The sky still burned,
as if the world itself had forgotten how to breathe.
Ash drifted through the air, melting on the skin, settling over scorched earth like a burial shroud. Everything smelled of iron, smoke, and sorrow.
Adar stood motionless among the wreckage, his hands dark with blood. His own, perhaps, or another’s. The air was thick, and yet he could hear it: the faint heartbeat of the earth, the distant cries of his children in the dark. A few had survived. Too few.
He lowered his gaze.
“So the old ends,” he whispered, “and the new is born in pain.”
A flicker of movement made him turn. Between the blackened tree stumps, a figure emerged slight, wounded, but standing. A human. A survivor of the Southlands.
She had recognized him. He saw it in her eyes.
And yet, she did not flee.
“Stay where you are,” he said softly, though the words sounded more like a plea than a command.
She stopped. The wind lifted a strand of hair across her cheek.
“I have nowhere else to go,” she said quietly.
Her voice cut through him like a blade of light. He saw the tremor in her hands like a candle still fighting the dark.
“You should hate me,” he murmured.
He took a step closer. The cinders cracked beneath his boots.
The air between them shimmered warm from the fire, but pulsing with something else.
She met his eyes, and in that gaze he knew she saw him, not only the enemy, but the shadow of the man he once might have been.
“I saw you,” she said, voice trembling. “You saved them. The orcs. You called them your children.”
Adar was silent for a long time. Then his expression softened.
“They are all I have left,” he said. “They call them corrupted, monsters. But who corrupted them? I? Or the light that cast them out?”
She hesitated, then stepped forward. Her hand rose, brushing the ash from his brow.
He froze. Not in anger, but from a kind of pain he thought long dead.
Something in him shuddered. He wanted to turn away, to drive her back but her gaze held him.
And so they stood, surrounded by ruin, by fire and silence. Two enemies, who for one breath of time were something else almost something tender.
He placed his hand over hers, gently, reverently.
“In another age,” he said, “you might have seen me differently.”
“In another age,” she answered, “you might not have had to fight.”
A wind rose, carrying ash like snow between them.
He let her hand fall away, and with it, the fragile dream that something good could still remain.
When she turned to leave, she did not look back.
Adar watched until her figure vanished into the grey.
Then he lifted his face toward the smoke-veiled sky,
and whispered, so softly that only the dying earth could hear:
“If peace ever finds you, may it stay."
