They did not kill him.
That was the cruelty.
Caius hadn’t been asleep when the first sound reached him.
He had returned to his quarters hours earlier and done little since. His armor lay where he had left it after removing it piece by piece, the bronze dulled beneath the grime of a battle he had decided could wait until morning to be cleaned away. He had washed the worst of the blood from his hands and face, eaten enough to satisfy his mother's insistence that he do so, and spent the remainder of the evening attempting something he had ordered everyone else to do with considerably more authority than he had managed himself.
Rest.
His body had been willing, but his mind had not. There were too many things waiting for morning.
The dead had to be prepared before the heat returned. The damaged homes nearest the eastern road would need to be assessed first, and Caius had already decided which men could be spared from the burial preparations to begin clearing them. Grain stores needed inventory. The wounded would require tending. Someone needed to determine how many animals had been lost and how much water had been contaminated during the fighting.
He had been sitting near the open window, arranging those problems into an order he could tolerate, when something struck stone outside. A second impact followed before he could dismiss the first, then shouting carried through the village. Caius rose and crossed to the window.
For several seconds, what he saw made no sense. Fire moved along the eastern road.
Not the dying fires he had watched being extinguished from the bridge. These were new. One climbed rapidly along the side of a house while another burned farther beyond it, bright enough to illuminate figures moving between the buildings below. People spilled into the streets in various states of dress, some carrying weapons, others nothing at all. A horse tore against its tether near one of the lower courtyards. Men shouted from somewhere beyond Caius's view.
Then he saw the first armed figure running toward the center of the village.
Another followed, then several more. Caius was moving before the thought fully formed.
He caught his sword from where he had left it and stepped into his sandals without bothering with the armor. By the time he reached the corridor, doors had begun opening around him. Men emerged confused and half dressed, some still blinking sleep from their eyes while trying to understand why a village that had gone to bed victorious was burning again.
“Get your weapons.”
The confusion ended around him.
“What happened?”
“I don't know. Get your weapons.”
Caius continued toward the stairs. Another impact shook something below, followed by the unmistakable sound of wood giving way.
“Wake everyone who can fight,” he called over his shoulder. “Send someone toward the western road. I want to know where they entered.”
The men scattered.
Outside, the night had become unrecognizable.
Smoke moved between the buildings in thickening sheets, illuminated from beneath by fires spreading faster than anyone could contain them. People ran in every direction. A woman crossed the road carrying a child against her chest while shouting another name into the chaos. Somewhere to Caius's left, several men struggled to pull someone from beneath a collapsed awning. Farther ahead, steel caught the firelight.
Caius saw one of his soldiers fall and ran toward him.
The man responsible had barely withdrawn his weapon before Caius reached him. Caius's sword entered beneath his ribs and came free as the body folded. Another attacker turned at the movement. Caius struck before the man could raise his blade completely, then stepped over him without watching where he fell.
More of his men were appearing now, though not enough.
“Caius!”
He turned toward the voice.
Four men were running toward him from one of the adjoining roads, two armed properly and the others carrying whatever they had managed to find. One still had blood dried across his chest from wounds acquired earlier that day.
Caius pointed toward the eastern road.
“Keep them from reaching the houses behind us. Anyone who can’t fight gets moved west.”
“They're already west.”
Caius looked at him.
The man's face told him the rest. This wasn’t another attempt to breach the village. The enemy had waited until Caius's men were exhausted and scattered, then returned under cover of darkness. They were already inside it.
They had watched Caius's men spend themselves in daylight, watched the wounded carried home and the dead gathered, waited for armor to be removed, weapons put aside, fires extinguished and the victorious to surrender themselves to exhaustion. Then they had returned to finish what daylight had failed to accomplish.
Caius's grip tightened around his sword.
“Then we hold here.”
The men obeyed.
For a while, obedience was enough.
Others joined them as word moved through the streets. Caius formed what defense he could from men who had already given most of themselves to battle hours earlier. They pushed the attackers back from one road and lost another. A group of villagers escaped behind them while Caius and six others held an intersection barely wide enough for three men to fight abreast. Someone brought shields. Someone else arrived carrying a spear with no shoes on his feet.
Caius stopped noticing. There was only the next man in front of him, then the next.
