"I….I remember. I remember the drought." His voice had lost its commanding edge, leaving something smaller underneath.
"I was supposed to bring rain. I was supposed to go to them and—" he stopped. The next breath he took was unsteady and uneven.
"Why did I leave? Why did I just let them die?"
"Focus!" Lucius landed in the plaza and snapped the word at him like a command.
The plaza had filled in their absence. Dozens of paladins in golden ceremonial armour had formed a loose ring around the perimeter, weapons drawn, and held ready, but not one of them had taken a step closer.
The divine energy pouring off Aurelius in unsteady waves was enough to keep even fully armed soldiers rooted to their spots, and Lucius had just struck a god and drawn blood.
The civilians who hadn't fled had gathered at the outer edges of the plaza instead, packed into windows and doorways and every available vantage point, watching in a silence so completely still, it had its own weight. Some called out in praises and chants, and it was impossible to tell if it was for Aurelius or for Lucius. Maybe they didn't know either.
Aurelius stared at the blood on his own hands, turning it over slowly, watching the way it glowed in an otherworldly glow. Then he laughed, a fractured sound with no humour in it, desperate and hollow ad too old for his small face.
"You actually hurt me. A mortal, a mortal, actually hurt a god."
He raised both hands, palms flat toward each other. Solar energy began building in the space between them, condensing visibly, compressing itself tighter with every passing second.
The temperature spiked hard enough that the air itself wavered. The flagstones of the plaza began to crack and discolour. A sphere had formed, the size of a cart, dense with enough concentrated divine mana to do something catastrophic.
"Lets see you survive this!"
He released it.
Lucius drove both palms forward and opened absorption as wide as it could go. The sphere hit him like a physical wall, divine energy slamming into him and fighting back, not passive power, but something dangerous and active in its resistance.
It burned inside him as he absorbed it and pushed back. He gritted his teeth and held the channel open, draining it steadily, forcing the conversion.
[Absorption In Progress...]
[Divine Energy: EXTREME]
[HP: 105 → 92 → 85]
The sphere shrank down to half. Down to a quarter of its original size, compressed and furious in the space between his hands.
Then, it gave up trying to be contained and detonated.
The explosion swallowed the entire plaza whole. Stone cracked apart in spiderweb patterns that spread out to the plaza's edges. Buildings along the perimeter lost their facades, the shockwave rolled outward across Solara and reached the temple district before it finally spent itself, shattering windows in its wake.
When the smoke thinned enough to matter, both of them were still standing.
Lucius breathed in shallow pulls, smoke curling off his hands. Half his face had taken the blast directly, skin blistered and raw, one eye barely open through the swelling.
[HP: -17]
Aurelius floated across the ruined plaza from him, divine energy guttering unevenly around his frame. For the first time, the boy was visibly winded. The small chest heaved.
The golden light around him pulsed with an unsteady rhythm rather than the constant blaze it had been. Channelling this magnitude of power through an undeveloped physical body was extracting a price, and the bill was coming in due time.
They looked at each other across the rubble and the smoke and the scattered wreckage of the central plaza.
Then they were both moving again.
Flash stepping, both of them vanished and reappeared simultaneously, colliding midair above the ruined fountain with a crack that sent another shockwave rippling outward.
Fist against palm, energy against energy. They broke apart, flash stepped again before either one had fully landed, and the cycle repeated, building surface to building surface, rooftop to rooftop, every collision sending a new tremor rolling through the city's bones.
Eventually, Lucius landed on a temple spire, fingers hooked around the stone. Aurelius came to rest floating a few meters away from him, his small body still covered in an unsteady gold light.
Behind the god-child, the horizon had begun to change.
The sun was rising.
Dawn light spilt across Solara in long, slow waves, washing over broken rooftops and scattered rubble and frightened faces and everything in between, painting all of it the same quiet, indiscriminate gold.
Aurelius went still for a moment.
He turned away from Lucius entirely and looked at the sunrise, and something in the way he looked at it made it clear he wasn't really seeing it, not the light, not the city either, not even the present moment at all.
In his vision, he saw a different district, an older one. The streets were narrower, the buildings leaning together overhead. Crumbling walls and missing roof sections patched with cloth.
Children were lying in doorways, too weak to stand, faces that looked much too old and a woman, she was young, with platinum hair, and silver eyes sharp even through the exhaustion, kneeling at a temple entrance, looking up at the priests on the steps above her.
