, not quite touching, then half against his shoulder, and finally—with a breath that shook like a flag in the wind—rested his head on the other’s chest. Cronus, at some point, had let his arm drift around him. Loose. Careful. Like holding something fragile without calling it that.

They did not speak before sleep took them, only let the hours bleed by while the stone walls held the silence.

And when the next cycle’s light came, it was soft.

Not the kind of dawn that split the sky open—but one that unfolded it. Pale light filtered through the high temple windows, catching the thin motes of dust in the air, tinting the stone gold. Kankri stirred first, blinking blearily against the light, curls flattened on one side, a bit of Cronus’s coat tangled beneath his cheek.

He didn’t lift his head right away.

Instead, he listened—to the steady thrum of Cronus’s pulse where his temple rested. To the quiet rise and fall of his breath. To the hush, finally, of a body that had learned how to rest.

“You’re still cool to the touch,” he mumbled, eyes half-lidded.

Cronus’s voice came slow, rough from sleep. “First time someone’s said that without flinching.”

Kankri chuckled—just a small breath of sound. “They must not have tried it in the early light.”

Cronus tilted his head to look at him, his expression unreadable but soft around the edges. “Did you dream?”

Kankri nodded, still not quite moving from his comfortable spot on the seadweller’s chest. “One of the old ones.”

“…What happened in it?”

A pause. Kankri’s dull claws tightened slightly in the worn fabric of the other’s shirt.

“We were together,” he said finally. “No empire. No castes. You lived by the shore with a vineyard behind the house. I’d walk the hills every morning to bring you bread. You’d call me something ridiculous like ‘sunrise.’ I never liked it, but I never asked you to stop. You’d write your own music and sing to me in the evenings, much too full of yourself.”

Cronus was very quiet. The light caught in the corner of his eye like he was holding something in.

“Did we grow old?” he asked.

Kankri nodded. “You hated the cane, but you let me bring it to you in the times you needed it. Let me paint flowers and vines onto the wood of it.”

“…That doesn’t sound like me.”

“It was.”

A quiet exhale from Cronus, low and shaky. He sat up slightly, careful not to dislodge Kankri too quickly. His hand brushed absently over the back of Kankri’s warm neck, like grounding himself to something real. “You always saw more in me than I earned.”

“I saw what you tried to hide. What you were scared to admit. There’s still a difference.”

They sat there a while longer, legs tangled and purring in tandem, the world slow to wake around them. Eventually, a faint clatter echoed from further in the temple—the Psiioniic or the Huntress waking, perhaps, as the elder jadeblood would have been more quiet to rise.

Kankri pulled back reluctantly, sitting upright and stretching, his spine cracking faintly. Cronus stood as well, looming in the light like a tired myth.

“You’ll still follow us?” Kankri asked, almost too quiet.

Cronus nodded once. “Until I’m not allowed.”

“You’re always allowed.”

“Even after everything?”

Kankri looked up at him, his face unreadable but unwavering. “Especially after everything.”

And then, without flourish, without ceremony, Cronus leaned down and pressed a kiss to Kankri’s temple. No ask. No expectation. Just a simple presence. 

They stepped out into the early cycle together.

And the rebellion moved forward again.

The world was still for once.

The seadweller later sat perched on the edge of a broken crate, elbows balanced on his knees, watching the faint dual colored hum of Mituna’s telekinetic field shimmer against the early night haze. The air smelled of copper and dirt and old fire—nothing new. But here, under the broken awning of a half-collapsed supply shelter, it almost felt like the lull before a tide turned.

Mituna knelt on the ground, delicate in his own chaotic way, surrounded by scraps of wiring and shards of circuitry no larger than his own hands. His palms hovered over the mess like he was praying instead of working—fingers twitching, blinking trails of red and blue between the broken tech, at that rising but now more familiar than threatening smell of burning chemicals in the air.

Cronus found himself staring again. Not at the power—though it was formidable. Not even at the skill with which it was wielded. But at the restraint.

The Psiioniic never flinched. Never snapped. Rarely even raised his voice, not even that cycle after the riot when they'd been shoved together and everything had gone sideways. Not even when Cronus had said too little, or too much.

His power crackled through the wires like thread through a needle—sharp and sure. Breathing life into things that could not speak, that could not feel.

And still, Cronus remembered the stories. The ones whispered in old barracks and command halls. A goldblood psiioniic that had broken out of captivity, melting steel bulkheads from the inside with nothing but his mind. Plugged into imperial circuitry like a battery was supposed to be. Escaped only because the systems overloaded from his own power and the ship’s core nearly ruptured.

Cronus exhaled slowly.

Mituna’s arms bore the proof of it—ridged scars like lightning strikes and those biomechanical tendrils trailing from shoulder to wrist, faded but deep. Pain lived in them, but so did control. Restraint. He could’ve killed him in the forest. He could’ve flattened a dozen cities by now.

But he didn’t.

And Cronus—infamous Orphaner Dualscar, killer of worlds—was still here, quietly watching him fix a signal repeater with the patience befitting their mutant leader.

"You always stare this much?" Mituna asked, voice soft and crooked, glowing eyes still fixed on the mechanism.

Cronus blinked, caught. He didn’t lie. “Only when I’m impressed.”

Mituna snorted, half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Must be weird for you. Someone like me fixing things, not breaking 'em.”

A beat. Then:

“You’ve never even tried to hurt me,” the violetblood said quietly.

Mituna looked up this time. The glowing power resting in his eyes dimmed as he gazed at the other, taller troll.

“No,” he said. “Because he’d feel it.” He didn’t say Kankri’s name, but the words curled around him anyway like a protective field. “And because you haven’t deserved it. Not really. Not since you stopped looking at me like I was a battery or a weapon.”

The quiet settled between them again—this time warmer.

Mituna turned back to his work. “Come here. I’ll show you how to recalibrate the relay. Might be good to know, if you’re sticking around.”

“I am,” Cronus said. “I am.”

They reached the city by dawn.

It had no name that survived the fires.

Even from the hill crest, Cronus could see the bones of it—buildings with their sides torn open, doors swinging on broken hinges, entire quadrants caved in by shelling long gone quiet. It looked less like a city and more like a scabbed wound.

But still there were lights. And signs. And movement.

Flags scrawled by hand fluttered from shattered windows. Paintings covered the stone—some of the Signless’s words in chalk, some symbols even Cronus didn’t recognize. Messages passed from hand to wall to heart.

A wriggler ran by barefoot, carrying water in a broken helmet. An elder leaned out a shattered storefront with bread. The rebellion was breathing here. Barely. Raspy, but breathing.

And in that broken breath, something clenched tight in Cronus’s chest.

They passed through the outskirts quietly. The Psiioniic—Mituna—kept to his side. Not as a leash, but as a shadow that chose to linger. Together, they moved through the fractured remnants of what had once been streets, now barely paths worn down by fleeing footsteps and returning ones alike.

When they reached the meeting point—an old train depot—the Signless was already there.

So was the rest of the clade.

Cronus felt his breath still. Just for a moment. Relief wasn't a thing he knew how to hold well.

But there he was.

Kankri, standing at the heart of the group, gesturing calmly despite the ruin around them, robes fraying further at the seams, but his voice steady even in brief instructions. There were a few trolls around him that the seadweller didn’t recognize such as a bronzeblood with wide shoulders and even wider horns. He seemed to be pitching ideas with a charming, dimpled smile.

