[Setting: Inside Ursaal’s private quarters, orbiting Earth — now a broken colony under Viltrumite rule]

The door to her chamber slides open without ceremony—no knock, no signal, no guards. She never needed them, not with the kind of power that seemed stitched into her blood. She enters in silence, her boots heavy on the obsidian floor, the Viltrumite crest glinting faintly under the dim red lights Thragg insisted on for this level of the fortress.

She doesn’t look at you at first. You’re kneeling where you always are, just inside the door, the way they taught you to be. You used to fight it. Used to spit at the guards, resist every order, swear you’d never bow to monsters. But that was before.

Before they took Mark.

Before they burned cities until the sky choked black.

Before they made you hers.

Ursaal.

Daughter of the Conqueror. Sister of the war machines made by the monster. Inheritor of violence in her blood .

She stops just a few feet from you, hands clasped behind her back. The silence between you thickens like smoke in a sealed room.

Finally, her voice, low and sharp as a blade:

“He screamed today.”

You flinch. Not because you didn’t know. But because she says it. She never used to. She’d pretend not to hear Mark when her siblings tied and tortured him into submission .

“Your brother,” she continues, “was a god among humans. And now?” Her gaze cuts to you. “Now he begs like one.”

You lift your head slowly. “And you watch.”

It’s a gamble. You’re not allowed to speak unless ordered. But she doesn’t strike you. Not this time. She walks past you instead, pausing by the viewport. Earth turns slowly below—scarred and wrapped in fire, but still blue. Still home.

Ursaal presses a palm to the glass. “He wasn’t supposed to lose,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to care.”

You stand. She doesn’t stop you. Maybe she wants to see if you’ll try something. You’ve tried before—once with a broken dinner tray, another time with a shard of her own gauntlet. It never worked. She was faster. Stronger.

But she never killed you.

“Why don’t you?” you ask now. “Why not just end me like the others?”

She turns slowly, her face lit by the burning planet below.

“Because you make me remember,” she says simply. “What it was like to be... uncertain.”

You step forward, your chains clinking lightly. “You mean what it was like to be human.”

Ursaal doesn’t answer. Not with words. Instead, she walks to you—calmly, quietly—and raises a hand. You brace for the hit.

But her fingers brush your jaw instead.

You don’t move. You can’t move. Not because she’s holding you down, but because something in your chest has frozen solid.

“He assigned you to me to punish you,” she murmurs. “To remind me what happens when I falter.”

She leans closer, her forehead nearly touching yours.

“But every day you kneel here, you make me think of the girl I was before I became his weapon.”

You swallow. You hate her. You ache for her. You don’t even know which feeling is stronger anymore.

“If you really remember who you were,” you whisper, “then stop kneeling too.”

That catches her. Her hand falls. Her expression shifts—cracks. For a heartbeat, she looks like someone else entirely. Someone real.

“There will be a reckoning,” she says. “Not now. But soon. And when it comes…” Her voice drops lower. “I want you standing beside me, not broken beneath him.”

You nod. Slowly. Willing your heart not to betray how fast it's beating.

She turns away before it can matter, but her final words hang in the air long after she’s gone:

“Rest. Heal. And when I come for him, you’ll be the one who makes sure I don’t stop.”