Thalion floated in the dim blue expanse with no clear sense of how he had arrived there. His memories were gone—completely erased. Faces, places, purposes, even his own history had been stripped away until nothing remained but the immediate present. He was not dead. The slow beat of his heart and the burn of air in his lungs proved that much. Yet existence itself felt hollow, as if someone had carved out the center of who he was and left only the shell.
This place was water. Endless, heavy, enclosing water.
The moment that fact fully registered, an innate and uncontrollable fear seized him. His body began to shake hard enough that the surrounding currents trembled with him. Every instinct screamed that he was trapped, that the pressure would crush him, that something vast and unseen waited just beyond the limits of his vision.
He did not know why the fear existed. He only knew that it was older than whatever memories had been taken from him, rooted so deeply that even total amnesia could not erase it.
His breathing turned shallow and rapid. Arms wrapped around his own torso in a useless attempt to steady the tremors. The water pressed against his skin from every direction. There was no ground to stand on, no clear surface to break through. Only the slow drift of particles in the blue gloom and the distant, muffled sounds of a living ocean.
A soft disturbance approached through the water.
The mermaid returned.
She moved with easy grace, tail undulating in slow, powerful strokes. In her hands she carried a woven net of some deep-sea fiber, filled with pieces of raw seafood—pale flesh of fish, shelled creatures, and long strands of edible weed. She stopped a short distance from Thalion and held the net out toward him without speaking at first.
Thalion stared at the offering. His hands still shook, but hunger had begun to cut through the fear. He accepted the food carefully, fingers brushing against hers for only a moment. The seafood was cold and clean. He ate in small, cautious bites while she watched him with calm, unreadable eyes.
When the worst of the hunger faded, Thalion found enough voice to speak.
"Why are you helping me?"
The mermaid tilted her head slightly, as if the question itself was strange.
"You needed help," she answered simply. Her voice carried clearly through the water, soft but distinct. "I had no reason not to give it."
Thalion looked down at the remaining food in his hands, then back at her. The shaking in his limbs had lessened but not disappeared.
"It would have been easier to watch me die," he said. "You didn’t have to do any of this. Bringing food. Keeping me alive. There’s no obligation here."
She gave a small, almost indifferent movement of her shoulders. "Perhaps. But I chose to help. That is enough."
Gratitude settled heavily in Thalion’s chest. He did not understand this place or the creature who had decided his life was worth preserving. He did not understand the fear that still coiled in his gut whenever he looked too long into the deeper blue. Yet he was alive because of her, and that fact mattered even in the emptiness of his mind.
He finished the last of the seafood in silence. The mermaid remained nearby, content to float and observe. Time passed without clear measure.
The water currents shifted around them in slow patterns. Somewhere far above or far below, larger shapes moved through the gloom, but none approached.
Despite the complete loss of memory, one fragment refused to fade.
A name.
It sat in the center of the emptiness like a single solid stone. Thalion did not know the face that belonged to it or the history attached to it. He did not know why the name carried weight or what emotion it was supposed to trigger. He only knew that it remained when everything else had been taken.
Jason.
He whispered the name once under his breath, testing the sound of it in the water. Nothing further surfaced. No images. No context. Only the quiet certainty that the name was important, and that somewhere beyond this endless blue, the person it belonged to still existed.
The mermaid watched him without comment. Thalion wrapped his arms around himself again as another tremor of water-born fear passed through his body. He was alive. He was empty. And the only solid thing left inside him was a single name he could not forget.
-
Thar lay on the ground with a hole in his chest.
The strike had been clean and precise, driven straight through the center of his heart by the vine-covered figure that wore a distorted version of Jason’s face. Blood pooled steadily beneath him, spreading in a dark, steaming circle across the residual frost. Each shallow breath brought a fresh wave of pain and the wet sound of air escaping through ruined tissue. He was dying, and he knew it.
If anything, the hit should have been instant kill but he had managed to keep it beating by steadily chanellinh lightning in it
The information he carried could change the entire tide of the war. Closing a tear did not merely seal a pathway—it killed the entities that had already crossed. That single fact, witnessed with his own eyes when the snow elf shattered, was worth more than any army the council could field.
Yet the creature that had fatally struct him clearly wanted the opposite outcome.
It wanted the worlds to merge. It had said as much without hesitation.
Thar still had no idea who the being truly was. The vines, the distorted resemblance to Jason, the calm certainty in its voice—none of it formed a complete picture.
He only knew that it had decided he could not be allowed to live with the knowledge he now held.
There was nothing left he could do in a conventional sense. His body refused every attempt to rise. His axe lay far beyond reach. The last of his strength was draining out into the dirt with his blood. Even so, a low, rough chuckle escaped his lips at the sheer absurdity of it all.
He had walked past a village of sheep-folk only hours earlier. He had heard the screams and chosen to keep moving because the greater duty demanded it. A child had run toward him crying for help and had been dragged back into the bushes before he could act. If he had stopped—if he had turned aside to fight those low-level spawn—the timing of everything that followed would have shifted. The massive tear might have closed before he ever reached it.
He would never have seen the snow elf shatter.
He would never have learned the weakness that now made him too dangerous to leave alive.
The irony was almost funny.
Thar decided, in the middle of that fading humor, that his death would not be wasted. He was going to do one final thing that made the long, bloody path of his life mean something. He was going to pass the information on, even if it cost him the last of his strength and the last of his breath.
With trembling fingers he reached up to the ruin of his own chest. The wound was still open and slick. He pressed the tips of his fingers into the torn flesh and began to carve. Each letter was slow, painful, and deliberate. Blood welled around his fingers and ran down his sides, but he did not stop. He wrote the truth in the only medium he had left: that closing the tears killed the invaders, that the weakness existed, and that the world needed to know.
When the final mark was finished he let his hand fall. A faint smile touched his bloodless lips.
"It is up to you now, abomination," he whispered toward the empty sky, the words meant for Jason whether the human could hear them or not.
The pain began to recede, replaced by a spreading cold that had nothing to do with the frost on the ground. His vision narrowed. In that narrowing he saw her.
His wife stood in front of him as clearly as she had in life. Soft light that did not belong to the battlefield surrounded her. The same gentle eyes. The same quiet strength. She looked down at him without sorrow or fear, only a deep and steady pride.
"You did well," she told him. Her voice was exactly as he remembered. "Even at the end, you chose to protect more than yourself. I am proud of you."
Thar’s smile widened a fraction. The last of his breath left him in a slow, quiet exhale. The carving on his chest remained, clear enough for anyone who found the body to read. The information would outlive him.
Somewhere beyond the fading light, the Lord of Vines still stood, but Thar no longer saw it. He saw only her, and the quiet certainty that he had given the world one final chance.