The moonlight spilled silver threads across the sky, casting veils over the old spirit tree where silence had taken root. Zhen Hu lay unconscious beneath its ancient boughs, his breath shallow, his body wrapped in bandages soaked with dried blood and crushed herbal paste.
Aelira stood nearby—no longer ghostly, no longer calm.
Her eyes glowed softly, dimmer than usual, as though uncertainty dimmed even the light of her spirit form. Her hands trembled. Not from pain, not from sorrow, but from a strange thing she hadn't felt in a hundred cycles—fear.
Because it hadn't been her.
Not during the battle with Vyrinth.
Not during the surge of death-born power that flayed the very ground Zhen Hu stood on. That was not her strength. Not her will.
And yet... it had come from within him.
She lowered herself beside his form, her fingers brushing the air just above his bruised cheek.
"Who awakened you?" she whispered to the wind, though it was meant for herself.
She remembered it now—faintly, like smoke from a dying fire. A presence older than her time. A signature etched not in Zen or Nytherion, but in the primordial fragments of pre-divine lore. A shrouded essence she had glimpsed only once, before her own death. Buried beneath the Veil Realms, sealed by the gods.
"They said it was erased…" she muttered. "But how can something erased still speak?"
She had thought herself the sole guardian of Zhen Hu's cultivation path. She had believed that his strength—however monstrous—was still traceable to her teachings, her whispers, her guidance.
But now? There was a deeper current running beneath the surface of his soul.
A darkness… unclaimed. Not merely Nytherion. Not simply death or decay.
Something that fed on those things and yet stood apart.
---
Zhen Hu groaned, shifting faintly. The bandages tugged against torn muscle. Aelira instinctively reached out again, pausing just before her fingers could graze his skin.
She couldn't touch him—not truly.
Not yet.
But something else could.
Something had.
---
"I was once a spirit of starlight," she said softly, tracing her fingers through the shimmering petals of a spirit blossom blooming beside him. "A guide to kings. A healer. A song the dying could hear and not fear."
She glanced down at him again, face tightening. "And now I serve… something even I fear to name."
Was this care she felt?
Was this love?
Not yet. But the root of it had taken hold.
Not because he was strong.
But because, despite everything, despite the rage, the blood, the way his body thrashed with power he did not yet understand—he still looked at the world as if he was undeserving of it.
Even when she had screamed at him in fury, when her spirit-infused training had nearly broken him… he had not hated her.
He had tried to understand her.
---
She sat beside him until the stars began to fade. In the faint blush of morning, the cold dew forming on the earth, she saw the future unfolding like a cracked mirror.
Aelira knew what tomorrow would bring.
The Oracle's Evaluation.
The Council would pry into his soul, attempt to read the truth. Intent, Conservation Base, Spirit Path—none would remain hidden.
Unless she stepped in.
Unless she lied… again.
But could she protect him from what even she did not understand?
And if it rises again... she thought, staring at the scars blooming along Zhen Hu's ribs like dead roots, what happens to me?
---
She vanished with the morning fog, leaving only a faint shimmer in the air and a blossom pressed beside his open hand.
Tomorrow would come.
And with it, the storm.