A man sat in the sky.

Not on stone, not on steel, but on a cloud. He was perfectly still, a black figure set against a white sea, as if the air itself had agreed to hold him and would not dare shift until dismissed. He did not blink. He did not breathe in any way a human would recognize. He simply waited, utterly immovable, until the village far below him bloomed with a silent star of darkness.

The ink bomb rose like a flower turning inside out.

Only then did he move. His throat worked once, and a pit of black blood spilled from his mouth, thin at first, then a rope, then a curtain, falling away into the wind. He wiped nothing. He needed no gesture to confirm what the world already understood: the vessel below had been his hand, and his hand had closed.

Maximilian Umper smiled.

Under his skin something glowed, bright, obscene violet, as if a second man lived beneath him and that man were burning. It pulsed along the tendons of his neck, raced his ribs in clean lines, gathered at the knuckles the way Sol gathered in Saints, only wrong, only colder.

A skeleton rose behind him, big as a horse and long as a bad dream, its spine threaded to his like a chain. The bones did not perch so much as grow out of the air at his back, joint by joint, a pale cathedral of ribs that settled its skull over his shoulder, eye sockets turned toward the earth. When it breathed, he breathed. When its fingers flexed, the hem of his robe whispered. You could argue which of them moved the other. You would be wrong either way.

He leaned back into the cloud as if into a chair and let himself fall.

The white gave way, the sky swallowed him, and the moment his body dropped through the vapor a small portal opened in front of his back. He slipped through it like a pin through cloth. The other side was close to the ground, close enough that a human would have broken either an ankle or a neck, depending on how they fell. The skeleton anticipated it, shooting both arms up under him, catching him by the shoulders with the care of a mother who knew the weight of every bone in her child.

He landed without a sound.

The room around him was nowhere, and it did not pretend otherwise. Circular, enclosed, all edges curved inward like a mouth. A small table sat in the middle, four chairs set with mathematical precision at the cardinal points. The walls were glass, perfectly clear, but beyond them there was no city, no path, no horizon, only an endless field of snow under a sky so white it seemed to eat color from the world.

Maximilian sighed, a thin drift of purple mist leaving his lips. "It appears," he said to himself, disappointed, "I'm the last to arrive."

"Maxi!" a voice sang, delighted. "My best friend aesthetically and the only one of us not cursed with terminal seriousness—finally!"

The masked man rose from his chair with a fluid eagerness that belonged to children. He wore a long black robe that hung in narrow, razor-clean lines, the cloth textured like a night sky brushed in one direction. A red sash slashed diagonally across his chest and vanished into the folds like a scar that refused to heal. Wisps drifted off his sleeves and pooled at his heels, each curl briefly resolving into a human face that opened its mouth to speak and forgot how. He had a mask for a face: smooth, porcelain-white, with a simple painted smile and two round eyes. It did not change as he spoke. Somehow it smiled wider anyway.

Maximilian did not return the wave. He never did, and Pyrrhos never stopped offering it. Some rituals are valuable because nothing changes them.

In his head, Maximilian named him the way he always did: Pyrrhos, Herald of the Child.

The third person was already seated on the far side of the table, hands folded, weight centered as if chairs had been designed with him in mind. Armor layered him perfectly, curved plates over plates, each engraved with symbols that were meanings before they were letters. A heavy chain draped from shoulder to hip. A hood threw his head into shadow, but the face beneath was not a face: a narrow, upturned sickle of ember-bright orange hung in the darkness where features ought to be, like a crescent wound that never closed. He looked at Maximilian without moving.

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Maximilian wiped his lip with the back of one finger. Purple luminescence chased the gesture like a second hand shadowing the first. "Pyrrhos," he said, taking the chair opposite the smiling mask. "You look unchanged."

"Flawless, you mean," Pyrrhos chirped, dropping back into his seat and planting both palms on the table with the enthusiasm of a boy about to ruin a board game. "I tried looking solemn while I waited. It made the ghosts leave."

