From the ridge, the Nexus battlefield looked almost beautiful.

The sky was a fractured dome, every crack bleeding color. Auroras coiled in the upper air, woven between shards of shattered moons. Far in the distance, a planet lay split open like a rotten fruit, its molten heart spilling across the void. It could have been a painting — if you didn’t look too closely.

Here, the dunes were carved by bombardment into serrated ridges, trenches webbed through the desert like scar tissue. The air was scorched-dry, stinking of charred flesh and hot metal. Every footstep sank in sand already clotted with blood, a cracked earth of sinew and lifeless eyes.

Juurose moved through it like something born of battle.

Ivory figure patterned with golden scars. A greatsword in hand, spun from light itself, its edge whispering as it cut the air. Each swing was clean, symmetrical, final — and the daemons before them came apart without a sound to spare. The four-fold split of the blade flared between movements, catching in sun-glare, dividing, splitting, as the towering warrior saw fit. Blinding any of the twisted aberrations who looked upon them too long.

“Hold the bridge,” they commanded, voice carrying with the base of divine patronage.

Not loudly. Not with heat. The command was simply… absolute. Reaching the ears of their battalion even in the noisy groan of the homing beacon behind them, painting a single, bright pillar of gold into the stratosphere. Their troops obeyed without hesitation. To them, Juurose was more than commander — they were the Zenith, the Pillar of the Eastern Line, the one who would not fall, not faulter. Avatar of Zeal, unmatched by any darkness or fiend. The troops pushed forward in rigid formation, faltering, filling gaps before the dead had even stopped twitching.

The land bridge was narrow, flanked on either side by the abyss where the ocean had once been. Below, the churn of what remained of that sea — glassy waves of light and shadow falling to nothing — looked almost calm from high above. Almost.

Juurose’s eyes, gold and steady, swept the broken horizon. The enemy was pressing harder. Their own soldiers were thinning. Each loss was a clean subtraction — acknowledged, accounted for, replaced. There was no ceremony, no pause. The only sign of strain the faint tightening around the Zenith's gaze.

Then the earth began to tremble.

It started in the soles of their boots — a low, arrhythmic pulse. Then came the sound: a hum turning into a crack, the scent of rain in a place that hadn’t seen clouds in a century. Juurose already knew who it was before the enemy line began to scatter.

Dahiin arrived like the first strike of lightning.

Her heraldry one of billowing cloth and scorched plating. Magic poured off her in visible waves, distorting the air. She didn’t move in formation. She didn’t even seem to notice the bridge’s narrow footing, floating above like a smiling tempest, four sandstone arms curled in imminent death. Every movement was casual destruction — a large chunk of the darkened landscape, piece of reality, thrown skyward — the daemons torn apart mid-lunge, the earth beneath them splitting like dry fruit under heel.

“You’re strangling them, Zenith!” she called, grinning wide as she hurled a bolt of white fire into the enemy ranks. It stuck to the writhing masses like a ghost, burning long after they fell still. “Tight leash makes for slow hounds!”

Juurose didn’t look at her, directing the left flank to fall behind as her's drew in.

“Discipline keeps them alive.”

The Maelstrom laughed, the sound sharp as broken glass. “Alive? Look at them.”

She gestured at the bridge — the corpses strewn in the sand, the ones still moving already dragged forward to plug the gaps. A twist, and a vortex of sand swallowed the scene, the fallen disappearing in its depths alongside the devils descending over them.

“Better to burn bright than choke in the dark.”

Her troops — if you could call them that — fought much like their commander. Loose, unpredictable, fearless in the way that only those who did not expect to live were. Juurose loathed the chaos of it. But they couldn’t deny the effect: the enemy faltered under the sheer power, the lightning switch of tactic.

By the time night came, the bridge still stood. The field stank of blood and ozone. And Juurose was already walking toward the outpost.

The forward outpost was carved into the side of a dune — scavenged metal walls covered in the sigils of the Light, as though paint could sanctify rust. Wounded soldiers lay in neat rows along the long hall, some murmuring prayers, others staring blankly upward. The oil lamps cast their faces in amber and shadow.

Here, everyone called them Zenith.

No one used the name their village had gifted them. No one used the name Mhaara had spoken like hymm.

No one, except— “Juurose.” Dahiin leaned in the doorway of the command tent, smirking. “Your leash is showing.”

Inside, Parcaas was already waiting. He looked like he’d stepped out of a temple mural — armor polished to mirror brightness, hair bound and oiled, massive shoulders leading into long white trails of holy cloth. The scent of incense clinging to him even here. If Juurose was zeal and Dahiin might, Parcaas was faith boiled down to ritual.

“You cut it close today,” he said evenly. “Close enough that I wonder if you’ve started hesitating.”

“I hold the line,” Juurose said. “That’s all that matters.”

Parcaas’ eyes — pale as quartz — didn’t move. “Until it doesn’t.”

