Gaidan's home was a black house perched on a ridge above a fjord, glass and stone and the quiet of old things. It sat like a memory made manifest—external lights dimmed against the long Arctic dusk, the aurora tucking itself like a veil behind the mountains. He came back alone, the League's summons still ringing like a bell in his head, and found his parents moving through the kitchen with the soft precision of people who have lived long enough to learn how to make small comforts survive cold.
They did not ask him where he had been. They did not puzzle over the fact that his face carried the dust of distant stars. Instead they poured tea, and the house filled with the calm arguments of a family used to bearing its own silence.
"It's not simple," Gaidan told them finally, hands wrapped around the warm cup. The heat bled into him like a small blessing. "They called me back for the League. There's a man—Moonveil. He broke the city."
His mother's eyes were a small pool of human worry. "And you think him a danger?"
Gaidan shook his head. "Danger, yes—but not the sort the League imagines. The League sees a symbol and wants to tether it. They prefer their mythology neat and accountable. Moonveil is neither neat nor accountable. He is a wound that will not be medicated with law."
His father, who had been quiet the whole time, looked up from his mug. "You always side with pragmatism," he said. "When you were small, you used to rescue the injured foxes. You always came back with blood on your hands and a new scar. You never liked the men who wrote rules that mended nothing."
Gaidan allowed a small, rueful laugh. "Then I am what I always was—bad with rules, good with consequences."
They spoke until the sky swallowed the last light. Outside, the air was the crisp hush of a world that had not yet learned it was being watched. He thought of the Court of Power like an old wound—grand, ceremonial, full of men and women who wore the world as if it could be ordered. He thought of Moonveil and of the drips of justice that never seemed to satisfy anyone. He thought of the League's neatness and the city's messy truth and felt, in the bones of him, the same weary certainty: someone would have to clean up the aftermath. He would do it when the time came.
—
They brought Marc in the next day like a spectacle the world had already seen. The corridor leading to the Court's chamber was flanked by heroes—and not just heroes, but symbols: men whose faces had become flags for entire nations; women whose names made children point and say, "I want to be like them." They had forged the shackles they put on him from Aetheric dampeners and monarch iron—technology that would absorb the whisper of gods and turn it into dead silence. He walked in handcuffs that burned like cold metal, his shoulders squared against the small crowd's noise.
The chamber was colder now, bristling with intent. Shiloh Kane sat at the center with the Lioness beside her like two judges carved of different kinds of rock—one plain, unyielding; the other fierce, carved with teeth. Around them the other League members had arranged themselves like a constellation prepared to pronounce law. Even without the cosmic dome overhead the room felt like a vault of moral certainty.
They seated Marc in the middle of the room like you seat an idea you intend to dissect. Cuffs locked around his wrists, chains at his feet. The dampeners hummed in steady, unreadable frequency. For a man who had walked between gods, the contraption felt like a child's toy; for the League, it was all the control they could muster.
"You will stay," Shiloh said, every syllable measured, "and you will listen."
He didn't argue. Listening, when your hands are bound, becomes a different thing—an instrument of memory and measurement rather than submission. He watched the faces, catalogued their thinness, their hypocrisy, the way their jaws set like gates. He saw the Lioness's scorn, the Palisade's thinly veiled impatience, the Cyber-Titan's clinical curiosity. He met Gaidan's absence in the crowd like a missing star.
"You will be given a choice," Shiloh announced to the chamber. "You will either join the League—formally and under their charter—or be classified and imprisoned with those who refuse to sign. Refusal will be treated as an act of hostile intent."
Her voice was not a question. It was a treaty laid down with ceremonial iron.
Marc's reply came from a place that no damper could silence: the place where a god's echo and a soldier's resolve overlapped. He said, simply, "Make me."
For a moment three things happened at once: the room's air thickened, the Lioness's mouth curved like a blade about to fall, and someone—somewhere—stifled a gasp.
"Did you just disobey a direct order?" One of the Councilors barked, incredulous. The question was a blade disguised as an inquiry.
Marc's laugh was soft and complicated. "Disobedience assumes I value your order the way you do." He leaned forward slightly, wrists kissing the cold steel. "I don't listen to rules. I deliver justice in the rawest possible form. This is only the beginning. None of you know where I come from. None of you knows why I do what I do."
Shiloh's face hardened into that precise expression people used when they learned of a new kind of threat. "We've all been where you are. We've acted in darkness before. But we have never, even once, taken a life so publicly in the dawn and called it justice. You have made this harder on all of us. You've given people permission to fear us, and to fear heroes."
The Lioness rose to her full height, the movement like a closing of jaws. "You think you're balancing an old ledger," she said, voice low and feral. "You think you can solve sacrilege with a blade. But we—" she jabbed a finger toward the assembled—"we protect the balance. Not carve it into pieces whenever our temper takes us."
Marc's gaze moved among them, and for a second the room felt too small for what it housed. The chains bit into his skin, but the limiter hummed at his throat and it was not enough to silence him. "Balance is a luxury of people who have not looked into the tunnels we hide from. You paper over rot. I pull it out and light it so you can see."
"You're insolent," Shiloh snapped. "You refuse alignment, then you mock our restraint. The Court will not be mocked. Sign, and you become something we can work with. Refuse, and you will understand the law's patience."
Marc's mouth was a fine line. "Make me." He did not clarify—did not say whether he meant make him join, or make him sign, or force him to bow. The sentence lodged in the courtroom like a challenge and a dare.
Laughter, sharp and dismissive, broke from the Lioness. "You're a wrecking ball that needs a harness," she said. "If you truly think your way is the only way, you will learn how small your world is when the rest of ours decides to bind you. We make Ruthless Men into prisoners and heroes into legends. Choose your name."
The Council deliberated for an hour that felt like a day. They weighed the optics; they counted votes; they measured risk. A handful argued openly for execution—an expedient, if brutal, solution. Others argued for containment and rehabilitation. Gaidan's absence listened over them all like a cold wind.
When the hall finally settled, Shiloh rose and pronounced, "The offer stands, Moonveil. Join us—or be classified."
Marc looked at the faces that would define him and shook his head. "Then classify me," he said. "Bind me and call me a criminal. The truth will still be in the tunnels. You will only make a myth if you think cages fix things."
They led him away then—not in triumph, but in the exacting calm of a tribunal that thinks it has tamed a storm. He walked, chains dragging like a metronome marking time. As they shuttered the doors, the Court's light folded into ritual shadows.
Outside, on a distant ridge, Gaidan watched the horizon and felt the slow gravity of what had begun. He touched his cup, turned the heat of home into a small armor, and thought: laws can bind men, but men like this—someone's fury given a second life—were not so easily caged.