The mist of the Plaza of Screams clung to them like a shroud of forgotten agony, its damp chill seeping through the coarse wool of their robes. Nyxara's final words, "Let us show us just how serious we truly are", hung in the jaundiced air, a sovereign challenge etched not in palace decree, but in the grim reality of this nightmare. They were not a request; they were the unyielding core of her newfound resolve, and they struck Corvin with the force of a physical blow, dismantling the last of his assumptions about the queen he thought he knew.

For a heart stopping moment, he could only stare, his galactic eyes wide, the master spy utterly disarmed not by a better secret, but by a metamorphosis he had believed impossible. The queen of patient diplomacy stood before him in the garb of a beggar, her multi hued eyes reflecting the pulsing, malevolent runes of the plaza. In their depths, he did not see the shattered woman he had left weeping on a floor. He saw the cold, hard surface of the river stone she had willed herself to become.

He swallowed hard, the sound obscenely loud in the psychic silence. "This way," he finally breathed, the words a ragged concession to a new, terrifying reality. He turned, his movements uncharacteristically stiff, and led them deeper into the heart of the nightmare.

The atmosphere was a physical weight, a suffocating blend of ozone, cold metal, and something faintly, unpleasantly organic, the scent of curated despair. The fleshy, membranous floor gave slightly under their boots, a horribly intimate sensation. The jaundiced runes embedded within it pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light, a sick heart beating beneath the world's skin. Each throb was a wave of psychic residue, a scream, a whimper, a final, shattered thought, that washed over them, a symphony of agony whose final, dissonant chord lingered in the air.

Nyxara's steady Polaris blue flickered, momentarily overwhelmed. The Vega silver of profound, aching sorrow surged, a visceral empathy for every soul broken in this place. It was swiftly followed by the Algol red, a hot, furious revulsion so pure it threatened to scorch her newfound calm. She grasped for the ghost of the river stone in her mind, its lesson her only anchor. A stone endures. Observe. Do not be overwhelmed. She let the emotions crash against her, acknowledged their terrifying power, and willed them to recede, leaving the deep, resolved blue to steady itself once more.

Beside her, Statera's meticulously restored composure was a thin veneer over a chasm of anguish. Her Polaris light, usually a beacon of unwavering calm, pulsed erratically, a frantic, strobing heartbeat of blue and panicked silver. The horror of the plaza was a desecration of all she held orderly and sane. But it was layered upon, and utterly eclipsed by, the seismic reality of her sister's fate. This was the kingdom that had consumed Adrasteia. This was the air her niece and nephew had been forced to breathe. Every pulsing rune felt like a judgment on her own inaction, her lifelong atonement now revealed as a pathetic, meaningless pantomime in the face of such absolute evil. Her breath hitched, a soft, broken sound she barely stifled.

Lucifera, in stark contrast, was a study in lethal focus. The binary pulse of her Sirius energy was a low, resonant hum, a calculated counter frequency to the plaza's psychic dissonance. Her brilliant white eyes scanned everything, missing nothing, the pattern of the runes, the structural stress points in the obsidian spires, the minute shifts in the corrosive mist. She was not feeling the horror; she was dissecting it, treating the Plaza of Screams as a tactical equation where variables of pain and dread could be quantified and neutralized. Her silence was not fear, but profound, unsettling analysis.

"The fissure is just ahead," Corvin whispered, his voice strained, cutting through the thick, soupy air. He gestured toward a deeper shadow, a jagged tear in the pulsating floor that wept the same sickly yellow light. "It's our current refuge. Ryo's patrols avoid this place, believing its own nature is guard enough." He glanced back at Nyxara, his expression still etched with disbelief. "They will be armed. And they see betrayal in every shadow. Follow my lead. Do not make a move unless I do."

"We did not walk into the lion's den to be dictated to by its mice, Crow," Nyxara replied, her voice low but iron clad, the voice that had absorbed a slap and a council's collapse and emerged stronger. "Our actions will speak for themselves. Lead the way."

