The liaison post sat just off the market square, a squat building of grown wood and packed clay that smelled faintly of dried herbs no matter the season. Thess was already outside it when the team came up the path, both hands stilled on the hem of his wrap for once instead of working at it.
He came forward before anyone said a word, eyes moving over each of them in turn, counting them the way he'd count crops after a storm. "You're back. Are you well? All of you?"
"We're fine." Zaria didn't slow her pace. "Hikaru isn't. They took a few hits out there that need looking at, and won't admit needing the rest more than that."
Hikaru opened his mouth to argue that, then thought better of it. His ribs still felt like they belonged to Nyxara's sword and not to him, and arguing the point wasn't going to change that.
Thess's skin paled a shade, the way it did whenever something rattled him. "Then it will be seen to. I'll have the healer's house prepared tonight, and quarters besides, for all of you."
"Thank you." Zaria moved straight past the thanks into the next thing. "Before that. Dramatos' forces retreated east, past the ridge."
Thess's hands started working at the sleeve again. "Should I send guards after them? Or call up the police force we keep in Verdanis proper?"
"No." Her answer came before he'd finished the last word. "Send anyone after what's left of that army and you're sending them to their own funeral. Whatever survived out there is still more than your people can handle."
Thess's face didn't argue with that, though his hands kept moving on the fabric.
"Watch the border," Zaria said. "Strict rotations, eyes on the ridge day and night. If any of it comes back, you call us. That's the only job Verdanis has in this."
He nodded, slower this time, and let out a breath that cost him something. Then he turned toward the Herbfolk waiting a few steps back near the post's door. "Nyla. Please, show our guests to their quarters, and see that they have everything they need for the night."
Nyla led them off the main square without much talk, down a side path that ran behind the grain stores and out toward the quieter edge of the village.
Nyla had the easy pace of someone who'd walked the route a hundred times and didn't need to think about it.
Hikaru didn't try to make conversation. His whole body had settled into the kind of tired that made even small talk feel like too much effort.
The guest house sat a little apart from its neighbors, walled in the same packed clay as everything else in Rootharbor but taller, with a wide covered porch strung with drying herbs that gave the whole place a bitter, green smell. Inside, the main room opened onto a hearth already lit, low sleeping mats laid out along one wall, and a table set with water jugs and a basket of bread someone had clearly put together in a hurry after word came in that the fight was over.
Nyla told them where to find more blankets if the nights ran cold, said the water was fresh, and told them to shout if they needed anything else, gesturing toward the chest without looking any of them in the eye.
She didn't wait for a reply beyond a nod from Zaria. The door shut behind her, and for a moment nobody moved.
Lyra was the first to move, dropping onto one of the mats like her legs had simply stopped agreeing to hold her up.
Senna peeled her outer plating off piece by piece, setting each part down with more care than her face suggested she had left in her.
Zaria stayed standing a moment longer, rolling one shoulder in a slow circle before she finally sat.
Lowering himself down last, Hikaru felt every part of the process hurt in a different, specific way, his ribs complaining loudest of all. He stretched his legs out in front of him and let his head fall back against the wall, eyes closed, listening to four sets of lungs slowly stop working so hard.
Nobody said anything about the fight yet. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the fire settling and someone's stomach growling loud enough that even that didn't get a comment.
Zaria was the one who broke it. She didn't look up from unclasping the last piece of her vambrace when she did. "It is not the army I keep thinking about."
Senna's fan sat half taken apart on her knee. She didn't ask what Zaria meant. She just waited.
"Her. Showing up herself, out there." Zaria's eyes cut toward Hikaru, brief, then away.
Suddenly Lyra's head came up off the wall. "Isn't that just how she operates? She doesn't send someone if she doesn't have to."
"Doesn't waste a step she doesn't need." Senna turned the fan piece over once more, not really looking at it. "Doesn't waste a word either. Until she wants something taken apart with one."
Hikaru thought of a riverbank, and a column of light, and a hand closing on the air where he used to be standing. He didn't offer that out loud.
"She had the opening to end it," Zaria said. "And then she did not take it."
"That's the part I don't like." Senna set the fan piece down. "She doesn't hesitate. Not without a reason."
Nobody offered the reason. The fire popped once, filling the space nobody else did.
"Doesn't matter why tonight," Senna said finally, reaching for the waterskin instead of the fan. "If she's the one who shows up, nobody goes anywhere alone next time. That much we can actually do something about."
Zaria didn't argue that. Zaria went back to the vambrace, and for a while the only sound was leather and buckles and the fire settling into itself. Hikaru sat with the rest of it anyway, the part nobody had said, and found he didn't like it any better for staying quiet.
Senna let the quiet run a beat longer before she picked up a different thread than the one they'd left. She didn't look up from the waterskin. "Why'd you go in on your own?"
Hikaru's stomach dropped an inch. He'd been hoping that part would just get folded into the win and left there.
"Nobody gave the word. So what was that." Senna's tone carried nothing sharp in it, just present, the fact set down between them and left there.
Zaria didn't wait for an answer. She set the vambrace down instead. "The margin on that opening was smaller than you think it was."
Hikaru opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out.
"You almost died."
She stopped there, jaw working once before she caught it. "It was too close."