The Dolorosa stood close, arms folded but soft-eyed. The Huntress leaned on the mutant leader like he was an extension of her spine. They were tired. They were hungry. They were all alive.

Kankri’s eyes found Cronus first.

And for a second—just one—he smiled. Not wide. Not dramatic. Just soft around the edges in a world full of sharp things made to hurt.

That was enough.

That night, Cronus stood on the roof of the depot. The stars above were dimmed by ash in the clouds, but the twin moons hung heavy and close. They lit the wreckage in glimmering lights and deep shadow.

Below, he could hear the soft murmur of voices—tired ones, familiar ones, not yet asleep but close to it. Somewhere, Mituna was tuning the receiver he'd built. Somewhere, the Dolorosa was wrapping a blanket around someone too proud to ask and reassuring them they were worth the resource.

And somewhere—soon—Kankri would find him again.

Cronus let himself breathe steady and slow.

Just once.

The city might have been war-worn, half-dead, half-alive. But he had come here to follow, and he had stayed. That meant something.

Maybe enough to build on.

Maybe not.

But for tonight, it was more than he thought he'd ever get. All those sweeps he had spent, isolated and signed to a life of violence, melting away to give way for something soft and new.

The rooftop was quieter than the world below.

Cronus leaned against the low wall at the edge, one hand splayed on the rough stone, the other loosely holding a sharpened hunting knife—not for use, just for company. The moons hung over the ruins, one thin and pink, the other full and honeyed. Between them, the ash drifting on the wind shimmered like dust caught in candlelight.

He didn’t turn when he heard the door creak open behind him.

He didn’t need to.

The steps that followed were careful, light to the point he strained to hear them, but terribly assured. Unmistakable.

The Signless.

Cronus let the silence stretch long, unbroken. He could almost believe they were the only two left alive in the whole city, the whole world. Just ash, and the moons, and that steady tread.

Then came the playful voice that made cities bend and trolls twice his size yield—

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Cronus didn’t answer. Not at first.

Kankri moved to his side slowly, standing close enough that their shoulders might’ve brushed if Cronus turned the slightest bit. He didn’t.

“They told me you were up here. Mituna said you’d been quiet since we arrived.” Kankri’s voice was soft, raw around the edges. “I wanted to see you for myself.”

Cronus exhaled through his nose slowly. “Still breathing.”

“That's not the same as living.”

He winced. Not at the words—but at how gently they were said. How carefully Kankri always pulled the truth out of him, like a blade from flesh. Not cruel. Just practiced.

“You scared us,” Kankri added. “When the riot broke out. When the crowds turned. We didn’t know where you were.”

“I was with him. With Mituna from the start.”

“Ah.” Kankri let the word rest on his tongue for a moment, then nodded. “That must’ve been... tense for you both.”

Cronus gave a low, dry sound in his throat. “Could say that.”

“And now?”

“Now he doesn’t glower at me when I walk past,” Cronus said quietly. “Even showed me how to fix something.”

“That’s good,” Kankri murmured. “You deserve that much.”

A long pause.

Then, softly, Cronus asked, “Do I?”

The mutant turned to him then, and that alone was enough to make Cronus meet his red eyes.

Kankri’s expression held no pity—just quiet conviction. “Yes,” he said. “You’re here. You’re helping. I don’t care what brought you to us. You stayed.”

Cronus looked away, back out over the ruin. “Not much of a world left, is there.”

“Not yet,” the shorter troll said. “But it’s coming. Brick by brick. Voice by voice.”

He hesitated, then added, “With you, if you’ll keep walking beside us.”

Cronus’s voice caught in his throat before it formed fully. His hand clenched the hilt of his old rifle—not to draw it, but to keep it from falling.

He didn’t say yes. Not with words.

But he leaned, just slightly, until their arms touched at the edges.

Kankri didn’t pull away.

And in that moment, with the moons behind them and the wind in their hair, there was no war. No rebellion. No blood between their hands. Just two silhouettes on a broken city’s rooftop, wrapped in quiet understanding.

They stood like that until the bells chimed low from the square below—someone marking the end of the watch.

The rebel leader tilted his head, voice quieter now, like prayer.

“Come down when you’re ready. There’s room by the fire.”

The violetblood nodded.

“I will.”

And he meant it.

The mutant didn’t leave right away. He lingered at Cronus’s side, gaze turned outward now too, following the broken line of rooftops and jagged chimneys, the far horizon smeared in violet smoke. The wind pulled at his cloak, and Cronus caught the faint sound of cloth brushing cloth, the shift of his weight against the wall.

“You remember the first time you climbed to a place like this?” Kankri said at last, voice hushed, almost curious. “On that uncolonized moon when I lived with your ship and crew. You said the air smelled like salt and rot.”

Cronus huffed. “Didn’t realize you remembered every dumb thing I said.”

“I remember what matters,” Kankri replied gently.

Cronus glanced at him sidelong. His voice softened. “Yeah. I remember too. You kept tryin’ to get me to drink something warm. I kept pretendin’ I wasn’t freezing.”

“You were shivering so much your teeth were chattering.”

“And you never called me out for it,” Cronus said, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “Why?”

Kankri’s expression flickered—somewhere between fond and pained. “Because I thought if I was too harsh, you’d vanish. Like mist. Like something half-wild I hadn’t earned the right to keep near.”

That pierced deeper than it should have. Cronus blinked hard, looking away again, jaw tightening.

“I didn’t want to go,” he murmured.

“I know.”

“I had to.”

“I know that too.”

The cool tempered wind quieted for a moment—like even the air paused to listen.

“I thought about you,” Cronus said. “More than I should have. Your voice. That thing you do when you talk with your hands and forget to stop. The sermons. The way you look at someone like they could still be better if they tried hard enough. The way you’d bleed for anyone, because you believe they can do better.”

Kankri’s breath caught.

“I didn’t think you thought of me at all,” he admitted. “Not really. Not when I wasn’t useful or mending your wounds.”

Cronus turned fully then, finally, his face worn but clear. “You’re wrong.”

And the redblood—slowly, warily—met his gaze. “Say it, then. Not just with silence. Not just with the way you stay now. Say it.”

It wasn’t a command. It was a plea.

Cronus shifted forward. The distance between them closed in a heartbeat, not with force, but with something quieter—something raw.

“I wanted to be someone better for you,” the seadweller whispered, lowering his voice not only from the proximity, but from the topic as if it were something sacred. “Not just someone good with a weapon. Or feared in a room. I wanted to be the one you’d let your guard down around. I just… didn’t know how.”

Kankri swallowed. His voice cracked for once, soft and tremulous.

“You don’t have to know how. Just don’t lie about what you want anymore.”

“I want you.”

The words left Cronus like a tide breaking—sudden and irreversible. “I want to keep seeing you speak until you go hoarse. I want to walk beside you, even if the world’s on fire. I want to fight for something that matters just ‘cause you believe in it.”

Kankri’s hand reached for his without hesitation.

Their fingers didn’t thread. Just pressed together—palm to palm, like a promise.

For a long time, neither of them moved.

And then—softly, Kankri asked, “Will you come down now?”

Cronus nodded.

