The morning the world felt thin, Azelar walked with Rayon to the rim of the high plateau. The sky was a hard, clean blue, and the heavy air of the western land seemed almost respectful—arranged itself so that even sound moved in careful, measured steps. Vorthalaxis lounged nearby, a silent, enormous shadow that watched like an old sentinel. Erethon drifted in the space between thought and wind, quiet for once, letting the moment have its own voice.
Rayon's hands were in his pockets. The Black Resonance thrummed faintly beneath his skin, a living pulse that kept time with his breathing. He looked out over the continent he had reshaped, then back at Azelar with a smirk that was softer than usual.
"Old man," Rayon said. "We're done here."
Azelar nodded. The lines around his eyes were deeper than a year ago; grief still sat in the hollow of his chest, but something steadier had taken root—acceptance, perhaps, or the small satisfaction of having taught what needed teaching. He had watched Rayon break his limits and then break the rules of history itself. He had watched the boy become something else.
"You did well," Azelar said quietly. "You listened when I spoke, and you honored what you learned. That is not common."
Rayon shrugged like a man brushing dust from a coat. "You taught me weight. You taught me balance. I learned the rest on my own."
Azelar's mouth twitched into a smile that barely moved his face. Then he straightened, and his gaze sharpened. "Before you go—one thing. Do not leave vengeance to fester inside you like a wound you never clean. If you are to level the Awakeners Circle, do it as executioners do: cleanly. Rage makes you sloppy, even you."
Rayon's eyes glinted. There was an edge to him now that had nothing to do with hunger for power. It was resolve shaped by cold logic.
"I won't be sloppy," he said. "And I won't let you carry vendettas. You lost family to rot and corruption—good. That anger will be a tool if you let it, but don't let it be an anchor. If I say I'll burn them, I burn them. If I say I'll kill you, you'll die. That's how promises work for me."
Azelar blinked at the bluntness, then barked a short, rueful laugh.
"You sound like a king," the old man said. Then, softer: "A dangerous one."
Rayon gave him a single nod. "I keep my word."
There was a long silence that the plateau filled with the sound of small birds and distant water. Azelar's face changed then—something cracked like the surface of old armor, and for an instant he looked younger, raw with the memory of loss. One small motion: a tear escaped, followed by a breath he hadn't let himself take in years.
"You'll go and you'll remake the world," Azelar said, voice thick. "If you ever find a place where you can simply be—take it. Live. I would like that for you."
Rayon watched the tear, the way it caught light, like a small, honest thing in a field of inevitability. He had never been good at words for others. He was good at making promises and keeping them.
"I might," he said. "Maybe one day I'll want a quiet place where the world's noise is something I can mute. Until then—business."
Azelar reached into a satchel beside him and drew out a folded garment. It was a suit—tailored, simple in silhouette but anything but plain. The fabric drank the light like ink, yet under certain angles it reflected faint silver threads, not decoration but woven resonance—thin lines that pulsed subtly in time with Rayon's new heartbeat.
"It's fitted for the way you move now," Azelar said. "It will hold your form, but also let the resonance flow. Not armor. Not show. Something that remembers the man beneath the power."
Rayon took the suit. He turned it over in his hands—no hesitation, no sentimentality. He slipped it on there at the edge of the world. The jacket hugged his shoulders, the cut perfect for a body already changed by pressure and battle. The silver threads skimmed over his collarbones and down his sleeves like veins of contained energy.
"I don't usually keep gifts," Rayon said, voice flat but not unkind. "But I'll use it."
Azelar's smile was a thin map of relief. "Then it will have purpose."
They stood for a moment longer, two figures on a plateau that had held so much. Erethon's expression, usually a knife in a velvet glove, had softened into something close to approval. Vorthalaxis lowered his head in a solemn bow—less ceremony than acknowledgment.
Rayon turned away first. He did not embrace Azelar; that wasn't his way. Instead he offered the old man a look that contained both promise and a threat: he would act, and he would be precise.
"Remember," Rayon said over his shoulder as he walked, "if I tell you I'll do something, consider it done. And if the world needs correction, I will correct it. Don't waste that vengeance on me. Save it for living."
Azelar watched him go, and the old place where grief lived shifted at last toward something like peace. He raised the teacup to his lips and drank, the motion small and private. The suit's silver threads shimmered in the turning light as Rayon's silhouette merged with the horizon.
He walked toward the road that led east—toward cities that had ears, toward courts that had tongues, toward a world that mistook mercy for weakness. The Black Primordial moved like a man on a contract with fate: efficient, inevitable, and utterly himself.
Behind him, Azelar said something that only the wind and Erethon heard.
"Come back if you can." It was a wish hidden as command. Rayon did not look back.
When the plateau swallowed him, only two things remained: the faint hum of Black Resonance threading the sky, and the thin sheen of a small tear on an old man's cheek.