---
The battle was still happening.
Astra knew this.
He could hear it through the courtyard walls. Through the smoke turning the air grey and bitter. Through the ground that shook each time something enormous met something else enormous on the other side of a city that had been ordinary this morning.
He knew.
He gripped the bark of the cherry tree anyway.
His knuckles had gone white a long time ago.
His silver eyes — the ones that usually moved across everything with wonder, that tracked every new thing this world kept producing, that found even the rain interesting — were still. Fixed. Reflecting the smoke above the wall. The shapes moving in fire beyond it.
Blu going down.
Getting up.
Going down again.
The sounds kept coming whether he was ready for them or not.
Explosions he felt in his chest before he heard with his ears. The crack of things that had no business cracking. Distant screaming — not toward anything, just away, the pure animal direction of away from where the sounds were loudest.
No one called his name.
No one came through the smoke.
No one reached for him.
He was behind the cherry tree and the world was on fire and there was nothing — not one thing — he could do about any of it.
He stepped back.
His bare foot found the loose stone.
He didn't catch himself.
He went down hard — knees into the dirt, palms open against the gravel, the impact sharp and completely real and uninterested in how he felt about it. Pain flared in his right knee. His palms stung where the small stones had broken skin.
He stayed down.
Didn't try to get up.
The pain in his knee was nothing.
The thing in his chest was not nothing.
The thing in his chest was the weight of being small in the middle of something enormous. Of watching people who had placed themselves between him and danger and not being able to do anything about what that cost them. Of calling for help inside himself where no one could hear it.
He curled inward.
Knees pulled up.
Head down.
The tears came without being chosen — they always came without being chosen — hot and quiet, dropping into the dirt below him without a sound.
Why is everyone fighting.
Why is everything breaking.
Where is Sensei Sai.
Where is Yuki-nee.
Where is anyone.
His shoulders shook.
The battle kept going.
And then —
The sounds moved somewhere far away.
Not quieter. Far away. Like someone had placed them at the end of a long dark corridor and closed the door between. The red of the sky dimmed at the edges of his vision. The smoke smell went somewhere else. The shaking of the ground became something he was aware of distantly, the way you're aware of things happening in other rooms.
Something else came up.
Something that lived below all of this. Below Earth and the dojo and the engawa and the mochi and Yuki's laugh and Sai's sword and the cherry tree bark under his palms.
Something older.
Something that had been waiting underneath everything, patient, the way deep things are patient.
It rose like water.
He went under.
---
Golden light.
Soft.
The kind that has no sharp edges anywhere — that filters through crystal and spreads across a room like something that decided warmth was the point and pursued it completely.
The smell of it first. Starfire incense — something he had no name for yet, something that lived in a part of him below language — and fresh linen and the particular clean smell of a room that has been prepared carefully for something precious.
He was in a cradle.
Woven from something that wasn't quite material — light and dark together, obsidian and something that moved like starlight when it caught the glow from the windows above.
He was very small.
Smaller than he was now.
His tiny chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of deep sleep. From his mouth — faint sparkles, tiny silver flames drifting upward like fireflies deciding on a direction before fading into the warm air above him. And at his side — a tail. Silver-scaled. Still soft from hatching. Wiggling in the private language of dreams.
He was sleeping.
He didn't know any of this yet.
He was just — sleeping.
And being watched.
---
Queen Monika stood beside the cradle.
Silver hair down her back — not the careful arrangement of public appearance, just down, the way it fell when there was no one to perform for. Her eyes were the same silver as his. Deep. Kind. Fixed on his sleeping face with the specific expression of someone looking at something they cannot quite believe is real.
Not because it seems impossible.
Because it seems too good.
She reached down.
One finger — gentle, the gentleness of someone who has decided that this particular thing deserves only this particular quality of touch — tracing along his cheek.
He didn't stir.
Monika, barely above a whisper: "My little Ares."
Her voice had a tremble in it. Not fear. Something that lives next to fear but is its opposite — the trembling of something so large it can't be held completely still.
Monika: "I want you to grow up as a man who never hurts anyone without reason. I want you to save people — that's what I want for you. Don't be cruel the way your father is."
A pause.
Her hand stayed on his cheek.
Monika: "Never. Okay?"
He snored.
Soft.
Small.
Entirely unaware.
From the doorway — the quiet shuffle of armor on polished floor. A group of Inferno guards, three of them, stopping at the threshold the way people stop when they haven't been invited but can't quite make themselves leave.
