Leaving Astralon felt worse in daylight.
At night, fire and smoke turned everything into rubble, burning roofs, collapsing walls, shadows running through streets that no longer belonged to people. But under the gray wash of morning, the destruction became clearer, uglier. The city looked peeled open. Whole sections of it were broken and blackened, as if something vast had raked claws through stone and timber and then moved on before anyone could stop it. Smoke still rose in long, bitter streaks from the deeper districts, and every so often a distant crash rolled over the rooftops when some weakened building finally gave up and collapsed into itself.
I kept walking.
There was nothing else to do.
My body hurt in ways that made it difficult to separate one pain from another. My side still felt torn open every time I breathed too deeply, even though the wound had closed enough for me to stand. My ribs ached from where the three-headed lion had struck me. My arms felt heavy and weak. My face was tight with dried blood and dirt. Every few steps I had to readjust my grip on the sword because my fingers wanted to loosen on their own.
But I kept moving.
The farther I got from the deeper parts of the city, the more the destruction spread out into uneven scars instead of constant ruin. One house would be standing, windows blown out and the front door hanging open. The next would be a heap of smashed stone and charred beams. A cart lay overturned in the middle of one road, its wheel still turning faintly in the wind like it hadn't realized the world had ended around it. Bodies were everywhere, soldiers, civilians, things that had once been monsters and now looked like butchered meat cooling on broken pavement.
I tried not to look too long at any of them.
That didn't stop my mind from finding other things to look at.
My parents.
Nate.
The bedroom floor.
The blood.
I saw all of it again every time my thoughts slipped loose for even a second. My mother's face. My father's torn-open chest. Nate with a claw through him, blood spilling down over his shirt while he told me to run.
My jaw tightened so hard it hurt.
I should have buried them.
The thought came sharp and sudden, like a blade sliding under my ribs.
I stumbled half a step before catching myself.
I should have buried them.
My parents had been left on the floor of that ruined house. Nate had been left in the street. No burial. No last words that meant anything. No grave. No marker. Just blood and ash and a city full of monsters.
A pulse of disgust rolled through me, at the city, at the monsters, at myself.
"You are slowing," Finn said inside my head.
His voice still felt wrong. Not because it was loud. It wasn't. It was calm, measured, almost cool in a way that made everything he said sound more certain than it had any right to. Wrong because it was inside me. Beside my thoughts. Too close to ignore.
I kept my eyes on the shattered road ahead. "I noticed."
"Then correct it."
Something about the bluntness of that made anger stir under the grief. It was better than the grief. Easier to hold.
"I left them behind," I said.
There was a short silence.
"Yes."
"That's all you have to say?"
"What would you prefer?" Finn asked. "A lie?"
I gripped the sword harder. "I'd prefer not having to leave my parents and Nate lying where they died."
"No," he said. "You would prefer them alive. As that is no longer an option, focus on the next thing."
My teeth clenched.
The worst part was that I knew he was right and hated him for it.
"I should've buried them."
"You could not."
"I could have tried."
"And then what?" Finn asked. "Dug three graves in a city overrun with monsters while half dead and nearly empty of spirit power?"
His tone sharpened slightly.
"Would that have honoured them? Or merely added your corpse to the collection?"
I said nothing.
The silence stretched.
Then, quieter than before, I muttered, "They deserved better."
"Yes," Finn said.
The answer came so simply that for a second I thought I had imagined it.
I looked down at the cracked stones under my feet, at the ash gathering in the seams between them.
"Yes," he repeated. "They did."
Something in my chest tightened again, but differently this time. Not eased. Nothing about this could be eased. Just acknowledged. It was the first thing Finn had said that didn't sound like a lecture or an order. It didn't help much. But it helped enough that I kept moving instead of stopping.
We reached the outer districts near midmorning, where the city walls and roads opened out toward the surrounding plains. From there, the City of Astralon looked like a wounded animal dragging itself through its last breaths. Black smoke clawed at the sky. A tower near the eastern side had lost its upper half. Fire still burned in scattered pockets across the inner neighbourhoods. Even at this distance, I could hear the city, faint screams, breaking wood, something roaring somewhere deep inside the ruins.
I stopped on a rise where the road cracked around a toppled milestone and turned to look back.
For a few seconds I just stood there.
Astralon had always seemed permanent to me. Not grand, not especially beautiful, but fixed. Home. The place you left for school and came back to for dinner. The place where the same neighbours waved from the same doors and the same bakery smell drifted down the same street every morning. The place where my mother fussed over the garden and my father complained about broken hinges and Nate appeared at the worst possible times wearing that stupid grin like nothing in the world could touch him.
