A Father And Son Reunion.

Fenrir stayed in the room for the better part of an hour. He sat on the edge of the bed, pondering both his father's and Sareena's words. The silence was the worst part of it. In Outworld there was always something to answer: a messenger at the door, a decree waiting to be signed, or the queen's company to be shared. Here there was only a polished room that had waited decades for him.

Why couldn't he remember?

The question circled him like a vulture. Trauma, perhaps, would be the most reasonable answer. He was only a boy that night, and a boy's mind could bury many things. Yet he had forgotten nothing else about that night. Not the snow blowing through the shattered door, nor the weight of his mother's hands shoving him toward the vault...Neither the sound his brother made when he fell. Yet the only thing his father had asked him for he had no memory of, and yet he should, for he, through a peephole, with his brother, had seen his mother die...Or at least, that's how he remembered it.

Beneath that, pulling the thread tighter, was a second question he liked even less: "how long had he been gone from his people?" Hours? Days, perhaps. He could not tell, and the ignorance frightened him more than the truth about his past did. Somewhere beyond this harrowing realm, Jade, Kitana and Mileena were holding a throne together with their bare hands. If Outworld, if not it already had, learned that its emperor had died at Kuatan, there would not be a throne left to hold, for all hope would be lost. "Gods...what if Reiko execute-" He did not let himself finish the thought; it was too painful for his already shattered mind.

Out of habit, he reached for Arondite. The mark between his shoulders stayed cold. For as long as he could remember, the sword had been a weight he could lean against, a steady note beneath every other noise in his head. Now there was nothing to lean against.

Fenrir's thoughts circled back to Kronika's words that cold night months ago in the palace. "Find him. Understand him. Forgive him." He had not understood him. He had certainly not forgiven. He, for sure, had told the man to go fuck himself and walked away, and the worst part was that some small, traitorous corner of him had enjoyed it.

Then, unbidden, Jade's face, the promise he had made. "He won't come back," he had told her. "I won't let him. I promise."

Fenrir pressed the base of his hands against his eyes. She had asked him for one thing. One promise, made while the battlefield burned around them and her trust was held together by nothing but her will. And he was about to break it, hours after waking, in a bedroom she would never see.

There was one witness to that night who had never lied to him, because it had never needed to. His father remembered it his own way. Fenrir remembered it as a child had. There was only one voice that knew the whole story.

He crossed the room to the tall cheval mirror beside the wardrobe and stood before it. The man in the glass wore black and silver and a crimson sash. Fenrir looked like an emperor. He looked, Fenrir thought, like someone who had never once been afraid. Yet, that statement would soon be put on trial.

"Are you listening?" he said quietly.

The man in the mirror did not say it with him. Fenrir's lips had moved. The reflection had not at first. It watched him a full heartbeat before its mouth curved, and when the voice came, it came from both of them at once, like a hymn sung by two people who hated each other. "I always am."

Dark lines crept along the reflection's throat, branching toward its jaw. Fenrir looked down at his own hands and found them clean. In the glass, both eyes were burning, the pale blue one drowned in black.

Fenrir held his ground. Of every voice in every realm, there was only one he truly hated, and it was this one. "Did you kill her?"

"Do you have any idea how little that question narrows things down?" The reflection tilted its head. "I have killed so many, little flame. You will have to be more specific."

"Don't." The word came out of him flat and hard. "Don't play games with me. I closed the door on you more than once, and I can close it again. Answer."

"Close it?" The reflection smiled. "Fen. Look at who opened it. You always come back to me, whether you like it or not."

He flinched at the nickname; only those that loved him did use it, Jade did... and she used it with tenderness in her heart. In the entity's mouth it sounded like a mockery.

"Don't call me that."

"Then be precise, boy." He wanted, for one cowardly second, to put the lid back on and let his father's version of that night stay a lie told by a man he hated. But Argarath's voice still haunted his mind: "Who killed her, Fenrir? Not what. Who."

"Was it you?" he asked. "My mother. Alain. Was it you?" The silence stretched for far longer than the Nephilim would have wanted. He felt the cold understanding of it settle in his stomach: the thing inside him had never hesitated before. It only did when the answer mattered.

