27. Naeris
There was no real time to rest. The ship still trembled intermittently from the damage it had sustained from the fight with the Moggaddesh and our desperate flight from Nox Eternum, and somewhere deep in the lower levels, I could hear strained metal groaning beneath the pressure of overworked systems.
Still, we all gravitated toward the breakroom as though instinct demanded proximity. Zapharos remained on the bridge long enough to set the ship into an erratic flight pattern through the outer currents of the Abyss, one designed to make tracking us more difficult.
“At least for now,” he’d warned grimly before finally joining us.
The atmosphere inside the breakroom was strangely subdued. No one seemed entirely present. We sat scattered around the room, wrapped in our own thoughts, yet not truly separate anymore. Ever since touching the globe, the bond between all of us had deepened into something startlingly intimate.
I could feel them. Not exact thoughts. More like impressions, emotions, and questions circling the same impossible truths.
Ashera.
Caelor.
Earth's duplicate: Terra Nova.
The Harrowed One.
Help him.
The words still echoed inside my skull. Ella sat curled against Zapharos’ side, absently tracing circles against his palm while staring into space. Nadine paced slowly near the viewport, while her mind visibly tried to reorganize the laws of existence.
Dravok watched her with quiet attentiveness.
Thyros lounged beside me with one arm draped possessively across the back of my chair, though I could feel tension simmering beneath his outward calm. He was thinking too hard. About himself. About Caelor. About where exactly he fit into all of this. My chest tightened for him.
Ella finally broke the silence. “Now what?”
Her voice sounded small for the first time since I had met her. “How are we supposed to help him?” She shook her head slowly. “Didn’t legend say Caelor burned in the depths of Nox Eternum?”
The phrasing struck me instantly. Not your legend. Simply legend, implying an unspoken our. Like me, Ella no longer saw herself as human first. She belonged to this story now. To the Arkhevari.
Dravok exhaled slowly. “My memories are much clearer now,” he admitted. “And many things I thought true aren’t.”
His dark gaze drifted toward the Shard of Echoes secured across the room. “Our memory must have become faulty over the years.”
“Fuzzy,” Zapharos corrected mildly. “Not faulty.”
Dravok gave him a dry look. “A distinction without much difference.”
“Suit yourselves,” Thyros drawled lazily. “Mine is perfectly fine.”
I bit back a smile. Even exhausted and emotionally wrecked, he somehow still managed to sound unbearably arrogant.
Zapharos snorted. “You were not born yet, whelp.”
Thyros rolled his eyes dramatically. “Yes, yes, I know. You’re ancient. Revered. So superior to me in every imaginable way.”
A grin tugged at Zapharos’ mouth. “You were merely a spark drifting in Nox Eternum when our war began.”
“Tragic for all of you, really,” Thyros replied solemnly. “Imagine having to survive without my brilliance for several million years.”
To my surprise, laughter rippled through the room.
Real laughter. Warm and familiar. There was no bitterness beneath the teasing.
No resentment. Only affection forged through endless war.
And through the bond, I felt something inside Thyros easing at last. For so long, he had viewed himself as separate. Other. Wrong.
But now he sat among the surviving Arkhevari as one of them, accepted so completely that they mocked him like family and he mocked right back. The realization softened something deep inside me. Zapharos’ expression grew thoughtful again.
“It is true, though,” he admitted quietly. “I believed the females died.”
He rubbed a hand over his face as though physically trying to reorder memories millions of years old. “When in reality… they fled.”
“To Terra Nova,” Nadine added immediately, snapping her fingers. All of us looked at her.
“The duplicate of Earth.” Wonder still threaded through her voice. “I still can’t fully process that.”
Ella shook her head slowly. “The first world recreated.”
“The legend that the females died alongside the elders might not be completely accurate,” Nadine theorized softly, “but that doesn’t change the fact that only the younger Arkhevari remained.”
Without Aelyth. Without balance. Fighting an endless war alone. Silence settled heavily across the room. Because that loneliness still lingered inside all of them. Millions of years of loss. Of waiting. Of believing the other half of their souls had vanished forever.
Thyros looked at me, and everything in his expression changed. The loneliness receded beneath something warmer. Something awed.
“She came back to us,” he said quietly.
Emotion lodged painfully in my throat. Not just me. All of us.
Ella reached for Zapharos' hand.
Nadine drifted instinctively closer to Dravok.
For one fragile moment aboard our battered ship, surrounded by darkness and war and impossible revelations, it felt as though something ancient and broken inside the universe had finally begun to heal.
“Still,” Ella broke the heavy silence, “now what? What are we supposed to do now?”
“Wait.” Thyros lifted a hand.
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 search for 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.
Nadine continued quietly. “The problem was that Nox Eternum amplified imbalance.” We all fell silent, mesmerized by her explanation. “The fracture destabilized reality itself,” she continued. “And the consciousness that eventually became the Harrowed One fed on emotional extremes.”
She looked toward Zapharos. “Especially the darker ones.”
Something ancient and grim flickered across the men's expressions.
“The Harrowed One called to rage.” Dravok nodded.
“To grief,” Zapharos added.
“To vengeance,” Thyros murmured.
Nadine nodded. “It fed on those emotions. Strengthened them. Twisted them.” Her voice softened further. “And because the Arkhevari males already carried the greater capacity for destruction…” She hesitated. “They became vulnerable to it.”
Understanding rippled through me slowly. “The darkness wasn’t separate from you,” I realized.
“No,” Zapharos said quietly. “It's part of us.”
“Oookayyy,” Ella dragged the word out as she rubbed her temples. “That still doesn’t exactly help us figure out what to do next.”
No one answered immediately.