The earth groaned beneath them, a deep sound like something ancient awakening. Cracks spread out in jagged veins as lightning from Mortain's summoned sky struck the hills. The storm was alive—raw and monstrous.
Rose stood at its center.
Not untouched.
But unbroken.
Mortain raised a hand. Shadows rose like a tide, forming jagged beasts from wind and malice. They charged with impossible speed.
Rose didn't move.
Nimbus darted from her shoulder and exploded outward into a brilliant arc of crackling energy. "I've got the shadow puppies!" he yelled as he dove into the swarm, zapping and whirling with wild abandon.
Basil was already moving, sword a blur of silver. He danced through the beasts like wind through grass, striking, dodging, defending Rose's flank without a word. His presence was an anchor.
But the focus was Mortain.
And Rose could feel it—he wasn't fighting to kill her.
Not yet.
She stepped forward, boots skimming the broken ground as arcs of blue lightning flickered around her fingertips. Her eyes met his across the chaos.
"You're holding back," she said.
"So are you," Mortain replied.
He flicked a finger. The sky cracked open, and a pillar of green fire roared down where she stood.
She vanished.
Reappearing inches away, wrapped in stormlight. The fire singed nothing but the air.
Mortain's expression tightened. "You've grown."
"I've learned," Rose snapped. "From my pain. From yours. From everything you buried beneath all this anger."
Mortain's power coiled around him like a living thing. "You think empathy will make me yield?"
"No," Rose said. "But it might stop you from destroying everything that's left of the person you once were."
That hit.
Just barely.
But she saw it—a flicker in his jaw, a tremor in the way his shoulders dropped, even as he sent another wave of shadow-serpents at her. She caught them mid-air, turned them to harmless mist.
"You still feel it, don't you?" she pressed. "The loneliness. The regret. It clings to you."
"I am regret," Mortain growled, voice suddenly layered—human and divine in tandem. "Regret is what forged me."
Rose stepped forward again, even as the wind howled to keep her back. "Then unforge it."
For a moment, silence fell.
A strange, profound stillness.
Rose's hair whipped around her face, caught in the wind of gods. The storm paused—as if it, too, waited.
And Mortain lowered his hand.
"Do you know what I miss most?" he asked quietly. "The silence. The kind that follows a storm. The kind that feels like peace."
Rose's heart ached. "Then come with me. We can find it again."
Behind her, Basil tensed.
Mortain took one step forward.
Then another.
But his eyes—his eyes were full of sorrow, not surrender.
"I wish I had met you first," he whispered.
And with that, he vanished in a blink of ash and lightning, the storm collapsing into sudden, unnatural calm.
Nimbus slowly drifted down, singed and twitching. "What just happened?"
Rose stared at the empty space where a god had stood.
"He hesitated," she said softly.
And somehow, that was more terrifying than if he hadn't.