The last of him scatters. Nothing left. No grave marker. No dog tags. No folded flag.
Just a patch of soil that’s slightly darker than the rest.
I stare at it.
Behind me, Orion sits down.
He’s just there. Silent and unmoving in only the way he can be. Well, not completely silent. He doesn’t say a word. But I hear his breath, I feel his presence.
Except, I don’t look at him. And I really want to pretend that’s fine. Even if it isn’t.
“Ashlynne.”
The voice doesn’t come from a direction. It comes from the ground. Up through my bare feet, through the bones of my legs, only to vibrate through the rest of my body like a tuning fork.
I blink. The world reassembles itself in pieces. Purple twilight still streaking the sky. Smoke threading through barren trees. The wet iron smell of a battlefield that’s gone quiet in the specific way battlefields do when the killing is done and the dying hasn’t started yet.
And Dagda. Standing on the other side of what used to be Colonel Marcus Graves.
He’s enormous. I keep forgetting that until he’s close enough to block out the twilight. Built on the same scale as Orion, same broad shoulders, same barely-contained energy rolling off him in waves, but where Orion burns, Dagda hums. A low resonance that makes the fillings in my teeth ache. The kind of power that doesn’t need to announce itself because the ground already did it for him.
He’s looking at me the way no man has ever looked at me.
Not hunger. Not assessment. Not the clinical cataloguing of a handler measuring an asset’s performance against projected outcomes.
Just seeing. The way you look at someone and find them enough.
He steps over the ashes. Doesn’t go around. Doesn’t avoid them. Just walks through what’s left of the man who stole me, and the dust swirls around his boots and settles.
“A father,” he says, “would look at you and see strength worth honoring.”
Three steps. He closes the distance in three steps and he’s right there, close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze. The heat radiating off him smells like woodsmoke and gold and something green underneath.
His existence is the embodiment of lore. Of the gods and the power they hold.
“Not strength worth using.” His hands settle on my shoulders. I’m not going to pretend that the touch doesn’t unfurl something dormant inside me. It does. “Not strength worth deploying.”
I’m going to cry again. I can feel it coming on.
“Strength worth honoring. As I do.”
The sound Graves made when he was proud of me was satisfaction. A hum in the back of his throat that I chased like a dog chasing a hand that sometimes feeds and sometimes strikes.
This, Dagda’s voice, gravel-deep and steady as bedrock, I don’t have a name for yet. But my body recognizes it the way my feet recognized Wild Court soil.
And fuck me, I didn’t know.
I didn’t know this was the wound under the wound. I thought the rage would be enough. That killing the man who weaponized me would cauterize whatever was bleeding underneath.
I break.
The tears come and I don’t stop them. Don’t swallow them. Don’t press my palms against my eyes until I see stars and the pressure forces it all back down.
I just stand here with a god’s hands on my shoulders and let the years of counterfeit fatherhood leak down my face in dirty streaks.
Dagda doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t soften. Doesn’t do the thing people do when a woman cries in front of them. That slight lean back, that flicker of discomfort, that silent calculation of how long before they can change the subject. Nor does he do the grey rock thing men love to manipulate.
He just holds the gravity of my grief.