He fought with none of the ceremony that would later be remembered from the day's victory. There were no formations left to preserve, no commanders waiting for signals, no distance from which to survey the movement of men and decide where pressure should be applied. The village had become a collection of isolated battles occurring simultaneously between burning homes, and Caius moved through them trying to impose order faster than the night could destroy it.
He shouted until his throat hurt.
Men followed until they couldn't.
One fell beside him with a blade through his neck. Another disappeared beneath three attackers after stepping forward to keep Caius from being surrounded. The man with the spear lasted longer than Caius expected before someone opened his stomach and left him folded against a wall.
Still Caius fought, his father’s voice returning with cruel clarity from only hours before. And you won. The memory felt almost obscene now. He drove his sword through another man before a blow struck him from behind.
He stumbled, turned and caught the next blow against his blade. The impact traveled through his shoulder. He retaliated hard enough to open the man's throat, but another attacker was already there.
Caius backed toward the wall and searched for his men, watching the few who remained fall before he could reach them. When the last went down, something struck the side of his head.
The world shifted violently. Stone met his shoulder before he understood that he had fallen against it. He pushed himself upright and swung at the first shape approaching him, felt his blade connect, then lost the weapon when someone struck his wrist. Caius reached for the man instead, his hands closing around a throat. For several seconds, fury kept him standing.
Then a fist drove into the old place beneath his ribs where pain had lived ever since the wound that had nearly killed him years before, and his body folded despite every command he gave it not to.
A knee struck his face, filling his mouth with blood.
Hands seized him from behind. Caius threw one man over his shoulder and was halfway upright when another blow landed against his temple. Someone kicked the back of his knee. Another drove a boot into his ribs after he hit the ground.
They didn’t stop when he stopped being able to fight them.
That, he would remember.
A boot struck his stomach. Another caught his shoulder. Something harder than a fist opened the skin above his eye, and blood immediately obscured half his vision. Caius tried to rise again and managed only to get one hand beneath himself before someone stamped it back against the stone.
He heard laughter before another kick landed. The village appeared and disappeared around him in fragments—fire, feet, a body lying facedown several paces away, smoke dragging itself across the road, someone screaming from inside a house, the taste of blood filling his mouth. Caius rolled onto his side and tried once more to push himself upright, but a boot caught him beneath the jaw and darkness took him.
When awareness returned, he was moving.
His feet dragged uselessly over stone while two men hauled him beneath the arms. Caius tried to lift his head and discovered that doing so required more strength than he possessed. Blood fell from his mouth in slow drops, disappearing beneath him as they moved.
He didn’t know where they were taking him. At first he thought they intended to execute him somewhere away from the fighting. Then they turned down a narrow passage between two structures and entered a section of the village Caius recognized only after several disoriented seconds: an old stone storage enclosure cut partly into the earth, older than several of the structures surrounding it and rarely used except when additional space was needed during the hottest months. One of the enemy soldiers must have found it during the earlier fighting.
The men dragged him inside and let him fall hard onto one shoulder. Then he heard iron, and the sound sharpened his awareness more effectively than the pain had. He tried to move, but someone kicked him onto his stomach.
A knee settled between his shoulders while his arms were dragged behind him. Iron closed around one wrist, then the other. The chain between them was pulled toward an anchoring ring fixed deep into the stone.
Caius twisted violently, earning a laugh from the man above him before another blow drove his face into the floor. After that, they beat him without urgency.
There was no battle left in it. No need to overcome him. They had already done that. This was something quieter and uglier, delivered by men who understood that the person beneath their boots had commanded those responsible for humiliating them earlier that day.
Caius stopped trying to rise.
Eventually, even breathing became something he had to remember to do.
One of the men crouched beside him and caught him by the hair, lifting his face from the stone long enough to look at him. Caius could barely make out his features through the blood covering one eye.
The man said something Caius couldn’t understand, drawing an answer from the entrance and another round of laughter. Then he released him, letting Caius’s face strike the stone before their footsteps retreated. Caius listened to them leave because there was nothing else he could do while, beyond the enclosure, the village continued to burn.
They hadn’t left him there out of mercy. He understood that much. Smoke had already begun finding its way inside, thin at first but growing heavier with every breath. Whatever remained standing when the attackers finished would be put to flame, and the stone surrounding him would become either an oven or a tomb.
