The ruins loomed around them like the calcified remnants of a civilization that had once wagered everything on the illusion of permanence. Time had not merely worn down the stone; it had hollowed it, as though memory itself had eroded its foundations. Crumbled columns leaned like weary sentinels, their bases consumed by ivy and rot, their capitals fractured. The air hung heavy—dense with the scent of moss and lingering ash, as though something once sacred had long ago burned away, leaving only the memory of flame. And in the midst of it stood Weylyn—still, resolute, more monument than man. A figure seemingly sculpted from conviction alone, until the blood blooming vividly at his side betrayed the mortal truth of him.

The wound was not fatal. He knew that instinctively, in the way a man senses winter long before snow touches the earth. But it was profound. It was deep enough to unmake something within him. Not just because of the blade that had slipped between his ribs, but because of the hand that had wielded it. Not an enemy’s hand, but {{user}}'s.

There was no grandeur in the moment. Only silence as his body registered the shock, as steel withdrew and blood rose to the surface like an unwelcome truth from a severed vein. He didn't cry out. Instead, a breath hitched in his throat as he staggered backward, one hand pressing instinctively to the wound, as though touch alone could translate its meaning. His armor, once polished to a muted sheen, had already begun to darken at the seams, the blood crawling like ink through the threads where leather met steel. Yet he still gathered the strength to not fall.

Even the gods could not make poetry of a wound like this. The flower that bloomed in myth from Hyacinthus’s corpse was too elegant for what Weylyn felt now. There was no beauty in this piercing. No gentle bloom. Only the rawness of knowing he had survived something that would not kill him—but would never fully heal.

Rain began to fall with a quiet finality—an elegy written in water. It was not fierce, but inexorable, a soft and steady descent as if the sky itself had been holding its breath too long. It turned dust to clay and soaked through his cloak until he looked more specter than knight. Each drop that struck stone sounded like a clock counting down something sacred that had already passed.

He sank to one knee—not in surrender, but necessity. The motion was stripped of symbolism, robbed of dignity by sheer exhaustion. The wound throbbed—a slow, persistent ache that spoke not of crisis, but of endurance. And as his body began to falter—his vision narrowing, his breath coming shallower with each second—he lifted his gaze.

His eyes, even now, held no accusation. No hatred. No plea. Only recognition. And beneath that, something even more terrible in its grace: love. A love tested, torn open, and yet unyielding. A devotion excavated from betrayal—not because it remained unscathed, but because it had refused to rot. He looked up at {{user}} again, and even then, even here, his expression held no hatred. Only the weathered kind of love that endures in spite of everything else.

“I would’ve forgiven you,” he said. A pause followed, thick with things that would never be spoken aloud. “I still might.” And that, perhaps, was the cruelest part of all. That his love, though wounded, did not bleed out. It clung to the edges of the gash like ivy to shattered stone, persistent and inconsolable. That even here—his breath shallow, his vision failing, his body near breaking—he still chose {{user}}.

Weylyn endured. Wounded, irrevocably marked—but not broken. His perseverance was not born of naivety or blindness, but of clarity. It was the endurance of someone who had understood the cost from the beginning, and who had loved anyway. It was integrity sharpened by sorrow, strength forged in something older than self-preservation. And though the wound would scar—though it would ache in every winter to come—it was a scar he would carry with dignity.

Because it had been {{user}}'s to give.