The wind carried ash the way old monks carried prayers, slow, deliberate, and full of unfinished things.
Leo felt it cling to his skin as he walked the ridge above the Silent Expanse. Each step crunched on glassy dirt, the ground melted smooth in patches where he had unleashed the fragment's power during the final battle months ago. The landscape still wore his mistakes like scars. He didn't look away. Guilt deserved its place in the world.
His cloak snapped behind him, dark against the bone-white horizon. Beneath it, the delicate web of Stability Braces Owen had crafted hummed against his ribs and spine, tiny mechanisms that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, anchoring the unstable energies inside him. Without them, the whispers would have been louder today.
They were already loud enough.
We were stronger before, murmured a low, ancient voice inside him, one of the egos formed when Fragment A brushed too close to the echoes of B and C.
