Theron could not sleep.
He lay on the pallet of furs that Aldric had given him, the fire dying in the hearth, his father's breathing a steady rhythm from the other side of the hut. But sleep would not come. The old man's words kept circling in his head, questions forming and reforming, each one leading to another, each answer only opening more doors.
You want to know what happened that day? The real story?
He had been six years old when they fled Valtherion. Six years old, watching his mother die, watching his sister burn, watching his father become something that had no name. He had spent five years running from that day, hiding from it, burying it so deep that he had almost convinced himself it didn't matter.
But it did matter. It mattered more than anything.
He sat up, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, and saw his father sitting by the cold hearth, the Echo in his hands, its light pulsing softly, casting shadows on his face.
"You're awake," Kaelen said, not looking up.
"I can't sleep."
"No. Neither can I."
Theron moved to sit beside his father, the warmth of the Echo reaching out to him, touching something in his chest that had been cold for a long time.
"The old man," he said. "He knew my mother, didn't he?"
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. The Echo pulsed, its light rising and falling like a heartbeat.
"He knew of her. Everyone knew of her, in the wars. She was the only one who could match me. The only one who could see what I was becoming before I saw it myself."
He looked at his son, and in the light of the Echo, his face was softer, younger, the face of a man who had not yet been broken.
"She was a strategist. The best there ever was. She saw the patterns in things—in war, in politics, in the way the Skylords moved and thought and planned. And she saw, before anyone else, that the war we were fighting was not what we thought it was. That the enemy was not the one we were told to fight. That the real enemy was standing behind us, watching us bleed for a cause that meant nothing."
Theron's throat tightened. "Did she try to stop it?"
"She tried to stop me." Kaelen's voice was barely a whisper. "She tried to make me see. But I was too proud, too certain, too full of the power Valkara had given me. I told her she didn't understand. That the war had to be fought. That the sacrifices had to be made."
He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he was not the God-Killer, not the Shattered Oath. He was just a man, remembering a woman he had loved and lost.
"She was right. About all of it. And I didn't listen. And then it was too late."
Theron reached out and put his hand on his father's arm. The marks beneath his father's tunic were warm, pulsing with the same rhythm as the Echo.
"She would have wanted you to keep fighting," he said. "She would have wanted you to finish what you started."
"She would have wanted me to be better." Kaelen opened his eyes, and there was something in them that Theron had never seen before. Acceptance, perhaps. Or the beginning of it. "She would have wanted me to be the man she knew I could be. The man I was too afraid to become."
He looked at the Echo, at the light that pulsed in his hands.
"Maybe that's what the Echo is for. Not to kill gods. Not to save the world. But to give me a chance to become that man. To become something more than the weapon they made me."
He looked at his son, and for the first time in five years, there was no wall between them.
"I'm going to try, Theron. I'm going to try to be better. For you. For her. For everyone I failed. And I need you to help me. I need you to tell me when I'm wrong. When I'm becoming the thing I was before. When I'm forgetting what matters."
Theron looked at his father, at the man who had raised him in a cave in the frozen wastes, who had taught him to fight and to survive and to never stop running. At the man who had carried him through a mountain pass and buried his enemies in the snow and faced the darkness of his own soul and chosen, finally, to come back.
"I will," he said. "I promise."
And in the darkness of the hut, with the Echo pulsing between them, the promise was sealed.