One knelt.
The others followed without being asked.
Guard, hushed, almost reverent: "The prince is really sweet and peaceful after all."
Monika looked at them.
The smile that came was small and fragile and entirely genuine.
Monika: "Yes."
A pause.
Monika: "He is."
The room held that.
The warmth of the incense. The soft drift of silver firefly-flames upward from his sleeping mouth. The guards kneeling at the doorway of a royal nursery because a child was sleeping and somehow that felt like something worth kneeling for.
Then —
Boots in the corridor.
Fast.
A soldier came through the guards, armor dented at the shoulder, face carrying the particular expression of someone running not from something but toward someone with urgency.
Soldier: "Queen Monika."
The warmth changed.
Not gone. Changed.
Monika straightened.
Soldier: "Lord Sin is calling for you. He needs to speak with you about Ares."
The smile left her face.
Not replaced by fear. Replaced by something that knew what it was and had already decided what it was going to do about it.
She leaned down one last time.
Pressed her lips to his forehead — soft, certain, a motion that had no hesitation in it anywhere.
Monika, just for him, just between them: "I'll protect you."
The silver tail wiggled in his sleep.
She straightened.
She walked out.
Monika: "Tell him to wait. I am coming."
---
The hallway moved past her.
Guards bowing as she passed, the click of her silver gown across polished obsidian, the way the palace held sound differently from room to room — the nursery soft and absorbed, the hallway giving everything back to you whether you wanted it or not.
She didn't notice any of it.
Her hands were folded in front of her.
Steady.
Her heart was not.
She reached the meeting chamber.
---
The obsidian table ran the length of the room.
Sin sat at the far end of it.
The way he always sat — like the room had been designed around the specific geometry of him occupying it. Tall. Still. His black armor taking in the light from the crystal panels above and not giving any of it back. His tail — thick, red-scaled — curled in one slow loop around the base of the throne leg.
Crimson eyes.
On her.
Sin: "Sit down."
She sat.
Back straight. Hands folded on the table now, the stillness of someone who has decided that whatever is coming, they will receive it upright.
Sin looked at her.
His expression was — not cold. Not warm. Something more precise than either.
The expression of someone who has made a calculation and arrived at a conclusion and is now delivering it, which is a different thing from feeling it.
Sin: "As you know. Our child has hatched. Since he was born a prince, there are things that must be addressed."
Monika, quiet: "I didn't forget your past words."
She said it evenly.
She had not forgotten anything.
Sin continued.
Sin: "He is a mythical Inferno. This category of dragon is born once every two hundred and fifty million years. One existence. A miracle — not a statement, a category, a thing that has not happened in living memory or any memory accessible to living people."
He paused.
Let that land.
Sin: "That is why he already holds the power he holds. Why he has surpassed me in child form without trying."
His eyes didn't move from hers.
Sin: "And why he carries what he carries. He is not simply a prince. He is the reincarnation of the dragon goddess herself."
The room was very still.
Monika held his gaze.
Held it.
She waited for the rest.
Because she knew from experience — from years of knowing this person — that when Sin made a statement like that, there was always a rest.
Sin said the rest.
She didn't move.
She sat with the words.
Her hands stayed folded on the table.
Her face stayed still.
Everything inside her — the answer, the refusal, the desperate love of a mother who had already decided what she would do the moment she needed to decide it — everything stayed inside.
Not yet.
Not here.
Not in this room.
Sin looked at her for a moment longer.
Then he stood.
He walked toward the door — the specific walk, the one that said the conversation was finished on his terms — and she watched him go.
He reached the doorway.
He stopped.
Not turning fully. Just — stopping.
He glanced back.
At her.
And on his face — in the space between one breath and the next, in the fraction of a second between the person he'd built himself into and the person underneath that person —
A smile.
Not the controlled expression he used for courts and councils and the business of ruling.
A real one.
Small. Quiet. The kind that comes from somewhere too deep to manage.
His son.
After all.
His son.
The door closed behind him.
Monika sat at the empty table.
She looked at her hands.
Then she made her choice.
---
Not all at once.
Choices like this don't happen all at once. They happen in stages — first the deciding, then the accepting, then the doing, each one its own separate act of will.
She decided.
She accepted.
She prepared the capsule — small, shielded, powered by starfire, designed to carry something precious through the cold dark between worlds and deliver it somewhere safe.