"No." The voice was quieter now, and for once it held no laughter. "I did not." A relieved breath left Fenrir in a rush. "The night happened just as you remember it. The door that shattered and how darkness burst from it, the vault where the boys hid, the little Nephilim who begged for revenge. I took what I could reach. But I was new then in a new body, and the boy’s body was small; a mind that size cannot hold something like me for long. When he took his hands back, I had to let him have them. Some of them died…Some of them ran away." A pause followed. "We ran too, afterwards. I covered your own tracks so well that you taught yourself to forget you had done it."

"What are you saying?" Fenrir said, puzzled at the entity's riddling words.

"Only that you remember the story; you lack the details." The entity laughed then, low and delighted. "You will understand. Soon enough."

"What does that mean, you fucking bastard?" The reflection's smile widened until it no longer looked like his face. In that moment, the entity tried to take over once again. Fenrir swiftly slammed the door shut inside his mind, the way he had taught himself to do throughout his life. Preventing the possession. The glass flickered slightly and showed only a tired man with blue eyes, breathing hard, one hand braced on the frame.

The veins were gone, and the room had grown quiet once again. He stayed there with his forehead almost touching the mirror. That was the thing about the entity. It never forced unless desperate. It waited to be invited. “I'm sorry, Jade.” He did not say it aloud. He did not feel he had earned the right.

Then, someone knocked at the bedroom door. "Lord Fenrir?" The voice beyond the door was low and slightly distorted. It was an oni’s voice. "I am Ulor, the keeper of the palace. Lord Argarath bids me tell you that dinner is ready, if you still wish to join him."

Fenrir straightened and looked at himself one more time. His light-blue eyes, the last of the Nephilim and emperor of Outworld, stared back at him. “Second chance…” he thought. "Tell him I'll be down."

"Sir." The oni's footsteps receded, heavy and unhurried, along the corridor.

---

Ulor was waiting at the end of the hallway when he emerged, a broad, hunched creature with grey skin and sharp teeth. Despite his broken structure, there was only unshakable loyalty in his eyes. He bowed deeply and did not raise his eyes until Fenrir had passed.

The Ashen Citadel unfolded around them as they walked. Fenrir found himself inspecting it carefully. He had been to the Netherrealm three times, and every visit had been a quick one: in, out, and gone before the realm could take notice of the half-blood trespassing on its soil. He had never set foot in the black-pyre domain out of prudence, and he had certainly never walked the halls of its palace.

He had expected a keep like the ones he knew, all bone and the like. Yet the Citadel was something else. Its foundations were obsidian, but the floors above had been laid in flawless black marble, polished to a mirror shine that threw back every passing figure in a cold and perfect reflection. Statues lined the great hall: demons, beasts and legendary warriors whose faces time had forgotten, yet not here in these ancient halls. Tapestries hung between them, heavy with embroidered fire. Everything was ordered, symmetrical, and quiet.

Beneath it all, so low he even felt it in his bones before he heard it, something hummed. A slow and patient pulse, like a forge the size of a mountain, working somewhere deep underneath the stone. “Ulor,” The hunched Oni turned to him. “What’s this vibration I’m sensing?” Fenrir asked, curious.

"The foundry, my lord," Ulor said, catching his glance. "It has not stopped since the dawn of time. The Citadel is built over it. Some say the heartbeat is the realm's own."

Fenrir said nothing. They passed servants in the corridors, oni and lesser demons in black livery, each of them stopped as he approached. Most bowed in respect due to the demon hunter’s reputation. A few did not look at him at all; perhaps they didn’t like his presence here. One, an older female, just like Ulor in appearance, with horns broken short at the tips, did something worse. She stared at his jaw, his brow and features. Her hand rose slowly to her chest as though she were looking at a ghost.

Ulor cleared his throat. She flinched and hurried off. "Forgive her," the oni murmured. "She was in the household when your mother lived."

"When she lived here?" Fenrir asked, shocked. That didn’t fit with the story he was told.

"When she visited in secret, my lord." Ulor's eyes flicked to the floor. "Not often, though. Her visits were always kept secret. But those of us, just us two, who remember cannot help but see her in you." Fenrir looked ahead and kept walking. It was the least he could do with an answer like that.

