All eyes turned toward him. He leaned back in his chair, one arm still draped lazily around my shoulders, though I could feel the sharp focus beneath his relaxed posture.
“So the story about all the females dying and the males barely surviving alone…” His amber gaze moved between Dravok and Zapharos. “Is not exactly the full story?”
“No,” Dravok admitted.
Zapharos exhaled slowly and dragged a hand through his hair. His eyes were slightly unfocused as though he were trying to reach backward through millions of years of fractured memory. A memory that had been refreshed by the process of Reconstitution and given us women access to our Arkhevari capabilities.
“The females were more susceptible to the Harrowed One,” he began carefully.
“Wait.” This time I held up my hand.
Everyone looked at me.
“I still don’t understand something.” I frowned. “Was the Harrowed One always there? In the Dark Abyss?” I gestured vaguely toward the viewport where distant shadows still churned far beyond the ship. “But the Abyss was created by the Umbrian weapon, right?”
The others nodded.
“Yes,” Dravok affirmed. “Nox Eternum was born when the Umbrians fired the Externum Beam at Earth Prime.”
“The Harrowed One did not exist before that,” Zapharos added grimly. “Not as it does now.”
“It was created by the fracture,” I summarized slowly.
“By the chaos,” Ella murmured.
“By memory,” Dravok said darkly. “By grief. Rage. Fear. Everything that refused to die when the universe broke.”
“Not quite.”
All of us turned toward Nadine. She had resumed pacing again, though slower now, visibly trying to organize impossible concepts into something understandable. She seemed to searchfor the right words. “You first have to understand the Aelyth bond."
“That’s optimistic,” Thyros muttered.
She ignored him completely. “It’s not as simplistic as light equals good and darkness equals evil.” She hesitated, clearly trying to simplify thoughts far larger than language. “Both have purpose. Both are necessary.”
She pointed between herself and Dravok. “Imagine a being made entirely of compassion and empathy. Completely incapable of aggression or violence.”
Ella blinked. “That sounds lovely.”
“That being would die immediately the first time something hostile attacked it,” Nadine replied matter-of-factly, shattering Ella's dreamy expression with brutal logic. “It couldn’t defend itself. It couldn’t harm another living thing even to survive.”
Ella considered this. “…Okay, fair.”
“So,” Nadine continued, “the universe—or evolution or cosmic design or whatever mechanism created the Arkhevari—built balance into the species itself.”
Her gaze shifted to the men. “The Aelyth carried more emotional sensitivity, empathy, intuition, and restorative power.” Then she motioned toward the men. “The Arkhevari males carried more aggression, war instinct, territorial behavior, and destructive capability.” She frowned apologetically.
“It’s largely biological. Physical strength, neurological response patterns?—”
Her eyes flicked toward me. I raised a brow. “Including me?”
Nadine shrugged helplessly. “Okay, admittedly, the data gets blurry with you, because apparently your preferred response to danger is to leap directly at it with knives.”
“That’s fair,” Ella admitted.
“But the point,” Nadine pressed on, “is that the balance mattered. The males grounded the females. The females softened the males.”
My gaze drifted instinctively toward Thyros. The truth of that settled warmly through the bond between us. Without him, I would burn too bright. Without me, he would eventually drown in darkness.