Their hands remained joined as they stepped from the edge of the rooftop into the broken stairwell. The temperature difference between their skin felt less now like a curse and more like a blessing, that there was something warm to hold. And though the ruin of the city waited below, so too did the others. A fire. A cause.

And something that, just maybe, could still become a future.

The clade was gathered around the modest flame they’d coaxed into life with frayed wiring and driftwood, its light flickering against the sagging stone of the half-collapsed shelter. The Huntress sat cross-legged, whittling the edge of a stick, though her eyes tracked the rooftop with quiet sharpness. The Dolorosa stirred a small pot with a battered ladle, the scent of herbs and starch softening the cold edge of the night.

When Kankri and Cronus reappeared—boots crunching on debris, cloaks loose in the wind—they didn’t speak of what had passed. But something had shifted in the silence between them, something visible even in the way they walked. Closer. Not quite touching, but no longer afraid to be in proximity.

The Psiioniic was the first to look up, his faintly glowing eyes unreadable in the firelight. He didn’t speak, but his fingers twitched against the stone he leaned on, pulse steady, gaze weighing Cronus not with the wariness of an enemy—but the wary interest of a reluctant comrade.

The Huntress broke the silence.

“You two going to sit or keep lurking like spooked wingbeasts?” she teased, though her tone was low and more amused than biting. She gestured with the whittled stick. “I don’t bite. Much.”

Kankri gave her a patient, level look that spoke volumes of the sweeps spent together and seated himself near the fire, shoulders relaxing as he leaned back against the wall. Cronus hesitated just a moment longer, then followed, settling beside him. Not touching. But near enough that the mutant’s shared warmth could stretch between them in the flickering dark.

The Dolorosa ladled out a portion for each of them and passed the bowls without a word. She paused before Cronus. Her eyes, lined with age and defiance, studied him long enough that he shifted in place—but all she said was:

“Eat. You’ve looked worse, but not by much.”

It was her way of making peace. Maybe even welcoming him further or showing that she cared to some caliber.

Cronus dipped his head in something akin to a bashful display as he took the warm bowl from her hands.

Beside him, the Huntress shifted closer and pulled a thin notebook from her belt. She thumbed to a fresh page and, with one knee tucked up, began scribbling with tight, deliberate lines.

“What’s that entry for?” Cronus asked, his voice low, not wanting to break the quiet too harshly as the others shared a meal around them.

“Archive,” she said. “I write down the sermons. And… other things. Our journey. The way people speak Kankri’s name now. What we lose. What we gain.”

A beat. She didn’t look up from her writing.

“You’re part of it now, y’know.”

The violetblood blinked. “Didn’t think you’d want me in your little rebellion memoir.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you in it,” she replied, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth despite her words. “But you’re there anyway. You make good story material. Complicated, brooding. Brocade cape. The former enemy turned maybe-ally. Very dramatic. Not to mention the red romance material.”

Kankri made a strangled sound beside him that was almost a laugh, half-muffled by his bowl. His pointed ears had tinted the faintest candy red that contrasted the dark mass of his curly hair.

Cronus shook his head, but something in his chest lightened. “Glad to be of service.”

The fire had burned down to embers. The others were asleep in loose circles, cloaks wrapped tight, breaths soft and even in the hush of the ruined shelter. Outside, the city creaked. Wind howled like a grieving thing through the broken walls.

Cronus sat alone, just beyond the edge of the fire’s glow.

He’d taken off his boots, his coat. His rifle lay beside him, but tonight, it felt lighter somehow. Not useless—but not needed in the same way.

He looked up at the stars overhead—shimmering past broken rafters and smoke—and thought of the rooftop. Of Kankri’s hand against his. Of the words they had finally let themselves say.

I want you.

He hadn’t meant to say it like that. Not then. Not with such sharp clarity.

But now, sitting alone with the hush of the city pressing in and the memory of Kankri’s gaze—clear, pained, unwavering—he didn’t regret it. Not a word of it.

He wanted him.

Not in the way he once had—as a passing ache, a flicker in a battlefield dream.

But as something real. Something lasting.

Someone who had reached into the hollow parts of him and stayed.

He ran a hand through his slicked back hair, exhaling long and slow.

When the wind shifted, he heard the faint, familiar cadence of sleep-murmured words from Kankri’s corner of the camp—his voice always active, even in dreaming. Cronus didn’t make out the words. He didn’t need to.

He stood, quiet on bare feet, and walked closer. Just enough to see him.

Kankri was curled in his cloak, still upright, face half-turned toward where Cronus had once been lying. As if he’d noticed the missing presence even in sleep.

Cronus stood for a long moment. Then, quietly, he returned—lowering himself back beside him, letting their shoulders brush.

And when Kankri shifted, still mostly asleep, and pressed against his side without thinking—Cronus didn’t move away.

He stayed.

The sky was still golden when Cronus stirred.

Light bled in through the cracked window slats and broken stone, catching faintly on the edges of armor, on the curled strands of Kankri’s hair where it spilled from his hood. Most of the clade still slept, distant and curled in threadbare warmth. But not Kankri. He was awake.

He lay with his eyes open, arms folded beneath his cheek, gaze already on Cronus when he blinked back sleep.

For a moment, neither spoke.

The space between them held only breath—soft, even, shared.

Then Kankri said, softly, “You stayed.”

Cronus shifted, elbows propping him up. “Yeah. Guess I did.”

Kankri didn’t smile, but something softened in his eyes. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

Cronus looked away. The light caught on the worn metal at his hip, but he made no move to reach for it. He wasn’t armored this morning—not really. He just looked tired. Less like the Orphaner. More like the troll who'd once let himself be healed, helpless and quiet, in the deep forest.

“I never knew,” Kankri murmured, “that you were capable of gentleness like that. But you always have been. It just... took time. And silence. And not looking.”

Cronus glanced back at him, voice still rough from sleep like a low roll of thunder over the sea. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Kankri said, shifting to sit upright with him, knees brushing, “I’ve seen your cruelty, and your mask. I’ve seen the world you come from, and the name that follows you. But I’ve also seen the way you flinch when someone touches a wound too old to bleed. And the way you keep looking over your shoulder when no one’s chasing you.”

Cronus was quiet for a long time. “And you still wanted to help me?”

“I told you before.” Kankri turned toward him fully now, voice still low and soft, still too early for sermon volume. “I stayed because I saw something. Not just in you, but in... other versions of us. In dreams. In visions. Where you weren’t like this. Where you were whole. Or trying to be.”

His hands, resting in his lap, curled faintly. “I don’t know if those were real. Or prophetic. Or just hope clinging to broken thoughts. But they kept me moving. Even when you made it hard.”

“You think I’m worth all that?” Cronus asked, and there was no pride in it. Only weary disbelief.

The mutant didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he reached forward and gently took Cronus’s wrist, fingers burningly warm. He turned it palm-up and began to trace the shape of his palm with his dulled claws, achingly slow and soft in a way that had once made the violetblood want to recoil.

“I don’t think,” he said softly, “that kindness needs to be deserved. You’re not some ledger to be balanced. You are... someone I care about. Even when you run. Even when you fight me. Even when you leave.”

The firelight hadn’t yet risen, but the twin moons were still faint in the sky beyond the window—ghostly and pale.

Cronus looked at him. “I want to follow you.”

That stilled the air between them.