The fire would kill him eventually.
Caius lay still without knowing how long.
Time had become difficult to measure between the shallow breaths he could manage and the periods when darkness gathered at the edges of his vision. His body had begun to feel distant from him, pain no longer belonging to any single injury but spreading into one enormous sensation that made thought difficult.
He tried to move his fingers and found them sluggish, his ribs and jaw wrong in ways he was too damaged to assess, something warm continuing to collect beneath his cheek. His thoughts drifted to his father, his mother, and the men who had followed him hours earlier because they believed he could bring them home. Absurdly, he remembered the rows of dead he had ordered prepared before morning. There would be no one left to prepare them now.
Then, somewhere beyond the stone, Calista screamed.
Caius’s eyes opened. For one suspended instant, every other sound disappeared beneath it. He knew that voice.
He had known it before either of them possessed language. He knew Calista laughing from across a crowded courtyard, knew the particular irritation in the way she called his name when he had offended her, knew the pitch her voice reached when anger overcame whatever dignity their mother had attempted to teach her.
He had heard her frightened and heard her hurt, but he had never heard her make that sound. When another scream tore through the village, Caius moved.
Pain exploded through him as he rolled onto his side and dragged his knees beneath himself. The chains snapped taut behind his back. He pulled anyway, every surviving muscle in his body tightening against iron fixed more securely than he had strength left to challenge.
Nothing moved. Caius pulled again, the iron cutting deeper into his wrists. “Calista!” His voice broke against the stone, but no answer came—only another distant sound he could no longer distinguish through the pounding in his head. He planted one foot beneath himself and hauled against the chains with everything remaining in him.
The anchoring ring held. His body did not. He collapsed forward, barely catching himself on one shoulder as darkness threatened the edges of his vision.
Something inside him broke before the chains did. The stone beneath his cheek was slick with blood—his, someone else’s, it didn’t matter. The air tasted of ash and blasphemy, and a harsh, broken laugh escaped him.
“Is this what you wanted?” he whispered into the floor. His voice shook—not with fear, but with something hotter.
No answer. Only fire. Only the distant, thinning cries of men who had trusted him.
Caius lifted his head, eyes burning.
“I fought for you,” he said, louder now, to the dark, to the smoke, to whatever watched from above and never bled. “I fought to keep my people from being crushed under those who would own them. I offered you victories. Altars. Silence. Obedience.”
His chains rattled as he strained against them, as if the metal itself offended him.
“And this is what you give me?”
Nothing answered.
Caius stared into the dark.
He had prayed before battles since he was old enough to carry a weapon properly. He had stood before altars with blood still drying beneath his nails and thanked gods who had never once descended to tell him whether the victory belonged to them or to the men who had died earning it. He had made offerings when the fighting went well and greater ones when it didn’t. He had asked Set for strength before walking onto fields from which other men didn’t return.
He had believed—not gently, because Caius had never done anything gently, but with the same discipline he gave everything else.
Another scream—Calista's—sharper, closer, and suddenly there was no room left in him for pride. His anger cracked, something raw pushing through.
“Fine,” he breathed, swallowing hard. “Fine. Take it. Take anything.”
His forehead struck the stone again, not in reverence—never that—but in surrender.
“Spare her,” he said, the words tearing out of him. “Spare my sister and I will give you whatever you want. My life. My blood. My name. My soul. I will carry your curse like a crown if it keeps her breathing.”
His breath caught painfully.
“Take every victory I have ever given you. Take every one I would have won. Take whatever years remain to me. I don't care.”
For several breaths, only the fire answered. Then the air changed—not gradually or like weather, but as though the world had been holding its breath and finally decided to inhale.
The sensation moved through the enclosure before Caius could understand it. The smoke hanging near the entrance seemed to hesitate. Fire still burned somewhere beyond the stone, but its crackling became strangely distant, as though the space around Caius had withdrawn from the rest of the village without physically moving at all.
Voices reached him, and at first he thought they belonged to the dying.
They overlapped too completely to separate, some little more than whispers and others pressing against him with enough force that he could feel them somewhere behind his eyes. Male and female ceased to have meaning within them. One voice seemed to begin before another had ended. Words passed through words until language itself became impossible to distinguish.
