Noah stood in the road with Render in both hands.

The hammer was heavier than it looked and the golden enhancement energy running through it had no interest in being held by someone it had not decided to accept, but it was holding for him, same as it had held on the battlefield, same as it had held when he caught it mid-flight. He looked at Egor across the road. Egor without his hammer for the first time since Noah had known him, standing there with his hands at his sides and blood on his face and the absolute certainty of a man whose mission was standing right in front of him.

"I'll tell you again.Your fight isn't with me," Noah said.

Egor looked at the hammer in Noah's hands. "You are my mission."

"I know you believe that," Noah said. "And I know why. But the woman who told you I was a plague, the one you saw in a dream, she has been playing both sides of this war since before this kingdom had a name." He looked at Egor properly. "I am not your enemy. I am going to prove that. But right now I need you to stay here."

Egor's eyes moved to the hammer.

"I'll give you this back," Noah said. "For about thirty seconds."

He threw it.

Not gently. Not as a return. He put everything his enhanced strength had into the rotation and released Render spinning at a speed that turned the golden trail off it into a solid line in the air between them, and Egor's hands came up because catching his own hammer was reflex built over decades and the reflex fired before the calculation could override it.

Egor caught it.

The force of catching something moving that fast traveled up his arms and through his chest and his feet left the ground and he went backward down the road, not falling, not tumbling, just moving backward whether he wanted to or not, the packed earth under his boots doing nothing to slow him, and he covered thirty feet before his heels found enough purchase to arrest the momentum.

Thirty feet was what Noah needed.

He turned and ran to Ares.

The red death was at the road's edge where he had come down during the fight, one wing partially spread against the undergrowth, and he was breathing with the deep rhythmic intensity of something that had taken serious damage and was in the process of a serious argument with that damage. The Molten Core was building. Noah could feel it before he even reached him, the heat radiating outward from Ares's chest in waves that had nothing to do with the air, the deep internal glow visible through the scales at his sternum, red-orange, cycling and building up.

Noah put both hands on the scales at Ares's neck.

"Hey," he said. "Look at me."

The amber eye rotated toward him.

"I know what you want to do with that," Noah said, nodding at the glow building in the dragon's chest. "And I know you've earned it. You have absolutely earned it." He held the eye. "But I need that energy for something else right now. I need you fast. Faster than you have ever gone with me on your back. We have to reach the capital fast and I need every single thing the Molten Core can give us just to keep ahead of it."

Ares held his gaze for a moment.

Then the glow shifted. Not dimming exactly, more like redirecting, the heat that had been concentrating at the chest spreading outward through the wings and the legs and the full length of the tail, the Molten Core converting from a weapon charge into something that ran through the whole body instead of gathering at a single point. The air around Ares climbed ten degrees in the space of two breaths.

Noah looked back down the road.

"Nami." She was pulling herself upright against the tree line, her leg doing what her face was refusing to do which was show how bad it was. "I need you to get Shade and take him to Holloway. The mountain cave, you know the one, where the wyvern was. Take Pip and Werner and wait for me there." He looked at her properly. "Can you do that?"

Nami looked at him for a moment with the expression she wore when she was deciding between several responses and had settled on the practical one.

"Yes," she said. "Go."

Noah climbed onto Ares.

The moment he was seated the red death's wings spread to their full span and the downstroke that followed drove them vertical with a force that sent everything on the road below scattering outward, leaves and dust and the loose debris of the fight rising in a ring from the air displacement. The road shrank. The trees became texture. The cloud layer came up fast and then they were through it and above it and the world below was a grey ceiling and the world above was open sky and Ares was still accelerating.

Noah pressed himself low against the neck and held on.

Down on the road, Gigarose watched the space where they had been.

But then her eyes were fixed on something. She looked at the interface only she could see, pink and structured in ways that had no equivalent anywhere in this world or most others, and on it two words were sitting where there should have been something else entirely.

[Error...]

[Error...]

She looked at them with the mild curiosity of someone who had found an unexpected insect on their windowsill. Not alarmed. Just noting.

"His system fought back," she said quietly, to herself, to the road. "Interesting little thing."

