Chapter 521: Honesty

ERIS

The door clicked shut with a finality that seemed to echo through the hollowed-out bones of the north wing.

Aldric was the last to linger, offering Soren a look that was devoid of his usual bureaucratic detachment, a gaze heavy with the unspoken weight of what was being asked of a man who had already given everything to the day.

Then, the latch caught, and the room emptied of everyone but the two of us.

The maps remained spread across the table, their edges curling in the draft, and the candles had burned down to guttering stubs of wax.

Outside, the world was already trying to mend itself; I could hear the rhythmic clatter of stone being cleared and the distant, barked orders of foremen.

Aldric was efficient, if nothing else. The world was continuing, indifferent to the fact that my own was currently anchored to a wooden bench, feeling as brittle as scorched parchment.

I sat still, exactly where they had forced me to sit under the guise of medical necessity.

Soren didn’t move immediately. He stood by the table for a long moment, a silhouette of exhaustion, before he turned and crossed the space toward me.

Now that there was no one left to perform for, no magistrates to impress or soldiers to command, I saw him. Really saw him. The god-tier radiance that had turned him into a living glacier was gone, retracted so deeply into his marrow that he looked startlingly, painfully human.

His shoulders, usually set with the rigid precision of a man carrying a mountain, were lower now. The lines at the corners of his eyes seemed to have been carved deeper by the day’s horrors.

When he reached up to push a stray lock of golden-blonde hair from his forehead, I noticed the slight, betraying tremor in his hand.

The cost of what he had done, the sheer psychic toll of unmaking ancient gods, was etched into the very way he moved. He was exhausted. He had used every drop of himself to save this city, and now he had to leave it.

Oh…

A sharp, cold ache bloomed in my chest.

I didn’t want him to go.

For the first time in two lifetimes, the thought of an empty room felt like a physical threat.

Soren didn’t take the chair opposite me.

He sat on the same bench, close enough that his arm pressed against mine. I didn’t pull away.

I leaned into the contact, allowing the heat of his body to seep through the layers of my clothing. We sat in silence for a long time, two people recovering from a wreck, listening to the muffled sounds of a rebuilding empire.

“How are you?” he asked. It wasn’t the formal check of an emperor or the clinical inquiry of a strategist. It was just him. Just Soren.

I looked sideways at him, my gaze tracing the sharp line of his jaw. “I’ve been better,” I admitted. The honesty felt strange on my tongue, a rare vintage I usually kept locked away.

A shadow of a tired smile flickered across his face, brief and haunting. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said all day.”

“Don’t get used to it,” I snapped back, the reflex of my old armor clicking into place as I bit back a smile.

“I won’t,” he murmured, his voice softening as he smiled. “But I’ll take it for now.”

The silence returned, longer this time, building into something heavy and suffocating.

I found myself fidgeting, my fingers picking at a loose thread on my sleeve.

I wondered what I could possibly say to him to ease the burden. He had faced Vetra—the woman who had been the architect of his nightmares—and he had done it while I lay broken on the stones.

The mental toll of that confrontation alone must have been staggering.

Soren didn’t fidget. He never did. His hands rested on his knees, held in a stillness that felt manufactured, a cage for the restlessness underneath. I knew what was coming. I’d known it since the maps were first unrolled.

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

The words were quiet, but they hit me like a physical blow.

My heart began to pound against my ribs like a large drum, the rhythm frantic and uneven.

I looked at his face again, and all I could see was the raw exhaustion and the profound sadness he usually kept hidden behind his divine mask.

“I know,” I whispered, my voice barely audible even to myself.

He turned toward me fully, searching my face as if he were trying to memorize every line, every flaw, every flicker of the fire beneath my skin. “I really don’t want to,” he repeated, as if the repetition could somehow change the necessity of it.

“I know that too,” I said, meeting his eyes.

“The seal,” he started, his voice cracking. “The healers said…” He stopped, the words catching in his throat. He couldn’t finish it. He couldn’t say the word death out loud.

“I know what the healers said, Soren. I was there.”

“Eris.” Just my name. He said it with so much weight, so much desperate protectiveness, that I felt the breath leave my lungs.

I decided then to stop the deflections. No more biting remarks, no more calculated distances.

“I’m not going to pretend that I’m not… concerned,” I admitted, searching for the word as if it were a foreign language.

“About the seal. About what’s happening.” I looked down at my hands, where the faint, glowing traces of the fractures were still visible beneath the skin. “I can feel it. Every time I use the power, or every time I feel too much… it cracks more.”

I heard his breath hitch… a sharp, contained reaction.

“But I’m also not going to spend whatever time I have—the time I have—lying down in a room waiting for something to happen,” I added, looking back at him. “That isn’t who I am. You know that.”

“You will not be alone,” he stated, the Emperor returning to his voice for a fleeting second. “I’ve already arranged it. There will be someone with you at all times. Healers, guards… people I trust.”

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