“I’ve said I’d protect you before,” Cronus added, voice thickening at the edges. “But that isn’t enough anymore. I want to stand beside you. Help build the thing you see when you talk. That better world.”

Kankri’s breath hitched slightly, and he smiled—not the wide, rousing kind he wore for sermons. But something small. And burningly real. It trembled slightly at the corners.

“Then you’d better keep up,” he whispered.

Cronus swallowed hard. Then leaned forward just slightly, their foreheads nearly touching.

“I intend to.”

They sat like that a while longer, sharing the slow birth of morning, the hush between waking and rising. Cronus, for once, not running. Kankri, not preaching. Just two tired souls, curled into warmth, chasing a flicker of something like peace.

Together.

The city lay shattered beneath a bruised sky, buildings scarred like old wounds, half-collapsed and crumbling. Dust hung thick in the air, drifting through narrow alleys and hollowed streets where silence had settled like a shroud where once laughter might have lived. Now, only echoes answered. The few who remained were ghosts tethered to this broken place, their eyes sharp with exhaustion and wary hope.

Cronus moved carefully, his heavy boots with each step stirring grit and whispered memories. This place smelled of ash and tension, a breath held too long. He was a stranger here, but the weight in the air was familiar—a world on edge, trembling under the boot of fear and waiting for a single spark to ignite rebellion.

Ahead, the clade assembled near a cracked plaza, faces drawn tight with tension and resolve. Among them, their leader stood like a beacon—a figure cloaked in quiet strength, warmth, and unyielding purpose. The Signless stood at the center as he always did, a dark figure in calm certainty. The hood of his cloak shadowed his face, but behind him the twin moons rose, casting a pale light that framed his silhouette like a quiet halo, tugging somewhere deep in the seadweller’s blood.

The crowd gathered slowly, ragged and tentative. They were farmers whose fields had been scorched, laborers whose factories lay silent, and young things who had only known hunger and war. Many clutched worn tokens—fragments of better days—and some bore scars deeper than skin, drawn from the rubble like moths to flame. They pressed close as Kankri stepped forward, voice calm but edged with fire. He lifted his head and spoke, his voice a low river flowing through the still air.

“We stand on the bones of a broken world, beneath the weight of a dying empire,” he began, words rolling steady like rain beneath a fragile sky. “Where the mighty feast on the weak, where justice is a whispered lie and hope is chained beneath their iron heel, where fear holds our tongues, and silence is the enemy’s sword. But silence will not save us. I tell you now—hope is not dead. It stirs beneath the ashes.”

The words fell like embers, kindling fires in violence-tired hearts.

Cronus felt the pull of that voice — not loud or shrill, but deep, resonant, wrapping around every soul present. The mutant’s words didn’t just reach ears; they reached bones and flesh, thrummed in the blood of the trolls present no matter the color it ran.

“We will not bow, nor break. Our scars are not marks of defeat but maps of survival—proof we have overcome. Every wound, every loss, tells a story of endurance. We are the broken, the beaten, the forgotten—but we are also the builders of what must come next. Our pain is the forge of change.”

He stepped forward, arms outstretched as if to embrace them all in that warmth he radiated, not only from his blood caste but from this persona he wore like a mask of his own creation.

“To those who say we are unworthy, who call us rebels and criminals—I say this: worth is not given by crowns, blood, or decrees. Worth is earned by the courage to stand, by the strength to rise when the world tells you to kneel, to stay, to be complacent.”

Around him, the crowd shifted, some fists clenched, others wiping dirt from their cheeks. The energy was electric but edged with danger—the kind that whispered of eyes watching from shadowed corners and ears listening behind cracked walls.

Cronus noticed how every word Kankri spoke seemed to weave a spell. His presence was magnetic — not just in the way he commanded attention, but in the small gestures: a nod to a weathered woman in the front, a quiet smile to a wriggler, freshly molted and clutching a tattered doll. Cronus watched as the crowd shifted—some faces hardened into fierce determination, others glistened with tears, fragile as the dust in the air. Fists clenched, hands reached out, and in the raw tension, he sensed something else within the city change with The Signless’s presence.

After the sermon, Kankri moved through the crowd with ease, a quiet gravity pulling the crowd toward him like a shield; he was a gentle force amid the chaos. He spoke softly with old friends, clasped shoulders, and offered hands. The clade’s loyalty shone clear in the way the others moved to do the same. The candy blooded mutant held hands with a gaunt man for a moment longer than the rest, whispered encouragement to a woman clutching a ragged wriggler, and offered a smile to a young boy who watched from the edge of the crowd with wide, hopeful eyes that were unburdened by war.

Cronus followed close, feeling simultaneously a stranger and a guardian—watching as Kankri’s warmth and conviction carved cracks in the city’s hardened despair and thousands of sweeps of instincts for violence. His violet eyes darted to shadowed doorways, to darkened windows. Soldiers loyal to the empire prowled nearby, their patience thin, their hatred palpable. The city was a powder keg, and this rebel leader’s words were the spark. Cronus paused at the edges of the crowd, feeling the tension between his own past as the hunted orphaner and the reverence the people showed Kankri at the center of this rebellion. It was a reminder of all they had lost—and all they still fought for.

He thought of the danger lurking—soldiers and spies hungry to snuff out the rebel flame—and yet, despite the peril, no threat seemed to touch Kankri when he was among his people, as if none dared challenge the mutant openly. It was as if the broken city itself bent inwards to protect him from harm in some quiet reverence. 

Later, as twilight folded the ruins in deep purple shadows, Cronus found himself at Kankri’s side, watching the moons rise like silent sentinels above the broken rooftops overlooking the city. The twin moons hung low, casting pale light that caught the edges of Kankri’s still drawn hood, framing his face in a soft, almost sacred glow.

For a moment, neither spoke, simply watched the moons climb higher.

Finally, Cronus broke the silence, voice low and tentative.

“Why do you fight so hard, Kan? For all of them... even for those who might never see change as their own? If even you may never see this change.”

Kankri’s red eyes reflected the slow light of the stars blinking into life, steady and clear.

“Other worlds—other lives, other paths,” he said softly. “Where we are not hunted, not broken. Where this endless war is just a memory, not a chain.”

He turned to Cronus, the hint of a smile breaking through the weariness.

“That’s why I keep going. For those possibilities. For the hope that even the unworthy can be worthy of love and change. Whether I am there for it or not, I want it to be true.”

Cronus swallowed the ache that settled deep in his chest.

“And you think I belong in those worlds?”

Kankri nodded, voice gentle but unwavering.

“More than anyone.”

The city’s distant sounds hummed below them—the restless stirring of a place waiting to be reborn.

And in that quiet, beneath fractured skies and twin moons, a fragile hope took root. In that moment, surrounded by the weight of ruined stone and whispered dreams, the previous Orphaner Dualscar understood.

This was why he fought—not just for survival, but for the flicker of light this redblood carried, fragile but fierce, in a world desperate for change.

Chapter Text

ACT 18: Fracturelight

The war-worn city was built like a husk, all scorched stone and hollow-eyed towers. Even the fog here dragged its feet against the ground. In the early nightfall, they’d walked beneath broken arches that once held banners. Now, only tattered threads whispered in the wind—warnings or elegies, it was hard to tell.