The fissure was a narrow, jagged wound, barely wide enough for a single person to slip through sideways. From within emanated the low, muffled cadence of a familiar voice, the soft, deliberate scrape of a whetstone on metal, and the faint, warm crackle of a small heating unit. The sounds of life, stubborn and defiant, clinging to existence in a place designed to erase it.

Corvin paused at the entrance, a final, silent look of warning that was met with three expressions of unflinching resolve. Then, he melted into the shadow and was gone.

Nyxara took a final, steadying breath, the air a toxic mix of ozone and dread. She glanced at Statera, whose light had now stilled into a grim, almost fatalistic beam, and at Lucifera, who gave a single, sharp nod. Together, they followed Corvin into the belly of the beast.

The space within was a claustrophobic fracture in the world, low ceilinged and cramped. The walls were the same veined, living obsidian, though the captured starlight within was fainter here, choked and sickly. The air was slightly warmer, tinged with the smell of unwashed bodies, boiled nutrients, and ionized energy packs. And in the dim, jaundiced glow, were the seven of them.

Not an army. A constellation of shattered hopes.

Ryota Veyne, the fallen Old Star, sat on a crate, his posture weary but his eyes still holding a flicker of hardened authority as he listened to Haruto. Juro Fujiwara, a mountain of silent resolve, stood with his arms crossed, his gaze perpetually scanning for threats. The seer, Mira, was a wraith in the corner, her hands tracing patterns in the air only she could see, her fractured sight turned inward. And Kuro… Kaya's son, stood near the back, his expression a familiar mask of defiance and deep seated pain that wrenched at Nyxara's heart.

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But it was Haruto who turned first as they entered. He'd been speaking in a low, analytical tone to Ryota, but his words died in his throat. His wintery eyes, cold and calculating, snapped to Corvin, and in an instant, they ignited with a frigid, incandescent rage.

"Crow?" The word was a shard of ice, sharp enough to draw blood. He took a step forward, his entire body coiling. He didn't even acknowledge the others; his world had narrowed to the betrayal he was certain was unfolding. "You've sold us out? You lead his hounds directly to our door?"

The reaction was instantaneous. Juro's hand went to the hilt of his axes. Ryota pushed himself to his feet, his weariness replaced by grim acceptance. Kuro's fists clenched, a faint crackle of cold shimmering around them. Mira flinched, a small whimper escaping her lips. The trust in the fissure, always fragile, shattered completely.

Corvin held up his hands, but his voice was a whip crack, devoid of its usual placating charm. "Haruto, stand down! Think for one second and look! I've brought allies, not enemies!"

He stepped aside, forcibly pulling the focus onto the three grey robed figures.

Haruto's furious gaze swept over them, dismissive for a microsecond before sharpening with a dawning, impossible recognition. The coarse robes could not hide the innate authority in their stances, the unique energy that radiated from them, one of royal resolve, one of binary calculation, and one…

Nyxara did not wait. She stepped forward, pulling her mask off. The ethereal light of her skin, a resolved symphony of blue, red, and silver, seemed to push back the gloom of the fissure. Her eyes locked onto Haruto's.

"We are here to propose an alliance," she stated, her voice firm and clear, a sound of absolute authority that belonged in a palace but was somehow more powerful here, in the dirt.

Lucifera and Statera moved to flank her, their masks falling back. Lucifera's brilliant white eyes performed a lightning fast threat assessment of each person in the room, her Sirius energy a palpable, humming pressure. Statera stood rigid, her Polaris light burning with a cold, fierce intensity, her own gaze frantically scanning the faces before her, searching for one in particular.

Corvin found his voice, the spymaster forcing order onto the unbelievable scene. "Haruto, strategist of the Astralon resistance. I present Queen Nyxara of Nyxarion. Councillor Statera of the Polaris High Council. And Lucifera, of the Sirius Council. They have come to offer the formal weight of the Starborn nation to our cause."