Farther along, an archway stood open on a chamber lit by braziers. Inside, a vast table of black stone held a map carved directly into its surface: the entirety of the Netherrealm laid out. Hundreds of small, figure-sized settlements sat scattered across it. Black-pyre sigils clustered thickest at its centre, but around them, thinner and farther out, were banners he did not recognise: a white skull on grey, a coiled serpent, a broken crown. Dozens of them. Each mark seemed to have been placed with care.

On the far side of the map, enormous and unmistakable, a single black spire had been carved into the stone. "The lord's war council meets here," Ulor said, seeing the Nephilim’s keen eye interested. "The household legions are all you will see from the walls tonight, my lord. The rest are spread across the borders. It is not wise to bring so many so close to the Spire while it still watches."

Fenrir stood in the archway a moment longer. A map like that did not belong to a man who played at rebellion. Then they were moving again as the great doors of the dining hall rose before them.

The table was long and laid for three. Black cloth, golden cups and a centrepiece of unlit candles. At its head sat Argarath, hands folded, watching the door. At his right, in her own chair, sat Sareena.

The girl had changed for the occasion. The jacket and the straps were gone; in their place she wore a close-fitting tunic of black leather, high at the throat and cut sharply across the shoulders, its crimson lining flashing at the seams whenever she moved. Fingerless gloves ran to her elbows. The silver streak in her hair had been pinned back from her face. Truth be told, she appeared relaxed. The casual attire she wore confirmed that.

Argarath rose as his son entered. "Fenrir." There was no grin in it, only a restrained and careful warmth. He gestured to the chair at his left. "Please. Sit. We have been waiting."

Fenrir sat, yet he did not look away from his father. Across the table, Sareena studied him in silence over the rim of her cup. Servants flooded the room as soon as he was seated. Wine was poured into the golden cups. Appetisers and the main plate were precisely and swiftly arranged. Then they were gone.

"I hope you have kept your taste for meat," Argarath said, lifting his cup. "It is the only fare this realm offers that will not poison you."

Sareena choked on her wine, seeing her lord being so considerate for someone; it was amusing. She recovered by covering her mouth with the back of her glove, shoulders shaking, and when she looked up, Fenrir caught the very end of a smile in her face, then something else formed. Surprise. It wasn't from the earlier amusement, but from Argarath's mouth, where a real smile had come and gone like a crack in ice. Her eyes flicked to him, then deliberately to her plate.

Rare, then, Fenrir thought. Or rare for him to let anyone see him show emotion. Then, with composure, he asked: "What is all this?"

"Dinner,” Argarath said nonchalantly. “I do remember you lot have those back in Earthrealm still, don’t you?”

"You know what I meant." He set his cup down untouched. "Why did you bring me back?"

The room held its breath. Argarath did not move; his crimson gaze rested on his son with the heavy patience of a man who had once stood unmoved before armies. "I do not know."

Fenrir waited for the rest of the lie. Yet it did not come. Beside his father, Sareena had lowered her cup, and the frown she wore was not for show. She had not known either. "That is not an answer," Fenrir said.

"It is the truest one I have." Argarath cut a piece of meat, considered it, and set down his knife. "Four nights ago, I dreamed. I do not dream easily. I have not dreamed in two hundred years. But I heard your mother's voice, Fenrir, and beside it another voice, one that no demon, no sorcerer and no god of the lesser sort could have made. It had weight and unspoken presence."

Fenrir's chest tightened. The Ixmucane ritual rose in his memory: his mother's face, her calm, the words she had spoken. The answers you seek are in the Netherrealm. Only your father holds them… "What did they say?" The emperor asked.

"That I would see you again soon and that I had a task concerning you, and concerning this realm's future." Argarath's jaw flexed. "Then, riddles. That you were divided in two. That fate must be rewritten if you were to survive." His mouth twisted. "I suppose we now know what the second one meant."

Fenrir said nothing for a moment. He was thinking of the goddess of time and the way she had looked at him in the arena long ago, as though he were a number that did not fit the sum. Irregular, she had called him.

"A woman once told me my fate doesn't behave naturally," he said slowly. "That I wasn't written where I should have been."

"Then you know about this voice I’m speaking of?" Argarath asked with a raised brow.

"No…I did not." Fenrir asked, just as puzzled.

