Three weeks had passed since the song had ended. Three weeks since the world had been scoured clean by a wave of impossible, wine-green life. Anastasya Orlova stood on the shore of the new lake, a body of water that filled the basin where the Dead Hill had once stood like a monument to decay. The air no longer tasted of ozone and ash. It was clean, sharp, and carried the scent of damp, rich earth and the explosive growth that now carpeted the land.
The growth was a deep, unnerving emerald, a color so vibrant it seemed to hum in the light. It was not the familiar, chaotic tangle of the Verdant Maze. This was something new, something hungry. Mikhail Kuznetsov, the Regalis engineer who had defected to their cause in the final hours, had confirmed her unease. The soil’s nutrient density was off the charts. The biomass conversion rate was impossibly high. If left untended, it would choke itself on its own vitality. Active maintenance, not conquest. The words echoed in her mind, a new doctrine forged in the ruins of the old.
Her shoulder ached with a dull, persistent throb, a reminder of the crystal spear. The wound, once a gaping tear in her armor and her flesh, had closed. A Silvanus healer had packed it with a poultice of glowing Photosynthetic Myxoid, a living bandage that had poured its own life into her to stave off the creeping crystallization. Now, only a puckered, silver scar remained, a permanent mark of her treason and her survival. She flexed her fingers, the motion stiff but complete. A price paid.
Her duty now was to this new, hungry world. A duty she shared with him. She turned from the water and walked toward the small, temporary shelter they had made, a simple canopy woven from the living roots of the new growth by the surviving Silvanus. It was a crude fusion of their two worlds, a fragile symbol of the truce brokered on the field of their shared victory.
She found Lauri Vatanen as he was waking. He sat on the edge of his sleeping mat, his back to her. For weeks after the Sunken Song, he had been little more than a ghost, his body slowly knitting itself back together from an expenditure of life force none of them could comprehend. The Silvanus healers had whispered that the life-wave had resurrected him, that the machine had paid back a fraction of the life it had taken. Anastasya, the pragmatist, saw only a man who had pushed his body past every conceivable limit and had, against all odds, survived.
He was thinner now, the dense fur of his Ailuropodine frame no longer hiding the lean muscle and bone beneath. A fine web of new scars, faint and silver like her own, traced patterns across his arms where the machine’s energy had found purchase. But it was his hands that she watched. They were perfectly still. The tremor that had been his constant companion, the violent, uncontrollable shaking of his withdrawal, was gone. Utterly.
He stood and turned, and his eyes met hers. They were clear. For the first time since she had found him hanging in a web-line snare, stinking of rot and despair, his eyes were completely, terrifyingly sober. The haze of the nectar was gone. The crushing weight of his past was gone. The man who stood before her was not the drunken, cynical warden she had captured, nor the broken soul who had fled from the sight of Elina Rovio’s death. This was someone new. Someone forged.
Without a word, Lauri moved past her and walked toward the shore of the lake. She followed, keeping a respectful distance. He walked with a new steadiness, a quiet purpose in his stride that was more commanding than any shouted order she had ever given. He stopped at the water’s edge, the place she had just been standing, and looked down. The surface of the lake was like polished glass, reflecting the clear sky and his own unfamiliar face. He stood there for a long time, simply looking at the stranger who looked back, the warden who had paid the ultimate price and somehow been given a receipt.
Anastasya came to stand beside him. The silence between them was not empty. It was filled with the ghosts of Dmitri Volkov’s sacrifice, of Ilmar Kallio’s defiant laughter, of the screams in the refugee camp, and the deafening, world-birthing chord of the Sunken Song. No words were needed to acknowledge the path that had led them here. They had been enemies, then a commander and her prisoner, then reluctant allies. Now, they were something else entirely. Partners in a duty too vast to name.
Lauri reached into the small pouch at his belt. For a flicker of a second, her old training surfaced, a reflexive assessment of a potential threat. But the motion was slow, deliberate. He pulled out an object she recognized instantly. The Nectar Flask. It was the same cracked, stained gourd he had clutched like a lifeline when she first met him. He must have retrieved it from the corrosive mud of the refugee camp, an unconscious habit, a final tether to the man he had been.
He held it in his palm, studying it. The hairline fracture near the rim seemed like a deep canyon now, a flaw that defined the entire object. It was a symbol of his despair, his failure, his crutch. It was the cage he had built for himself, woven not from life or law, but from a sweet, numbing poison. He had carried it through the entire ordeal, empty but heavy with the weight of his past.
He looked at the flask for a long, quiet moment. Then, with a simple, final motion, he opened his hand and let it drop.
It hit the surface of the lake with a soft splash, the sound swallowed by the immense quiet of the basin. It bobbed for a second, a dark, ugly shape on the pristine water. Then, it tilted, filled, and began to sink. Anastasya watched it descend, a distorted, broken form shrinking into the blue-green depths until it was gone completely, swallowed by the clean water of the world he had paid to create. He had released it. He had released himself. The price was the past, and he had paid it in full.
The air was still. The water was calm.
Her hand found his forearm, her grip firm. It was not a gesture of comfort, but of acknowledgement. A soldier’s promise. A warden’s pact. It was the silent confirmation of their new, shared reality. They stood together, looking out not at a victory, but at the vast, hungry, and beautiful work that lay ahead.