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the faint crackle of the fire. Stunned disbelief replaced hostility on the faces of the resistance. Ryota's eyebrows shot up. Juro's hand eased slightly from his axes. Kuro stared, his mask of defiance slipping into pure confusion.

Haruto's icy composure fractured. A minute, incredulous twitch at the corner of his mouth. His gaze swept over them again, truly seeing them. The queen of the failed truce. The heart of Nyxarion's rigid tradition. A mythic Sirius warrior. Here. In the filth of this.

"An alliance," he repeated, the word flat, hollow. He took a single step closer, his eyes narrowing to slits. "You cross the mountains, you walk into the very heart of his power, you find this…" he gestured around the dismal fissure with utter contempt, "…to propose an alliance?" A brittle, humourless sound escaped him. "Prove it."

It was a challenge thrown from the absolute bedrock of his cynicism.

And it was in this suspended moment of high tension that Statera's frantic search found its target.

Her eyes locked onto the figure she had missed at first, half hidden behind Juro's broad frame. A young man, sitting on a pallet, intently cleaning a star carved blade with a ragged cloth. His hair was an imperious white, his frame lean but strong. And as he looked up, drawn by the sudden silence, the jaundiced light caught his eyes.

They were a striking, luminous amber.

Statera's world stopped.

Her breath vanished. Her heart, a frantic drum against her ribs, seemed to freeze mid beat. Her Polaris light didn't just flicker; it guttered like a candle in a gale, plunging into a panicked silver before flaring back into a desperate, unstable blue.

Adrasteia.

It was her sister's jawline. Her sister's defiant posture. Her sister's fiery spirit, now banked into a grim, survivalist ember. This was no report, no ghost from a sad story. This was her blood. Her sister's son. The boy she had left to the wolves. The guilt of a lifetime, the decades of rigid protocol, the unwavering loyalty to a crown that had exiled his mother, the desperate, silent atonement, crashed down upon her with the force of a collapsing star. It was a weight so immense she felt her knees weaken. She saw Aki's face then, superimposed over his, broken and used, and the thought was a knife to her soul. He must hate me. He must despise the very air I breathe for what I let happen to them. I do not deserve to look upon him. A choked, suffocated sound escaped her lips, and she took an involuntary, stumbling step forward, her hand outstretched as if to touch a mirage.

The movement, the raw, shattered sound, drew his attention away from the queens and the strategist.

Shiro looked up from his blade.

His amber eyes, tired and ancient, met hers. He saw a Starborn noblewoman, her face a mask of utter, devastating agony, staring at him as if she were witnessing a resurrection. He saw the distinctive light, his mother's light, flaring wildly across her skin. Confusion knitted his brow. And then, something deeper stirred, a primal pull from a place beyond memory, a ghost of a feeling from a time before the darkness, a warmth he thought he'd imagined.

He forgot the blade. He forgot the tense standoff. The world narrowed to this woman's face, to the inexplicable and overwhelming sense of connection that made his chest ache.

He rose slowly, his movements hesitant, almost dreamlike. He took a step forward, then another, weaving through the stunned resistance fighters who watched, mesmerized by this private apocalypse unfolding in their midst. Nyxara and Lucifera fell silent, the political shattered by the profoundly personal. Haruto's analytical mind, for once, had no calculation for this.

Shiro stopped a few feet from Statera, his young face a battlefield of confusion, a dawning, impossible hope, and a fear so profound it made him tremble. He looked at her, really looked, and the ghost became flesh. The feeling broke through the walls of survival and loss, and a name, a word, the first and most important word he had ever known, formed on his lips. It was not a question of identity, but a recognition of essence, a soul crying out for what it had lost.

His voice, when it came, was not that of a resistance fighter, but of a lost, heartbroken child, trembling with a vulnerability he had sworn he'd never show again.

"…Mother?"

The word hung in the cramped, tense air of the fissure, a single, fragile syllable that shattered the political standoff and replaced it with a profoundly personal earthquake.

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