Caius closed his eyes. He was dying; that had to be it. Blood loss, smoke, the damage inside his body finally pushing him past suffering and into delirium.
We hear you.
His breath caught. The words offered neither comfort nor mercy, only acknowledgment. Something vast brushed against his awareness as the voices shifted and tangled until one presence separated from the rest. Caius had never heard the voice before, but he knew it.
He had carried it onto battlefields. Called upon it before blades met. Felt closest to it in the violent space where order collapsed and men discovered what remained of themselves beneath fear.
Set.
Caius lifted his head and pulled against the chains. For an instant, the iron resisted as it had before. Then it fractured beneath the strain, blackened cracks racing through every link before the chains crumbled into dust around his wrists. For several seconds Caius remained on his knees, staring as the remains of the restraints slipped from his wrists in fine black particles and scattered across the bloodied stone.
He brought his hands forward and watched the wounds around his wrists close, torn flesh drawing together until only the blood remained. His next breath filled his lungs completely. The grinding pain beneath his ribs vanished with it, followed by the ache in his jaw and every other injury the beating had left behind. Caius touched his side, searching for damage that was no longer there as his vision cleared with startling precision, then stared at his hands.
The firelight reaching the enclosure shouldn’t have been sufficient for what he saw. Every line in his palms appeared with impossible definition. Grains of dust rested individually against his skin. Beneath it—
Caius leaned closer. For a moment, he thought the blood covering his hands was moving, until he realized he was seeing beneath it. Fine vessels branched below the surface of his skin with impossible clarity, his blood traveling through them in a rhythm that seemed somehow different. Then he heard his own heartbeat—not merely felt it, but heard it with such clarity that the sound seemed to fill the enclosure.
The fire reached him next. Not one fire, but every flame consuming the village at once. Timber cracked somewhere beyond the stone while a man shouted farther away, footsteps struck the road, an animal cried out and metal fell against the ground. More sounds crowded in until distance seemed to collapse altogether, everything near and far arriving with the same unbearable clarity. Caius recoiled and pressed his hands against his ears, but it changed nothing. Through the chaos, Set’s voice came again, distinct from everything surrounding him.
A gift. No one else.
Caius stared into the darkness as a scream sounded outside. A man appeared at the entrance with his weapon raised, managed a single step toward him, then seized and collapsed against the stone. Nothing had touched him. Another cry rose somewhere beyond the enclosure, followed by another, and Caius stepped over the fallen man and ran into a village that had become something impossible.
Fire consumed the buildings around him, yet Caius could see through smoke that should’ve blinded him. Every movement registered with unnatural precision. Sparks lifted individually into the night. He heard feet striking roads he couldn’t see, men shouting from opposite ends of the village, the terrified breathing of someone hiding behind a broken wall.
And everywhere he ran, his enemies fell.
One man staggered from a doorway and collapsed before Caius reached him. Another turned toward him with a blade in hand, opened his mouth as if to shout, and dropped where he stood. Farther down the road, three men began running in the opposite direction. The first fell. The second made it several steps farther.
He didn’t know whether Set was moving beside him, above him, through the smoke or nowhere that mortal direction could describe. He knew only that men who had entered the village believing themselves victorious were dying around him without blade or arrow touching them.
Caius didn’t stop to watch.
Every collapsing wall arrived as clearly as the blood moving through Caius's own body. He heard dying men trying to breathe, animals straining against restraints and wind pushing through broken structures. Somewhere, water poured steadily from an overturned vessel.
He hadn't gone far before the flood of sound became almost impossible to navigate. Fire consumed timber on every side, footsteps struck stone from streets he couldn't see, and voices rose and disappeared beneath one another until distance seemed to have lost all meaning. Caius slowed, overwhelmed by a world that had become too loud and too precise, his attention pulled toward everything at once.
Then something familiar surfaced beneath it.
He stopped and closed his eyes, trying to find it again. He didn't understand what he was doing, only that somewhere among the fire, collapsing structures and dying voices was a sound he knew. Instead of reaching toward everything his hearing suddenly offered him, he held to that familiarity and let his attention settle around it. The surrounding noise remained, but gradually one voice separated from the rest—broken, distant, unmistakable.
Calista.
Caius opened his eyes and ran toward his sister.
