The memory shattered.

Arik came back to himself with a violent inhale.

The waiting room of the diplomatic palace blurred around him for half a second, ether lamps flickering softly against polished marble and dark glass windows, but the scent of blood still clung to the inside of his lungs.

His hands were shaking.

No.

Trembling.

Like Goliath’s hands had trembled after the poison.

Tears slid silently down Arik’s face before he even realized he was crying.

Across from him, the old woman sat quietly beneath the dim ether light, her pale blue eyes fixed on him with the exhausted calm of someone who had survived too long to be surprised by grief anymore.

Amara.

Not a fortune teller. Not merely an old woman in a market stall.

Amara Kaelen-Tor.

Goliath’s daughter.

Arik laughed once under his breath.

The sound came out broken.

"That," he said softly, voice rough from memories that did not belong entirely to him, "was cruel."

Amara said nothing.

Arik dragged one hand over his face, smearing away tears that kept coming anyway.

"You watched me walk around Wrohan carrying his face," he continued bitterly. "You saw me standing there like an idiot asking about cards and stars while you already knew."

The old omega’s expression softened faintly.

"I wanted to be sure."

"Sure of what?"

"That you were still him."

Arik’s jaw tightened.

The room still smelled faintly of saint’s breath from Liam’s pheromones clinging to his clothes, and now the scent twisted painfully together with memory.

Silas.

Seraphina.

Blood.

Iris.

He looked at Amara again.

Really looked at her

At the deep lines across her face. The trembling hands hidden beneath old sleeves. The exhaustion settled into her bones like something permanent.

Dominant omegas aged slowly.

Amara should not have looked like this.

Not yet. Not even close.

Arik’s expression darkened.

"What did Felix do to you?"

For the first time since he entered the room, hatred moved through Amara’s face.

"The rot spread," she said quietly.

Arik went still.

Amara looked down at her own hands.

"When Felix poisoned Goliath, it did not stop with him. The poison was built from ether corruption and his pheromones together. It attached itself to living ether channels." Her mouth curved bitterly. "We survived the palace. Barely. Kamal was still alive. So were some of the Emperor’s remaining shadows and engineers."

"Kamal lived?"

"Kamal is still alive, but he doesn’t believe that you returned." She shrugged, and the familiarity of the movement made Arik’s heart ache.

For a moment, he did not hear anything else.

Kamal is still alive.

The name struck somewhere Goliath still existed inside him.

Kamal, standing on the terrace with perfect posture and dry irritation.

Kamal, catching Amara in a poisoned corridor.

Kamal, bleeding so badly he should have died on the nursery floor and somehow refusing even that with the same stubborn dignity he had once used to deny ministers access before breakfast.

Arik swallowed.

"Where is he?"

Amara’s eyes lifted to him.

"Hidden."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only answer I will give until he allows more."

Arik almost laughed again.

Of course.

Of course Kamal, after surviving the fall of Nuria, Felix’s poison, forty years of ruin, and whatever came after, would still manage to be difficult from a distance.

"He doesn’t believe I returned," Arik said quietly.

"No." Amara’s fingers curled lightly over the edge of her sleeve. "He believes in Goliath’s revenge. He believes in plans. He believes in contingencies. He believes your parents were useful, dangerous, and chosen by what remained of Goliath’s will." Her gaze held his. "But reincarnation requires faith, and Kamal lost most of that in the nursery."

Arik’s chest tightened.

"And you?"

Amara’s smile was faint and exhausted. "I... want you to meet him."

"I do not know if I want to meet him," Arik said.

It was a lie.

It was such an obvious lie that Amara did not even honor it with a response.

Arik leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment because looking at her was becoming dangerous. Her face kept shifting in his mind, not into a younger version of herself, but into fragments. A small hand gripping the edge of his robe. A child’s voice asking why ministers were always ugly when they begged. Pale blue eyes narrowed with offended dignity because Goliath had refused to let her bring a frog into council.

His daughter.

Not his.

His. Goliath’s.

The distinction was beginning to lose meaning in a way that made his bones ache.

Until now, it was fairly easy for him to discern which part of himself was Arik and which was Goliath, but with the memories and something old moving through his blood and soul, he realized that he was Goliath, just the younger version of it, a version he himself forgot later in his life.

"Amara..." he exhaled.

He could lie again. He could say something sharp enough to wound them both. But what could he possibly do to her that Felix had not already done better?

And why would he waste time fighting the truth of a past that was his, while Felix and his conspirators were still alive?

While Liam was asleep in another wing, warm with saint’s breath, tied to Wrohan’s rotting grid by blood, brilliance, and terrible timing.

Arik lowered his gaze from the ceiling.

"I remember enough," he said quietly.

Amara’s fingers tightened in her lap.

"Not all of it. Not yet. But enough to know the difference between inheritance and return." His mouth curved bitterly. "I am not wearing Goliath’s shadow, Amara. I am what remained after the world failed to kill him properly."

For a moment, the old woman did not breathe.

Then her eyes filled.

She did not look like a fortune teller now.

Not at all.

She looked like a daughter who had waited too long to hear her father stop denying the shape of his own soul.

Arik leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his voice dropping into something colder.

"So tell me what Felix became."

Amara blinked once, forcing the tears back with the discipline of someone who had survived grief by making it useful.

"The rot did not only age me," she said. "It followed all of us who breathed too much of his scent. Kamal, the remaining shadows, the engineers who escaped the palace. Some died within months. Others lasted years. The strongest endured, but none of us remained untouched."

"And Felix?"

"He is the source and the worst victim of his own poison." Her expression hardened. "It is eating him too."

Arik went still.

"He should have died decades ago," Amara continued. "But he learned to feed it. Ether stabilizes the rot. Enough ether slows the collapse of his body. More ether lets him appear untouched."

"Wrohan," Arik said.

Amara nodded.

"The country is his feeding ground. Civilian grids. Old temple wells and buried Nurian lines. Water relays. Medical reserves. Mining districts. Anything with enough ether to drain quietly." Her voice turned bitter. "Cities worth of power, taken one piece at a time, just so Felix can survive another day."

Arik thought of Liam’s Vanguard.

Of the civilian grid hidden beneath Wrohan’s neglected districts.

Of red ether, it turned blue and white for people. Felix’s system had already begun starving.

His expression emptied.

Amara saw it.

"Yes," she said softly. "Your star has already disrupted him."

The ether lamps flickered.

Arik’s voice came quiet enough to be dangerous. "Does Felix know?"

"No, Felix is planning to devour the Ether Core from Agaron."