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Until of course… I did.

And there was no fucking way I was ever letting her go again.

“Yes,” I said, working my jaw side to side, trying to ease the tension building there, “Some good did come out of it all.” I let out a sigh, longer and louder than I expected. “But look at the cost.”

I turned to Aster then, because I had circled the matter long enough. “Alexandra told me the Gorgon King had a hand in bringing the two of you to me in time. However, she told me little else.” My jaw tightened. “So, you will tell me the rest. All of it. From the moment she forced that Rift open to the moment you walked into a war you had no business fighting in. I want every step of that road, Aster. Especially the ones she would rather I never see.”

Aster’s grin faded into focus. He sat forward; forearms braced on his knees.

“You’re not going to like most of it,” he warned.

“I haven’t liked a single part of this war,” I said. “Begin anyway.”

So, he did.

He told me about the Rift and how she had forced it open, though from what I knew of it, when I had been through it both times, it felt to me like it was never meant to bear a mortal. He explained how it had taken so much from her that she had crossed into Theïkós gray and shaking and barely able to stand, and still she had refused to stop. He told me of the Labyrinth, that ancient, breathing horror of a maze. How they had walked its shifting halls precisely because it was the one road that could fold the leagues my army had bled across into much less time. The shortcut no sane creature would ever take. The one they took anyway.

He told me how they had found the herd living within it.

How he had found Stava.

He spoke of his aunt with a roughness he could not quite smother. The woman I knew he had painfully believed dead for more years than I cared to count. Found alive and leading what remained of his people in the one place the corruption feared to follow.

He told me about the Badlands.

There, his account grew smoother. Quicker. He spoke of crossing into that cursed garden of stone and bone, of the Gorgon King’s domain. How they had come away with the relic they needed to bridge the last of the distance. Yet he did not say how. He did not say what it had cost, only that the Way Weaver had used the torch to tear a door in the world and spill them out into the heart of the battle.

I marked the gap in his telling the way one marks a missing star in the night sky. Because, Theron of House Chrysaor did not give.

He bargained.

He took.

A human did not walk out of the Gorgon King’s land with a treasure clutched in her hands and owe nothing for the privilege. Aster knew that as well as I did. The omission sat there between us. The second careful silence wrapped around the Gorgon King’s name in as many days. First Alexandra. Now him. And I felt the question rise hot in my throat.

But then he reached the battlefield, and every other thought burned away.

“By the time we came through,” Aster said, quieter now, the humor long gone, “it was already at the brink of being lost. The line had broken. The corrupted were everywhere, and at the center of it was a thing the darkness had built out of a thousand serpents and a man’s worst dreams. The Typhon.” He shook his head slowly, his eyes closed as if he were reliving the memory. “I have lived a long time, Atlas. I have seen things that would unmake most men. And I tell you, when I saw what we had walked into, I thought we were already dead.”

My hands curled into fists against the desk.

“And Alexandra?”

“Alex,” he said, and something almost like reverence touched the word, “Gods, Atlas…she only went and drove a fucking dagger full of a Cyclops’s lightning into the earth. Not into the beast. Into the ground beneath all of it. Like she fucking knew… knew what the land needed and that wasting it killing one wouldn’t win the war.” He met my eyes. “And then… well, she burned the darkness out of every vessel on that field at once. The corrupted. The Typhon. All of it. She ended the war with a single strike and dropped half a kingdom’s worth of evil into the dirt.” A breath later, and he continued retelling the story with nothing short of pride in his tone, “She saved your brother. She saved you. She saved me. She has no idea how to stop saving people, that woman, even when it’s killing her to do it.”

The silence that followed was vast.

Lazaros had gone still and pale, listening to the truth of his own salvation laid out plainly for the first time. And I sat there with my heart pounding against my ribs, torn so cleanly down the middle that I could scarcely breathe.

Pride.

Terror.

A love so enormous it frightened me.

My little warrior, my fated, had crossed worlds, walked through nightmares, and fought monsters even gods would struggle to battle, and she had done it all without me. While I had been here, certain she was safe, certain I had kept her from harm. When in reality…

I had kept her from nothing.