"Nor have I." Argarath studied him a moment longer, and something shifted in his expression, a flicker of the old lord behind the father. "I am as old as this realm's oldest scars, my son. I can feel the shape of things before they arrive. When you died, I felt the fire still. That is all I know. I cannot tell you why your mother's voice asked it of me, or why the other voice agreed. I only know that I could not leave it be."

The words my son spoke sting the Nephilim deeply in his soul. “This is too strange,” he said at last. “None of it makes sense. Why you, of all people?”

“I do not know,” Argarath admitted, and Sareena’s brow rose. “But I assure you of this. Sooner or later, we shall reach the bottom of the hand that fate has dealt us.”

---

The dinner went on, and for a time the only constant was the low hum of the foundry beneath the floor. Silverware clinked against gold and wine was poured and left undrunk. Argarath ate slowly, with the exact economy of a man for whom meals had long since become a duty rather than a pleasure, and Fenrir matched him out of something between pride and defiance, until Sareena, who had endured the silence far longer than anyone had a right to expect, set her cup down with a decisive click.

“Does anyone here know how to have a conversation,” she said, “or did we all agree to chew until one of us died?”

“Sareena,” Argarath said, in a tone that was half warning and wholly fond.

“What? Someone has to.” She leaned forward on one elbow, the crimson lining of her tunic flashing. “Emperor. I’ve heard a lot about you from the old man, and none of it in your own words. Tell me something true. How does a demon hunter end up on a throne?”

“With terrible luck,” Fenrir said, and surprised himself by almost smiling.

So, he told them. Yet, not all of it, nor in order. He told them about hunting through the Earthrealm’s long nights, years of fighting and borrowed shelters, of waking with his back against cold walls and his hand already closed around a hilt. He told them about Raiden and the tournament. The roar of the arena as Shao Kahn’s helmet cracked and scattered across the sand. About Sun Do.

Somewhere in the telling, Argarath began to ask questions of his own: short and precise at first. Then less so, and finally nothing but the questions of a father who had missed a decade and was trying to buy it back one detail at a time.

“The sword,” Argarath said at one point. “Arondite. Your mother gave it to you, I suppose?”

“Yes, the first time I invoked it was the night she died. Though at the time I didn’t know how I accomplished it… I thought you knew.” Fenrir asked, puzzled.

Argarath shook his head. “No, I suppose she kept it as a secret to protect you two in case she couldn’t anymore.”

Fenrir paused. Then, his voice sharpened. “Where is it?”

“Sealed. Safe.” Argarath did not flinch. “The blade is bound to the fire of this realm. Had I allowed you to carry it through my halls, every demon from here to the Spire would have felt you arrive. I will return it to you once possible.”

Fenrir let the matter rest, but his hand drifted to the mark between his shoulders. Without the sword, the extra power that it gave him, the thing inside his soul was louder. He was almost sure of it. When he looked up, he found Argarath watching him. The old demon’s eyes flicked, very briefly, to Fenrir’s chest and away again. He set his cup down carefully. “How long was I gone?”

Sareena’s gaze dropped to her plate. Argarath took his time in answering. “Time, as I suppose you know from your studies, does not behave here as it does normally,” he said at last. “I could give you a number, but it would be a guess dressed as a fact, and I have promised myself not to lie to you tonight. We will speak of it when I have something better to offer.”

It was not a comforting answer. Fenrir swallowed it anyway, because he had no better choice, and because the alternative was to ask again and risk learning the answer.

Sareena had her own question ready, though it came out quieter than her last. “Who was she? The one with the staff.”

Fenrir blinked. “I never mentioned a staff.”

“You never mentioned her at all.” She tilted her head, her silver streak slipping free of its pin. “Every story you told had a hole in the middle of it, one you tried to avoid. I suppose it was someone you cared about deeply, most likely a woman.”

Fenrir was quiet for a long moment. The firelight caught the edge of his cup, and in it he saw Jade’s face, as clearly as if she were seated at the table. “Her name is Jade.”

He did not elaborate, and Sareena, to her credit, did not push. Something crossed her face that might have been disappointment or, most likely, understanding. She turned her attention to her wine with a small, rueful twist of her mouth. Argarath, who missed nothing, said only, “She matters to you, as the other two and crimson woman do.”

“More than anything,” Fenrir answered remorsefully.

“Then you will want to leave quickly.”

“I want to leave now.” He answered with conviction.

