The cold stone of the dais seeped through Nyxara's robes, a grounding counterpoint to the feverish turmoil that had just wracked her body. The ghost of her father's smile, the echo of his dream, still hung in the air around her, a fragile shield against the crushing reality of her decision. She remained on her knees, not in supplication, but in gathering, drawing the shattered pieces of herself back together. The silent sobs had subsided, leaving behind a raw emptiness that was, paradoxically, filling with a cold, hard certainty. The path was madness. It was also the only path.

She did not hear the sanctum door open. The first sign was a subtle shift in the air pressure, a whisper of displaced shadow, and the soft, almost imperceptible scrape of a boot on obsidian. Then, a familiar, low resonance vibrated through the chamber, a counter melody to Algol's dying groan.

She did not need to turn. She knew the texture of their presence. Corvin and Korinakos.

She rose slowly, her movements deliberate, each one an effort of will. She turned to face them, not bothering to wipe the traces of her tears, the streak of frozen Polaris ice, the tacky smear of Algol ichor, the glistening track of Vega silver. Let them see. Let them see the cost.

The two Corvus watchers stood just inside the doorway, their forms seeming to drink the chamber's dim light. Korinakos looked as he always did: a nerve ending exposed to the void, his sharp, avian features tight with anxiety, his hands fluttering slightly at his sides. But it was Corvin who held her gaze. His usual impenetrable calm was gone, replaced by a grim intensity. The galaxies in his eyes swirled not with their usual calculated patterns, but with a storm of conflict and dread. The fear she had seen in the fissure was still there, now mixed with a protective ferocity that was startling in its rawness.

It was Corvin who broke the silence, his voice stripped of its usual masking distortion, sharp and clear with an urgency that bordered on command. "The council is contained, but volatile. Umbra'zel's faction is rallying the most desperate of the Hungry. They will not wait long." He took a step forward, his gaze piercing. "Nyxara. You cannot go to Astralon."

The use of her name, not her title, was a deliberate intimacy, a plea from the ally who had walked in shadow beside her for decades.

"Ryo is not a man to be reasoned with," Corvin continued, his words precise and cutting. "He is not the boy who played with practice swords under a kinder sky. The void has twisted him. It is not just in his mind; it is in his marrow. It has eaten away every memory of honour, every shred of the humility his father tried to instil. He is a creature of pure, calculating malice now. To believe otherwise is not hope. It is a delusion that will get you killed in the most excruciating way possible. He will not see a queen offering parley. He will see a prize delivered to his doorstep. He will break you on that throne not just to win, but for the sheer, vicious pleasure of proving his father's dreams of unity was weakness."

His words were hammers, each one striking the bell of her deepest fear. They were not spoken to undermine her, but to shield her. She could feel the truth in them, the cold analysis of the master watcher who had studied Ryo's every cruel, calculated move.

Nyxara met his galactic gaze, her own multi hued eyes still swimming with emotion, but now underpinned by that unshakeable Polaris resolve. "I hear your fears, Corvin. I feel their weight as if they were my own. You see the monster he has become. I am not blind to it." She took a step toward him, her voice softening, not with weakness, but with a profound, aching conviction. "But I also see the blood that runs in his veins. It is Shojiki's blood. The blood of a man of honour, of curiosity, of peace. The void may twist and corrupt, but it cannot erase lineage completely. There must be an echo, a ghost of that memory buried deep within him. A splinter of the boy who looked at the stars with wonder, not hunger."

She gestured weakly to the frozen pool, to the portrait. "If I can find that splinter… if I can speak to it, not as the 'Demon Queen' of his propaganda, but as the daughter of his father's closest friend… if I can remind him of the world they dreamed of… perhaps it can be a crack in the void's armour. Perhaps we can avoid the oceans of blood that Umbra'zel craves and Kaustirix awaits. It is not a delusion. It is the only weapon we have left that we have not tried."

Korinakos, who had been wringing his hands in anxious silence, suddenly stepped forward. His voice, when it came, was a reedy but firm counterpoint to Corvin's deep dread. "Corvin… she is right." He glanced at Corvin, not with defiance, but with a desperate kind of faith. "We are watchers. We see patterns, strategies, outcomes of force. We see the thousand paths that lead to ruin. But we do not see… hope. It is not a something you can calculate. But what is sovereignty if not the courage to defy equations? If there is even the faintest chance to end this cycle, to save our people from being consumed by either Ryo's void or Kaustirix's cold hunger, then we must take it. I believe in my Queen's vision. I will follow you into that den."

Nyxara offered him a grateful, weary nod before turning her full attention back to Corvin. The storm in his eyes had not abated. He was her oldest friend, her most trusted counsel, the one being in all the worls, who saw every part of her and had never flinched. His opposition was a pain deeper than any councillor's doubt.

She closed the final distance between them. She did not reach for his hand, but she placed her own on his shoulder, a touch of startling intimacy between a queen and her spymaster. The contact was electric; she could feel the tension thrumming through him, the conflict between his devotion to her and his certain knowledge of the horror that awaited.

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"Corvin," she said, her voice barely a whisper, yet it filled the vast space. "You are my greatest ally. My shadow. The one who understands the entirety of my burden. Which is why I need you now to understand this." Her grip tightened slightly. "You cannot come with me."

He began to protest, a sharp intake of breath, but she pressed on. "Your place is not at my side in that throne room. It is with them. With the Twin Stars, with Haruto, with Ryota, with Juro and Mira. Their resistance is the other half of this gambit. It is the pressure on the other side of the door. They are brilliant, defiant, but they need guidance. They have seen Kaustirix's touch. They are terrified. They need your guidance. Not to stop them, but to… harmonize them. To make their blow count. You must be their shadow now. As you have been mine."

