I am Atlas — Atlas von Roxweld. The full na felt strangely heavy in my mouth, like an old coin I’d unearthed after years of walking with bare feet. For a second, walking the frozen plain, I forgot the middle and last na; mory thinned the longer I stayed in Hell.
Maybe nas fray here. Maybe people fray. I only rembered my surna when Lara’s na, bright and stubborn, flickered into view beside it. That small reconnection made laugh, a short sound swallowed by the wind.
How long had it been? Months, or a single bruise of months that the fourth layer could stretch into years if it pleased. Ti here wore different clothes — dilation, contraction, a loop tucked inside a loop.
The first entry into the Fourth Layer felt like a lifeti ago, like a story told in another man’s voice. The roads we’d taken were stranger than I could have imagined.
We’d crawled through geotry and mory, through the torn banter of gods and the silence after the scream of a dying prophecy.
We’d been told to shelter on the mountain by Seraphel, the High Elder — the man who called himself Asmodeus until the world decided nas were optional — but I had refused to wait.
You don’t get to be born twice by sitting still. You had to keep walking.
Seraphel had his agenda. Everyone here had an agenda. But an agenda didn’t save the people who followed you when the mountain shook and the gate drew breath. Everybody had given reasons not to move. I had given myself reasons to move. They never looked the sa.
Aurora had cried once because of . I still hadn’t learned how to carry the sight of the mage’s tears without feeling my chest tighten into sothing like guilt. She was a stoic, century-old figure of calm and thunder; seeing her eyes leak made the world tilt.
She’d stepped forward to answer for words I spoke back to Ouserous, and then Loki and she had paid the cost. Guilt leached into rlin’s cadence.
He muttered that he should never have argued with that other power — that if he’d kept his mouth shut, things would not have followed the way they did. Loki would have been less hurt. Aurora would have been less torn. The problem with hindsight is that it never stops bleeding.
We walked the barren, snow-swept plain in a ragged line like ghosts trying to outrun a forecast. The sky overhead was a slate slab, heavy and patient. The wind slled of iron and old rain, a sll that always tugged at the edge of so mory I couldn’t reach. Our breaths hung like lanterns.
"Do you regret it?" Aurora asked suddenly, quiet enough I had to lean my head to hear. Her boots crunched; she kept pace beside , wings folded tight like a soldier who had learned the cost of showing himself whole.
We’d been through this conversation a dozen tis. The first ti, she had asked with accusation; the second, with worry. This ti she asked with sothing softer, more fearful — like a child hiding her thumb beneath a blanket.
My eyes flicked over at Eli. The curve of her belly had begun to show: small, round, already luminous with life. Her hand rested on it sotis; small deliberate touches that were more prayer than ownership. I watched that gesture and felt my heart move a step outside my ribs to stand beside it, protective and trembling.
mory offered a flash then: a palace to himself, with many maids, a life of a prince...he left it all.
That life — Henry’s life stamped with its small cruelties and empty apologies — was an echo in my bones. It had taught how to shrink in rooms that should have fit like suits. It had taught what not to be.
"Do I regret it?" I echoed, and the words tasted of iron and frost. "No. I don’t. Not a single step."
I could feel the lie scraping the edge of truth. I was not unscarred by everything I’d lost. I had learned to keep the shadows at bay by making promises, by steady work. But regret was a fine thing: it could turn reactionary or serve as a whetstone. I would not be carved by who I used to be.
rlin, ever the asuring eye, ca up beside . He placed a hand on my shoulder—the gesture sudden, almost paternal, though his face kept the lines of a man who had eaten many long nights for breakfast.
"You are more mature than your age suggests," he said, matter-of-fact as wind. "You were reborn with knowledge. That is why you have taken all this upon yourself."
I let the line sit in the air. Reborn felt like an accusation and a gift. So part of wanted to dismiss it as vanity. Another part wanted to sit under it and let it rain.
We climbed. The mountain rose like a folded sleep, white and waiting. Michael circled above, wings cutting clean lines through the gray. The angel’s watchfulness was sothing I could pick up like a scent; he swooped down and called, his voice warm and strong.
"Prophet," he called. "Valley below. They are gathered together."
The valley where Gabriel and Uriel and the others had been scattered. The word gathered ant safety — temporarily — and that word tasted like a welco.
Night rolled forward like a soft wave pressing against the world. We hardened a place to rest where slopes t like hands. rlin’s staff carved shapes into the air; incantations unwound themselves from his lips in a language older than the snow.
The spell caught the flakes and wove them into walls, then doors, then a small palace fit for a middle-class prince, as if ti in these realms could be folded into things useful for sleeping.
Aurora layered wards, one after another, quiet ropes of power like prayer beads that would keep impossibilities at bay. Michael set his shield of light like a do over the whole — a sacred bowl that humd at the edges with an implacable insistence: not yet. Not tonight.
We moved like a small court. The snow palace slled faintly of lted candlewax and old leather — the sll of human spaces that had survived too much. The inside felt too large and too safe in the way that makes you appreciate it more because it’s not permanent.
That night, alone in the corner of my small chamber, I wrote. Writing had beco the compass I used to find myself when the world elm and folded. Paper beca the shoreline for my thoughts.
The fourth layer devoured clocks and calendars; Eli and the child within her had beco my only real asurent. Each flutter of her breathing felt like a bell tolling ti into being.
She ca in, whispering. Eli, whose hair was like bleached linen and whose eyes carried ash and light, had a softness she allowed only for us. She sat beside and hugged my arm in a way that made the emptiness of the world seem less loud.
"Are you...okay?" she asked, that tiny question pulling at the seams of everything. Her voice was a small knot. I wanted to fix her, to give her the steady night and a palace and a dozen starlit promises.
I placed my hand over her belly. The child moved — a tiny kick that made the whole of lurch forward so sharply I laughed like it hurt. There was an old fear inside , raw and ugly: I do not want to be like Henry. I swallowed it down, a stone.
"I’m going to be a father," I said into the dusk of the room.
Eli turned her eyes toward , and the wonder in them was an ache. "You will be a great father," she said. She believed it like a declaration. Her certainty ward like the first sun after months of frost.
"I don’t want to be the kind of father I had," I admitted suddenly. Saying it out loud made it a wound I could be honest about. "I don’t want holes for promises, nor apologies for full stops."
Eli squeezed my hand. Her white hair brushed my skin. "You won’t be. You are not him. That cunt of a king and jolt of a father..."
I wanted to believe that with my entire body. I wanted to be the kind of man who built fortresses and then sat on the floor to play, who could apologize and stay. I tightened my fingers around hers until my knuckles burned.
Her eyes, ash-colored and soft, watched like an oracle testing prophecy.
"You will be," she said again, and this ti her voice had steel threaded through it.
Sowhere in the corner of the room, a notification I had been told to fear blinked like a small cot on my awareness.
[Note from Lilith]
The na hit the room like a storm bell. My pulse beca a drum. Everything in paused — a held breath that could not be unmade.
Lilith. My mother. The empress who had spoken in the halls of the Fourth Layer with the kind of intimacy that could lt empires. The woman who had shaped my system, who had dotted my map with questions, and whose shadow in the Fourth Layer reached deep.
Eli saw the change in my face. "Is it...bad?" she asked, voice taut.
I didn’t answer. My fingers hovered, then slid the ssage open like a hand opening a door into a dark room. Words there on the screen were simple and layered.
Atlas,—
My son. The path you walk is thorned; you have collected wounds and glory both. I watched the mountain move for you. Now I ask a favor: co to the Hall of Echoes. There are things to be spoken. There are corrections to be made.
Do not bring your army. Bring yourself.
—L.
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