“I know.” Argarath’s voice was gentle; yet there was no smile in it. “Eat. You will need it.”

They ate. At some point the plates were cleared, and the wine refilled. Fenrir found himself asking the questions he had promised himself he would not: how had it been, those fifteen years? Where had Argarath gone? Had the Netherrealm known? His father answered every one, and that unsettled him more than any silence could have. He had steeled himself for the careful evasions of a man with something to hide. Instead, Argarath spoke plainly, as though each answer cost him a little less than the one before.

He had spent a decade and a half burying a crime. Fenrir’s mother had been a woman of Earthrealm, a champion and a mighty warrior in her own right. Her sons had been Nephilim: children of a union the inquisitors of the Netherrealm would have burned a city to prevent. After the night of the attack, Argarath had rewritten everything: records, rumours, and the whereabouts of his own Earthrealm household. He had ensured that no hunter, human or demon, learned who had fathered the boy who walked out of that burning house. It had cost him everything but his title. He could not leave the Netherrealm to search for his son without inviting questions, and questions led to investigations, and investigations led to graves.

“Then you hunted them,” Fenrir said. “The ones who came that night.”

“Sareena and I did.” Argarath’s voice did not change. “One by one. Some had run far. Others had sworn that they saw nothing until the end.” He folded his hands on the cloth. “Now, there is one left.”

Fenrir said, very quietly: “Who?”

“Not tonight.” His father said solemnly.

“You told me you’d answer my questions.”

“I said I would answer what I could provide a definitive answer on. A name given in anger and still uncertainty would only lead to more unnecessary death, Fenrir.” Argarath’s eyes held his. “I will tell you. All of it. But you sit in, according to you, a stranger’s house with no weapon and a war waiting at your door. I will not hand you a blade you cannot yet lift.”

Fenrir held his father’s gaze. Every instinct he owned told him this was a refusal dressed as mercy. But a smaller voice, quieter and more stubborn, observed that Argarath had said I will, not I might. It was as near to a promise as the man could give.

“Who else knows?” he asked. “Who knows that you’re my father?”

“Sareena. Raiden. My two most trusted servants, as I suppose you already met.” He said, referring to Ulor and the elder woman. “And you.”

The corner of Fenrir’s mouth twitched, and he hated it for doing so. Argarath only closed his eyes, and that fleeting crack of a smile touched his lips a second time. Sareena’s gaze went to it, then to her plate, and stayed there. She had served this man for decades, and she could now count the number of times she had seen him smile on one hand, and both of them had happened tonight.

“You should not have survived,” she said, abruptly, still not looking up. “I mean that kindly. Nephilim aren’t meant to live past childhood. Half the old clans will swear your kind is a story we tell our children to keep them away from human beds. The few who were born either died or went mad with power before they were struck down like vermin.” She finally lifted her eyes to him; they were bright and serious. “Do you have any idea how rare you are?”

Fenrir said nothing. He did not know what to say to a sentence like that. He only turned his cup a slow half-circle on the cloth and watched the firelight tilt across the gold.

---

When the last dish had been carried away, Argarath rose with a murmured excuse and walked to the tall doors at the far end of the hall. They opened onto the night. Fenrir stood up from his chair as well and watched his father’s silhouette until he realised he had been staring for a full minute, as if the old demon might vanish if he looked away.

“Are you going to keep watching him,” Sareena said at his shoulder, “or are you going to pull your head out of the gutter and go talk to him?”

He glanced sideways. She stood with her arms crossed, the white streak in her hair slipping free of its pin, her expression carefully bored. “What do you get out of it?”

“Entertainment.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “Hell is extremely boring.”

He laughed before he could stop himself, one short, genuine breath through the nose. She grinned as though she had won something. There was a quickness in her, a mouth that had a habit of hiding a wound behind a joke, that reminded him of Mileena so sharply that the laughter died in his chest. Sareena saw it die, yet she did not dare to ask.

“You’re leaving the moment you can, aren’t you?” she said, more softly.

“I have a war to finish.” He met her eyes. “My people need me.”

She did not argue. She understood duty better than most; it was the language she had been raised in. Yet for reasons she could not have named, she found herself wishing he didn’t. She set one hand briefly on his shoulder tenderly. “Then talk to him. At least let him say goodbye.” She left with quiet steps, her boots barely whispering across the marble. Fenrir stood alone in the great hall a moment longer. Then he stood and walked toward the balcony.

