Aethelos Pain and Blood

The battle was over. · Aldiana was smoke, silence, and ash. · Away from the center of the destruction, Joseph found Jonas Dorp among the trees. Neither of them raised a weapon. There was no need anymore. · Jonas was the first to speak, his voice tired but firm. · “I know it was you, Joseph. · The attack on the Vindicari Royal House. · You were the one who gave the government the ‘atrocity’ they needed.” · Joseph did not deny it. His shoulders were bent, as if the invisible armor of duty had finally cracked. · “I did what I was ordered to do.” · “You may not feel like a traitor to the government,” Jonas continued. “But you look like someone who betrayed his own values.” · Joseph closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, the honesty came out without defense. · “I would rather be dead… than live with this guilt.” · Around them, soldiers and students of Solaris looked at the ruins of the nursery, at the small bodies, at what the “honor of the kingdom” had cost. The silence was heavier than any speech. Tyranny had stopped being a word from a manifesto. It had a face. It had a smell. It had a name: Aldiana. · Jonas observed all of it and then turned back to Joseph. · “I won, in a way. · The academies will decentralize from the government. That was what I wanted.” · Joseph did not answer at once. Jonas added, in a low voice, almost to himself: · “What joy can there be in victory, when mortality still stalks my night-hours.” · Then, with a half-smile without joy: · “It’s a battle that still has a lot of fighting and sweat left along the way.” · Nayb did not return with the formation. · Kneeling among the ruins, still holding Eli in his arms, he looked one last time at the Solaris emblem on his shoulder. He tore it off. He let it fall onto the burned earth. · “I will never belong to this again. · I saw what a government is capable of. · And I will not serve those who kill children in the name of honor.” · No one stopped him from leaving. · Two years later · Nayb walked the streets of Aethelos with a small boy holding his hand. Eli. Attentive eyes. Small steps. · That was when he met Áquila. · She did not ask for explanations right away. She only looked at the father and the son, and offered what at that point he no longer quite knew how to accept: a place where the boy could grow without the smell of war smoke. · Nayb stayed. For a while. · But even with Eliana dead, he never stopped loving her. That truth became a wall between him and any new life. When he left, he left Eli with Áquila — not for lack of love for his son, but because the mother’s ghost still fit into every room of the house. · Those who remained · Joseph Ville Light rose in the hierarchy. In time, he became a central figure of an already independent Solaris. At night, however, the Vindicari Royal House returned to him in dreams — the attack he himself had helped invent. · Brock Rocket hid his true strength. He never again spoke of the Meteor Blast over the nursery. He laughed, trained, pretended lightness. Inside, every child he saw made him look away. · Violeta kept fighting. She kept winning. But whenever a father protected a child on the battlefield, she saw Lysander falling to his knees and Glinn crying. · The three of them lived. · The three of them won, in a way. · And the three of them carried demons that no victory could erase. · Aethelos, years later · The academies were no longer a direct arm of the crown. · New institutions were born. Jonas Dorp followed his path to Umbral. · The name Eliana almost disappeared from official records. · But in a boy with inherited eyes, raised by a stepmother named Áquila, the story was not over yet. · It was only waiting.