She turned to look at Egor who had found his feet and was standing in the middle of the road with Render in his hand and his eyes on the sky where Ares had gone, the look of a man whose objective had just achieved a considerable altitude advantage.

"How do you feel about dragons?" Gigarose said.

Egor looked at her and behind her he could see a swirling mass of energy forming around her.

She was already drawing the gate.

It did not arrive with ceremony. No light building, no sound preceding it, just a rectangle of somewhere else opening in the middle of the road, the edges of it clean and precise, and through it came darkness first and then the smell of something ancient and then a sound.

The roar came through before what was coming did.

It hit the road like a physical thing, the sound wave rolling outward through the trees on both sides and sending every bird in the canopy up simultaneously in a panicked cloud, and three kilometers north Ares shuddered in the air, a full body response that ran from his neck to the tip of his tail, all the spikes on his back prickling up and he looked back over his shoulder at something he could not yet see.

Then a foot came through the gate.

Then a leg. Then a shoulder. Then the full head pushing through the rectangle of the gate with the patience of something that had done this before, that had stepped through doors between places with enough frequency that the novelty of it had worn away centuries ago.

It was enormous.

Not in the way that Ares was enormous or Nyx was enormous, the comprehensible enormity of creatures that existed at the far end of a known scale. This was different. This dragon occupied space differently, the way it stood on the road suggesting that the road had simply accepted the arrangement rather than that the dragon had chosen to stand on it. Its scales were purple, not the purple-black of void energy but something deeper than that, the purple of deep water where light stopped being relevant, and the energy running through them was not electrical like Gail's lines or thermal like Ares's glow but something that had no name in this era and possibly no name in any era that Noah had passed through.

It opened its mouth and roared again.

The trees on both sides of the road bent away from the sound. Not from wind. From the sound itself, the pressure of it pushing physical matter out of its path, and Egor standing ten feet away put one hand up in front of his face reflexively before he controlled the reflex and lowered it.

Gigarose looked up at it with the expression of someone admiring their own work.

"There we are," she said warmly.

She looked at Egor.

"Get on," she said. "We have a boy to catch."

Egor looked at the dragon. At its scales and its eyes and the energy running through it that had no framework in anything his twenty years of dragon knight training had given him.

"A Purple one. I thought it was a myth," he said in pure reverence.

Then he looked at the sky where Noah and Ares had gone.

He walked to the dragon and climbed on.

The purple dragon launched without ceremony.

The air where it had been standing collapsed inward in its wake, a brief vacuum that sucked the leaves and dust of the road's surface upward before the atmosphere filled the gap, and then it was above the cloud layer and accelerating north.

Its first breath came a minute into the chase.

The beam was purple-white, wide, and it hit the landscape three hundred meters to the left of Ares's flight path because the dragon was still ranging, still finding its angle, and where it touched the earth below it did not burn. The ground along the contact line simply stopped. A rift opened, clean-edged, dropping into nothing, and the cold that rose from it reached Noah at altitude and made the air around them ten degrees colder in a single breath.

Ares felt it too.

The red death's body responded without Noah needing to direct it, banking right, the Molten Core's energy pushing through the wings and driving the speed higher, and Noah pressed himself flat and watched the next beam come, further right this time, the purple dragon correcting its angle, and a second rift opened in the landscape below them, parallel to the first, and the earth between the two rifts groaned audibly even from this height before it subsided into the gap.

They were three minutes from the capital.

Noah looked back once.

The purple dragon was closing.

He looked forward again.

"Ares," he said, against the wind. "Everything."

The Molten Core detonated through the wings.

The acceleration was not a smooth increase. It was a step change, the kind of speed that came when something biological decided that its previous operating parameters were no longer sufficient and discarded them, and the wind went from something pushing against Noah's face to something trying to remove his face from his head, and the capital on the horizon went from a suggestion to a fact in a time frame that his mind filed as very fast and declined to be more specific about.

They came down hard at the city's northern approach.

Noah was off Ares's back before the red death had fully landed, his boots hitting the street and carrying him forward at a run, and above him he could hear the purple dragon's wings as it descended toward the city, the shadow of it crossing the street ahead of him in a sweep that made the civilians still in the street look up and then immediately make decisions about being somewhere else.

