The silence in the study was a newly forged thing, fragile and sharp. It was no longer the suffocating absence that had pressed down on Nyxara after the Conclave, nor the charged, judgmental quiet that had followed Lucifera's slap. This was a silence of assessment. Of two powerful wills recalibrating around a new, unstable truth. The only sounds were the faint, dying crackle from the Celestial Tapestry, a sound that was growing weaker, more intermittent, and the soft, almost imperceptible hum of Lucifera's binary energy, a frequency that felt like two contradictory truths existing at once.

Nyxara held the stylus loosely, the deep, steady blue of Polaris light radiating from her skin in a muted, constant glow. It was not the brilliant, commanding beacon of her former certainty, but the sure, deep light of the true north star on a cloudy night. A light of direction, not spectacle. Her father's river stone sat on the desk beside the fresh vellum, an anchor of cool, unchanging reality in a universe of shifting lies. Her thumb, almost of its own volition, found its smooth, water worn surface, stroking it in a slow, rhythmic caress. A stone endures. The gesture was no longer a desperate tic but a conscious communion. She had asked her question. "The Twin Stars. Shiro and Kuro. Fighting against Ryo. What are your thoughts on them?", and now she waited, her multi hued eyes, currently a resolved Polaris blue, fixed on the Sirius woman. She was learning to be the thing that waited. The thing that observed.

Lucifera did not answer immediately. She stood near the great crystal window, her back to the room, a silhouette of sharp, unwavering angles against the soft, silver grey light of the Nyxarion morning. Her presence was a paradox: utterly still, yet vibrating with a coiled, analytical energy that seemed to parse the very atoms of the air. Her brilliant white eyes were not on the sanctuary's spires; they were focused on some internal calculation, her head tilted as if listening to a cosmic frequency only she could hear.

The moment stretched. Nyxara did not fidget. She absorbed the silence, the patience of it. She let her awareness expand beyond the desk, beyond the stone. She felt the residual warmth of the sunlight on the floor, the dull, distant throb on her cheek where Lucifera's hand had landed, a brand not of shame, but of a brutal awakening. They were simply facts. Points of sensation in the moment. This was the work: not to eliminate the pain, but to stop letting it rule her.

Finally, Lucifera turned. The movement was fluid, a displacement of energy rather than a simple shift of weight. Her galactic eyes, the fierce, possessive light of the Dog Star, swept over Nyxara, taking in the calm blue luminescence, the clean desk, the river stone beneath her thumb, before locking onto her gaze. There was no contempt in her expression now. Only a fierce, analytical intensity.

"My thoughts on the twins," Lucifera began, her voice not the whip crack of her fury or the ground glass monotone of her report, but a clear, resonant tone layered with the binary pulse of her clan. It was the voice of a master strategist assessing a newly revealed piece on a stellar board. "Are that they are a variable none of the great powers accounted for. A statistical anomaly with a cascade effect. Ryo, for all his meticulous cruelty, operates on a principle of predictable domination. He breaks what he understands. These two… he does not understand. They are chaos theory given flesh and starlight."

She took a single step toward the desk, her boot heel striking the floor with a soft, definitive click that echoed in the quiet room.

"I do not know them personally. I have not walked their paths or felt the particular texture of their despair. We Sirius do not involve ourselves in the petty squabbles of rebellion until the calculus demands it." A faint, almost imperceptible curl of her lip. "But the rumours that reach even our isolated spires… they are quite poetic. They have the resonant quality of truth, even if the details are shrouded in the hyperbole of the desperate."

Nyxara remained still, her Polaris light unwavering, but internally, she felt a shift. The steady blue at her core flickered, touched by a thread of Algol red, a spark of hunger, desperate curiosity. Poetic. The word was so alien to the brutal reality of Ryo's regime, yet it called to the part of her that was still a historian, the part that believed stories had power. She felt the heat of that curiosity, the Algol passion to know, to understand this new weapon. But she did not let it flare. She observed the heat, acknowledged its power, and let it cool back into the steady blue. Patience. Observation.

Lucifera's gaze grew distant, as if reading from a scroll of cosmic gossip. "They are the catalyst, the unstable core around which a rebellion has coalesced. Ryota Veyne, the fallen Old Star, provides the broken foundation. Haruto Isamu, the disgraced Architect, offers the cold, ruthless strategy. Juro Fujiwara, the leader of House Fujiwara, is the unbreakable shield. The seer, Mira, with her fractured sight, tries to chart a path through the storm. And your Crow…" Her eyes flickered back to Nyxara, a knowing, sharp glance that made the queen's stomach tighten with the fresh, complicated wound of Corvin's betrayal. "…provides the shadows and the secrets. A council of exiles and ghosts. Not so unlike your own, wouldn't you say?"

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She paused, letting the comparison hang. Nyxara's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The Vega silver of memory and sorrow traced a faint path through the blue of her resolve, a silent acknowledgment of the parallel. Both her council and this rebellion were made of shattered pieces.