The balcony was a long arc of black stone open to the sky. The Netherrealm bled in every direction. Far off, mountains split open to liberate rivers of lava across an ashen plain. Ash drifted down through. Above, the sky hung low and bruised, choked with black clouds that dragged a perpetual dusk across the realm. On the horizon, perched on its cliff like a crow, the capital of the Netherrealm, Vraethos, glittered in hollow lights.

Closer, in the shadow of the Citadel, a scattering of encampments settled. Tents were clustered around watchfires. Soldiers moved between them who had stopped hoping for a quiet night long ago. Obsidian banners bearing the black-pyre sigil snapped above every tent. Fenrir counted a few hundred fires at least. It was a modest host, but he had seen the map in that chamber of braziers, and he understood now that this was the household guard. The rest waited elsewhere, along the borders, patiently for their moment to strike.

And beyond them, rising like a spine from the realm’s heart, stood Xanagore: the black stronghold of the Brotherhood of Shadows, a city built around a single tower. Its peak vanished into the clouds. Shinnok’s Spire. Even looking at it made the air feel thinner. Fenrir remembered the warning the veteran hunters gave their apprentices: “Never go to Xanagore, not even if your soul was taken into it.”

Argarath stood at the railing with a cigar burning between two fingers, his gaze fixed on Xanagore. Fenrir came to stand at his side. “It is peaceful tonight,” Argarath said without turning.

“Peaceful?” The word was absurd. This was the Netherrealm. It could be many things, malignant above all. It was never peaceful.

“Listen.” Fenrir almost refused. But there was something in his father’s face, half test and half plea, that, reluctantly, made him close his eyes. “Not with your ears,” Argarath said. “You have been a hunter long enough to know the difference. Let the realm in.”

Fenrir breathed out, and the Netherrealm came to him. At first there was only the thick, smothering air and the faint wail of the Styx, the drowned dead crying out for no one. Then something beneath it: a presence, vast and slow, moving under the noise. The fire in the ancient stone. The pulse of the foundry. The heat that held the entire realm together. It was calm. It felt like a hand laid carefully over a dormant animal. It flowed through the rock, the wind and through him.

“That is it,” Argarath murmured. “Stay there.”

Then, the shadow arrived. It came like cold and malignant. Something was hunting the calm. Then a shriek tore through the stillness, ragged and hungry. Fenrir pulled out of the trance so violently that he stumbled against the railing and caught himself with both hands. His lungs burned. His ears were ringing.

“You felt it,” Argarath said; he had not moved.

“What was that?” Fenrir asked as he tried to compose himself.

“The calm before the storm.” Argarath exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “What you felt first was the Netherrealm itself, the heart of the realm, speaking to its child. You are demon as much as human, Fenrir. You carry an ancient blood inside. You have spent so few hours in this place that you never learned it could answer you.”

Fenrir straightened slowly. The realm had spoken to him. Perhaps that was what his mother’s spirit had meant. Perhaps the power he needed did not live in his sword or his temper, but here, in the place his blood had come from. “And the scream?”

“Belokk.” The name left Argarath’s mouth like something he wished to spit out. “A demon lord of my own standing, and a loyal dog of the Brotherhood.”

“It sounded like a war cry. Aimed at you.”

“It was.” Argarath turned at last. The fatherly expression had gone from his face; only the demon lord remained. “Many other clans, under my leadership, have declared war on Shinnok.”

Fenrir stared at him. Then he laughed, a short, hard sound that grew into something uglier. “So that’s it. All of it was for this. You needed a soldier.”

“Yes,” Argarath said, without hesitation. “That was one reason…Yet, it wasn’t the only one.”

“Speak. Now.” Fenrir said coldly, reaching the limit of his patience. “Or I walk off this balcony and find my own way out.”

“I did not lie about the dream.” Argarath did not raise his voice. “And I believe it has something to do with what you carry inside you.”

Fenrir’s eyes widened. He took a step backwards. “What...How do you know?”

“Do you believe I cannot feel it?” There was a fiery conviction in the old demon’s gaze now, and under it, a hatred as old as the rock they stood on. Yet, it was not directed at Fenrir but at the being that lived inside of him. “I know whom you made your bargain with to survive that night. I knew the moment you opened your eyes in my halls.”