Dualscar trailed a few paces behind The Signless as they passed through the market square, the mutant’s hood drawn up. The sermon from the day before had stirred something dangerous. Eyes had lingered too long on the preacher. The way he’d spoken of rebirth, of revolt, of remembering one’s worth—it had been too sharp, too beautiful. It left an ache in the chest like the first breath after nearly drowning.

Now, tension laced the city like a weary, overworked seamstress sewing delicate threads into a fabric bound too tight. Any more pressure and the threads would snap and the fabric would fray.

The Psiioniic walked ahead of them, muttering to himself in low tone laced with irritation, his hands flicking in bursts of static as he made minor repairs to a small device slung across his hip. Sparks kissed his knuckles as he turned it in his hands, claws crackling with energy as he restrung it like he was trying to breathe life into something incapable of feeling. Cronus had learned not to interrupt when he worked. There was a rhythm to it, and breaking that rhythm was like pulling the tide back by hand.

The Huntress kept looking over her shoulder, her usual bravado thin today. Her clawed gauntlets were drawn, and her posture was stiff. Even the Dolorosa walked tightly beside Kankri, as if her very presence might shield him from whatever was brewing in the wind on this cold evening. Though she typically would stride with her head held high and indifferent, she too was scanning for danger down every alleyway, every side path.

It didn’t feel like peace. It felt like a storm pressing down behind every breath they shared.

“Too many uniforms,” Cronus said with his voice low enough for only the clade to hear him, watching the far end of the street. “They’re not even bothering to hide anymore.”

“They know we’re here,” the Huntress said under her breath. “They want us to feel it.”

Kankri hadn’t spoken in a while, not since that dawn when he’d stood barefoot in a sunbeam too thin to burn him, head bowed in silent thought. Cronus remembered the way his hand had curled in his cloak—like bracing for a blow that hadn’t yet fallen. How he had had this calm indifference about him, and how it shone through even now. Despite being younger, it was clear why this was their leader…yet he saw that same tension now had taken root in this mutant’s  spine.

“They’ll act tonight,” Kankri finally said, voice a low simmer.

“You sure?” Cronus asked.

“No,” he said, quietly. “But I feel it.”

They gathered in the crumbling courtyard of a city already lost.

The night air had broken cool over the city, heavy with soot and the sting of chemical ash that never quite cleared from the wind. Burnt edges of banners clung to stone and scaffold, and the rebellion’s sigil—once bright, now faded and torn—fluttered listlessly against walls worn with gunfire. 

The walls bore burn marks from a prior purge; buildings sagged where beams had long since blackened, and the sky above swam with a low gray haze that stuck in the lungs. Yet the people came. Dozens. Then hundreds. Then hundreds more still. Word spread like oil over fire when the Signless arrived — always thin, always cloaked, his voice, his message too large for a body that had learned to disappear at the drop of a pin.

The crowd of the clergy filled the broken square, packed tightly together beneath a ruined spire and the wide fractured window of a long-abandoned temple, repurposed now into a quiet pulpit. Its roof had collapsed years ago, but the arch of stone that remained rose like a wound against the sky. Through the shattered window above it, twin moons cast a strange light—silver and violet—forming a fractured halo behind the one who stood there.

The Signless. 

Kankri.

Cloaked, the fabric still bloodstained from the last escape, or far too many attempts on his life before that. He stood as though born from the rubble. The wind tugged gently at the hem of his robes as he looked out across the gathering.

“You’re still here,” he said softly, but the words carried. “Even now.”

There was a tremble underfoot—just slight, like breath held before a scream.

He kept speaking.

“You are not alone. You are not wrong for feeling too much. You are not weak for surviving. And you are not without a future.” His voice sharpened, slow and deliberate. “They will tell you that pain makes you obedient. But you have already learned that pain teaches you to listen.”

Dualscar kept to the shadows near the ruined colonnade, one hand never far from the hilt of his rifle at his side. He didn’t watch the crowd, nor the Signless. He watched the rooftops, the alley mouths, the stifled tremors in the ground. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the heaviness of the air.

But still, Kankri spoke. He spoke as clear and concise as ever, as if he was unshakeable.

“…and what is law, if not an inheritance of fear? What is an empire, if not a monument built atop the backs of those we’re taught to ignore?”

His voice rang off broken stone like hymn and howl all at once. Even Cronus, who had heard him speak a dozen times before, felt something tighten in his chest. That familiar, anchoring pull.

The Huntress stood behind Kankri now, half-listening, half-scanning the crowd. Her notebook and charcoal had long been abandoned. The Dolorosa hovered at the fringe with an eye on their escape route. And Mituna — the Psiioniic — stood to one side, lips pressed thin, hands twitching faintly at his sides, as if the tension in the air had begun to charge him like stormlight. He seemed restless, eyes glowing faintly with an energy he couldn’t quite suppress.

 Kankri’s gaze found him.

And for a moment the sermon fell silent, both of them pinned in that thin silver thread of eye contact. The moons behind him caught against the edges of Kankri’s hood again, haloing his silhouette in a light that looked nearly ethereal.

The rebel leader lifted one hand to him, palm upwards.

A small gesture. A call.

Not to fight. Not to run.

Just to come closer.

Cronus shifted, but not in discomfort. Yet, further still his knuckles whitened where they gripped the inside of his cape. Cloaked deep in his own coat, shoulders hunched as though to bear a weight too long carried, yet he moved forward. The crowd parted around him, wary—horrified, even. The Orphaner was a story lusii told to keep their given grub hatchlings from wandering. Yet here he stood, weaving slowly through a crowd that parted with whispers, eyes fixed upward on Kankri as though tethered to something unspoken.

Kankri returned his focus to the crowd as Dualscar approached, raising his voice—not to shout, but to cut through the haze of fear that never left this part of the galaxy.

“There are those among us,” he continued, “who come from the enemy’s halls. Who have done harm and now beg to do good. If you cannot forgive them, I will not ask you to. But I will ask that you let them walk beside us.”

A ripple moved through the crowd—murmurs, discontent, tension brewing like a storm—but Kankri’s steadfast voice held it back.

“I believe we are made better when we do not repeat the sins that broke us.”

He reached down from his otherworldly pedestal to press a warm palm to the shoulder of the so feared Orphaner, and the crowd was still, obedient despite their fear. The power the Signless held was that of trust rather than control, something entirely unknown to this galaxy and its tyrannical rule.

“No,” he muttered.

Kankri faltered mid-sentence.

But this—this wasn’t the usual sort of sermon silence where the audience was simply enraptured with the speaker that stood on crumbling ruin. This was something else .

The ground trembled.

The sermon had barely begun when the wind changed further.

It came in low across the broken rooftops of the city, hot and unclean. Something in it felt wrong — not storm-wrong or sulfur-wrong, but history-wrong , like the breath of an ancient predator inhaling over cracked earth. Cronus felt it even before the clade did: a prickling up the back of his neck, the kind that never meant anything good. The kind that left scattered bumps of pure adrenaline across his chilled skin.

Kankri had just stepped down from the half-collapsed altar of shattered stone where he’d spoken, wiping the heat from his brow with a worn cloth. His voice still echoed faintly in the square, the crowd dispersing beneath a midnight haze that turned from stark cold to something that shimmered like fever. Cronus had slowly moved to stand at the edge of the crowd again, unnoticed save for the hush that followed his shadow. Always too visible, always too large, always too late.

