“Ryzen.”
No response. The daggers didn’t pause their chaotic dance.
I crossed the room anyway.
One step. Two. Three.
Each one drew me closer to the spinning blades—and closer to the grief rolling off him in waves so dense it felt like heat. My shields flexed under the pressure, not to shut him out, just to keep my lungs working. To keep my mind from sliding under.
He’d reached for me once.
A little over a year ago, across impossible distance, when he’d burned everything he had into a spirit bomb meant to save his people. When he’d been dissolving—stardust and ruin—and his mind had clawed for an anchor.
He’d found me.
Neither of us had understood why. Maybe we still didn’t.
But I understood loss. I understood watching your world go up in flames while your body stayed stubbornly alive, helpless to stop it.
I lowered myself to my knees in front of him.
The daggers paused.
They didn’t fall. They didn’t vanish. They simply… held, suspended in the air, the moment refusing to exhale. Emerald light slid over my skin, turning my hands and cheekbones into something strange. One blade hovered inches from my throat—close enough that I felt the hum of psionic energy against my pulse.
A warning. A test.
Ryzen’s gaze finally found mine.
Empty, my mind supplied immediately.
Hollowed out in a way that made my chest ache. Whatever fire had lived in him—the steel, the protective fury—had been drowned in the absence where his twin should’ve been. A shape cut out of him and left bleeding.
“I know what it’s like.” My voice came out soft. Steady. The voice I used with my cubs when they needed comforting. “To lose someone.”
Something flickered in those empty eyes. Recognition, maybe. Or the first crack in the wall he’d built around his devastation.
“You don’t.” His voice scraped raw, unused. “You can’t.”
“I grew up in a test tube.” The words came easier than I expected. I’d told this story before—to my mates, to Mwe, to the Assembly when they needed to understand what the demihumans had survived. But saying it here, in the dark, to someone whose pain matched my own... it felt different. “I was an experiment. A failed one, according to my creators. They kept me in white rooms with padded walls. Strapped me to tables and cut me open to see what was inside. Used instruments that—”
My throat tightened. Some memories refused to soften, no matter how much time had passed.
“I was helpless,” I continued, forcing the words out before the silence filled with everything I didn’t want to admit. “Completely helpless. And I hated it. I hated them.” My hands curled into fists against my thighs. “And ultimately, I hated myself for not being strong enough to stop it.”
Ryzen didn’t move. He didn’t blink.
But the daggers drifted lower, as if his control—frayed, shredded—was still listening.
“They took your brother,” I said. “The Verya. And they severed your bond. Ripped out something that was part of you.”
My chest hurt in sympathy, sharp and useless.
“I can feel it, Ryzen. Your phantom pain.”
His runes flared, then dimmed. His jaw worked, muscle tightening beneath pale skin.
“You feel it?” The question broke on the edges.