Her voice gave him direction where the village no longer could. He followed it through the smoke, past bodies he didn’t stop to identify and men who fell before they could reach him, Set’s presence moving through the destruction in ways Caius neither understood nor had time to question. By the time he reached the house, Calista’s cries had weakened, but he could still hear them above everything else.
He crossed the entrance and took the stairs two at a time. Blood marked several of the steps, dark against the stone, and more waited at the top. The corridor beyond was damaged and thick with smoke, one doorway hanging crooked from its frame. Caius followed the sound through it, his newly sharpened vision taking in the chamber all at once.
The overturned furniture. The blood across the floor. A body several feet from the bed.
Calista sat among it all.
For several seconds, Caius couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing with the sister whose voice had led him there. Her dress was dark with blood from the waist down, the pale fabric gathered beneath her where she sat on the floor. Her hair had fallen loose around her shoulders and across her face, tangled with sweat and ash. Both hands were red.
At first he thought she was injured. Then he saw Atreyu's head resting in her lap, the rest of him lying several feet away.
Caius stopped in the doorway.
He had known Atreyu most of his life. Had watched him grow beside Calista, had fought beside him that afternoon, had seen him lift her from the ground only hours earlier while the village celebrated around them. The memory arrived with a clarity Caius had never possessed before: Atreyu's hands around his sister's waist, Calista laughing as he lifted her, his father's voice beside him on the bridge.
Calista moved.
Her fingers passed slowly over Atreyu's forehead, pushing a strand of hair away from his face with such care that Caius felt something inside him give. She seemed unaware of the fire beyond the chamber, of the smoke gathering near the ceiling, even of Caius standing only a few feet away.
"Cali."
Her hand stopped.
Caius crossed the room carefully. Broken pottery shifted beneath his feet, the sound unnaturally sharp to him, but Calista didn’t react. He lowered himself beside her and reached for her shoulder.
She recoiled so violently that he pulled his hand back.
"No."
"It's me."
Calista stared at him.
Recognition came slowly. Her eyes moved over his face as though she had to assemble him from separate pieces before she could understand who had entered the room.
"Cai?"
"I'm here."
Her mouth trembled as she looked back down.
"They took him."
Caius followed her gaze.
"I know."
"They took him."
This time, the words broke apart.
Calista bent over what remained of Atreyu, drawing him closer against her as another sob tore through her. Caius reached for her again and stopped before touching her. There was nothing he could put his hands on that would undo what had happened. No order to give. No wound to bind. No enemy left in the room to kill.
He had spent his life responding to disaster by finding the thing that could still be done.
There was nothing here.
"Cali."
Her breathing caught, and for the first time her attention settled fully on him. Her gaze moved from his face to the torn, bloodied clothing across his chest, lingering where wounds should’ve been.
"They spared you."
The words were barely audible.
Caius glanced down. Blood still covered him, his clothing split where blades and fists had opened flesh beneath it, but there was nothing left to heal.
"They listened."
Calista stared at him.
"Who?"
"The gods." His voice sounded strange even to him. "I called. I—"
He stopped.
"I bargained."
Her face emptied.
For a moment, even her crying ceased.
"They don't answer."
Caius said nothing.
Calista's eyes searched his.
"They never answer."
"They did."
The silence after it was worse than her screaming.
Caius dragged a hand over his face. It came away streaked with blood and ash, though he no longer knew how much of either belonged to him. Exhaustion should’ve been pulling at his body after the fighting, the beating, the desperate run through the village, but there was nothing beneath the strain in his mind that resembled physical fatigue. He felt the weight of everything that had happened without any of the weakness that should’ve accompanied it.
His gaze moved through the chamber.
The broken furniture. The blood. Atreyu's body. Beyond the damaged doorway, smoke continued to move through the corridor while somewhere below them fire consumed another part of the house.
Set had answered him.
The thought should’ve brought relief. Caius had begged for Calista's life, and she was alive. Whatever else had been taken from them, whatever remained of the village by morning, his sister was still breathing.
Yet when he looked at her again, survival seemed an inadequate measure of what had been spared.
Calista sat exactly where he had found her, Atreyu held against her as though she could keep some part of him with her through refusal alone. There was no anger in her now. No disbelief. Even the grief that had torn screams from her only moments before seemed to have exhausted itself into something quieter and far more frightening.
