Time blurs.
I don’t know how long we stand there—hours, maybe, or days. The Battlefield Beyond the Veil doesn’t follow normal rules. Soldiers come and go. Stories pile on top of stories. Names accumulate in my memory until they blend into a chorus of grief that should crush me but doesn’t.
Because I’m not carrying it alone.
Aradya stays at my side. She doesn’t speak to the soldiers directly—that’s not her role here, not yet—but she reinforces my words when I falter. Fills in the gaps when exhaustion makes me stumble. Her hand never leaves my back, and the brand beneath my armor pulses in time with hers, a reminder that I have an anchor now. A reason to stay standing.
Mine,the mark whispers.Yours,my heart answers.
The flood of soldiers begins to slow.
Those who wanted to speak have spoken. Those who wanted to be heard have been heard. The battlefield looks different now—emptier, the wandering dead reduced to scattered clusters instead of endless ranks. The sky has shifted from blood-red to dusk, and the ground beneath my feet feels less saturated with ancient death.
I can breathe here now. Not easily—the air still tastes of endings—but better than before. The oppressive weight of three centuries of accumulated grief has lifted, not entirely, but enough. Enough to see the horizon. Enough to imagine a future beyond this moment.
The King watches from its ruined throne.
Where before it towered over the battlefield, now it barely exceeds my height. Its composite body has lost most of its soldiers—what remains is a twisted knot of the ancient dead, those too lost to remember who they were, those too angry to accept release. Their faces surface and submerge in its flesh, but they don’t speak individually anymore. They’ve given themselves to the collective entirely.
“Satisfied?” The King’s voice is weaker now. A hundred throats instead of a thousand. “You’ve stolen my subjects. You’ve broken my army. Does that ease your guilt, Ashwalker? Does it balance the scales for the graves you burned without ceremony?”
I step forward. Close enough to see the individual faces trapped in the King’s body. Close enough to recognize the rage that still burns in its borrowed eyes.
“No.” I don’t raise my blade—I left it on the ground somewhere behind me, and I don’t need it anyway. “Nothing will balance those scales. But this is a start.”
“A start.” The King laughs—a horrible sound, hollow and hungry. “You think I’m finished? You think hearing a few hundred stories has undone three centuries of silence? There are thousands more trapped inside me, Ashwalker. Thousands who are too far gone to remember their own names, let alone speak their truths.” Its body shifts, faces merging and splitting in patterns that hurt to watch. “And there are millions more beneath your city. Every mass grave, every ash pit, every unmarked burial. All of them feeding me. All of them screaming for the vengeance you’ve denied them.”
The last soldier steps forward.
He’s different from the others. His armor bears the insignia of a general, his face preserved enough to show the lines of age and authority that defined him in life. He died with his hand on his sword and questions in his eyes. This is the man who led them into their final battle. The man whose orders brought them here.
The man who has watched his army dissolve into light, soldier by soldier, while he waited for his own turn to speak.
“I led them here.” His words carry the weight of centuries. “All of them. Every soldier in this realm followed me into the final battle. I told them the war was worth fighting. I told them victory was worth dying for.” He looks at the ruin of the King’s army—at the scattered dead, at the empty spaces where his men used to stand, at the throne that no longer commands their loyalty. “Was I wrong?”
The question hangs in the air.
I don’t have an answer. No one does. The wars that created the Gravetide King were fought for reasons that stopped mattering centuries ago, by factions that no longer exist, over territory that has changed hands a dozen times since. Every soldier here died believing in a cause that history has forgotten.
But Aradya steps forward.
“The war didn’t matter.” Her whisper carries power that makes the remaining dead turn toward her. “Your men mattered. Their lives mattered. Their deaths mattered. And whether the cause was worth it or not—” She reaches out, places her hand on the general’s rusted breastplate. “You led them because you believed. They followed because they trusted you. That’s not wrong. That’s human.”
The general studies her for a long moment. Then his gaze shifts to me.
“You burned my men.”
“Yes.”
“Without rites. Without names. Without letting them say goodbye.”
“Yes.”
He nods, slowly. “Then give them this. Let them rest. Even the ones who can’t remember—” He gestures toward the King, toward the ancient dead still trapped in its body. “Let them go. They’ve been angry long enough.”
The King roars. “ENOUGH.”
It rises from its ruined throne with a sound like shattering bone. What’s left of its body uncoils, fifteen feet of fused rage and ancient grief, every face that remains screaming in unison.