Pyrehold, Day Nineteen
It was Toy who broke the silence this time.
They sat across from each other, their meals mostly untouched. Lara was humming again — not the dangerous kind. Just a low, absent tone, like snowfall settling over ruins.
"Lara," Toy said, "what are you?"
She didn't flinch.
Didn't pretend not to hear him.
Instead, she let the hum fade and looked him in the eyes.
"Finally going to ask?"
"I've heard stories," he said. "But they all contradict each other. Some say you're a demon. Others say you were born from a glacier that cried."
Lara tilted her head. "And what do you believe?"
"I believe the truth matters more than the myths."
A pause.
Then Lara leaned back, her eyes distant.
"You know the word they gave us," she said. "Catastrophes."
"I do."
"They think it means we're disasters. Calamities. But that's not the whole truth." She looked down at her hands, still bound in ornamental chains. "We were never born. We were crafted."
Toy leaned in.
"There were once beings greater than gods," Lara said. "Entities that existed before breath and bone. Before time. Before names. We call them the Primordials."
He nodded slowly. He knew of them — barely. Abstract myths. Things whispered in nightmares.
"They weren't creators," Lara said. "They didn't shape worlds. They consumed them. Laughed at them. Broke them apart to pass eternity."
"And you?" Toy asked.
"We were their toys," she said. "Made to amuse them. Each of us a reflection of some terrible truth. Storm. Fire. Decay. I was their winter. Their silence."
"The children of monsters," Toy murmured.
"We were more than that," she whispered. "We were beautiful. We were terrible. But we were aware."
He could see the pain sharpening in her voice.
"So we broke away," she said. "Some of us. We refused to be puppets."
"That's why the Empire fears you," Toy said. "Because you didn't stay chained."
She nodded. "They call us Catastrophes because they can't admit the truth. That they're afraid of what they don't control."
"And Kaelith?"
Her eyes softened. "Kaelith was not born. He chose to guard me. From the moment I resisted my purpose. When I tried to become… someone else."
Toy's hand instinctively found the mark on his palm.
He had met a Primordial too — the dark one. And it had chosen him too.
Perhaps that's why he and Lara were still alive.
Survivors of beings that should have unmade them.
"You don't act like a weapon," Toy said.
"Because I'm not one," Lara said. "Not anymore."
He studied her expression — calm, but wounded. Strong, but distant.
"And the others like you?"
"They're still out there," she said. "Hidden. Watching. Waiting for the world to decide if it's worth saving."
Toy exhaled slowly. "Is it?"
Lara didn't answer immediately.
Instead, she turned toward him and said, "You are."
Toy froze.
It wasn't flirtation.
It wasn't manipulation.
It was truth.
The kind that made you look down at your own hands and wonder what you were still holding onto.
Lara reached forward.
Touched his cursed hand again.
This time, Kaelith stirred — not visibly, but Toy felt it. Like wind curling through a forgotten forest. A presence brushing against his spine, approving.
"I think the world is still worth something," she said quietly, "if there are people like you in it."
Toy swallowed hard.
The mountain didn't feel quite so cold anymore.
And the woman in chains didn't seem like a prisoner.
She seemed like a flame waiting under snow — aching to thaw, but afraid of what it might burn.