The morning sun pierced the mist—not like a triumphant conqueror, but more like a timid visitor. A pale light, golden and cold, that did not yet warm the ravaged earth but outlined the ruins and the bodies. The fog, more subtle than usual, drifted in translucent tatters, like the last sighs of the night.
Dylan rose.
It wasn't a sudden motion, but a slow emergence, like a drowning man finding footing on an unfamiliar shore. His body was a landscape of dull pain—bruised muscles, rusted joints, the ghost-memory of every fracture inflicted by Élisa and healed by… the other. He no longer had that monstrous regeneration, only the heaviness of an exhausted and sullied flesh.
He blinked, chasing away the last streaks of a darkness no longer fully within him, but whose imprint remained—viscous. The clearing was a silent battlefield. Patches of scorched grass, steles snapped like twigs, the ground scarred by dark, sticky impacts where the corruption of the Lady of Midnight had spread.
