One day earlier.
Eli opened her eyes.
The sky above her was blue — not the bleeding sky of battle, not the black void of the sixth realm, but blue. The kind of blue that ca after too many storms. The kind that felt like a lie told gently.
She blinked.
The ridge stretched before her like a mory she hadn’t earned — stone and mud, quiet wind, and the faint curve of the hill’s distant silhouette in the haze. The grass was damp beneath her. The sun, impossibly gentle, ward the side of her face.
Veil’s instructions had been correct after all.
Sleep here, he had said. Near the old walls. Near the place where he vanished.
And she had.
Now she was awake.
Alive.
But when she pushed herself up, the world tilted — not from vertigo, but from imbalance. Her right side gave out. She fell hard onto her shoulder, breath knocked from her chest.
She stared down at the space where her arm should have been.
Gone.
Not just severed, but sacrificed — a symbol carved into flesh. A cost she had offered willingly. And now, waking in this foreign peace, the phantom ache surged in her bones.
She touched the stump with her good hand.
No blood. No magic. Just skin and silence.
She thought she had made peace with it.
She was wrong.
If she’d still been the woman she was — the Empire’s shadow, the tactician, the cold Empress — she would’ve let Atlas die. Left him in that cratered realm to finish her mission.
But she didn’t.
He lived.
And worse — so did she.
She rembered it. So vividly it cut:
Atlas, screaming as he carved through his own arm to deflect the demon’s strike — all to protect her, the broken, the failure.
He should’ve left her.
He didn’t.
And she still couldn’t understand why.
"Atlas..." she whispered, voice hoarse. "...Why? Just... why?"
No one answered.
She swallowed back the ache that rose in her throat and stood. It took ti. Effort. The pain in her ribs flared with every breath, and the weight of her grief pressed against her shoulder like a phantom limb.
But she stood.
The world didn’t stop for the wounded.
She glanced around.
"Veil?" she called quietly, scanning the ridge.
Then paused.
Her shadow flickered.
Not with light — with presence.
A shimr, then a bloom of deep void.
"Looking for ?" a voice rumbled beneath her heel.
Eli exhaled softly. "Took you long enough."
Veil rose — or rather, folded himself out of her shadow like an old robe slipping off a hook. The Void hunched, his mossy shoulders hunched, single eye watching her like a distant moon.
She didn’t smile.
But she was glad he was here.
" So care to tell what happened back there." he asked.
Eli didn’t answer right away.
She sat on the edge of a cracked boulder, her eyes scanning the horizon as the breeze carried dust and old mories past them.
"I’ll tell you what happened," she said. "All of it."
Veil said nothing.
He simply waited.
So she began.
"We were trapped," she said. "The demon had us pinned — so kind of lord, older than most of the filth we fought before. I was already bleeding out. He was going to kill . Eat , maybe. I don’t know. Atlas..."
She paused.
The na still tasted strange.
"Atlas did sothing stupid. Cut through his own arm. Gave a second. A single breath."
Veil tilted his head. "He has a habit of doing that. Buying ti no one can afford."
"I hated him for it," she muttered. "Still do, maybe. That he keeps choosing . Even when I wouldn’t choose ."
A beat.
Then another.
"I cut off my arm, Veil. You know that. I made a trade with that thing — the giant snake, the whisper in the dark. I don’t even know what I gave, not really. I just knew I couldn’t let him die."
She clenched her hand — the only one she had left — and stared down at it.
"And now he’s gone again. Sowhere I can’t reach."
Veil rumbled low in his chest.
"I don’t think he’s as far as you think he is....you guys can still...."
She looked up. "No, you don’t understand human politics enough Veil. He is gone. He left ....no, that’s wrong. I left him. I betrayed him in a way." She voiced with longing.
"....More than that," Veil said. " You guys love each other. What’s politics shit gotta do with that?"
Eli’s voice cracked. "No...you’re wro....haaaaa.
Maybe you’re right. What loves gotta do we politics, ruling, heart wants what heart wants...." she voiced ekly. " but what’s done is done.....it’s finished....the only way I can make him mine to is...."
Veil looked away. The shadow that passed over his eye was old.
"Is....?"
They fell into silence.
The kind that only ca after truth.
Finally, Eli stood. Her legs ached. Her balance swayed. But her voice was steady.
"I’m heading back," she said. "To the Empire. I need to regroup. Rebuild. We’ll be fighting soon... probably against each other...."
Veil said nothing.
Then she asked, not softly:
"Will you co with ?"
He turned to face her.
His answer was simple, straight and truthful. No human facade or lies laced in between.
"No."
She blinked.
"...No?"
"I will wait here," he said. "For Atlas."
The words hit her harder than she expected.
"....You’re choosing him."
"I chose him the mont he chose to suffer," Veil said. "You want strategy. A future. Borders. He wants... truth. I’ll stand with that."
Eli didn’t reply.
She couldn’t.
Instead, she nodded.
Tightly.
Almost curt.
And turned to go.
The sound ca first — rustling in the brush, heavy steps.
Veil shifted instantly, shoulders tensing.
His claws extended like blades of dark steel, his shadow swelling behind him like a cloak of execution.
But Eli raised her good arm.
"Wait," she said sharply.
The shapes broke through the trees — three n in armor, their tabards marked by the imperial sunburst.
One of them stumbled.
Another limped.
Knights.
Her knights.
Recognition crashed into her chest like a flood.
"Don’t," she told Veil again, more quietly now. "They’re mine."
He didn’t lower his claws.
But he didn’t strike either.
The sun crested the ridge behind them, spilling gold across blood-soaked earth. And for the first ti in what felt like forever, Eli stood in the light.
Incomplete.
Wounded.
But alive.
"....you lot actually ca..." she voiced in a sign of comfort.
*******
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