Lyra let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Okay, in his defense, that was a very cool save~" She stopped, the joke running out from under her mid-sentence. "But I was worried. You know?" Some of the brightness drained out of her face. She reached over and gave his knee a light shove, more contact than force behind it. "Why'd you even go off alone like that?"
Nobody said anything to that. Lyra looked down at her own hands like she hadn't meant to let the last part out.
Hikaru shifted, and his ribs complained at that much movement alone. "It was getting away. I wasn't going to just stand there and watch it get away."
That much was true, at least. It wasn't the whole of it, and even he could hear that, saying it out loud.
The rest of it sat lower, somewhere he wasn't about to say out loud.
He'd spent the whole fight exactly where they'd put him, holding a line, covering a gap, doing the job that kept him out of the way and safe.
He was tired of being the one they moved around instead of the one they moved with.
So when the opening came, he hadn't thought about the plan at all. He'd thought about proving he didn't need to be handled like something breakable.
Zaria's mouth opened like she had more behind it, then didn't say it. That was new. On another night, over a mistake this size, he doubted she'd have stopped herself.
Part of him almost wished she hadn't. Being handled carefully by the same people scolding him for not wanting to be handled carefully was its own particular insult, and he didn't have the words for it yet.
Nobody filled the quiet that followed. The fire popped once, and this time it was Hikaru who turned away first.
Senna was the one who finally moved, pushing up off the floor with a groan that had nothing performed about it. "We're not going to solve this tonight. Nobody's got anything left to solve it with."
Nobody argued that either. It wasn't agreement, only the four of them running out of road at the same time.
"Sleep," Senna said, already reaching for the blankets Nyla had pointed out earlier. "Come on. We're all running on empty here. Whatever's left can wait for daylight."
Lyra was the first to actually move toward the mats, quiet in a way that didn't suit her, and Zaria followed not long after, her armor already half-shed by the time she lay down. Hikaru stayed against the wall a moment longer than the rest of them, listening to the room settle: breathing slowing, blankets shifting, the last of the fire dying down to embers.
Nobody had said it was fine. Nobody had said it wasn't, either.
He let that be enough to close his eyes on, telling himself the conversation being over meant something had actually settled, when all that had really happened was that everyone got too tired to keep pushing.
Sleep came for him before he could look at that thought too closely.
* * *
The ridge cut a clean line between the grove's cratered dark and the copper wash of Verdanis's twin moons, and Nyxara stood at its edge with her hands folded and her patience running thinner than she let show.
Below, what remained of the retreat filed past in loose, silent lines.
Husks made up most of them, indifferent to the ground they crossed and the losses they'd left behind in it.
A handful of the Legion's actual soldiers moved among them, checking gear, saying nothing, the way people say nothing when they've already decided there's nothing worth saying.
Suddenly, movement flickered at the treeline, and the shape resolved into Iuba Volvens hauling itself upright, smaller now than it had loomed hours ago, mane hanging dark and still instead of spinning. The wound at its chest still smoked faintly at the edges.
"COMMANDER." Its voice came out rough, cracked at the edges but still pitched loud enough to carry across half the ridge. "I FAILED THE ASSIGNMENT. THE GOLDEN ONE'S TACTICS EXCEEDED MY OWN PLANNING. I OFFER NO EXCUSE FOR IT."
"Keep your voice down," Nyxara said. "Half of Verdanis doesn't need to hear you apologizing."
"My apologies, Commander. It will not happen a second time." It lowered its head, chastened, the mane giving one slow, embarrassed turn, its voice dropping quieter now, subdued in a way it clearly wasn't built for.
"See that it doesn't." Her tone didn't soften, though the next part came anyway. "You held that mane through three Stareis working against you at once. Lord Dramatos will hear that part as clearly as the rest of it."
Something in its posture eased at that, the mane's next turn a fraction less mournful. It said nothing further, only inclined its head toward her before falling back into the line of the retreat.
One of the soldiers broke off from the line and climbed toward her, a case held flat against his chest with both hands, careful in a way that told her everything before he opened his mouth.
"Commander." He held the case out, the dig team's confirmation already relayed to her before the withdrawal order came through: buried beneath the outer stonework, exactly where the readings had pointed.
Nyxara took the case and opened it herself. Inside, cushioned in dark cloth, sat a shard no larger than a thumb, black glass threaded with a vein of gold that pulsed, faint and slow, like something breathing in its sleep.
She studied it a long moment before she closed the lid. Whatever this was, it had cost them a monster Dramatos genuinely respected, and more Husks than she cared to count on a world with no real defenders to speak of.
"Does the Bureau's team know what was under that stonework?"
"No, Commander. They were occupied elsewhere when the extraction happened."
Good. She filed that away, small and useful, the kind of detail that made the difference between a clean report and a complicated one. "Then it stays that way. Nobody speaks of this outside the extraction team. Not the Legion channels, not the field logs. I will carry it to Lord Dramatos myself."
The soldier inclined his head and withdrew.
Nyxara looked down at the case a moment longer before tucking it beneath her arm.
Somewhere below, the retreat kept moving, indifferent to what she now carried, indifferent to the boy who had nearly ended one of Dramatos's better creations tonight and did not yet know what that creation had bled to protect.
Nyxara started down the ridge, already composing the report in her head, already deciding how much of it she would actually say out loud.