Alex stared at the young woman encased in clear crystal, her form frozen mid-breath, caught in a single moment of quiet acceptance just before life had stopped keeping time for her.

A smile spread across his face, radiant, unguarded, the kind that rarely any moment demanded.

But his eyes betrayed something else entirely.

Normally dark as the abyss, giving away nothing, offering no window into whatever moved behind them, they now carried a clear, glassy sheen, a tear building at the edge of falling and, for the moment, refusing to actually fall.

"Zahra." His voice came out quiet. "Can you believe we met in this place a decade ago." He shook his head slowly, as if the number itself refused to sit comfortably in his mind. "I feel like it was just some time ago."

He smiled, his eyes tracing the familiar lines of her frozen face the way he must have done a hundred times before, in a hundred different quiet moments just like this one.

"We met because you saw me as a tool. A means to your revenge." A small huff of breath left him, not quite a laugh. "But fate has a strange sense of humor, doesn’t it? Without you, I would be dead right now. An empty soul, worn like a glove by that monster."

"It was as if we were made for each other," he said softly. "I still wonder, sometimes, when you truly caught feelings for me."

"It was certainly before you told me the truth, after you gave up trying to convince me to leave the Ancestral Realm and simply decided I needed a reason to." He paused, his jaw tightening slightly. "But you never told me exactly when."

"We never had the luxury of sitting down and simply talking about it... about us. There was always some new disaster waiting its turn. Most of what we had, we found in the cracks between one battle and the next, stolen in whatever quiet the realm war happened to leave us."

He was quiet for a moment, letting the memory of that time settle over him, the noise of it, the constant motion, the particular exhaustion of two people trying to build something soft in the middle of something that refused to stop being hard.

"I know when it happened for me, though." His voice softened further, the edges of the smile deepening into something more private. "It was the night I defeated Zarach. I blacked out afterward, from the aftershock of wielding the will of the Ancient." He exhaled, something warm moving through the memory even now.

"I opened my eyes in your lap, and for a moment, before my mind caught up with where I actually was, I thought I had died." A small chuckle escaped him. "I thought I had woken up in heaven."

"It was quite a moment." He shook his head slowly, the smile lingering. "The days after that, I kept coming back to that moment, replaying it in my head, and I was so certain it had to be one of your tricks, that you had done something to make me believe I had feelings for you, because you did have one of the most broken abilities in existence for making exactly that kind of thing possible."

A pause, softer now.

"It took me longer than it should have to admit it wasn’t a trick at all, and if it was, I no longer cared."

He leaned forward slightly, his hand finally coming to rest against the cold surface of the crystal, his palm flat against where her hand would have been beneath the crystal.

"I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if we had found each other sooner. If we hadn’t spent so much of what little time we had just surviving." His voice dropped lower, quieter, carrying the particular ache of a question with no answer left to give it. "Maybe the future would look different now. Maybe we could have found a way out of that realm together. Maybe..."

He stopped.

The word hung there, unfinished.

--------

Alex slowly opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was a face, breathtaking, suspended just above his own, close enough that for a moment it was the entirety of his vision. Her irises held two mesmerizing depths, the deepest black swirling against the richest white, colors that seemed to move even while perfectly still.

Her expression was calm. Cold, in the particular way that beauty carved from ice was cold, flawless and composed.

’I must be in heaven,’ Alex thought, his mind free of any memory, arriving at the only conclusion that seemed to fit.

"Congratulations on the victory," Zahra said, her voice calm and measured, though a trace of genuine warmth deepened its pleasant depth.

Her voice broke through the small, quiet reverie Alex was floating in. The comment jolted something within him, as weeks’ worth of memory came crashing down all at once, no gentle unspooling, just the full and sudden weight of everything arriving together.

Alex groaned, closing his eyes briefly against it, giving himself a moment to sort the flood into something manageable before opening them again.

’I must have been exhausted from the battle against Zarach.’ A headache was already building behind his eyes, slow and heavy, pressing in from somewhere at the base of his skull.

’I ended up using the Descent of the Dark Ancient, and that seems to have taken whatever mana I had left with it, and when I stopped using it,’ He winced internally at the memory of it. ’The pain was genuinely terrible. And then, nothing. I just blacked out.’

’I did win, though.’ He let that settle; a relieved sigh couldn’t help but escape him before his face brightened with a smile. ’So it was worth it.’

Alex suddenly realized he was lying on a lay’s lap, so he rolled swiftly onto his side and away before pushing himself upright.

He let his senses wash over his body and realised that, besides the headache which was slowly retreating, fading into something more manageable with each passing second. Beyond that lingering ache, he felt, remarkably, fine.

"I owe you for this victory," Alex said, offering her a genuine smile once he’d fully settled upright. "Without the skill gained from the artifact you found for me, I would have lost that fight. No question about it."

He looked down at his own hands for a moment, turning the thought over, as the memory of inhabiting the will of a being whose power lay beyond his comprehension. The experience remained vivid, yet burdened with too many mysteries for him to fully grasp.

"I suppose I still have a long way to grow, if I want to stand on par with the best of my own rank," he added, speaking more to himself than to her, as glipses of his battle against Zarach resurfaced as well.

"Good thing the realm is at war, then." Zahra’s voice carried a faint, dry amusement. "War brings no shortage of opportunity to temper oneself." A pause, her tone shifting slightly. "Also, you already promised me one favour in exchange for my help. No need to add anything further to that particular debt."

Alex nodded, giving her a long, considering look before his gaze dropped to his own crossed legs.

He raised his hands, hovering them a few inches above his knees, and a breath later the air beneath his hands blurred, space folding and unfolding in the span of an instant, and a blade appeared in a flash of movement.

Abyss black, Long and sleek, double-edged, its surface catching what little light existed in the clearing and returning none of it, a dark glint running the length of both edges.

"Umbris," Alex whispered, the metal cold beneath his fingers as he closed his hand around the hilt. "Sorry for losing you. It won’t happen again." He held the blade a moment longer, his voice dropping further, quieter, more private. "As an apology, I promise to restore you to your true nature as quickly as possible."

The blade hummed faintly beneath his palm, as if in recognition, slow and quiet, the closest thing to acknowledgment a weapon like this one could offer.

His fingers closed fully around the grip of his legacy blade, the same weapon that had carried him through years of battles. He raised it, turning the blade to the side, feeling its perfect weight shift exactly where he willed it, responsive in a way that felt less like an object being moved and more like an extension simply following intention.

The blade was already drawing on his mana, feeding on it the way something starved fed on the first meal it had been offered in too long, its cold edge radiating a darkness that seemed to deepen the shadows around them.

He sat with the sword for nearly ten minutes.

Not moving. Not speaking. Simply letting the two of them settle back into familiarity with each other. The sword had no will of its own, not in the way a living thing possessed one, but its connection to Alex ran deeper than words had ever managed to properly describe, and if he paid close enough attention, he could feel something there. A hint. Small, and faint, and unmistakably present regardless of how weak it remained.

Eventually, he returned it to his space ring, and then he drew a deep breath.

Across from him, Zahra sat in silence, watching, giving him the space the moment required without filling it with anything unnecessary. A full minute passed before he finally looked up at her again, a silent message conveyed without a word spoken aloud.

He drew another breath and let his mind reach into his space ring again, his senses washing briefly over the hundreds of items stored within it before narrowing, focusing, settling entirely on a single blade of unique design resting at the very heart of the ring’s contents.

Suspended in the open, empty space of the pocket space, the sword hung motionless. A darkness that stood out even against the lightless expanse surrounding it.