The sharp, throbbing pain in my jaw was a lighthouse in a storm of confusion, a single, undeniable point of reality in a world that had become a nightmare. I lay on the cold stone floor, the metallic taste of blood a grim punctuation mark to Valerius's brutal truth. He stood over me, not as a tormentor, but as a fellow mourner, his own grief so profound it had to be expressed through the only language he truly understood: brute force.
Before he could say another word, a blur of motion intervened.
"Valerius, that is enough!"
Lyra's voice was sharp, cutting through the heavy silence with an authority I had never heard from her before. She was at my side in an instant, kneeling, her usually placid amber eyes now blazing with a fierce, protective anger. She placed a gentle hand on my shoulder, positioning herself between me and the hulking summon. Her calm, perfect demeanor had utterly shattered, replaced by the raw emotion of a den mother defending her charge.
"Look at him!" she commanded, her voice trembling with a rare, undisguised fury. "He has been unconscious for two weeks, Valerius! The Master himself oversaw the restoration of his core data after the strain of the forced synchronization. His physical wounds have just now fully healed, and this is how you greet him? With a blow?"
Her words, meant for Valerius, struck me with the force of a physical impact far greater than his punch.
Two weeks.
The number echoed in the sudden, ringing silence of my mind. Two weeks. Fourteen days. A chasm of lost time that my brain struggled to comprehend.
It all clicked into place with a horrifying, sickening finality. The lack of scars. The absence of pain. The feeling of being fully rested. It wasn't because it was a dream. It was because an immense amount of time and effort, the Master Builder's own effort, had been spent putting me back together. The seamless healing wasn't a comforting sign of a nightmare's end; it was the terrifying proof of its reality.
The memories weren't a fantasy. They were a report.
The fight. The rage. The borrowed power. The reinforcements.
Silas.
The last, stubborn wall of denial in my mind didn't just crack; it was obliterated, blasted into dust by the force of that one, simple fact. Two weeks. He had been gone for two weeks, and I had been sleeping, blissfully unaware, while the world had moved on without him. The empty chair wasn't a temporary absence. It was a permanent, gaping wound in the fabric of their family.
And it was my fault.
A sound, a choked, strangled sob, tore itself from my throat. It was an ugly, broken noise, the sound of a heart finally admitting what the mind had refused to see. The dam broke. The cold, hard knot of grief I had been unknowingly suppressing burst, and a wave of raw, agonizing sorrow washed over me.
Tears, hot and stinging, welled up in my eyes and streamed down my face, mixing with the blood trickling from my lip. I didn't try to stop them. I couldn't. I curled in on myself on the cold floor, the full, crushing weight of Silas's death finally hitting me.
Lyra's expression softened, the anger at Valerius melting away, replaced by an overwhelming wave of sympathy. She moved closer, and then did something so unexpected, so profoundly out of character for the perfect, logical construct, that it momentarily stunned me. She wrapped her arms around my shaking shoulders and pulled me into a hug.
Her embrace wasn't soft or hesitant. It was firm, solid, an anchor in the storm of my own grief. I collapsed against her, my face buried in her shoulder, and I cried. I cried like I hadn't since I was a child, raw, shuddering sobs that tore through my body, each one a testament to my failure.
"I failed him," I choked out between breaths, the words a ragged, broken confession. "I failed… I was right there… and I couldn't do anything…"
"It is not your fault, Kael-sama," Lyra whispered, her hand gently rubbing my back in a comforting, steady rhythm.
"Yes, it is!" I insisted, my voice thick with self-loathing. "If I had just been stronger… if I had been faster… if I hadn't needed him to save me… he wouldn't have… he wouldn't be…" The word dead was a mountain I couldn't bring my voice to climb. "I was supposed to be the key! I had the orb! I had the power! But it wasn't enough! I couldn't even avenge him! I failed…"
The guilt was a poison, and it was flooding every part of me. Silas had died to protect Elara and Miyuri, to buy the time we needed to plant the beacon. But he had also died because I, the supposed trump card, had been taken out of the fight, forcing him to make that impossible choice.
Lyra held me tighter, her voice a steady, comforting presence against my ear. "Listen to me, Kael. Silas was a scout, but he was also a guardian. His core function, his very purpose, was to see the threat and neutralize it. In that final moment, he assessed the situation. He saw the Founder's attack, he saw you were unable to intercept, and he saw Elara and Miyuri, defenseless. He made a tactical decision. He chose to shield the objective."
Her words were logical, clinical, but they were laced with a deep, unwavering respect for her fallen comrade.
"He did not die because you were weak," she continued softly. "He died because he was strong. He chose to fulfill his purpose. He chose to save the mission. To save all of us. There is no failure in that, Kael-sama. There is only sacrifice. A sacrifice that you, in your rage, honored by buying the final seconds we needed for the portal to open."
Her words didn't magically heal the gaping wound in my soul. They didn't make the pain go away. They didn't bring Silas back. But they were a sliver of light in the crushing darkness of my guilt. She was reframing it. It wasn't my failure. It was his final, heroic success. A success I had, in my own broken way, helped to secure.
My frantic, desperate sobs slowly subsided, replaced by a deep, hollow ache that settled in my chest. I didn't pull away from Lyra's embrace. I clung to it, a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood. The tears stopped, but the ache remained.
It was real. All of it. The pain in my jaw was real. The emptiness in this room was real. The comforting weight of Lyra's arms around me was real.
And Silas was never coming back.
The acceptance of that truth didn't make me feel better. But for the first time in two weeks, I was no longer running from it.