He ran for the castle.

Right now the streets near the castle were the wrong kind of quiet, the quiet of somewhere that something had already passed through rather than somewhere something had not yet arrived.

The first body was a gate guard. Full armor, positioned where he would have been standing when whatever reached him reached him, and the way he was lying said he had not seen it coming and had not had time to form an opinion about it afterward. Two more inside the outer wall, a patrol that had been moving when it stopped moving, and further in, near the great hall's entrance, four knights in a cluster that suggested they had responded to something together and had not found the response sufficient.

Arthur had not come through the front.

Noah looked at the bodies and at the path they implied and felt the clarity of understanding something that had already happened and could not be changed, only accounted for.

Arthur had done to this kingdom exactly what Noah had been sent to do to Arthur.

Cut off the head.

He walked through the great hall and the corridor beyond it and pushed open the throne room doors.

Arthur was inside.

——

Outside the castle, the purple dragon came down hard.

The courtyard stone cracked under its feet, fractures spreading outward from each point of contact, and Egor was off its back before the dust finished rising, Render in his hand, eyes already on the castle entrance.

He took three steps toward it.

"Egor."

He stopped.

Gigarose came around the corner of the courtyard wall like she had been standing there the whole time and had simply decided to move. No rush in her steps. Her hands clasped in front of her, her pink hair sitting completely wrong against the grey stone and the grey morning and everything grey about this moment.

She stopped between him and the entrance.

"The traitor is inside," Egor said. "If I go now I can end—" 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"The flames are dying."

He closed his mouth.

She looked up at him with those eyes that were warm in the way that certain things were warm before they burned you.

"Your kingdom, Egor," she said softly. "Right now, while you stand here. The last ember is guttering." She tilted her head. "You feel it, don't you. You have been feeling it since you landed."

Egor's jaw tightened.

"She told you what must be done," Gigarose continued, her voice dropping lower, like she was reminding him of something sacred. "You know what it costs. You know what it requires." She held his eyes. "There is only one person who can save what remains. And that person is standing in this courtyard."

Egor looked at the castle entrance.

Then he looked at the sky.

"The kingdom," he said, and the way he said it had nothing left in it except that. No question. No conflict. Just a man who had received an instruction from his god and had remembered what mattered.

He turned and walked back to the purple dragon.

He climbed on.

He did not look back at the entrance. He did not look back at Gigarose. He looked north, toward the kingdom, toward the dying ember she had placed inside his chest like a coal, and the purple dragon read him and launched, the downstroke cracking what was left of the courtyard stone, and in seconds they were above the rooftops and gone.

Gigarose watched the sky where they had been.

Her smile came back slow, like it had never actually left, just been waiting somewhere just offstage for the cue to return.

She smiled and said. "Well that was easy,"

——

Noah walked in and Arthur turned and looked at him and for a moment neither of them said anything, two people in a large stone room with the sounds of a city that did not yet know its war was about to the apex coming through the high windows.

He looked quite different to the person Noah knew as Arthur from the other timeline. This person actually looked the part. He was old, with grey hair on the side and significantly more menacing looking.

"You are not one of mine," Arthur said.

"No," Noah said.

Arthur looked at him with the patience of someone who had been reading people for centuries and was reading him now. "And not one of theirs." He glanced at the door Noah had come through. "From the looks of things and your general appearance, it would seem you ran through a city that my forces are currently occupying to get into this room. Either you are very stupid or you have something to say that you believe is worth the effort. "

"I know you are an intelligent man which is why I know you will listen to me because I have something to say," Noah said.

"Then say it," Arthur said. "As you can see, I have a kingdom to conquer,"

Noah looked at Arthur across the throne room and thought about where to start.

Not with Gigarose. Not yet. You did not lead with the conclusion when the conclusion required the foundation to hold it up.

"There was a woman," Noah said. "No name in any record that survived. She walked into the war between the three kingdoms, the one before this one, the one that produced everything this kingdom is built on. She met with each king separately. Made demands nobody could agree on afterward. And then she blessed the land."

