Her fingers tightened around Atreyu.
Caius waited. He could have lifted her. The realization came with disturbing ease now that the weakness from his injuries had disappeared, but he dismissed it just as quickly. Too much had already been taken from her that night, and he wouldn’t make leaving Atreyu another thing done to her by force.
Another section of the house collapsed below them. Heat pressed farther into the chamber, carrying sparks through the damaged doorway, and Calista finally looked toward it. For several seconds she seemed to watch the smoke without understanding what it meant. Then her gaze lowered again.
Her thumb moved once across Atreyu's cheek.
Caius said nothing.
The release came slowly. Calista drew her hand from his wrist first and placed it beneath Atreyu's head, lowering him from her lap with a care that belonged to someone being put to sleep rather than abandoned in a burning room. She arranged him against the floor and pushed the blood-matted hair away from his forehead. Her hand remained there long after there was anything left to do.
When she finally leaned down, she pressed her lips to his forehead.
Caius looked away.
He heard her whisper something, but even with hearing capable of reaching beyond the walls around them, he didn’t allow his attention to settle on the words. They belonged to Atreyu.
Calista rose without asking for help. Her legs faltered beneath her on the first attempt, not from any weakness Caius could identify but as though her body still expected limitations that no longer existed. He reached for her instinctively. She caught his arm, steadied herself, and after a moment stood fully beside him.
Neither looked at Atreyu as they crossed the chamber.
The corridor had deteriorated since Caius entered it. Smoke obscured portions of the passage, and part of the ceiling had fallen near the stairs, leaving burning timber scattered across their path. Caius moved ahead of Calista at first, clearing what he could and testing the floor before allowing her to follow. Yet within several steps it became apparent that the heat affected them differently now. It remained intense enough to register, but the instinctive recoil Caius expected from his body never came. Calista seemed to notice the same thing when an ember landed against her bare forearm. She brushed it away and stared at the unmarked skin beneath it before continuing.
There was no time to question it.
They descended through what remained of the house and stepped outside into a village neither recognized.
Fire had transformed the streets Caius crossed only minutes earlier. Buildings that had survived the day's fighting now burned beside those already reduced to stone and timber, their light stretching across abandoned weapons, overturned carts and bodies scattered where Set's judgment had reached them. No soldiers remained standing. Caius listened automatically for movement beyond the flames and heard only the collapse of damaged structures, the restless crack of fire and Calista beside him.
She stopped.
In the open air, with nothing left to obstruct her newly sharpened senses, the scale of what surrounded them seemed to reach her all at once. Her gaze moved from one ruined building to another before settling on the bodies nearest the road. Faces she knew were among them. People who had celebrated only hours earlier lay beside the men who had come to kill them, distinctions that had mattered desperately while the fighting continued already beginning to mean very little in death.
Caius stood beside her without reaching for her. He had promised that what he gave her would make her endure. Watching her take in what remained of their home, he began to understand how little he had considered what endurance might require.
Calista moved closer until her shoulder touched his, and neither of them spoke.
There was no one left to answer them.
DAY ONE
By morning, most of the fires had burned themselves down. Smoke remained over the village, caught low between damaged buildings and drifting through streets that had grown unnaturally still. Ash settled over abandoned weapons, broken doors and the bodies no one remained to collect.
Caius hadn’t slept. Neither had Calista.
He found her sometime before dawn beside their mother's body, curled against her with one hand resting over the fabric of her dress. She had cried until her voice disappeared, fallen silent for a time, then begun again. Her mind showed every sign of exhaustion while her body showed almost none, recovering from each bout of grief only enough to permit another.
Caius stayed nearby. He listened for survivors until the absence of them became impossible to deny, searched what remained of the nearest homes and brought back water neither of them seemed to need badly enough to want. Hours passed without hunger becoming urgent, without fatigue settling into his limbs and, most disturbingly, without either of them becoming sleepy.
It was Calista who finally gave the strangeness a voice.
“Why can't I sleep?”
Caius looked toward her. “I don't know.”
“What are we?”
This time he took longer to answer. “I don't know that either.”
Her face folded beneath another wave of grief, and she turned back toward their mother. “I don't want this.”
Caius moved closer but didn’t touch her. He remembered promising that whatever he gave her would make her endure, and for the first time understood how cruelly accurate the word had been. Nothing he had done could lessen her grief. He had only given her a body capable of surviving it.
The first day passed without answers, and when darkness returned, neither of them had slept.
Calista eventually lay down beside their mother and closed her eyes. Caius watched her remain that way for a long time, forcing herself into a stillness that never became rest. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely recognizable.
“Cai.”
“I'm here.”
“Make me sleep.”
He could not.
By the time she began crying again, Caius understood that morning would find them both awake.
DAY TWO
The second morning arrived without either of them having slept.
By then, Caius had stopped expecting exhaustion to come simply because enough time had passed. His mind felt the strain of remaining awake, but his body continued without complaint, untouched by the heaviness that should’ve followed nearly two days without rest. Calista fared worse. Grief had left her withdrawn and disoriented, yet even after another night of crying, nothing physical forced her into the sleep she had begged him to give her.
The village had grown quieter as the last fires died. Without them, the reach of Caius's hearing became harder to ignore. He could distinguish the movement of wind through damaged structures, small animals returning somewhere beyond the village and Calista shifting among the ruins at distances that should’ve made each impossible to hear. He had begun learning, mostly by accident, that concentrating on one sound could push the others farther away, though the effort required more attention than instinct.
His body presented a simpler question, and Caius found a blade among the dead and drew its edge across his forearm.
Calista looked up sharply.