“Then say the name,” Fenrir said, barely audible.

“Not within these walls.” Argarath’s eyes flicked, once, to the black spire on the horizon. “Fire carries words in this realm, my son, and the Spire has very long ears. When I say it, I will say it where nothing can overhear.”

“That’s awfully convenient if I say so.”

“It is necessary.” Argarath lowered the cigar, and his voice softened, not by much, but enough to hurt. “I will tell you something else, and you may believe it or not. I did not raise my banner against Shinnok merely to defend the living. He took this realm from the one who ruled before him, from our ancestors. There is an old debt that has existed ever since then.” He narrowed his eyes. “I mean to see it collected.”

Then, his tone shifted once again. To a warmer one. “If I had let you go and stay in the void. Then, I would have let the last of her slip through my fingers.” His throat dried with sorrow. “I could not allow that spark to go out.”

Fenrir looked at him, searching for the lie beneath his tone. Yet, there was none to find. There was only an old man who had built a palace to now grieve in, one who had polished every floor of it for a son who never came. “He is a broken man…He…he truly loved her”, Fenrir thought. “What do you want?” he asked at last.

“One day. Help me with this war.”

“One day.” Fenrir’s laugh was brittle. “You know what you’re asking. A day in your realm is the better part of a week in mine. I’ve already lost I don’t know how long in the void, and you want to take another week from me.”

Argarath did not look away. “I know what I am asking, and I will not insult you by pretending it costs nothing.” He drew a slow breath. “But Belokk is moving. If he reaches the borders unchecked, the Brotherhood will be beyond even me. They will march into Earthrealm under Shinnok’s banner, and after Earthrealm, then another realm, and another, until there is nothing left to guard.” He gestured toward the waste, the watchfires, the long black tower. “Your people will not be saved by you hurrying home. They will be saved by whether this war is won.”

Fenrir did not answer. In his chest, beneath the hollow where Arondite should have been, something cold turned over and settled. The last line of defence between life and ruin, he thought, was the damned. It was almost funny. “What exactly would you have me do?”

“Retrieve an item for the war effort. I will tell you what, and where, it is at first light. When you return with it, I will take you home myself. And I will make you strong enough to meet what is waiting for you there.”

Whether Fenrir liked it or not, he was bargaining with the wind, and he knew it. Argarath held every door. And yet Fenrir turned the offer over in his mind and found that it was the only one he truly had if he wanted to win. For Reiko, with a storm of stolen souls, had become stronger than before. If Fenrir returned as he was, he would die at that man’s feet a second time, and there would be no father waiting in the dark to pull him back this time. His mother had told him he needed Argarath to unlock the rest of what slept inside him. Perhaps this was what she had meant.

“I have terms,” he said.

Argarath’s brow arched. For the first time all evening, he looked genuinely pleased. “I would think less of you if you did not.”

“My sword. My revolver. Both, before I set foot outside this palace.”

“Done. The moment you depart.”

“A way to reach my palace. A message, an envoy, anything.”

The pleasure left his father’s face. “Impossible.” Argarath’s voice was low and sorry. “No message crosses between realms without being read, and any carrier would be traced to you by nightfall. Hear me, Fenrir. If I could, I would have sent word the moment you woke.”

It struck harder than he had expected. Fenrir looked down at his hands and said nothing for several breaths. “The name,” he said. “The one who’s left. The one who killed her.”

“When you return.” Argarath did not hesitate. “I will give you everything. Not before.”

“And if you’re lying?”

“Then you will have your sword in your hand and a very good reason to use it.”

Fenrir let that sit. He thought of Jade’s hand in his, and of the promise he had broken in front of a mirror. He thought of the thing waiting inside of him patiently for its moment. If he came back, he would come back as the man she had asked him to be, or he would not come back at all.

“One day,” he said.

“One day, and nothing more,” Argarath stated solemnly.

Fenrir’s gaze rose to the black spire, dropped to the dim fires, and settled on the horizon where a pale flare of molten rock bled across the dark. Ash kept falling, soft and grey and endless, like snow. “When do we begin?”

“At dawn.” Argarath tapped ash over the railing and watched it fall.

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