Arthur said nothing. Listening.

"She changed the fundamental nature of human capability across an entire population," Noah said. "People started manifesting abilities that had never existed before. Fire. Enhanced strength. Healing. The dragon knight order exists because of what she did. Every ability anyone in this kingdom has ever awakened traces back to her." He paused. "And nobody knows her name. Nobody knows where she came from. Nobody knows where she went."

"This is history," Arthur said. "You are also a dragon Knight, your kind irks me the most. A line of poorly bred delinquents meddling with the affairs of the gods. And so I ask again, why are you telling me old history, boy?"

"Because she did not leave," Noah said. "She just stopped being visible in that role."

Arthur looked at him.

"Your witch," Noah said. "How long has she been with you?"

A silence.

"Long enough," Arthur said.

"Did you find her or did she find you?"

Arthur's jaw moved slightly. "She found me."

"When?" Noah said. "After the tomb?"

The throne room went very quiet.

Arthur looked at him with eyes that had been reading people for centuries and were reading him now with a focus that had nothing casual in it.

"You said that word," Arthur said. "The tomb. As though you know what it means."

"Forty-seven years," Noah said. "Underground. In a chamber lined with material designed to contain void energy. They sealed the entrance and left you there and you spent three days in the dark before you understood that nobody was coming." He held Arthur's gaze. "And then you spent forty-seven years learning what you were actually capable of."

Arthur had gone completely still.

Not the stillness of someone controlling a reaction. The stillness of someone whose body had received information of a certain weight and was taking a moment to distribute it.

"Nobody knows that," Arthur said.

"Leviticus used your own name," Noah said. "When he sealed the entrance. He said it like it was already past tense. Like you were already something that had been rather than something that was." He paused. "You heard it through the stone."

Arthur looked at him for a long time.

"Who are you," he said.

"Nobody from here," Noah said. "That is the honest answer and I know it is not a satisfying one but it is what I have." He took a step closer. "What matters is that I know about the tomb and I know about Maive and I know what you found when you came out and I am standing in front of you because you deserve to know something that nobody in any version of your life has ever told you."

"Say it then," Arthur said.

"The woman who found you after the tomb," Noah said. "The witch who came to you when you were building toward this. She found a fire already burning and she came to it." He watched Arthur's face. "She did not give you the fury. The seven families gave you the fury. But she has been feeding on it ever since. Every campaign you have run. Every kingdom you have broken. Every burning thing you have built from what was done to you." He paused. "She does not care which side wins. She never has. She is on both sides because both sides feed her and the war itself is the meal."

Arthur said nothing.

"The woman who blessed this land," Noah said. "The one whose name appears in no record. The one who gave your enemies their abilities and their gates and their dragon knight order." He held Arthur's eyes. "And then came to you. Afterward."

Arthur looked at the floor.

Not away. Not avoiding. The look of someone whose mind was moving through something at a speed that required a moment of apparent stillness to accommodate.

"You are saying," Arthur said slowly, "that the same woman gave this kingdom its power and then came to advise me."

"Yes," Noah said.

"To what end."

"Ask yourself who benefits," Noah said. "Not who wins this war. Who benefits regardless of who wins. Who has been present on both sides of every conflict you have ever been part of and has never lost anything in any of them." He let that sit. "What does chaos need to survive?"

Arthur looked up from the floor.

Something was happening behind his eyes that was not visible on his face but was present in the room the way heat was present, felt before it was seen.

"More chaos," Arthur said.

"And you," Noah said, "have been the most reliable source of it she has ever found."

There was silence. And then there was footsteps.

Then footsteps.

Light ones. The click of high boots on stone that had not been in this room a moment ago.

Gigarose came through the side entrance the way she came through most spaces, unhurried, visible now because she had chosen to be, her pink hair catching the light from the high windows. She looked at Noah first and her face was doing the pleasant open thing it did when she was least concerned, and then she looked at Arthur and whatever she saw in his face made the pleasant open thing do something very small and very brief that she controlled before it finished happening.

"Arthur," she said warmly. "There is still so much to do."