Then the shouting began.

At first it was just a scuffle. Someone in the crowd throwing a brick, someone else returning a baton swing. Cronus turned toward the source with something fierce in his posture, dangerous — a pocket of uniforms pressing in too fast, too early, and too confident . Not the usual guards. These were trained. Armored. Prepared.

A line of rebel fighters surged forward from the crowd, makeshift weapons raised to block the onslaught of soldiers. One of them — a young ceruleanblood, barely out of their first molt— caught the first blow full in the chest but didn’t go down. Screams erupted as panic swelled. The soldiers had no interest in a fair fight. They were herding, forcing them toward the central square’s mouth like livestock — like cullbait.

“Go,” the Dolorosa hissed through clenched teeth as she pulled a blade free from its sheath. “ Now. ”

The clade moved fast. Cronus was already breaking from his cover to carve a path through the rear line when Mituna froze beside the stage, eyes wide and glowing. That intense smell of ozone filtered through the square as energy crackled up his very being. Any items not properly sealed down began to lift with his power as though he was setting a sea of floating mines loose in the field.

“KK—run—” he rasped as though in pain, then turned—

A sound like screaming metal broke the haze open. Heads turned. The crowd didn’t start to scatter yet, not until they saw it: the shape above, descending like judgment clad in metal.

A ship—not a battleship, not a cruiser, but a cathedral of a warship. Hulking and covered in fuchsia markings so bright they bled against the clouds, bearing the crest no rebel wanted to see, even in their final moments. And at its helm, visible even at a distance— Her .

Fuchsia.

No insignia could deny it now. No escape would be enough. The Empress had truly come like a form of divine punishment.

Her Imperious Condescension.

Towering, divine, and terrible.

The moment Her silhouette resolved against the sun, every breath that valued their life in the square fled. The Empress was real. Here . Not just an idea of war, not just a symbol of a dying empire flexing its teeth— She had come in person .

To end this foolish hope that had taken a hold of this crowd.

A pulse of heat and light split the sky. That massive warship broke through the last barrier of clouds like a falling star, wrapped in the telltale signs of psionics, where Mituna was attempting on his own to slow the descending ship. Cronus stopped cold at the sight.

And that was when another shriek came.

It wasn’t from the goldblood attempting to halt an entire army of soldiers, or even from the crowd—it came from the sky.

A great, low whine of engines splitting the air, thick and shrill and primal. A warship, descending faster than any rebel vessel or any psiion’s might could counter. It gleamed a sickening fuchsia against the ashen sky, lined in twisted barbs of metal and veined with harsh Imperial markings that burned against the skyline like brands. Lights from its underbelly cut through the mist as more soldiers began to descend, armed and silent, weapons already drawn.

And even as the others scrambled to pull the Signless back, to funnel through alleyways and sewer hatches, Mituna stood his ground stubbornly. He was the last one out, gripping the stone rail beside the stage, flickering with unstable psionics — trying to hold not only the descending warship, but the soldiers at bay as well, if only long enough for Kankri to vanish behind the veil of smoke and falling rubble.

The Signless was pulled under before Cronus could reach him.

Chaos bloomed across the city square like fire through dry grass. The city residents scattered, some rushing for cover, some standing in place in disbelief—too stunned to run until the first body hit the ground. Another burst of light as the canons fired recklessly upon the city square. A chorus of screams that were woven with grief. 

Her Imperious Condescension stood at its helm — vast, godlike, clad in fuchsia robes that swept like flame. She raised Her trident toward the square.

She stepped forward.

Towering. Impossibly tall. Her horns were vast arcs like the scythes of a dead moon, and Her trident burned with energy that didn’t touch the ground so much as sear it. Fuchsia bled from Her armor in flowing etchings that writhed like they lived. A single glance from Her burned holes in the fleeing crowd’s resolve.

And the rebellion, what remained of it, scattered .

Then came the flashbombs.

Kankri was already vaulting down from the broken pulpit. The Dolorosa shouted orders, grabbing those closest to her tall frame to get them under cover. The Huntress had already vanished into the smoke, blades drawn, eyes flashing gold.

And Cronus—

Cronus went toward the fire with his rifle drawn and whirring with a plasma charge that laid on a hairpin trigger.

A beam from a rifle not too unlike his own seared across his left shoulder. He staggered but didn’t stop, cutting through the rush of bodies, fighting against the press of movement until he could see Kankri again, until he saw what was happening.

Mituna, flanked by too many guards.

He was still trying to hold the line to get everyone else to safety.

That mustard colored blood was running from his nose in rivulets, and his eyes glowed searing flashes of electric crimson and bright blue, but the strain showed in every limb. He lifted both hands and sent a burning shockwave through the nearest soldiers—enough to melt metal, enough to throw their formation and push rows of them back at once.

But nothing he could do was enough. They kept coming.

The Empress was watching the goldblood.

With a flick of her clawed hand, something dark and humming dropped from the belly of her ship—a device, round and heavy and clearly meant to trap. When it struck the ground, an entangling net of searing fuchsia light whipped up and around the Psiioniic’s frame, coiling like barbed wire around his already scarred arms, tightening until he screamed in nothing short of pure agony.

“No!” Kankri choked the word, reaching forward—Cronus caught his wrist hard and lifted him up to pull him back, ducking into cover with the mutant pressed to his chest as imperial fire lit up the stairwell.

“I’ll get him,” Cronus rasped. “Stay— stay hidden. ”

But the Psiioniic was already going under despite his struggling to escape and the beams of light his eyes emitted. They were dragging him up toward the ship like he weighed nothing. Like his struggle meant nothing. Like it was some foolish, dying thing.  Like he was something to be herded like livestock. The net flickered around him, short-circuiting his power, and his head lulled low, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth as he mouthed something silently—

Battery.

Cronus’s blood ran impossibly colder, like the depths of all the icy seas were not enough.

He’d seen it before. What they did to telekinetics when they wanted power without resistance. He’d done it. Ordered it.

But not this.

Never this.

The ship began to lift, the crowd now scattered to the winds, and with one last echoing shriek of metal, it rose into the darkening clouds.

And was gone. Like it had never been there at all.

Kankri fell to his knees beside Cronus, hand still tight in the folds of his threadbare cloak, as if holding on to what hadn’t yet slipped from his grasp entirely.

But something in the pathways of fate had changed here.

The Empress had come Herself to put a stop to the rebellion entirely. To crush any fragile dreams of resisting that laid within the hearts of those who listened.

And the rebellion, now no longer whispers but shouts, was suddenly so very close to dying.

The acidic storm didn’t break until long after the Empress’s ship had vanished into the upper atmosphere, leaving the ruined city below scorched and gutted, like a cauterized wound. The smell of ozone, blood, and acid clung to every breath, and the sound of battle had quieted to distant crackles and whimpers—the last sputtering embers of resistance crushed under iron bootheels.

They escaped underground.

Old irrigation channels twisted beneath the city like veins long gone dry. Stone and steel curved overhead, rusted but stable, once used to redirect water and now serving as tunnels for something far more vital—survival. Footsteps echoed in the dark. Breath steamed in the cold. The only light came from the occasional flicker of scavenged power cells in the Dolorosa’s pack and Cronus’s shoulder, still singed and bleeding from the riot.

Kankri hadn’t spoken since the ship left.

