Two weeks after Seattle, the world waited.

Everywhere, the same broadcast filled living rooms, hospital waiting areas, and bar corners with the sound turned too loud. Firmatha Sangaur had opened its Covenant Hall.

The ten Seats sat elevated above the floor. Between them, banners of the old world, when humans believed themselves the masters of this planet, hung. The Ninth Seat's chair was filled not by its lord but by his representative: Sage, her hair pinned in a bun, as she wore the Veridhan uniform proudly. To her left, Amaterasu sat upright and radiant.

On the floor—lower than the thrones—sat delegations. A row of human envoys: ministers, a few presidents, and prime ministers who had insisted on standing here in person. Across from them, the Councils of Firmatha: elders whose words had helped to shape Firmatha Sagaur.

Between these two oceans of eyes, alone in the open space, sat a single figure upon a simple platform: Cefketa.

They had not bound him. There were no chains, no collars, no symbolic shackles meant to calm an anxious planet. He sat with hands folded loosely, the same posture he had kept on the lip of the smoking crater, where he was arrested.

The broadcast host narrated for those just tuning in: This is a grand hearing, not a human court. The Seats preside. Governments of the world and councils of Firmatha are present and may speak. The Seats have stated they will "handle things our way." Their phrase, not ours. "Our justice does not wait behind paperwork."

That last sentence had set cities arguing for a fortnight. Trials of this magnitude in the human world took years, just to start.

Sage's voice opened the proceedings, clear as a blade's edge. "This hearing convenes under the authority of the Ten Seats. We will hear evidence, we will hear counsel. The world may speak through its delegates. But this is our house. We will decide."

A murmur rolled through the chamber —a ripple of unease or insult, it was hard to tell. Firmatha's side did not stir.

Cefketa did not look up when he spoke.

"There is little to discuss," he said. "Play it."

A narrow pillar at the center of the floor unfolded like a blooming instrument. Light peeled upward, gathered, and threw a square of moving vision into the air, bright enough to paint faces.

It began with a rooftop and a night sky, a city sleeping beneath. Two figures: one seated with screens shimmering before him; one descending like a shadow with a robe half-open. The images moved without sound.

The first figure turned. The second's robe fell back and revealed healed scales. A tilt of the chin. A question. A reply.

Then the first strike was launched. There was no music, no narration, only the stark quiet of the footage.

The vision ended, and silence took over the room.

Amaterasu's voice broke it. "There is no sound."

Her tone was steady, but the words cut. "You show pictures and say, but without sound, there is no context. We do not know what was said, how it was said. We do not know what pushed him to action."

A human envoy took the opening. "She is correct. Release the sound," he called, unable to keep the ragged edge from his voice. "If you want the world's confidence, we need full context."

A Firmatha elder shifted, antlers catching the filtered light. "Will finding out what was said fix the damage caused?"

Cefketa lifted his gaze at last. There was no scorn in it. Only patience. "As the elder says. What was said is irrelevant," he answered. "The results are all that matter. Cities shattered. Lives lost. No amount of harsh words can weigh against that."

He then lifted his hands as if conceding, "If context comforts you, I would be fine with Mythara's recount of the events that happened to act as sound. If he were here... But Heka has failed to produce him for these two weeks."

The hall's temperature seemed to drop. A dozen gazes cut toward the Heka observers. The Tiny Tits were not among them, but those that were sat like statues with their hands folded—too disciplined to flush.

Some among the human delegation spoke. "So he has fled justice," he said, relief and fury braided together.

Amaterasu's shoulders tightened, but she said nothing.

The air in the chamber trembled as space fluttered and then split open.

Mythara teleported into the hearing chamber. Shock swept the hall, gasps echoing from the gathered nations and their delegates.

He was shrouded head to toe, a high-collared coat clasped tight across his chest, gloves sealing his hands, fabric brushing to his ankles. Not a single patch of skin showed. To the watching world, it looked like shame. Concealing those ghastly cracks that were shown in the footage.

The Seats did not stir. They watched him without surprise, though

Only Cefketa's gaze sharpened. Not surprise; not approval. Recognition of a change he could not name. Mythara seemed... different.

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Sage spoke first, voice cool. "Why didn't you turn yourself in these past two weeks?"

Mythara did not bristle. He did not bow. He stood with his hands at his sides. "I had more important things to do," he said. The words carried without force.

"I didn't come to undergo a trial. I came to take responsibility for my actions. And to say that he—" he turned his head a fraction, included Cefketa without looking away from the Seats "—should do the same."

Cefketa closed his eyes. Folded his arms. Inclined his head once, as if satisfying an agreement he had already made with himself.

Ferradon spoke. "Before this hearing, Cefketa consented to a condition proposed by the Ten Seats," he said for the record. "He will accept whatever judgment Mythara accepts. Their punishment shall be shared."

The human section broke into layered voices—outrage, disbelief, opportunistic relief. Someone shouted that tying a penalty to two monsters instead of one would not make it twice as heavy. Another said it was the only guarantee either would remain where put. Firmatha elders murmured the word honor.

