The silence after Corvin's revelation was a physical weight, thick with the ozone tinged air of the fissure and the coppery scent of their own spilled blood. Nyxara's decision to parley hung in the stagnant gloom, not as a hope, but as a death sentence. The eight pointed star's afterimage was seared into their vision, a brand of impossible allegiance that did nothing to warm the chilling dread her choice had instilled.

The rebellion's leadership did not gather; they simply existed in shared, shattered space, each consumed by the ghosts Nyxara's gamble had summoned.

Haruto stood rigid, his back to the others, one pale hand pressed against the cold, damp obsidian. His aristocratic composure, so recently reforged after his breakdown, was a pane of glass under immense pressure, webbed with hairline fractures. He saw not the rock before him, but the strategic maps of his youth, the clean lines of the fallen House Isamu's logic. Nyxara's move was not logic; it was sentiment. It was his father, Takeru, trusting the Frostguard's honour, believing in protocols and parleys while Ryo's butchers sharpened their knives in the dark. A low, almost inaudible sound escaped him, a sharp exhalation that was the ghost of a scream. His knuckles, where they gripped the rock, were bone white. She trusts the geometry of diplomacy against a man who only understands the calculus of pain. The polished control was there, but beneath it, a tectonic fury threatened to break free, not at Nyxara, but at the brutal, repetitive stupidity of hope in the face of absolute evil. Every lesson from his father's flaying, every whispered secret of statecraft dissected over cold tea, screamed that this was not a gambit but a surrender. It was placing their one potential ally, however enigmatic, onto Ryo's sacrificial altar. The vow he'd sworn over his father's mutilated corpse, to unmake his killers, felt both more impossible and more urgently violent than ever. To do nothing was its own form of blasphemy.

Shiro flinched as if struck, his right hand flying to the Polaris scar on his palm. It wasn't flaring with light, but with a deep, sympathetic ache that radiated up his arm, a phantom echo of every cruelty Ryo had ever inflicted. The news of the parley dragged up the memory of the throne room, the Butcher King's venomous delight as he revealed Yuki Aratani's fiery death. It pulled forth the image of his mother's pyre, a spectacle he'd been forced to witness as a child, the scent of charring flesh and incense forever seared into his soul. He saw Nyxara on a similar pyre, not of fire, but of political theatre, her multi hued light extinguished for the entertainment of the court. He respected her courage, a courage that felt alien and terrifying, but it looked less like bravery and more like a surrender to a death wish, a willing walk into the slaughterhouse because the fight outside it was too exhausting. His breath hitched, the grinding pain in his wrists a dull counterpoint to the sharper agony in his heart. Aki's face flickered in his mind, bright, hopeful, trapped in her own glacial prison. Was this what it took to save anyone? A grand, futile gesture that only served to tighten the tyrant's grip? The helplessness was a cold stone in his gut.

Across from him, Kuro's corrupted arm erupted in a violent pulse of sickly blue light, the luminescence lancing up past his collarbone, making the invasive tendrils writhe like frozen worms under his skin. The static around his head escalated to a deafening roar, a physical manifestation of the storm inside him. Nyxara's defiance mirrored his mother's ,Kaya, who had defied Ryo to show a young Kuro a moment of kindness, only to be torn apart by hounds for it. He could already see it: the public forum, Nyxara standing proud, and Ryo finding some small, imagined slight, some flicker of defiance in her kaleidoscopic eyes, and ending her. Not quickly. Not cleanly. Making a prolonged, excruciating example of her, just as he had with Kaya. A strangled sound, half growl, half sob, escaped him. He clutched the frozen, dead weight of his arm, his storm grey eyes wide with a terror that was both personal and prophetic. He admired her, but the cost of defiance in Astralon was written in his mother's blood and now, it seemed, in Nyxara's future. The cold fire in his veins felt like a premonition of the icy fate awaiting her. Every pulse was a countdown to a spectacle of horror he'd seen before.

Ryota Veyne let out a wet, rattling sigh that ended in a cough, dark blood speckling his lips. The Old Star's pragmatism, hardened in a hundred frozen battles, warred with the memory of Kaya's sacrifice. He understood strategy, the value of a gambit, the need for a distraction. But this? This was feeding a lamb to a glacier. Ryo didn't understand peace; he understood consumption. He'd consumed the Frostguard's honour, consumed Volrag's loyalty, consumed Kaya's light. Nyxara was just the next meal. "Fool's errand," he grunted, the words scraping his ruined throat. "Thinks she can reason with the avalanche." He shifted, agony flaring in his gut, a fresh stain spreading on his bandages. His guttering Polaris light, the last ember of Kaya's gift, seemed to dim further, as if in mourning for another light about to be snuffed out. He had seen good men and women walk into Ryo's parlours with hope in their hearts and never walk out. This felt no different. The weight of his own powerlessness was as heavy as the mountain above them. He was a weapon, broken and bleeding out in a dank hole, while the real battle was fought with words and lies he could not combat.

