I turn to see a woman in pale gauze robes, her hair white like moon-ice. Her eyes are closed; she leans on a staff carved with vine-patterns. “You came back to us,” she states. Not a question. A fact.
I growl low. “Why?” I ask. My voice hurts in ways I didn’t expect. “Why did you drag me from the wreckage?”
She turns and smiles. “Because you were dying. Because the wounds of war are not more sacred than the chance at peace.” She offers me a cup filled with warm root-milk and honey. I resist. She holds out the cup until my fingers wrap around it.
I drink. The taste is simple—earthy sweetness, a faint tang of something ancient. Not whiskey or fire-liquor; no, something purer and gentler. I swallow twice before I can speak again.
“Where am I?” I mutter.
“A new place. A new chance,” she answers. “We are the Solari. We farm the land. We heal the wounded. We ask nothing of you but your presence.”
Her words churn inside me like acid. I push myself upright. My armor—half melted, twisted—lies in a heap behind a dome of pale clay. I walk over to it, feeling each step like a punishment. One of the towers overhead spins slow, creaking. Wind farms. Vineyards sloping off past the fields.
I lift the helmet with one hand and stare. The visor is cracked. The Reaper clan emblem still glows faintly silver in the dim light. I drop the helmet. It hits the ground with a thud. “I’m a weapon,” I say. “Not a farmer.”
A voice—male, young—calls from behind me. “You can be both.” I turn. A boy not older than ten stands holding a sickle the size of his wrist. He watches me with bright eyes.
I crouch near him. “What’s your name?”
He grins. “Aren. Want to help?”
“My hands…” My hand flicks a bloody residue from the sickle’s edge. “They kill.”
He shrugs. “These kill too—these cut grain. I’ll show you.”
I glance at the field beyond—the sunrise-grain shimmering gold like waves. I swallow. “Fine.”
Later, the sun nearly overhead, I’m trudging across that field, the sickle heavy in my hand. Each swing slices through stalks that brush my skin. The smell: dry earth, pollen, sweat.My muscles ache. My ribs protest. The quiet is louder than any battle cry I’ve heard.
I hear the woman with the staff approach. “Pain makes you honest,” she says as she walks beside me. “Better to accept the hurt than to deny it.”
I swing the sickle the wrong way. It catches and halts mid-cut. I swear and yank it free. “I’m not your lesson,” I say.
She tucks a strand of white hair behind her ear. “You are exactly that,” she replies. “You were made for war—but war doesn’t heal you. You must choose what you will use the rest of your life for.”
I look at the field. “I used to kill. I smelled death for breakfast, roared for dinner, and fought for dessert.”
She doesn’t smile. “Then you are wounded. Healing is valid.”
I bite my lip. The wind kicks up, grains brushing my bare arms, slapping against my skin like cold fingers. I close my eyes. I taste metal in the air. I hear the hum of the wind towers in the distance—they sound like sighs.
I open my eyes and swing again. This time I get a clean cut. A stalk falls. I stare at the blade, at my hand, at the grass. I realize: my muscles remember the motion. The logic behind the fall doesn’t matter. The body responds.
That night I sleep for the first time in months without waking to nightmares. The dome’s guest chamber is simple: a cot of woven reeds, blanket thin but warm; the hum of vines outside the window chopping through the darkness like gears. I lie on my side, pull the blanket up to my chest. Sweat cools into clammy sheets.
Dreams find me: Liora’s voice echoes in black corridors. My name. A beam splinters above us. She whispers, “Don’t go.” I wake with my claws dug into the mattress, nails scratching shredded fibers, my heart racing.
But I don’t leave the bed.
Morning—two suns and a faint haze—I rise and go to the courtyard. The Solari greet me, nod gently. No fanfare. I nod back.
A child—Aren—runs up with a basket of grapes. He holds one out. “Eat.”
The sweetness bursts in my mouth. Warm grape-juice trickles down my chin. For a moment I forget the war. I forget the weapons. I forget the roar of collapsing tunnels and the weight of Gyon. I swallow the grape. The sweetness lingers.
I say thank you.
Then I walk away.