She took the tail herself.
Careful.
Precise.
Knowing that it would hide him. That the tail was the signal — the broadcast of what he was — and that without it he would arrive somewhere as a child, just a child, and no one would know what they were holding.
Only she would know that.
Only she.
When Sin found out — and he found out the way he found out everything, eventually, inevitably — the choice had already been made and the capsule was already ready and all that remained was the moment.
Some soldiers refused to follow orders.
Sin did what Sin did.
And then Dano arrived and the planet did what planets do when something terrible enough hits them.
And in the chaos of everything ending —
A capsule went up.
Into the dark.
Carrying something small and silver and warm.
Toward a planet neither of them had heard of.
Toward whatever came next.
---
The world was harsh.
Red skies and cracked earth and the particular dust of a planet that had never quite figured out what it wanted to be. The kind of place that nobody traveled to on purpose — which made it, briefly, the kind of place that was useful for people who needed to not be found.
He sat on a rock.
Six years old, maybe seven. Spiky black hair that went upward like it had somewhere to be. Black eyes — deep and almost cosmic, the kind of eyes that collected light rather than simply reflecting it. A black tail switching behind him with the specific irritation of someone who has decided they are annoyed and wants the world to know about it. White armor over black shirt and pants. White gloves.
He bit into a fruit.
Something the planet grew that was technically edible.
He made a face.
Threw it.
Tenkai: "Tch."
He stared at nothing.
Tenkai: "That clown Ares really thinks he's the strongest?"
Nearby — sitting on a rock of his own, golden tail twitching nervously, golden eyes carrying the expression of someone who has been through enough that he's decided optimism is a survival strategy rather than a personality trait — Fin winced.
Fin: "Tenkai. We shouldn't talk about the prince like that. We barely even survived this."
Tenkai: "Shut up, Fin."
He said it with the weary authority of someone who has said it many times.
Tenkai: "I should be the strongest. Not him. Just because he's the prince — just because of what he is — everyone acts like he's the only one with value. I have value too."
His tail switched harder.
Fin rubbed the back of his neck.
He smiled — the careful smile of someone trying to manage a situation.
Fin: "Ahahaha. Should we just drop this?"
He placed a hand on Tenkai's shoulder.
Tenkai threw it off.
Tenkai: "Don't touch me. Weakling."
Fin's careful smile went somewhere else.
Fin: "Hey. I'm not weak. And how dare you say —"
He punched.
Tenkai dodged without looking, which was the most irritating possible way to dodge something, and landed a kick that sent Fin into the cracked earth with a sound like a complaint.
Fin, from the ground: "Ahh. Are you crazy!?"
A flicker.
Someone appeared between them.
A girl — small, pink eyes that glowed faintly at the edges, a pink tail that wiggled with the nervous energy of someone who had placed themselves in the middle of something and was immediately regretting the placement.
Piko: "Hey. Both of you. Stop."
Tenkai looked at her.
Tenkai: "Oh? You think you're tough, Piko?"
Piko stepped back.
Her eyes went to the ground.
Piko, very quietly: "I didn't mean... I just don't like chaos."
Her voice wobbled at the end.
She sniffed.
Once.
Fin was up from the ground immediately.
Fin: "Hey hey hey. Don't cry. It's alright."
He turned to Tenkai with an expression that was trying to be stern and getting partway there.
Fin: "And you. Don't be rude. We need to stay together. That's how we survive faster. There are no adults here."
He rubbed his stomach.
His expression shifted.
Fin: "I'm kind of hungry though. Ehehehe."
Tenkai: "YOU IDIOT. SHUT YOUR BELLY UP."
Across the campsite — on a flat rock slightly apart from the others, green tail sweeping the dust in slow arcs, face entirely peaceful — another boy slept.
Or had been sleeping.
Piko sat beside him and shook him gently.
Piko: "Kento. Wake up."
Kento opened one eye.
Then the other.
He blinked at the sky.
Kento: "Huh... Prince? Ah. You mean Ares."
He said it like he'd been in the middle of a dream about exactly this topic and was glad to be continuing it.
Fin nodded.
Fin: "Yeah. But he's too far. We don't even know which planet he's on. That's the problem."
Kento yawned.
A long and complete yawn.
Kento: "But how do we find him?"
From the other side of the campsite — hands on hips, gray eyes bright, a single tooth visible in her smile, tail swaying with the energy of someone who has an opinion and intends to share it — Yuro stepped forward.