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Juro said nothing. His silence was more thunderous than any outburst. He stood at the fissure's mouth, a solid, immovable bastion of fur and frost forged steel, but his shoulders were tensed, his grip on his axe hafts so tight the leather wrappings groaned. He saw Nyxara's decision through the lens of Takeshi's betrayal, another bond of trust shattered on the rocks of Ryo's corrupting influence. He saw a leader walking into the viper's den, believing in the goodness of a brother, only to find a Void Guard's poisoned blade. His jaw was clenched, a muscle ticking in his temple. History wasn't repeating; it was a spiral, dragging them all deeper into the same frozen hell. The urge to act, to charge out and physically interpose himself between Nyxara and the fate he foresaw, was a physical ache in his muscles. But the memory of the ledge, of Takeshi's venomous words and the love hidden beneath them, was a cage. Action without understanding was what had fractured his world. Now, they were being asked to understand, and the understanding was its own form of torture.

Into this maelstrom of silent, shared trauma, Corvin reappeared. Not with a swirl of shadow feathers, but simply there, as if he'd stepped from a fold in the darkness itself. His galactic eyes took in the scene: Haruto's rigid back, Shiro's haunted grip on his scar, Kuro's pulsing corruption, Ryota's grim resignation, Juro's furious silence.

"Her choice is made," Corvin stated, his distorted voice cutting through the thick atmosphere. It wasn't an apology. It was a fact, cold and hard as the obsidian around them. "She believes the demonstration in the Plaza, the proof of your resilience, has altered the board. She believes Ryo, at his core, is a strategist who will see the mutual destruction of continued war."

Haruto whirled around, his obsidian eyes blazing with a cold fire. "What she believes is wrong! He is a cancer! You don't negotiate with a tumour; you fucking cut it out!" The outburst was raw, the Architect's control slipping to reveal the wounded, vengeful son beneath. The fissure seemed to shrink with the force of his fury.

"Rushing in now would not save her," Corvin replied, his calm a stark contrast to Haruto's fury. "It would merely prove Ryo's point, that we are reckless, emotional, incapable of the strategic patience true power requires. It would give him the excuse to execute her immediately and then purge this city until the stones are red and the last spark of defiance is extinguished. Your charge would be the spark that burns the last hope for this city, not its salvation."

He took a single step into their midst, his gaze sweeping over each of them, his words carefully chosen, aimed like scalpels at the heart of their individual sufferings. The low thoom of his ring seemed to mark time, a countdown to an inevitable catastrophe.

"Haruto," he began, his voice losing some of its distortion, becoming sharper, more analytical. "You understand precision. The cost of a mistimed strike. Vengeance, served cold, is a dish that must be prepared with excruciating care, lest it poison the chef. Rushing now is not precision; it is the wild swing you condemned in the Plaza. It is the very lack of control you despise."

His gaze shifted to Shiro. "Shiro". Your entire life is a testament to scars borne. The scar on your palm. The scars on your soul. Nyxara offers a path, however dangerous, that leads away from creating more. It is a gamble on a future where scars are memories, not ongoing punishments. Is that not a wager worth making, however long the odds?"

He turned to Kuro, his galactic eyes seeming to reflect the chaotic blue pulse of the prince's corruption. "Kuro". You know the price of defiance in your father's house. You have lived it. You carry it in your flesh. Her defiance mirrors your own. To charge in now would be to spit on that same defiant spirit, to treat it as a weakness to be protected rather than a strength to be leveraged. She has chosen her stand. Honor that choice by making yours count."

His attention fell on Ryota. "Ryota. You have lost more than any of us to Ryo's hunger. Kaya. Volrag. Your command. Your peace. You understand the value of a soldier who holds the line, even a doomed one, to create an opening for others. Nyxara has chosen to be that soldier. The question is, will we waste her sacrifice? Or will we use the time she buys us to sharpen the blade that severs the head of the beast?"

Finally, he looked at Juro's broad back. He didn't speak immediately. The silence stretched, acknowledging the depth of the Frostguard heir's silent fury. When he did speak, his voice was lower, almost respectful. "Juro". Brotherhood betrayed is a wound that never truly heals. It teaches a brutal lesson: trust is a weapon that can be turned against you. I do not ask for your trust. I ask for your patience. For your cunning. So that the next blow struck is not one of desperate emotion, but of calculated finality. So that the next bond tested is not broken, but proven."

He stepped back, encompassing them all. "The die is cast. We cannot stop her. The window she provides is our only advantage. We must wait. We must use these hours to mend, to plan, to become the precise, lethal counter stroke that can exploit the chaos her parley will inevitably create. In the waiting, you will find not weakness, but your strength."

His chilling final admission hung in the air, a verdict and a command. The path of reckless heroism was closed. All that remained was the agonizing, necessary pause in the eye of the storm, a silence filled with the ghosts of the past and the terrifying uncertainty of the gamble to come. They were left with nothing but their trauma, their distrust, and the grim, shared understanding that Nyxara's fate was now the ticking clock by which their own would be decided. The weight of inaction settled on them, heavier than any armour colder than the void itself.

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