Location: Years Later — The Rebuilt City of Thallor
POV: Seris Valen
The wind was gentler now.
It didn't carry screams or ash, only the scent of rebuilt stone and the soft whisper of green things returning. Thallor had risen from ruin. Slowly. Quietly. Not with magic or miracles—but with hands, and hope, and time.
Seris stood at the edge of the reconstructed square, watching children run across the stones where once only fire had lived.
They didn't remember the war.
She prayed they never would.
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The Price Remembered
She still dreamed of him sometimes.
Ashren—his voice like winter rain, his crown tilting as if it weighed more than bone could bear. She'd see him standing at the edge of that impossible throne, looking back at her with regret and peace and something she dared to believe was love.
And always—he would say the same thing.
> "I chose to stay."
She'd wake, heart thudding, fire curling in her chest. But it didn't rage anymore. It warmed.
A constant ember.
A promise.
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Caelis's Legacy
Caelis hadn't stayed in the cities. The ice within him made him restless—half-beast, half-man still. But he visited once each winter, dragging behind him tales and scars and laughter.
He had aged slower than her.
Whatever the beast had left behind inside him… it respected what he had become.
> "Not a monster," he'd once said. "Not a king. Just someone who survived."
They didn't talk much about Ashren.
Not because they couldn't.
But because some things you carry together in silence.
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A Flame Rekindled
Seris lit the memorial each year with her own hands.
Not a temple. Not a shrine.
Just a single stone where the sky once split open.
The flame she placed there burned blue. Pure. Unending.
A symbol of the soul that locked himself beyond the edge of gods, so they might know peace.
> "You were never just vengeance," she whispered that evening.
"You were the future we didn't know how to ask for."
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Final Scene — The Distant Echo
Far beyond the veil, in the place between endings and beginnings…
A figure sat on a throne carved of shadow and memory.
No crown. No war. Just watching.
Ashren Vale, King of the Forgotten Door, smiled faintly as a wisp of warmth brushed across the void.
He closed his eyes.
And for the first time since the beginning—
He slept.
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The End