The silence did not lift.
It settled over the ruined battlefield like a weight too heavy to breathe through. Smoke still hung in the air, frozen where the wind had abandoned it. The world felt wrong, paused between heartbeats.
Lyria remained on her knees.
She didn't dare move. The mud beneath her palms was cold and wet, but she barely felt it. Her ears rang, her breath coming in uneven pulls as her body tried to exist under the crushing presence pressing down from the sky.
He was still there.
She felt it before she looked. The pressure, immense and absolute, centered on her like the gaze of something vast enough to swallow the horizon. Slowly, she lifted her head.
The figure suspended above the battlefield had begun to descend.
He did not fall or glide. The space between them simply shortened, the air folding until he stood a short distance away, boots resting lightly on earth that should have crumbled beneath him. Up close, he looked no more real than he had from afar. Dark hair fell past his shoulders. His clothes were untouched by ash or blood. His eyes were clear and distant, like a winter sky.
Lyria's throat tightened.
He was close enough now that she could see her reflection in his eyes, small and mud-streaked and trembling.
His gaze did not waver.
It moved over her slowly, deliberately, as though he were studying something he did not understand. The weight in the air shifted with that attention, focusing in a way that made her skin prickle.
"What are you?" she whispered before she could stop herself.
The words slipped out, thin and shaken.
He tilted his head slightly.
"I am," he said.
The answer made no sense, and yet something in his expression suggested it was complete.
His gaze sharpened.
Lyria felt it then, not on her skin, not on her clothes, but deeper. Something unseen pressed against her chest, against her very being, like a hand searching for a place to close.
Her breath caught.
For a moment, the air warped around her, light bending at the edges of her vision.
He was trying again.
To erase her.
The pressure intensified, and then slid away like water against stone.
Nothing happened.
The ground did not vanish. Her body remained painfully, stubbornly whole.
A faint crease formed between his brows.
"Impossible," he murmured.
Lyria's heart hammered in her ears. She forced air into her lungs, her voice shaking as she clung to the only truth she knew.
"I'm just human," she said. "I don't understand any of this."
The word lingered in the air.
Human.
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not emotion. Not recognition. Something deeper, like a ripple across still water. His hand lifted slightly, then stilled, as though the motion had been forgotten halfway through.
For an instant, Lyria thought she saw something else layered over his expression, a memory too distant to hold. Then it was gone.
He looked at her again, more intently this time.
"Your existence is irregular," he said.
A tremor ran through the ground beneath them. Far off, beyond the scar where the battlefield had vanished, the sky groaned as the crack overhead shifted. Fragments of light fell like dying stars before dissolving midair.
The pressure around him pulsed.
Reality trembled.
Lyria felt it in her bones, the wrongness of his presence pressing outward, unraveling the world in slow, invisible waves.
Then she noticed something else.
Closest to him, the earth fractured, lines splitting through soil and stone as though unable to endure the weight of him. But where she knelt, the ground remained intact. The air felt thinner, lighter, like standing at the edge of a storm that refused to cross an unseen boundary.
His gaze dropped to the space between them.
He noticed it too.
The tremor in the air eased slightly.
Not everywhere.
Only here.
He took a step closer.
The pressure around her eased further. The world felt less like it was being torn apart and more like it was holding its breath.
Understanding dawned slowly in his eyes.
"Stability," he said.
Lyria did not know what that meant. She only knew that when he moved closer, the sky above seemed less likely to break again.
She swallowed.
"Did you do this?" she asked. "All of it?"
His gaze shifted past her, to the vast empty scar where thousands had stood moments ago.
"I ended what was there," he replied.
There was no pride in his voice. No cruelty. Just fact.
A shiver ran through her.
The tremor in the sky deepened. A distant rumble rolled across the plains, as though something vast had turned its attention toward this place.
He looked up briefly, then back at her.
The air between them tightened, decision settling into place with quiet finality.
"Stay," he said.
Lyria's fingers curled into the mud.
She did not know if she had a choice.
But she understood something with terrifying certainty.
Leaving him now would be more dangerous than staying.