"But the engine," Lucifera continued, her voice dropping into a more intimate, compelling register, "the undeniable, chaotic force… are the Twin Stars. Their feats with the resistance are not just victories; they are statements. They are symbols carved into the Butcher's own flesh."

She began to count them off on her long, elegant fingers, each point a hammer blow of implication.

"First. They conquered the Plaza of Screams." The name itself seemed to darken the room. Nyxara knew it only from the oldest, most horrific histories, a place of psychological torment carved into the heart of the Astralon, where Ryo's will was made manifest through unbearable pressure and cosmic dread. "A place designed to break the spirit, to grind hope into dust. It is not a physical fortress to be stormed; it is a nightmare to be endured. And they did not merely endure it. They broke its hold. They made it theirs. To do that requires a bond that goes beyond strategy or loyalty. It requires a shared soul deep resonance that even Ryo's void cannot penetrate."

The image flashed in Nyxara's mind: seven figures, standing defiant in a place of absolute despair. Her Polaris blue glowed a fraction brighter, a reflexive response to the concept of defiance. The Algol red within her, the hungry will to survive, pulsed in sympathetic resonance. She thought of the Conclave, her own personal Plaza of Screams, and the sheer, solitary effort it had taken just to stand. The idea that two young men had not only stood but won in such a place was… staggering.

"Second." Lucifera's second finger snapped down. "They faced Akuma. The Butcher's own blade. His Scourge. A being of curated malice and absolute power, a fragment of Ryo's own nihilism given form. And they did not just face him. They made him retreat. They shattered the invincible. They put fear into a creature that knows only how to inflict it. They broke through his defences, enough for Haruto to finish it off, or so the whispers say. They fought a shadow with a sharper shadow."

This time, the shift within Nyxara was more pronounced. A web of fine, angry Algol red crackled briefly across the back of her right hand, the passionate fury at Ryo's chief enforcer, the instrument of so much pain, the one who had undoubtedly carried out countless atrocities, flaring hot and bright before she consciously smoothed it back into the steady blue. The effort was visible; a fine tremor passed through her for a microsecond. She focused on the stone. Endure. Do not strive.

Lucifera noted it, a flicker of something akin to respect in her brilliant white eyes. She was silent for a long moment, her galactic gaze turning inward once more, as if verifying a final, most critical piece of intelligence.

"And then… there is Volrag," she said, the name a whisper that seemed to suck the warmth from the room. "The top General. Ryo's fist in the field. A commander who has never known defeat, whose very presence freezes the blood of legions. A tactician of glacial, inevitable advancement." She looked at Nyxara, and for the first time, a genuine, stark curiosity showed on her face. "The rumours say the twins defeated him. At the academy itself. I have no operational details. The 'how' is a mystery, shrouded in conflicting reports of… chaotic light and absolute cold. A supernova contained within a frost. It makes no logical sense, which is perhaps why it worked."

She shook her head slightly, a rare admission of incomplete data from the famously omniscient Sirius clan. "But the outcome is undeniable. Volrag was bested. His inexorable advance was… halted. Not by an army, but by two boys. The implications of that alone should shake the foundations of the Black Keep."

Lucifera finally stepped fully to the desk, placing her palms flat on the nebula wood. She leaned forward, her presence overwhelming, not with fury, but with the weight of her conclusion. Her Sirius resonance vibrated through the desk, a tangible pulse of certainty that made the river stone tremble faintly.

"So, my thought on them, Queen Nyxara, is this: They are not merely soldiers in a rebellion. They are the rebellion's shattered heart and its unforeseen will. They are the key that can turn the lock on Ryo's reign. They have done what entire armies and diplomatic envoys could not," she said, her gaze flicking pointedly to Nyxara, a reminder of her failed truce. "They have struck at the myth of his invincibility. They have brought the fight to his doorstep, not with an army, but with a truth he cannot comprehend, that even broken things can have unimaginable strength."

The speech hung in the air, each word a stone dropped into the still pond of Nyxara's newly forged calm. She saw them now, not as names in a report, but as forces of nature. Two boys, one a prince of the enemy, the other a slum rat with a stolen legacy, standing together against a glacier of tyranny. They were a mirror, reflecting her own shattered state back at her. They were broken, yes. But they were fighting. They were not rushing in trying to be a star; no they were enduring like a stone. The Betelgeuse orange of stubborn, enduring will pulsed deep within her core, a low ember of kinship.

The quiet in the room deepened. The faint, dying light of the tapestry gave one last, fitful crackle and fell permanently silent. The Algol heart within it had finally guttered out. The only light now was the soft morning sun through the crystal and the steady, resolved glow of Polaris on Nyxara's skin.

Lucifera straightened. The fierce, analytical light in her eyes softened by a degree, replaced by something else: a challenge. She had provided the assessment. Now she would test the vessel meant to receive it.

"You have asked me about external weapons. About twin stars in a foreign sky. You seek answers, strategies, tools to wield against the Butcher King," Lucifera said, her voice dropping into a lower, more resonant register. The binary pulse of her energy seemed to focus, aiming directly at the core of Nyxara's being.

"Now, my Queen, let me ask you a question."

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