"Please, just this once. Just help us. That's all we're asking." She pleaded with her hands put forward in front of her in a pleading gesture.
The priests didn't move. Their expressions didn't change.
"The gods have decreed. Blessing is for the faithful only. Return when you have earned it."
He saw the woman's face as they turned away. Silver eyes weren't filled with tears, just went flat and cold and very, very certain about something.
Seraphine was there, years younger than she currently was. Still learning what the world was willing to do to people who asked for help.
The god-child's composure disintegrated without warning. His face crumpled from something composed and divine into something small and overwhelmed and incapable of holding itself together.
Tears came fast, and the divine heat evaporated them off his cheeks almost as quickly as they fell, little wisps of steam rising from his face in the early morning light.
"I saw it," he said, barely above a whisper. "I saw all of it. The suffering, every prayer that came to me. All the people I abandoned….." he couldn't finish that sentence.
"I was there, I was receiving every single prayer, and I just, I got comfortable in the divine realm. I got too comfortable, and I stopped listening, and I just…" his voice broke into pieces.
"I just forgot them."
Lucius moved across the rooftop toward him quietly, the knife already in his hand. No flash step, no rush. Just steady steps across cracked stone while the sunrise painted everything the colour of a god's blood.
Aurelius didn't react, didn't call up a shield or anything, and didn't even look away from the horizon.
"I deserve this," the boy said, voice small and very level. "I deserve this and worse."
Lucius raised his blade as he closed the gap between them quietly.
Aurelius turned to look at him at last. His cheeks were wet with tears, his golden eyes were clear. He was smiling, not the divine authority of a god who had issues sentences, but something genuinely and exhausted and completely at peace with what was happening or rather what was about to happen.
"Do it," the god-child said quietly. "Please. I can't keep carrying this guilt, I can't…" he stopped and steadied himself.
"Please."
The knife went forward, and Aurelius didn't flinch or move.
He didn't raise his hands to defend himself. He simply opened his arms, a small, strange, deliberate gesture.
The blade entered his chest and found his core beneath, and the light that poured from the wound was not like blood. It was like watching a star bleed, slow and luminous, and irreversible.
Aurelius gasped, his small hands found Lucius's arms and closed around it. Not trying to pull the blade out or push away, just holding on to him.
"Thank you," the boy breathed.
He was losing weight somehow, or it felt that way. Lucius caught him as his legs gave out, lowering them both carefully to the rooftop, one arm wrapped around a small body that had carried the weight of divine consciousness and all the failures that came with it, and was finally, fully done.
The rising sun fell across Aurelius's face in clean, warm lines. Tears still tracked slowly down his cheeks, drying before they reached his jaw.
The golden blood where the blade had entered spread outward in a slow circle on the stone beneath him, glowing with fading light.
"Don't feel sad about this," Aurelius said. His voice was almost nothing now. It was just plain air moving through a body that was already becoming still.
"You did the right thing. In my next life…" he coughed in a slow breath. "I'll remember. I'll carry it with me from the beginning and I won't let myself forget again."
"You better not, or I'll come for you again." Lucius said sarcastically.
He was still smiling fully, without reservation or performance.
"I'll be the god they deserve to have, I promise."
The light in his eyes dimmed gradually, like a flame running low on something to burn. His chest rose once more, slow and complete, and then it didn't rise again.
The divine energy unwound from his small body like mist burning off in the morning heat, dispersing silently into the air around them until nothing remained of it. The golden glow that had made him somehow more than human faded last of all, leaving behind only a small boy with blonde hair catching the first light of the sun, tear streaked face resting in an expression that had no tension left in it anywhere.
Lucius didn't move for a long moment. He stayed where he was, holding the boy, watching the sunrise spread further across Solara.
The entire city had gone silent around them. The paladins stood motionless at the plaza's edge, their weapons lowered without anyone giving the order. The civilians at the windows and doorways and street corners hadn't moved, hadn't spoken. Even the usual sounds of a city waking up had paused, as if Solara itself understood that something that couldn't be undone had just happened and was holding its breath accordingly.
Lucius's throat worked. He looked down at the still face.
"You died like a true god," he said quietly.
The morning sun continued to rise, unhurried, falling in equal measure across ruined stone and the boy resting in Lucius's arms, warming both the same way, making no distinction at all.
And for the first time since the drought had started — since all of this had started — the thing moving through Lucius's chest wasn't rage.
It was grief. Plain and heavy and entirely human.