The Mouthless King stood alone, his once-impervious silence now frayed at the edges. The battlefield stretched out around him—a ring of scorched earth, broken Choir fragments, and the fading shimmer of magic still echoing with Rose and Mortain's last strike.
He looked... tired.
But Rose didn't trust that. She'd seen creatures more dangerous when desperate than when invincible.
Mortain stepped forward beside her, his silver hair matted with ash and blood. "We've cracked his shell. Doesn't mean he won't try to bite back."
Rose nodded. "Then we keep swinging."
Before the words had fully left her lips, the King raised both hands. From the scorched air above him, silence erupted—an inverted blast that sucked away all color and sound, like the world exhaling for the last time.
Rose stumbled, ears ringing in the absence of noise. Even her flames flickered, smothered by the sheer force of the void.
But Mortain remained standing. His storm didn't go out—it twisted, condensed.
And then it screamed.
A spear of lightning carved through the dead space, disrupting the silence with raw, beautiful noise. The air shook. The King staggered.
Rose felt her fire rush back, reinvigorated by the defiance.
She reached for it—and found something new.
Inside her, the Bramble Fire had changed. It had grown. It wasn't just destruction anymore. It had roots now. Memory. Emotion. Connection.
She glanced at Mortain, who turned his head toward her.
"We do this together?" she asked.
His eyes flashed with something more than power—trust. "Always."
She didn't know if it was the moment or the mayhem, but she took his hand.
Together, they ran.
The King unleashed his full force—shadows like knives, silence like chains, every ounce of despair he could summon from his ancient, broken soul. But Rose and Mortain were not just two forces now—they were a bond. Flame and storm, joined.
Their magics spiraled upward in a cyclone of light, burning and crackling, roaring back at the darkness.
When they struck the King, the impact wasn't just power—it was memory. Their bond, their journey, the strange love blooming between them like a fireflower in a war zone.
The King screamed, truly screamed this time, his silence cracking open like a fault line.
And then—he fell.
Not exploded. Not incinerated.
He fell, as if his body finally remembered how to die.
The battlefield went still.
The Hollow Choir disintegrated, their last song escaping like a breath of wind. The silence lifted.
Rose collapsed to her knees, panting. Mortain joined her, both their hands still linked.
"It's over," he said, disbelief in his voice.
"For now," she whispered.
They sat like that for a while, in the smoke and thunder of what remained, holding hands in the ruins of a nightmare.
Then Rose leaned in, lips brushing Mortain's ear. "So… I guess you're stuck with me."
Mortain chuckled, low and tired. "I've had worse curses."
And they both laughed, with smoke in their lungs and something dangerously close to hope in their hearts.