As the final words of Aria’s farewell dissolved into the heavy mist of the graveyard, Kaiser reached out and seized her arm, not roughly, but with the deliberate inevitability of a man pulling a sword from its sheath. There was no hesitation in his movement, nor any softness. Aria offered no resistance. She allowed herself to be guided away from the graves, her eyes closed, her face caught somewhere between peace and devastation.

  They walked in silence, the world around them muted except for the grinding crunch of gravel beneath their boots, a funeral drumbeat that marked their slow passage through fields of stone and memory. Kaiser stole glances at her from the corner of his eye — at the faint tear tracks marring her cheeks, at the rigid line of her jaw — but he said nothing. He knew better than to pierce a silence still bleeding from an open wound. Some battles were fought within, unseen, and he respected the weight of her war.

  He turned his gaze elsewhere, to the figures that floated among the graves: the death fairies, their jet-black robes brushing the air an inch above the earth, their white masks blank, featureless, and somehow all the more disturbing for it. They drifted like living shadows, telling silent, incomprehensible stories to the dead.

  One perched atop a crumbling tombstone, weaving unseen adventures with sweeping gestures. Another knelt beside a grave, crooning low nonsense that only the earth could understand. The scene was absurd, and for the first time in many long years, Kaiser felt something close to disorientation clawing at the edges of his mind. This was not a battlefield he understood. This was not a kingdom he could conquer. It was a place that had forgotten the living, and Kaiser, for all his strength, was an intruder here.

  Then, from beside him, he heard a soft giggle. He turned his head slightly, catching the barest glimpse of a true smile curling on Aria’s lips, a smile fragile and unguarded, but born not from politeness but from something real clawing its way out of the wreckage.

  “That’s better,” Kaiser said, his voice light, though his relief was real.

  Aria turned her head?slightly towards him, a smile still lingering on her lips. “What’s better?”

  “You smiling. It looks good on you, more than…” He waved vaguely at her face.

  “Crying?” she said,?raising an eyebrow.

  “Grieving,” he corrected. “But yes, that too.”

  They took a few more steps in silence before Aria’s voice rose once again. "So... what’s our next move?"

  Kaiser hesitated, just for an instant. The question, simple as it was, carried the weight of expectation, command and direction. Things he usually had no shortage of. Yet before he could answer, his stomach growled, betraying him, and shattering the moment's gravity like a hammer against glass. He closed his eyes briefly, feeling a rare and unwelcome flash of embarrassment.

  Aria laughed, bright and unburdened, and Kaiser found, to his own reluctant amusement, that he didn’t mind the sound. “You haven’t eaten?” she asked, half-worry, half-mockery.

  Kaiser exhaled sharply through his nose. “Not for two days. It wasn’t... a priority.”

  Her smirk was wicked, playful. “Well, there’s always spider flesh. I have a whole storeroom full of it back in the forest. Tastes like dirt tho.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Kaiser gave her a sideways look of pure disdain, but without real malice. “If I’m desperate enough to eat one of those cursed things, I’ll make sure to die first.”

  Aria laughed, her voice playful again. “Fine. But the nearest city is three days’ walk away. You think you can survive that long without eating?” Kaiser just sighed, but smiled and nodded.

  She laughed again, the sound light and genuine. For a moment, the weight of the graveyard, the loss, and the absurdity of their situation seemed to lift.

  As they walked, the tombstones gave way to wild grass and stubborn roots that clawed through the soil. Mist broke apart, torn by blades of sunlight slicing down from a clearer sky. Kaiser noticed it before he felt it — the shift. The cold was less cutting here. The air less burdened. Life was beginning to return to the land, creeping in slowly like an invading army. He adjusted his stride to match Aria’s smaller steps, but he said nothing of it. She needed no coddling.

  Yet the question still gnawed at him, relentless as an old wound reopened. He stole another glance at her. The way she walked, so sure, so precise, despite those sightless, hollow eyes. He couldn’t let the mystery fester any longer. "Aria," he said, his voice low, a slow roll of thunder. "How do you see?"

  She tilted her head at him, as if surprised he’d waited this long to ask. "Through them," she answered simply, cryptically.

  Before he could demand clarity, two shapes dropped from the canopy above — spiders, their backs painted with faintly glowing blue eyes. They moved with unsettling precision, crawling across her arms, up her shoulders, and into the hollow voids of her eyes.

  Kaiser stood still, unflinching, though something inside him shifted — a slow, inevitable respect for the girl and the extent of her power.

  Where there had once been horror, there was now adaptation. Evolution. Strength. She had not wept over her loss. She had turned it into something new.

  "Better?" Aria asked softly.

  Kaiser nodded once. "Better," he said, his tone unreadable.

  She smiled faintly, and then, as if offering him a piece of her armor, she spoke again. "I lost them six months ago," she said. "At first... it was a punishment. I thought if I couldn’t see the world, maybe the world couldn’t see me. Maybe I could disappear."

  Her words were light, but Kaiser heard the weight beneath them. The slow, grinding weight of a soul that had learned too young how deeply the world could wound. "I stayed in the darkness," she continued. "Let it swallow me whole. I thought the silence would bring peace."

  "And?" Kaiser asked, his voice a blade pressed lightly against the moment.

  Aria’s smile was brittle but real. "It didn’t."

  The wind stirred around them, rustling the high grass. Somewhere, a crow cried once, distant and hollow. Kaiser watched her for a long moment, then simply said, "Good."

  She blinked, the blue glow in her sockets flickering. "Good?"

  "You didn’t lose yourself," he said. "You endured. And after all..." He allowed a faint, almost rare smile to flicker across his lips. "It led to the two of us meeting. And I find that quite a good thing."

  Aria blinked, the blue glow in her sockets softening, and for a heartbeat, she looked almost human again... Fragile, yes, but no longer hollow.

  'If the darkness had broken you,' he thought to himself, 'You would have been useless to me.'

  A beat of silence, and then, to his quiet satisfaction, she laughed. A small, weary laugh, but a real one nonetheless.

  "You’re an idiot," she said, shaking her head, the faintest ghost of a smile pulling at her lips.

  Kaiser smirked, sharp and dangerous. "Maybe," he said, his voice dry as the grave. He shifted his gaze toward the endless graves around them, then back to her with a look that pinned her in place. "But you're the one following the idiot. Doesn’t that make you the bigger fool?"

  Aria opened her mouth, as if to snap back, but faltered, her cheeks coloring slightly as she realized she had no real retort. Kaiser’s smirk deepened, almost imperceptibly, as he watched her wrestle with it.

  "Don’t worry," he added, his tone deceptively light as he turned away and began walking again, his coat stirring behind him like a banner in the wind. "I’m good at dragging idiots to better places."

  For a moment, Aria stood there, caught between indignation and laughter, and then she hurried to catch up, her steps falling in beside his.