Blood surfaced along the cut, but before enough could gather to fall, the wound began closing. Caius watched the flesh restore itself until only blood remained on unbroken skin.
He cut himself again, deeper this time.
“Stop.”
Caius glanced toward his sister.
“I'm not trying to hurt myself.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Learning.”
The second wound disappeared as quickly as the first.
Caius wiped the blade clean and set it aside. Whatever Set had changed in him wasn’t weakening with time. If anything, the consistency of it disturbed him more than the transformation itself. Pain remained—he had felt the blade enter his arm—but it had lost much of its authority when the damage it warned of couldn’t remain.
Calista watched him for another moment before looking down at her own hands.
“Will we stay like this?”
“I don't know.”
“Can you ask him?”
Caius knew who she meant.
He had tried.
More than once since the previous night, he had reached for the presence that answered him in the enclosure. He had spoken Set's name aloud and silently, repeated prayers he had used before battle and finally abandoned formality altogether. Nothing had answered.
“He isn't listening.”
Calista's expression tightened. “Why?”
Caius looked toward the ruined village rather than give her an answer he didn’t possess.
The silence did it for him.
Day Two passed with more questions than discoveries. They could be injured, but the injuries didn’t remain. They could eat and drink, though neither understood whether they required either. Their senses reached farther than they could comfortably control, their minds remained capable of exhaustion while their bodies refused the relief of sleep, and nothing Caius tested suggested the changes were beginning to fade.
By the second night, the possibility neither of them had wanted to consider was becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss: whatever they had become, they might remain that way.
DAY THREE
The third morning found them exactly as the first two had: awake.
By then, neither of them attempted to sleep. The need for it simply didn’t come, though their minds carried every hour that had passed. The bodies around them had begun changing in ways his and Calista’s did not. That difference disturbed Calista enough that she stopped looking at them; Caius had begun looking at everything else.
Two days of observation had given him very little understanding, but uncertainty no longer prevented him from recognizing patterns. Injuries closed almost as quickly as they were made. Hunger and thirst could be satisfied but didn’t arrive with the urgency he remembered. Their senses remained difficult to control, though concentration could narrow them temporarily. Neither had weakened. Neither had slept. Whatever Set had done to him—and whatever Caius had passed to his sister—showed no indication of fading.
Calista had been quiet for most of the morning when she finally spoke.
“What did Set say?”
Caius turned toward her.
She sat with her arms around her knees, no longer crying but bearing the emptied expression that followed it.
“When he answered you. What did he say?”
There were parts of that night Caius had repeated to her and one he hadn’t. Until then, her questions had allowed him to answer with uncertainty. This one didn’t.
“He called it a gift.”
Calista waited.
Caius knew immediately that it wouldn’t be enough.
“What else?”
For the first time since the chamber, Set's warning felt less like a command he had violated than something whose consequences he and Calista were now living inside.
“He said, ‘A gift. No one else.’”
She stared at him.
No accusation followed. Her gaze moved instead across the dead village, then down to her own hands as though their unchanged appearance had become suddenly unfamiliar.
“He meant you.”
“Yes.”
“And you gave it to me.”
Caius didn’t insult her with another answer.
The silence stretched between them before Calista looked at him again. “Is that why he won't answer?”
Caius had asked himself the same question enough times that the possibility no longer surprised him.
“I don't know.”
Her expression tightened. “Then we're alone.”
He looked over what remained of their home. Three days earlier, the thought would have meant something entirely different. Their parents were dead. Atreyu was dead. The people Caius had expected to help rebuild the village were dead. Even the god who had answered him once had withdrawn whatever presence remained after Caius disobeyed him.
“Yes.”
Calista lowered her head.
Caius remained beside her, but his attention eventually returned to the questions the past two days had created. If Set wouldn’t answer them, waiting would produce nothing. Whatever they were now, they would have to understand it themselves, and that realization changed something.
Until then, Caius had approached their condition as a problem he expected eventually to end. He had waited for exhaustion, tested the healing and watched for some sign that their bodies were returning to what they had been. By the third day, he could no longer justify that assumption. The question was no longer when the changes would disappear.
It was what they could do if they didn’t.
His gaze moved across the distance beyond the village. A body that didn’t tire could travel farther. Wounds that refused to remain changed the meaning of danger. Senses capable of reaching beyond mortal limits might become useful if he learned to control them. Caius didn’t yet know whether they could die, how long the condition might last or what other consequences had come with it, but for the first time, those unknowns existed beside possibility rather than fear alone.
Calista noticed him looking toward the horizon.
“What?”
Caius was quiet for a moment.
“We can't stay here.”
She looked around them, and he watched the meaning of leaving settle differently across her face. For Caius, the village had become a place with nothing left to build from. For Calista, leaving meant abandoning everyone who had once made it home.
“Where would we go?”
Caius looked beyond the ruins again.
“I don't know.”
It was one of the few answers he had given her over the past three days that no longer sounded helpless.
Calista didn’t answer immediately. Her gaze traveled across the ruins once more, lingering on the places where a lifetime still existed beneath everything the fire had changed. Caius didn’t ask her again. He waited until she rose on her own.
They left sometime before the sun reached its highest point, carrying little because there was little worth taking and nowhere yet to take it.
Calista looked back more than once as the distance widened behind them. Caius did not. His attention remained on the unfamiliar land ahead, already occupied by questions for which no god appeared willing to provide an answer.
Three days earlier, he had stood beside his father and considered what would be rebuilt by morning.
Now there was nothing left to rebuild.
Only what came next.
The village eventually disappeared behind them.
Some choices do not echo. They settle. And the world spends centuries learning how to live with them.