Now it was burning behind me.
And I was leaving it.
The thought came with a fierce, sudden urge to turn around and run back. Not because I thought I could save anyone. I wasn't that stupid. But because walking away felt like betrayal. As if leaving the city behind meant leaving all of them behind for good. My parents. Nate. The life I had before. The version of me that had still belonged to ordinary things.
My foot shifted backward an inch without me meaning it to.
Finn's voice cut through the moment. "Don't."
I stared at the city. "I'm not going back."
"You were thinking about it."
"I said I'm not."
He was silent for a beat, then, "Good. Because the dead are beyond your reach now. If you wish to honor them, survive long enough to make their deaths cost something."
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
My grip on the sword tightened again.
Cost something.
I looked one last time at Astralon, at the smoke, the shattered outer wall, the fire still eating through the city, and spoke quietly enough that the words were almost for myself.
"I'll come back."
Finn did not answer.
"I'll kill that thing," I said, louder this time. "The three-headed lion. One day I'll come back and kill it."
Still nothing.
I glanced toward the horizon road ahead, then back at the city one final time.
"I swear it."
This time Finn spoke.
"Then you had better become far stronger than you are now."
I almost laughed at that. Almost.
Instead I turned away from the city and kept walking.
The roads beyond Astralon were a mess.
Refugees had spilled out in every direction. Some moved in groups with bundles tied across their backs or children clinging to their hands. Some were injured badly enough that others half-carried them down the road. A wagon with one shattered wheel had been dragged off to the roadside, where an old man sat beside it in a daze with dried blood across his forehead and a girl no older than ten pressed against his side.
Others were worse.
A woman knelt beside a body covered with a torn blanket and wouldn't move no matter how many people passed. A boy walked alone with an empty stare and both sleeves dark to the elbow with blood that didn't look like his. Two soldiers tried to organize a line of civilians at a crossroads checkpoint, but there were too many people and not enough order left for anyone to listen.
I stayed off the main road where I could, keeping to the edge of the fields and the tree lines, hood up, sword low. The last thing I wanted was questions. A half-healed boy soaked in blood with a blade in his hand tended to attract the wrong kind of attention.
Even from a distance, the refugees got to me.
Not because I felt some sudden urge to help everyone. I didn't. That part of me felt scraped raw and emptied out. But seeing them made the scale of it real in a different way. It wasn't just my house. Not just my parents. Not just Nate. The whole city had been torn open. Families shattered. Homes gone. People carrying whatever pieces of their lives they had managed to drag free before the monsters found them.
I kept moving anyway.
There was nothing I could do for them. Not really.
After a while, the sound of the roads faded enough that it was just me, the wind, and the long stretch of broken ground leading toward the forested wilds between Astralon and Sylarion.
I swallowed and realized my throat hurt from dryness.
"I need water."
"Yes," Finn said.
"And food."
"Yes."
I looked down at myself. Torn clothes. Blood. No pack. No canteen. No supplies at all beyond the sword and the half-healed body carrying it.
"This is going well," I muttered.
"You are alive."
"That is not the same as doing well."
"Sometimes it is."
I rubbed a hand over my face and regretted it immediately when I felt dried blood crack against my skin.
After another stretch of silence, I said, "Explain the spirit power thing again."
"You nearly emptied yourself yesterday," Finn said. "You forced far too much through a well too shallow to handle it. If you do that repeatedly, you will cripple yourself or die."
"I got that part. Explain the rest."
He was quiet for a moment, as though deciding how little he could say and still have it count as an explanation.
"Spirit power is not endless. Think of it as water held in a well inside you. The deeper the well, the more you can store. The wider and stronger the channels leading from it, the more cleanly you can use it. Yours is shallow, narrow, and unstable."
"That sounds insulting."
"It is descriptive."
I rolled my eyes.
He continued anyway. "Training can deepen it. Controlled use can strengthen it. Certain elixirs, fruits, and treasures can improve it. But none of those things matter if you behave like a starving hound every time you draw on power."
"What does that mean?"
"It means rage can push power outward quickly," he said. "That does not mean you are controlling it. It means you are wasting it."
I looked down at the sword in my hand. "Then teach me to use it properly."
"With the sword?"
"With both."
There was a pause.
"I can advise," Finn said. "Your body must learn the rest."
Before I could answer, movement caught my eye on the far side of a broken roadside shrine.
I stopped instantly.