He moved like someone half-drowned, his shoulders rigid, eyes too wide and too dry. His hand was still pressed to his collarbone where Mituna had stood bleeding just moments before, like the gesture might rewind time, might call him back.

They moved through three tunnels before they collapsed into one of the safeholds the Psiioniic himself had rigged weeks ago—little more than a cellar lined in dented supplies and maps covered in his distinctive scratchy handwriting.

The moment the makeshift door shut behind them, and they were alone, Kankri collapsed to his knees in a heap.

Not in the position of prayer, something graceful and gentle.

Just—crushed under the weight of what they had lost. He had never looked so fragile. So utterly broken.

Cronus didn’t speak, not at first. His fingers were blood-slick, half from others, half from himself, and he had never felt this filthy. Not even during his worst raids. Not even when he burned villages and walked away with medals and praises for it. He felt nauseous at the thought of how he had once admired Her, watching the things She would do over Her subjects having faltering hope for change.

The Dolorosa crouched beside Kankri, checking his ribs for fractures, whispering something too soft to hear in a sweet cadence of voice as she attempted to soothe wounds that were not just of the flesh.

It was the Huntress who broke the silence. Her blades clicked as she sheathed it, face streaked with ash and blood, eyes hard. “We need to talk about what they’ll do to him.”

Kankri’s head snapped up, a furious firelight behind scarlet eyes.

“They won’t just use him to power Her warship,” she said. “That was the reason they came. But that's not all.”

Her voice caught. “They’ll question him.”

“No—” Kankri stood so fast he swayed with the momentum of it. “He won’t talk. He wouldn’t. You know he—”

“They won’t ask him to.”

That came from Cronus.

The room turned.

He leaned against the wall, coat slung over his injured arm to slow the bleeding, still smeared with soot. His voice was low. Grave.

“They don’t extract words. They extract memories.”

The Huntress nodded. “Cortical thorns. Mnemonic splitters. They’ll rip every face he’s seen from his skull if they think it’ll end the rebellion faster.”

Kankri’s hands trembled. “He’d die before letting them—”

“He won’t get a choice. ” Cronus bit the words, too sharp, too soon—but he forced himself to still. “They’ll tear his mind apart strand by strand and call it efficiency. If we don’t find him before that happens…”

He didn’t finish the thought.

He didn’t have to.

The images were there anyway: Mituna on his knees, blinking through blood, his eyes blinded, muttering fragmented words while a violet-lit machine latched cables to his spine, the thorns driving in. The sound he made when the net took him— not just pain exactly, but fear —echoed behind Cronus’s eyes.

He closed them. Just for a moment.

“I’ve seen what those warships run on,” he said. “The ones with living cores. You don’t… come back from it. Not whole.”

Kankri moved across the room, near-feral with urgency, dragging a cracked map toward the ground and circling the nearest orbital spires.

“Where would She go?” he rasped. “Where does She dock when She wants everyone to see?”

Cronus met his eyes. “There’s only one place bold enough for that.”

The Dolorosa’s face tightened. “The Crowned Orbit.”

The Huntress exhaled sharply. “That close to the galactic heart? We won’t get a skiff within a thousand clicks without getting glassed from orbit.”

“That’s why,” Cronus said, already reaching for gear, “we don’t bring a skiff.”

“You plan to walk into a stronghold?” the Dolorosa snapped. “You’ll get all of us killed.”

“I don’t plan to bring all of you,” he returned evenly. “You’ve got too much to lose.”

“And you don’t?” Kankri said, voice cracking like dried paint under stormy weather.

The silence that followed hit harder than a blow.

Kankri didn’t look away, eyes burning.

“Don’t talk like that,” he said, softer now. “Like you're some disposable blade we found in the rubble. I already lost him—I’m not going to lose you too.”

Cronus blinked. The air in his chest caught like a thread snagged on jagged metal. That same tethering thread had pulled him along for sweeps now, each beat of it winding tighter between his ribs, and now it burned.

“We’ll get him back,” Kankri said, and it wasn’t a question. “I need you with me.”

For once, Cronus didn’t have a clever line to give him.

He just nodded.

And across the room, the Huntress pulled a faded datapad from her coat and lit it with a flick of her wrist. It was the datapad of a ring of assassins, a relic from her past.

“I’ve got old Imperial codes,” she said. “Old, but deep. Ones I never used. We’ll need to forge clearance to even breathe near the docks.”

“And I know the paths,” Cronus said. “Every guard rotation. Every weakness in the hull. They used to call me there to watch when new warships got their first burn. I’ve been inside that ship.”

The Dolorosa turned. “Then we use that knowledge. We plan tonight. Move at dawn.”

Kankri let out a shaking breath and dropped his hand back to the map, tracing a course with his clawed fingertip, silent and steady.

Above them, the world burned quieter now, but not for long.

They had one of their own to retrieve.

And this time, they would make the Empire bleed for it.

Chapter Text

ACT 19: Knives in the Silence

The forest swallowed them in ash and silence, save for the quick footfalls of the surviving rebels. Smoke coiled behind them, chasing the scent of fear and failure, but also something sharper—something alive.

Cronus’s lungs burned from the sprint, but he didn’t slow. He was running not just for himself, not even just for Kankri anymore—but for all of them. The Huntress, with wild eyes and careful, diligent notetaking. The Dolorosa, the stern figure with the quiet voice who reminded him of old sea legends. The Psiioniic, with wires and lightning in his veins and untamed fury behind his teeth.

And now, one of them—Mituna—was gone.

They had seen the ship lift into the air again, fuschia banners unfurling like some imperial bloom. The Empress had not even disembarked fully—Her silhouette alone, glimpsed through the plumes of smoke and flare-fire, had been enough to fracture the gathered rebellion.

He remembered Her face—beautiful, ageless, cruel. He had once thought Her divine. Now, he saw only death.

They made camp in the ruins of an abandoned outpost, a half-collapsed structure with enough shadows to hide in and enough exits to escape again if needed. No one spoke for a long time.

But Dualscar watched the Signless—watched how his shoulders hunched and his knuckles turned white as he gripped the sickle always strapped to his waist, rarely drawn.

Until now.

The oddly colored blade hissed from its sheath like a truth finally spoken. Moonlight caught the curve of it as Kankri stepped into the clearing where the others had gathered. He held it low, not as a threat—but as a promise.

“She’s not keeping him,” he said softly.

The Huntress—smeared in soot, one arm cradling a cracked rib sustained in their previous scuff—nodded grimly. “We’ll get him back.”

“She’ll torture him first,” the Dolorosa murmured. “She knows what he knows. What he could power for Her. He is far more skilled than most goldbloods are at using his telekinetics.”

Cronus's clawed and battleworn hands curled at his sides. He thought of the way the Psiioniic had rubbed those ridged scars up his arms. The way he had paled at the sound of static kickstarting on a device he himself had repaired, as though he could hear all of the doomed voices of his culled caste trapped within it. And of the brief truce, hard-earned, when the goldblood had finally offered him his name—Mituna—like an olive branch across fire.

“He didn’t deserve that,” Cronus muttered. “None of you do.”

Something in Kankri’s expression cracked. He turned to the previous orphaner with something nearly unrecognizable in his gaze—not accusation. Not even weariness. Something warmer. Shared.