Yuro: "We need to travel across space."
She said it the way people say obvious things.
Fin looked at her.
Fin: "That's not as easy as you make it sound."
Yuro: "I didn't say it was easy. I said we need to do it."
Fin opened his mouth.
Drashin spoke first.
He hadn't moved from where he was sitting — hands in pockets, purple eyes carrying the specific flatness of someone who finds most situations inadequate, tail moving slightly faster than the rest of him suggested — but his voice arrived in the conversation with the precision of something thrown accurately.
Drashin: "You are both being dumb. You don't know how far away he is. Space is not a short trip across a city. It is endless. Unlike your collective brains."
Yuro turned.
Yuro: "Watch your words. Freak."
Drashin looked at her.
Said nothing further.
Considered this his entire contribution to the exchange.
Fin sat beside Kento.
He looked at the red sky above them.
Fin: "Even if we tried — if we flew across space without knowing where he is — we'd just die out there. Not even history would remember us."
Kento, nodding slowly: "Yeah. I wanted to see myself in a newspaper at least once."
Silence.
The kind of silence that settles when a group of people are confronted with the true size of what they're trying to do.
Then Piko raised her hand.
Piko: "I have an idea."
Tenkai made a sound.
Tenkai: "Don't give us another bad one like last time."
Piko: "I will not!"
She stood straighter.
Pink tail rising slightly with the intention of it.
Piko: "We travel across planets. One by one. We search. Ares is somewhere — on one of them. And when we find him..."
She paused.
Her expression did something — the tears that were always close to the surface moving back for a moment to make room for something else.
Piko: "He can make a home. For all of us."
A home.
The word landed differently than any word had landed since the planet ended.
Not a strategy. Not a plan with steps.
A home.
Fin looked at her.
He cracked his knuckles slowly.
Kento sat up.
Not gradually. All at once — the sleep entirely gone, replaced by the expression of someone who has found a direction.
Kento: "Yeah. Okay. Let's go."
Tenkai looked at the sky.
His tail had stopped switching.
He didn't say anything.
That was answer enough.
Drashin stood.
Slid his hands deeper into his pockets.
Walked toward the edge of the campsite without looking back.
Yuro smiled — the full one, the one with the tooth.
And Piko wiped her face with both hands and looked at all of them and laughed — a small, watery, completely genuine laugh.
Six children.
On a harsh planet that wasn't theirs.
With no adults.
No map.
No certainty about any of it.
With a direction.
And for the first time since the world they came from had burned —
That was enough.
---
The memory faded.
Slowly.
The way good things fade — not all at once, edges first, the center holding as long as it could.
The red sky of that harsh planet.
Piko's watery laugh.
Kento standing up.
The real smile on Sin's face in the doorway.
Monika's finger on his cheek in the golden nursery light.
My little Ares.
I'll protect you. No matter what.
---
Astra was behind the cherry tree.
He was curled into himself, knees to his chest, palms still stinging from the gravel.
The battle was still happening beyond the wall.
He could hear Blu. He could hear the ground shaking. He could hear the city taking what the city was taking on the other side of the smoke.
His tears were still falling.
He didn't stop them.
But something had shifted.
Not outside. Outside was the same — the fire and the screaming and the enormous cost of tonight that hadn't finished being paid.
Inside.
Something had shifted inside.
He pressed his palms flat against the dirt.
Felt it.
Cold. Real. The actual earth of this planet he'd landed on.
He thought about Monika's finger on his cheek.
He thought about six children on a red dusty planet deciding to go looking for him.
He thought about Yuki's arms around him in the dojo saying you're mine now.
He thought about Sai dropping his hammer without deciding to.
He thought about Blu getting up.
Again.
And again.
And again.
For the city.
For him.
He uncurled slowly.
Sat up.
Put his back against the cherry tree.
The bark against his spine — rough and solid and real.
His silver eyes found the smoke above the wall.
He looked at it.
His tears were still falling.
He didn't wipe them.
He just looked.
He was not the only one.
He had never been the only one.
He hadn't known that.
He knew it now.
The memories of his past — the nursery and the smile and the capsule and six children choosing a direction — were not things that had ended.
They were things that were still going.
Still warm.
Still alive inside him.
Still his.
He pressed his palms against the dirt.
He kept watching the smoke.
He waited.
---