The request was a supreme act of trust and a terrible sacrifice. She was sending her most powerful protector away on the eve of her greatest peril.

Corvin's composure, held so tightly until this moment, finally wavered. The storm in his galaxy eyes stilled, the swirling nebulae seeming to contract, and then… they glistened. A single tear, welled in the corner of each eye, tracing a slow, shimmering path down his cheeks. It was a sight so alien, so profoundly vulnerable, that even Korinakos took a sharp step back.

"Nyxara…" His voice was a raw scrape, stripped bare of all its layers and distortions. It was just his voice, filled with a fear that was entirely for her. "And what of you? Who will guide you? Who will watch your back in that nest of vipers?"

She offered him a small, sad smile, her own tears answering his. "I must walk this path alone. The weight of my nation, of my father's dream, rests on my shoulders. I cannot outsource this risk. I must carry it. And I ask you… I ask you to trust me to carry it."

For a long moment, he simply looked at her, the silent communication between them saying more than words ever could. Then, he gave a single, slow, agonized nod. "I do trust you," he whispered, the admission costing him dearly. "More than you know. More than I trust the turning of the stars."

The words hung between them, a confession that cost him a piece of his soul. For a long moment, the only sound was the faint, dying groan of Algol and the frantic hammering of his own heart against his ribs. He could still feel the phantom warmth of her hand on his shoulder, a brand of trust that was also a sentence. To leave her. To walk away from his primary function, his raison d'être, on the eve of her annihilation.

His mind, a weapon honed for centuries to calculate probabilities and parse lies, revolted. It presented him with a thousand horrific tableaus of her fate in Astralon: Ryo's cold smile, the glint of a void touched blade, the snap of a Polaris chain. Each one was a shard of ice in his gut.

But then, he looked past his fear, past the personal dread that threatened to unmoor him. He looked at the Queen. Not just Nyxara, the woman he was sworn to protect, but the strategist, the last scion of a shattered dream. He saw the brutal, elegant geometry of her gambit. She was not just a sacrifice walking to the altar; she was the diversion, the brilliant, blinding light that would draw every eye in Astralon. And in that distraction, a shadow could move unseen. A different kind of weapon could be positioned.

The Twin Stars. Haruto's fractured genius. Ryota's unbroken will. They were chaos, a storm of raw, defiant potential. But a storm, pointed in the right direction, could shatter foundations that no single blade could ever touch. Her order was not a dismissal. It was a promotion. It was a command to forge the dagger that would be at the tyrant's back while he was mesmerized by the crown before him.

The storm in his galactic eyes didn't calm; it crystallized. The swirling nebulae of fear and conflict solidified into a cold, hard constellation of purpose. The tear tracks on his face were not wiped away; they were absorbed, becoming part of the new, harder landscape of his resolve. She was not sending him away. She was deploying her most valuable asset to the critical flank. And he, her shadow, would not fail her.

He stepped back from her touch, the moment of vulnerability passing as a new resolve settled over him. The time for words was over.

"Then go to them," Nyxara said, her voice regaining its regal strength. "Go back to the Plaza of Screams."

Corvin nodded once, sharply. He took another step back, into a deeper pool of shadow cast by a towering Algol prism. And then, he began to change.

It was not the graceful dissolution into shadow feathers. This was a transformation. A low, subsonic hum emanated from his core, vibrating through the sanctum floor. His body seemed to blur at the edges. Then came the sounds, wet, organic, and brutally specific.

A series of sharp, sickening CRACKS echoed in the chamber, the sound of major bones breaking and reforming in an instant. His shoulders twisted inwards with a grotesque, popping crunch, his clavicles snapping and reknitting themselves into a new, avian structure. His spine curved and compressed in a ripple of audible vertebrae realignment, a sound like stepping on a basket of wet twigs. His arms seemed to melt and flow, the bones of his hands elongating, fingers fusing together into the precursors of flight feathers, the process accompanied by a sound of tearing ligament and shifting cartilage that was deeply, instinctively wrong.

Through it all, his face remained a mask of intense concentration, but not pain. It was a natural, yet horrifying, metamorphosis. His features sharpened, his nose and jaw stretching, reforming into a sharp, black beak. His galaxy eyes remained the same, vast and knowing, now set in the head of a large, formidable crow. The last of his dark robes seemed to liquefy and cling to his new form, becoming sleek, iridescent black feathers that shimmered with captured nebular light.

Where a man had stood, there now perched a crow, its form radiating a palpable aura of ancient power and lethal intelligence. The Corvus network was not made up of crows as Corvin had us believe but, It was Corvin himself he is the Corvus network, he stood utterly and completely still. He tilted his head, his galaxy eyes locking with hers one last time, a final, unspoken promise passing between them.

With a powerful beat of wings that sounded like a cloak of night being shaken out, he launched into the air. He did not fly toward the door, he ascended into the shadows gathered near the high ceiling, and simply vanished into them, leaving behind only a single, iridescent black feather that drifted slowly down to the floor.

The sanctum was silent once more. Nyxara watched the feather settle, then turned to Korinakos, who stood pale and wide eyed, visibly shaken by the visceral reality of Corvin being told to leave.

"Now," Nyxara said, her voice cold and clear, all traces of her earlier grief scoured away by the necessity of action. "Prepare the Carriage. No banners. No honour guard. We travel fast and we travel light." She looked toward the sanctum exit, her kaleidoscopic eyes hardening into chips of determined stone. "It is time to go to Astralon and come face to face with the Butcher."

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