A woman in the second row, voice steady, spoke. "How do you 'take responsibility' for a crater?" she asked. She did not raise her volume. She did not need to. "How do you stand before mothers who have no children and tell them you are responsible? Apologies do not resurrect the dead. Do not insult us with them."

Mythara's mouth tightened. He had come to an understanding of himself and the situation he found himself in. He had been led by the noise every step of the way, by Cefketa. It was time for that to change. He looked up to where the cameras were, and beyond the cameras to the millions of eyes watching.

"I never offered apologies," he said.

The reaction was instantaneous—an indrawn sound like a thousand winter doors shut at once. Across continents, in flats and stations and hospitals, couches shifted as people sat forward, anger sharpening for the strike.

Cefketa's eyes opened. His face was as unmarked as stone, and yet something in it moved.

Mythara did not flinch. "I came to give answers," he continued. "I came to let you decide what to do with me and with him." He gestured without looking at Cefketa again. "I offer no regret."

Amaterasu's hand on the arm of her chair clenched once. Sage's lashes lowered a fraction, a calculation moving and being filed away.

"Because this is the truth," Mythara said, and now his voice carried an iron that had not been there when he had spoken in panic amid rubble. "As long as we live, this will happen again."

There was no shout this time. No instant roar. The Hall held the sentence and weighed it, and the world did the same. The words were not a boast or threat. They were a weather report.

"Cities will fall," he said. "Lives will break. Sometimes, because we fail to hold back in time, sometimes because someone decides to force our hand. You can hold hearings until the walls collapse from your voices. You can make prisons and call them justice. The truth will not change. We are dragons."

In the second tier, a statesman who had not slept in days began to rise, to declare that here was proof that extermination was sensible, not cruel.

Cefketa's chest moved once with a breath as he killed his laughter in his throat. He did not show his teeth. He did not need to. He folded one ankle over the other and watched the boy who barely understood himself make the perfect move.

"Then what?" someone called from the human side, "If that is the truth, what is your responsibility? What does it mean when you say you'll take it?"

Mythara looked at her, and maybe for the first time since he had exploded from that rooftop, he did not look like someone caught between names. He looked like someone who had decided to stand inside a single address even if the street re-mapped itself each night.

"It means I will not run," he said. "It means you decide what you do with me, and I will abide. It means when you call, I come—not to be your dog, but to admit the weight of what I am. It means I will not pretend you are safe when you are not. It means I will not pretend I am harmless when I am not."

"And him?" Sage asked. It was not a challenge. It was a prompt to complete the line.

"Him," Mythara said, and finally he turned his head all the way to look at Cefketa, "should do the same."

Cefketa's answer was a closing of the eyes and a tilt of the head so small it could have been a nod or the beginning of a bow. He did not correct the boy. He did not protest.

Ferradon's voice carried again. "The pact stands," he said. "We bind them together under sentence. The Ten will deliberate with counsel."

The words rippled through the chamber like a spark across dry fields — some voices flared in outrage, others in disbelief.

"No," came at once from the human tiers—different languages making the same denial with the same weight. "Deliberate here. Before us."

Sage lifted her hand a fraction, and the Hall listened. "You asked to be present," she said. "You are. You asked to be heard. You have spoken. We will decide. That is the agreement."

"We do not accept—" a minister began, and found his words absorbed by the Hall's refusal to let chaos echo.

The Firmatha elders did not blink. For them, this was not cruelty but order; time could not be bribed to unbreak what was already broken; speech could not be stretched into a net strong enough to catch falling cities.

Amaterasu's gaze slid to Mythara, who nodded.

"Better to let them hear our reasoning now, than force us to explain it later when anger has doubled."

The Hall did not move. The outside crowds became a single vast sound that could have been anger or prayer. In houses and shelters, people who had lost someone reached for whatever they believed could hold the shape of absence without breaking. Others counted policy votes on their fingers and tried to see how a verdict could be enforced upon a species that used reality as a suggestion.

"The ten will confer," Sage said.

"You will do it here," a human voice said again, quieter.

"We will do it here," said the First Seat, Zyvaroth.

"This has carried on far enough, and they need to understand exactly their position in creation."

His words brought both relief and apprehension. What did he mean — that they would learn their place?

The Seats leaned together briefly, shadows folding across their thrones. Sage glanced at Cefketa, who smirked. She then raised her hand, her expression cool as steel.

"We will begin with what can be done, not with what cannot," she said. "Compensation. To the cities harmed. To the families who lost. To the lives broken."

Then the chamber exploded.

Human delegates surged to their feet, their outrage a storm of overlapping tongues. Some shouted insults, others demanded retribution. One voice cracked through the uproar like a whip: "You cannot repay the dead with coins!" Another followed, sharp with grief: "My son is not a debt to be repaid!"

The roar of anger shook the hall, echoed back by millions of screens across the world.

The Seats did not move. The monsters did not stir.

Only humanity raged, their grief filling the air like fire with no place to burn.

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