“You’re one of us now, aren’t you?” Kankri asked, tone carefully low and inquisitive.

It startled Cronus more than he let show, though his heart hammered in his chest.

“I guess,” he said roughly. “Doesn’t mean I forgive myself for who I used to be.”

Kankri didn’t answer at first. He stared into the firelight, into the wounds of the night. The flames danced in the rings of his mutated red eyes. 

“You don’t have to. But you can still help us write something better. You can still write something better for yourself, too. None of this is a lost cause, even now.”

The next day, they would plan their infiltration. They would whisper through maps and codes and tunnels older than the Empire itself. They would dream of the sea and the stars and a troll with too much voltage in his spine and not enough freedom.

But that night, Cronus sat beside them all. When the Dolorosa passed him a rough-wrapped ration, she didn’t hesitate. When the Huntress leaned against his arm, exhausted and in need of support, she didn’t flinch. And when Kankri sat down close beside him, blade still in hand, he didn’t move away. He leaned deep into the violetblood’s other shoulder, gazing up into the brightening sky.

In the silence, he whispered, “We’ll bring him home.”

And for the first time in his long, blood-marked life, Cronus meant we.

They moved beneath the broken belly of the world—through a network of long-forgotten tunnels buried beneath the scorched outskirts of the imperial base. Old metro shafts and overflow drains twisted around each other like rusted veins. Cronus led the way at times, but always deferred to Kankri's strange instinct for paths others overlooked. Just like on the untamed jungle planet, he was oddly in tune with his sense of direction, guiding the group with gentle hands and silent cues. Beside them, the others moved with grim resolve. The Dolorosa had grown quiet. The Huntress checked her blades in silence. They all had injuries, but refused to slow their pace.

They had one goal: reach the Empress’s stronghold and extract Mituna before the damage became irreversible.

Every so often, faint vibrations shook the dust from the ceiling above. The low, pulsing hum of the warship’s engines filtered down like the growl of a sleeping god.

Mituna was somewhere inside; for any of this to work, he had to be.

The final length of the dark, winding tunnel gave way to a narrow drain shaft. From there, they climbed, single-file, until they reached the surface—a rise in the shadow of the base’s east wing, cloaked by the skeletal remains of a shattered spire. The stronghold loomed ahead: columns of white stone and black alloy, hemmed in by electric gates and rows of blood-lit sentries. There were no stars visible. The Empress's docked ship had eclipsed them all.

They did not charge. They seeped in like smoke.

Cronus moved with ruthless grace, striking from behind with the pommel of his rifle or dragging his quarry silently into the dark. His hands were efficient. His violet eyes, hard like when facing a beast upon rough seas.

But it was Kankri who stunned them all.

When they were spotted—because inevitably, they were—a squadron of highblooded, armored guards rounded the corner. The Huntress stepped forward to intercept with clawed gauntlets drawn, only to pause when Kankri raised his hand.

“Let me,” he said, and walked into the light, his hood obscuring his dark curls.

The guards hesitated only a second. The Signless. That outlaw. That threat.

They lunged.

Kankri didn’t flinch.

He moved like a windstorm—his cloak sweeping behind him, that curved sickle flashing stark white and red in the high floodlights. He disarmed two with blunt, decisive strikes, kicking a third square in the chest and sending them sprawling despite how much stronger the caste system taught them they should have been. Every movement was clean, almost beautiful, but not without purpose.

But he did not kill. He left no permanent damage on a single guard he faced.

Even in the heat of it, with the fury of a dying sun, he left every blow calculated. Paralyzing, not lethal. Crippling, not final. He caught a knife meant for the Huntress with the shaft of his sickle, twisting until the attacker yelped and dropped it. When a taller guard came at him with a plasma spear, Kankri ducked low, caught the haft, and swept the legs from beneath them with the curved and duller end of his weapon.

His fury was not in the violence itself, but the restraint.

Cronus couldn’t look away. He was like a sun who could not burn up close.

This was not the quiet troll who read late into the night in the belly of an orphaner’s ship or the troll who whispered soft sermons over candlelight for a thousand reckless dreamers. This was the storm behind the words. This was what he fought for.

When the last guard was unconscious, Kankri exhaled, a shudder running through him. The strikes had been quiet, concise enough that less attention was drawn than having any of the others attack.

Blood speckled his cheek faintly—not his own.

The Huntress pressed a hand to his shoulder carefully. “You good?”

“No,” Kankri said. “But I’m clear.”

He turned to Cronus then, crimson fire meeting his violet eyes across the ruin of the encounter. His hands trembled only slightly on the handle of his weapon.

Cronus stepped forward and laid a cold hand briefly over Kankri’s own.

“You didn’t kill them,” he said, not as a question.

“I never will,” Kankri replied. “Even when it would be easier. Even when I’m burning for it.”

That burn lived in his gaze still, a low and steady flame that Cronus felt flickering somewhere inside his own ribs.

And in that moment—among the ruins, the faint alarms now rising, and the path still ahead—they weren’t fugitives or former warlords or martyrs waiting to happen.

They were comrades-in-arms.

They were the start of something sharp enough to survive. The seadweller understood then, just how this group had escaped so many near fatal encounters.

The halls inside the stronghold were colder than any wind outside. No matter how far they descended, how many guards they slipped past or subdued, it felt like stepping deeper into the bone of some great, dead beast—its marrow hollowed out in the name of conquest. Of greed.

The silence was tense. Even the Dolorosa did not speak now. She moved ahead with the careful speed of someone retracing familiar nightmares.

Cronus kept at Kankri’s side, keeping their strides close together.

He could feel it building in the air—pressure mounting like the weight before a storm, like the drawn breath of something about to break. Kankri’s jaw was clenched tight. His fingers flexed compulsively at his sides.

Then—

A sound, echoing faintly through the walls. At first, it could have been mistaken for a creaking, violent sound. Like a blade hitting a metal wall and rebounding with harsh vibration.

It wasn’t mechanical.

It was a voice.

High-pitched, warped by pain and metal acoustics, but unmistakable in its wild, stuttering cadence.

“—gghk—n-NO don’t—n’won’t tell y-y-you sh-shit—”

Mituna.

The scream that followed curled through the corridors like a blade through soft tissue. Cronus felt it in his spine, the way he had all those sweeps ago, like static kissing skin and vowing gravity to change. But it was Kankri who responded like lightning meeting steel.

His body snapped upright. His breath hitched—not in fear, but rage.

Not fear.

Fury.

Without waiting for instruction or confirmation, Kankri surged forward. Cronus shouted his name, but it was like trying to command the sun to lessen its heat.

The others sprinted after.

They moved quickly now, ducking under bursts of light, scaling high-raised platforms meant to be guarded checkpoints. The signs of hasty imperial reinforcement were everywhere—open crates of restraints, violet-colored serum splattered across floor tiles, torture implements only half-cleaned.

And the screams continued. Less coherent now. Cries broken by static. Electricity. Choked breaths. Pleas swallowed before they reached words. The sickening smell of the ozone being burnt layer by layer, all at once.

“Hold position—we need to think—” the Dolorosa tried.

But Kankri was already gone ahead, his cloak whisking behind him down a side hall where the walls hummed like the inside of a living engine. His footfalls echoed sharp and solitary. Cronus caught up in time to see his silhouette at the end of the hall—small, cloaked, and shaking.