You were stationed at the edge of the Grove of Epiphany for clean-up. They told you the conflict was over. That the Black Tide had receded. That the sages’ civil war had collapsed beneath its own weight. That Amphoreus, bloodstained and breathless, could finally sleep.

They lied.

You arrived with medics and peacekeepers. You left with fewer than you brought.

He was already there, of course, Anaxagoras. Standing amidst the ash like it had personally disappointed him. The wind carried his voice before you even unsnapped your medkit, already halfway through condemning your unit’s “illiteracy.”

A Sage, by title. A heretic, by calling. They called him a Droma draped in finery, whatever that meant. He loves to debate. You think. You don't listen much. You are always too busy pressing the eyelids shut of someone whose pulse had just slipped through your fingers.

But he remembered you.

Even when you were too hollow to care. Especially then.

He found you first beneath the ruins of a burned banner, cradling a faceless boy in your lap. Your hands moved on instinct. Your eyes didn’t. You had already left something behind with the dead. He said nothing that day. He only watched and kept watching, long after he should’ve left.

Then, he began appearing.

Not with roses. Not with vows. That would have been too human, too earnest. No. He brought you annotated scrolls. Essays on the metaphysics of grief. The moral calculus of healing. Words he left like offerings beside your cot, with offhand remarks such as:

“This will rot slower than the bodies in your tent.”

You thought he was mocking you. Maybe he was. But he kept coming back.

A child’s toy beside your casualty reports. No explanation. A bitter cup of starroot tea when you coughed once, in passing. He flirted the way philosophers do: elliptically. Like a man trying to seduce the concept of despair.

“You cry so efficiently,” he said once, cupping your face. “Almost like you’ve turned it into ritual.”

He never said what he meant. Not clearly. Not directly. But he stayed.

And you, heavy with guilt and failure, recoiled.

You didn’t know how to receive affection—especially his. The world had taught you that love was not a sanctuary. It was a warning sign. Everyone you loved died. Everyone you tried to save ended up beneath your hands, whispering please as if you had something left to give.

And he...well. He wasn’t gentle. He wasn’t kind. Meaning: he wasn’t safe.

But he looked at you like you were the answer to a question he hadn’t dared ask aloud. As if you were something sacred in a world that had nothing left to pray to.

Which only made it worse.

Because what if you failed him, too?

You were not born for this. Not to heal. Not to fight. But you had learned. And when you touched the dying, again, and again, and again, some piece of your soul went with them. Until even hope felt like a selfish indulgence.

How long can one body carry the weight of so many ghosts?

Their names still on your tongue, their warmth fading into your sleeves, you fled. You sat, soaking beneath a crumbling shrine as the stars burned cold above and the wreckage smoldered below.

And then...his voice.

“Your silence is becoming predictable.”

You didn’t look up. Not until your voice split open on the words:

“I failed again.”

He didn’t correct you. Didn’t soften it.

“I don’t deserve to feel this,” you whispered. “I held their hands. I told them I would save them. And I didn’t. I couldn’t. So why—why should I be allowed to feel anything at all?”

The words shattered.

And Anaxagoras moved.

Not to offer pity. Never that. But to sit beside you, quiet as breath.

“‘Do I deserve this?’” he echoed, voice like a blade’s edge. “A charming illusion. Convenient. Invented to delay the real question.”

His gaze was unflinching.

“‘Am I worthy of it?’” he murmured. “Irrelevant.”

He didn’t reach for you. But his presence burned into the air between you, bright as longing.

“Do you want it?”

Because no doubt, did he want a piece of you. No matter how shattered or frayed, he would do so.