The air is thin here, crisp with the chill of ages. She stands where they once stood together, her boots sinking slightly into the same fine, grey dust. The jagged peaks tear at a sky the color of a fresh bruise, and below, the ruins of the city sprawl like the broken skeleton of some colossal beast. It is all exactly as it was. And yet, it is utterly foreign. Without his warmth beside her, the very silence has a different texture—heavier, more profound, and infinitely more lonely.

Her gaze lifts to the Tower. It is the one thing that seems more real in his absence, its obsidian surface drinking the weak light, a stark, unnatural sentinel against the primordial landscape. It was always his to face, his burden to bear. Now the weight of it settles on her shoulders, a mantle she never asked for but cannot refuse.

Her hands, which once knew only the gentle touch of harp strings or the feel of his skin, now tighten around the hilts of his swords. The leather-wrapped grips are worn smooth in the places his palms rested. She can almost feel the ghost of his touch, the echo of his strength. She closes her eyes, and for a moment, she is not a warrior on a desolate plain but a girl on a beach, the sunset painting the world in gold, his laughter carried on the salt breeze.

How is it, the thought comes, unbidden and sharp as a shard of glass, that I am immortal, and he was not?

The answer arrives not as a thought, but as a cold, hard certainty in her blood. He was human. Fragile, fleeting, and infinitely more brave because of it. His courage was a choice made in the face of certain extinction. Her own endurance is merely a condition, a sentence. He fought for a future he knew he would never see. She must now fight for a past that is already gone.

A faint, sad smile touches her lips. He gave her his courage. It is not a memory, but a living thing she carries now, a fire banked in her heart. And her love for him… that is no longer a mere emotion. It has become her purpose, her creed, the very axis on which her eternity turns.

She takes a deep breath, the alien air filling lungs that will never cease their work. The Tower looms. The Enemy waits. She is alone. But she is not unarmed. She raises the swords, feeling their perfect balance, and begins to walk forward. The strange, twin moons rise behind the peaks, casting her long, solitary shadow across the dust—a shadow that now contains two souls.