From the corner, Dahiin laughed softly. “Do you two hear yourselves? Like old priests arguing over who’s got the prettier blade while the roof’s on fire.”

Juurose ignored her. But Parcaas’ lip curled, just faintly.

“You mistake devotion for decoration,” he said.

“And you mistake devotion for worth,” Dahiin shot back. “But sure. Keep polishing the icons. Maybe the enemy will stop to admire them.”

The tent felt smaller with the three of them inside, the air thick with the faint hum of magic that always bled from their kind. To the soldiers outside, these were living pillars — avatars of the Light's chosen, the gods' hands.

But in here, under the low lamplight of a reclaimed ruin, they were something colder. Hollow. Their voices carried no warmth. Their words weighed more like chains than guidance.

And Juurose felt, in the space between the three of them, the same thing they always did after a victory. The faint hum of the Light’s praise. The cold taste of its absence. Their patrons were not beings to be found, but...still. Where would they be if not here. At the very heart of their eternal conflict.

Their lack was like a brand.

The command tent emptied slowly after their meeting, soldiers bowing or saluting with the same reverence as the first day they’d taken the oath. The same faithful day as Juurose did. They were of one blood, yet Juurose was — elevated. Not senselessly, they had been high general back when their world was bled by darkness. A time that began to elude memory. But, a feeling. Of azure pastures and purplish skies.

Juurose remained behind as Dahiin and Paarcas moved to the Arcdome, westward.

Their armor sat in pieces across a pale, marble table — each one cleaned, each edge polished. They could almost imagine it was still new, untouched by the grit of the Nexus. An old ritual, to clear the mind as much as the body. The oil caught the lamplight like liquid gold.

Their hands moved automatically, smoothing away the grime from the joints, tracing the golden scars etched into the plates like they might find something in them if they looked long enough.

When the last pauldron was set aside, their gaze caught on their reflection in the half-polished breastplate.

For a heartbeat, the gold in their eyes softened. The reflection was not theirs — not entirely. A warm hand, smaller than theirs, was reaching across the gap. Skin the color of aquamarine waters. Fingertips calloused from work, healing, not war. Pale white eyes, not the harsh glow the Light had given them.

Mhaara.

The image blinked away like a glitch in the glass, leaving only their own face — hard, distant, unmoved like a statue, lit by the false sun of their twin gaze.

Outside, the outpost was settling into the tense quiet of a battlefield night. The desert wind carried the smell of blood and steel through the narrow halls as the fighting went on, ever on. Voices murmured prayers, words of healing by the clerics hands as they bandaged the wounded. Somewhere, a soldier coughed dryly, over and over, the sound never quite fading.

Juurose did not sleep.

The first sign was the sound. Their limbs buzzing with a tension, sensing darkness like hound trained on scent.

Not the wind, not the shifting sand — something softer. A footstep that didn’t belong.

They turned toward the perimeter trench. The lamps there burned low, throwing long shadows across the deep trenches, broken cracks between floating rocks down into nothingness. A figure stood at the far edge, half-lit by the flame. The shape was familiar — too familiar.

Mhaara.

The curve of her shoulders. The tilt of her head. Beads and wraps and the strong set over her spine. Even the small scar at her jaw, caught in the lamplight as she turned.

For a moment, Juurose didn’t move, even as they should have.

Then, the abberition stepped forward into the light — and it fractured. Her eyes were pools of black. Her skin was ash-pale and threaded with hairline cracks, the dark beneath flickering like embers.

“Juro,” she said, and the name slid from her lips exactly as Mhaara had once spoken it. Juurose's weapon rose before the challenge even formed in their mind.

“You’re not her.”

The thing tilted its head. “No. I am what you made me.”

It moved quickly — faster than the sand should have allowed — darting toward the deeper trenches. Juurose followed, hooves digging into the grit. They moved like the Light itself was at their heels, afterimages of gold and cutting air. Their towering body swung across the back of a Thynirell, the beast coiling as though it knew the exact shadow they were chasing. A whip crack, reigns cracking in the darkness, and it's claws dragged through the dunes. Leaping over sandbags, across chasams and cracks, cutting through the husks of old barricades, splintering wood beneath its steps.

The trenches were a maze, narrow and suffocating. Moonlight spilled down in sharp, silver bars. Every time Juurose closed the distance, the thing turned a corner, and for an instant her face was Mhaara’s again — warm, frightened, real.

“You could have come with me,” it called, voice carrying too far in the stillness, disappeared again. Juurose dismounted the bucking mount as it hissed something high and sharp, four layered voice calling with apprehension. “But the Light doesn’t share. Does it?”

Juurose struck, the blade splitting in four, the arcs of light slamming into the trench walls as he blades settle heavy in their hands. Sand poured in from above, the smell of burning grit thick in the air. The false Mhaara moved again, closer this time. She brushed past them, and for a heartbeat they felt the same warmth they’d once known, the exact heat of her skin, the ghost of her breath.

Juurose’s rhythm broke.

That was all it took.