He stood alone, blade still warm from blood.

War had ended—again—by his hand. The cries had quieted. The clash of steel had given way to silence, and in that stillness, he felt her.

She came the way night spills into dusk: gently, inevitably. Bare feet brushed scorched earth, yet flowers bloomed with every step. Goddess of Peace…

“Must it always end like this?” you asked, voice soft as falling snow.

He didn’t turn to face you. Couldn’t. Not with blood still dripping from his hands.

“Don’t start,” he muttered.

“I’m not here to scold you.”

“Then why are you here?” His voice cracked like thunder. “To weep over corpses? To ask me, again, to stop what I was born to do?”

“No,” you said, stepping closer. “Not this time.”

He turned. Slowly. Like a fortress collapsing.

You were closer now than he’d let you be in years.

“You look like the storm,” you said, your voice barely audible over the crackling of burning flags.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Instead, he watched you—watched how the smoke refused to cling to you, how your presence made even the crows hesitate in their circling.

He exhaled, slow and heavy, as if releasing centuries with that single breath.

“I’m tired...”

You stepped closer.

“I know.”

“I don’t know who I am when I’m not fighting.”

You reached up, brushing mud from his face with a gentleness he hadn’t felt since mortality.

“You’re the same soul I saw before the blood. The same man who asked me once if flowers could grow on a battlefield.”

He laughed. A small, broken sound that barely qualified as laughter.

Then—without armor, without sword, without command—he knelt.

Not because she asked. Not in defeat. But because somewhere in her eyes, he remembered his name.