She looked hollow.
Caius had asked the gods to leave her alive. He hadn’t considered what might remain of her when they did. His gaze dropped to his hands as Set’s command returned with perfect clarity.
A gift. No one else.
There had been nothing ambiguous in the warning. Whatever had been placed inside him belonged to him alone.
He looked at Calista again, and for the first time since entering the chamber, Caius considered whether obedience was worth what it would require him to leave untouched.
"Cali."
She didn’t look at him.
"We need to leave this room."
"No."
"The house is burning."
"Then go."
Caius studied her profile. "I'm not leaving you here."
"I don't care."
The answer came without anger, and that disturbed him more than if she had screamed it. Calista had always cared—about too much, in his opinion, and with an intensity he had never entirely understood. She argued when she was angry, laughed when she was pleased, and made her displeasure impossible for anyone in the household to mistake. Even as children, silence had rarely been the weapon she chose.
There was none of that in her now.
"You are still here," Caius said. "And I am still here. That matters."
Her fingers stopped against Atreyu's cheek.
"It doesn't."
Caius waited.
"Not without him."
The words settled between them, quiet enough that another man might have struggled to hear them beneath the destruction outside. Caius heard every syllable.
He looked at Atreyu and then at his sister, and the possibility he had been refusing to shape into a decision became harder to dismiss. Set had restored flesh that should have remained broken. Caius didn’t know what had been given to him or what else it might do, but he knew what it had already done. His body carried no evidence of injuries that should have killed him.
Nothing in Calista's body required healing, yet something in her had broken beyond his reach, and Caius had never been good at accepting what he couldn’t fix.
"I can fix it."
Calista looked at him, but the words brought no hope to her face.
"Not what happened," Caius continued. "Not him—but you. This. What they've done to you."
"I don't want you to fix me."
Caius fell silent. He had spoken with more certainty than he possessed, driven by the same instinct that had governed him whenever something threatened the people he loved: identify what remained within his control and act upon it. But there was no wound to close here, no enemy left to defeat, nothing he could return to Calista that would make the room bearable again.
His own body offered the only contradiction. Hours earlier it had been broken beyond repair. Now he knelt beside her without pain or exhaustion, every sense delivering more of the ruined world than he knew how to contain. He didn’t understand what Set had made him or whether any part of it could be given away. He knew only that something impossible had happened once, and that the god had explicitly forbidden him from making it happen again.
Caius looked at his sister. He couldn’t give her back what had been taken, but perhaps he could change what she would have to become in order to survive it.
Caius looked again at the blood covering his hands. He didn’t understand what Set had placed inside him or whether it could be shared, but the possibility had already taken hold. The warning remained clear, as did the risk of defying it. Neither outweighed the thought of leaving Calista here with nothing but a life she no longer seemed to want.
"There is something I can give you."
Calista barely reacted. "I don't want anything."
"I know."
Caius moved closer, his attention settling on the sister he had spent his entire life protecting and could do nothing now to comfort. Whatever Set had given him had restored a body that should’ve died. It hadn’t returned what he lost, nor erased what had happened. Caius had no reason to believe it would do either for her. But it might give her something grief couldn’t take from him.
"You don't get to leave me too."
For the first time since he made the offer, Calista looked directly at him. Her eyes searched his face before drifting again to the blood covering his clothes. "What will it do?"
There was no certainty Caius could honestly give her. He understood little beyond what had happened to his own body and the undeniable fact that, despite everything done to it, he remained here. "I don't know."
Her gaze returned to Atreyu, fingers resting against his face while silence stretched between them. When the question finally came, her voice had lost nearly all of its strength. "Will it make me forget?"
Only then did Caius understand what she was asking for. She didn’t want strength or healing or whatever impossible thing now moved beneath his skin. She wanted the room erased—the blood, the sound of steel,
Atreyu falling in front of her. Whatever he was offering, she wanted it to take those things with it. That was the one promise he knew he couldn’t make.
"No." Reaching for her carefully, he rested his hand against the side of her head. "But it will make you endure."
Her eyes closed beneath his touch. Around them, the house continued to burn as smoke gathered overhead, yet Caius waited without knowing whether he wanted her agreement or merely needed it. The distinction became irrelevant when she finally nodded, the movement barely perceptible and more surrender than consent.
