The bells carried far in the frozen air, low and heavy, as though the city itself were groaning under some unbearable weight.
Alexis rode hard into Eldara's capital, his men thundering somewhere behind—but he didn't slow, didn't turn, didn't think to give a single order.
There was no room in his mind for discipline or strategy, only a single, jagged thought that scraped against him with each breath: Please, let it not be what I think it is.
Snow whipped into his face, stinging, but he pushed on.
The streets ahead thickened with people, their dark hoods bending together, voices hushed to a fearful murmur. His horse could go no further in that crush.
He leapt down without pause, forcing his way through, then up—grabbing ledges, vaulting low roofs, his boots slipping on frozen tiles. He crossed the city as the crows might, running the spine of it, the bells beating in his blood.
A final jump onto a parapet brought him to the palace's outer square. Below, the crowd rippled with grief.
Two draped catafalques holding the coffins stood in solemn stillness, each flanked by guards rigid as stone. The air smelled of smoke and incense, sharp and cold against the wind.
Alexis froze where he landed, breath tearing from his lungs.
And there—just beyond the coffins—stood Hiral.
Their eyes met across the gulf of crowd and snow. In that instant, the storm, the bells, the city's grief—all of it narrowed to the faint, pained curve of Hiral's mouth.
A smile, if one could call it that, cracked by something deeper than sorrow.
Hiral mouthed the words slowly, deliberately, as if etching them into Alexis's mind: The war begins.
Then, before Alexis could move, before breath could become a shout, Hiral turned and slipped into the crowd, vanishing like smoke into the winter air.
The bells tolled again.
Alexis could not tell if it was the sound or the meaning that struck him harder.
Hiral!
Alexis chased after him.
Alexis dropped from the parapet, boots hitting the cobblestones hard enough to jar his bones.
He pushed through the crowd, scanning every face, every flicker of movement between dark cloaks and hunched shoulders.
"Hiral!" The name burned in his throat, though he didn't dare shout it aloud.
He caught glimpses—a tall figure disappearing into an alley, a coat hem vanishing around a corner—but each time he forced his way toward it, the shape dissolved into someone else, and the city seemed to swallow him whole.
He searched until his lungs were raw and his breath came in white shudders.
The bells tolled on, marking not time but distance—every strike another step further from what he had hoped to find.
Boots clattered behind him. His men, winded and wary, finally caught up, their eyes darting over the mourning crowd and the black-draped catafalques.
"General," one of them whispered, voice low but urgent, "what are your orders? Do we stay? Do we—"
Alexis closed his eyes.
The cold cut at his skin, but the greater ache was somewhere deeper, heavier.
If we stay, their grief will have a face to blame. If we act, we only stoke the fire.
The fault—his fault—was in being too late.
He drew a slow, steady breath, then opened his eyes.
"We return to Ro," he said, the words like stones in his mouth. "Now."
The men hesitated, glancing toward the palace, toward the crowd, toward him.
"That's an order." His voice was firm, though it cost him to make it so. "Go back. Report the truth of what happened here. War will come regardless of what we do now."
Without another word, he turned from them, striding for his horse. He mounted in one fluid, practiced motion, and set his eyes on the road ahead.
This time, he did not look back.
He was afraid that if he did, he would see Hiral standing there in the snow—wearing that same broken smile—only now with a blade leveled at his heart.
****
The wind was a living thing now—howling through the narrow streets, tearing at cloaks, scouring the skin raw.
Alexis slowed his horse just enough to pull one hand free from the reins. His fingers found the small weight hidden beneath his layers, cool against his palm.
The koi necklace.
He curled his hand around it until the chain bit into his skin. For a heartbeat, the world bent—not snow and stone, not bells and grief, but sunlight glittering across a restless sea.
Hiral beside him on the deck, wind tangled in his hair, eyes squinting against the spray, smiling as if the whole world could fit in that one moment.
That free, unguarded smile—the one that had always belonged to the horizon.
But it was replaced just as quickly by the fractured echo he had seen today.
That broken curve of lips, as if joy itself had been splintered, as if something precious had been taken and could never be returned.
The wind howled louder, rattling the wooden eaves overhead.
Alexis tilted his face into the storm and whispered Hiral's name.
Then, louder, he called it again, though there was no one to hear but the swirling snow.
The cold bit at his cheeks, but the sting wasn't from the wind.
He let the storm have his tears, let it whip them away before they could fall, let the world believe they were only melted snow on his skin.
The necklace was still warm from his grasp when he lowered it back beneath his cloak.
He didn't look back. He wanted to.
The road to Ro stretched ahead, white and unending, but in the storm behind him, he imagined that broken smile lingering—waiting, daring him to meet it again across the edge of a battlefield.