"As they should," Maximilian murmured. The skeleton behind him draped a radius across the top of his chair as if laying a shawl around his shoulders. "You feed on attention."

"Ah! Compliment received." Pyrrhos tilted his head, and the porcelain face caught the white light and gave nothing back. "You taste like ash today, Maxi. Did you cry again?"

Maximilian set two fingers against the edge of the table and pressed. "A tear," he said. "One."

"For the man?" Pyrrhos asked gently. "Or the thrill of the moment?"

Maximilian considered. "For the axis. He names himself correctly."

"Oathkeeper," the armored one said at last. His voice was low.

"Yes. He does not bend—there is nothing in him that understands the concept. He observes, he dissects, and he learns the weaknesses of all he sees. Then, without hesitation, he applies the exact amount of force needed to destroy it, no more, no less. He is patient, deliberate… and entirely without sentiment for the thing once it's broken. In truth, he is nearer in nature to an Unborn than any we currently possess, only he wears the shape of a man."

Pyrrhos clapped once, the sound sharp and clean, his delight almost childlike, though the ghosts coiled at his sleeves giggled in a way that was far less innocent, their laughter soft and fake. "Perfect," he breathed, leaning forward as if savoring the thought. "He'll be perfect for it—for the game, for the riddle, for the kind of tale where the so-called hero slays the dragon, basks in the applause, and then, when no one is looking, eats up the kingdom he saved."

Maximilian's eyes barely shifted, his tone calm but certain. "No," he said. "He won't devour it. He'll take its bones, grind them down, and build something in his own image where it once stood."

Pyrrhos's mask tilted, the smile painted there somehow managing to widen without moving at all. "Ah—semantics," he said with mock, voice rolling the word as if it were fine wine. "And you know, my friend, semantics has always been my thing."

"You were late," the armored one said. If an object could frown, it would sound like that.

"I wanted to see the detonation for myself," Maximilian said, his tone even, almost conversational, though there was a precision in his choice of words that made them cut. "The princess was wearing a mantle, an old one. One of the relics they still keep locked away in the Liberatorium. Even after all this time, they've managed to keep its ugliness polished."

Pyrrhos tilted his head, the painted grin on his mask catching the light. "And tell me," he asked, voice lilting with a child's curiosity that was far too deliberate to be real, "Do you dislike it? The ugliness?"

"I dislike craft without spirit," Maximilian replied without hesitation. "They parade it around under the name of heroism, but it was never that. I know that both of you know that, perhaps too well."

The crescent on Pyrrhos's mask seemed to warm in the light, his next words carrying a teasing, singsong edge. "You speak like their creation didn't benefit us as well, Maxi'."

Maximilian let the sentance bleed a moment longer. Then he folded his hands and let the skeleton fold its hands over his. "Enough about that, we're here," he said, voice thinning. "To talk about Ossa, correct?"

The armored figure's crescent flared once. "Enough."

The word wasn't raised in volume, but it carried the authority. It cut through Pyrrhos's feigned cheer and Maximilian's deliberate cadence alike, leaving the air still in its wake.

"That matter is not for this table," the figure went on. "Ossa belongs to the Great Overlords. None of them are here. We are not them., and thus, we will not touch it."

The authority in his tone wasn't loud, and in all honesty, it didn't have to be. The ribcage walls seemed to lean closer to hear him. Even the skeleton at Maximilian's back paused mid-drift, fingers stilling against the chair.

Sanguis, Maximilian named him inside his mind. Herald of the Elder.

Of all the Unborn, Sanguis was the one Maximilian despised most, save for the Elder himself. Sanguis spoke with his master's certainty, his master's taste for final word, and worst of all, his master's conviction that everyone else at the table was a means to a greater end that only he deserved to see.

Pyrrhos leaned back, porcelain mask tilted, fingers idly toying with the wisps at his sleeves, as if the tension were music to him. "Well," he murmured, "There's your line in the sand, Maxi. Best not to step over it, hm?"

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