"Okay."
For several seconds, Caius did nothing. Agreement had been easier to seek while it remained hypothetical. Now that she had given it, however faintly, he was left with the reality that he had no idea how to accomplish what he had promised.
His attention returned to his hands. Blood had dried across his palms and beneath his nails, yet every wound responsible for it had disappeared. Set had changed something fundamental in him, something Caius could feel without understanding, and if any part of that change could be passed to Calista, blood seemed the only answer available to him.
He reached among the debris and found a narrow piece of broken metal, turning it once between his fingers before drawing the edge across his palm. The cut opened cleanly. Before he could fully register the pain, the flesh began pulling itself together.
Caius stared.
He cut deeper the second time.
Blood gathered quickly enough for him to close his hand around it before the wound vanished again. The sight should’ve made him hesitate. Instead, it confirmed the only thing he needed to know: whatever Set had done was still there.
"Cali." He held his hand toward her. "You need to take this."
Confusion moved faintly across her face, but she no longer had the strength to argue. With Atreyu still resting in her lap, she allowed Caius to guide his bleeding palm toward her mouth. There was no hunger in the way she accepted it, no instinct drawing her forward. She simply obeyed because he had asked her to, swallowing once and then again while Caius watched the wound beneath her lips struggle to remain open.
He didn’t know how much was enough. He didn’t know whether any amount would be enough.
The wound closed anyway.
Caius pulled his hand back and waited.
Nothing happened.
For one terrible moment, the possibility that Set's command had described more than a prohibition occurred to him. Perhaps the gift truly could belong to no one else. Perhaps he had asked his sister to swallow his blood for nothing while Atreyu lay dead between them.
Then Calista drew a sudden breath. Caius remained beside her, watching for some further change he couldn’t have known how to recognize, until something altered within his own awareness instead.
He hadn’t realized some remnant of Set remained until its absence made the difference unmistakable. Beneath the noise of the burning house and the impossible clarity of everything his altered senses delivered, there had been something else—a presence he had mistaken for part of what he had become. Caius searched for it instinctively and found only emptiness. No voice answered him, no shift in the air suggested the god remained near, and the warning he had deliberately ignored returned with uncomfortable clarity. Whatever attention Set had given him had ended.
Before Caius could decide whether that silence was punishment or abandonment, Calista's hand tightened around his wrist.
Her breath caught as the first change moved through her. It lacked the violence of his own transformation, unfolding instead beneath his hands as her pulse accelerated and her body tensed against him. Her attention began moving restlessly around the chamber, drawn toward sounds beyond its walls with a confusion Caius immediately recognized. Fire consuming timber below them, stone settling somewhere in the damaged house, movement in the streets outside—everything reached her at once, and there was no understanding yet of how to separate one sensation from another.
Caius moved closer to steady her, and something that didn’t belong to him entered his mind.
Atreyu was laughing.
Not as Caius remembered him. This Atreyu was younger, his hair wet, sunlight behind him as he reached toward whoever held the memory. The image lasted no more than an instant before disappearing, but it left Caius staring at his sister with a certainty that unsettled him more than the vision itself. He had never been there, had never seen Atreyu that way.
Calista was staring back at him.
Something in her expression had changed too. Confusion remained, but it was directed at Caius now rather than the world suddenly pressing in around her. Neither spoke. Whatever had passed between them had been too brief to understand and too impossible to explain, leaving them only with the shared awareness that something had happened.
Caius kept his hand around hers while the moment passed. There would be time enough to question what Set had done to them, though neither could have known then just how much time they had been given.
The house reminded them first.
Somewhere beneath the chamber, timber gave way with a violent crack, followed by the heavier collapse of something structural. Smoke had thickened while they remained on the floor, spreading across the ceiling before lowering gradually into the room. Caius could hear the fire moving through the house with unnerving precision now, consuming one section and reaching for another, and although he had no idea what their altered bodies could withstand, he saw no reason to discover it there.
His attention returned to Calista. Whatever had passed between them moments earlier had left her visibly unsettled, but grief reclaimed her almost as quickly. Atreyu remained in her lap, one of her hands resting against his face while the other still held Caius loosely by the wrist.
“Cali. We have to go.”