The night at Hallowed Falls did not end when Fern walked out of the cabin.
The party had laid Jophiel to rest, restored the sacred waters, and witnessed the light of J_On spread across a dying city. Yet the miracle had left the four of them more divided than they had been before it. Fable had withdrawn to her room. Nys had spent the evening moving from one wounded companion to another. Fern and Behzad had struck one another, called each other monsters, and finally agreed upon the only truth they still appeared to share.
Neither of them trusted the other.
When they tried to speak again, Fern began with a boundary.
His name was Fern.
Whatever Behzad believed about the soul inside him, he would not be called Corellon. The name carried a history Fern had only begun to understand and a weight he had never agreed to bear. Behzad explained that he did not use it as an insult. To him, calling Fern by the name of the God of Elves was an act of reverence, an acknowledgment of something sacred that Fern continued to deny.
But this time Behzad listened.
He called him Fern.
It was a small concession, but after the fury of the night before, it was enough to let the conversation continue.
Behzad asked Fern what he knew of the Dawn War.
Fern recounted the history as he understood it. The Primordials had attacked the Gods for control of the Material Plane. The Gods defended Creation, but the conflict left mortals without their guidance and drove the people of the world to seek protection from dragons. Tharizdun attempted to end the war, opened a gate to something beyond Creation, and became the very horror he had sought to oppose. The remaining Gods eventually defeated him and ended the conflict, though they were left permanently diminished.
Behzad told him that the history was incomplete.
The Gods had not created the world.
The Primordials were also children of J_On, and they had helped shape Creation long before the divine order Fern had been taught. Dragons, ancient peoples, and entire civilizations had existed before the Gods claimed the world as their own. The Dawn War had not been a simple battle between holy creators and invading monsters. It had been a war among the children of the same father over who possessed the right to rule what they had inherited.
Fern did not dismiss him. Instead, he asked what the world had been like beneath the Primordials. Even if Behzad’s history were true, existence before the Gods was not necessarily peaceful or just. An older claim was not automatically a better one.
For the first time, they were not merely accusing one another of blindness. They were discussing what either of them could actually know.
Fern reflected upon the Gods who had survived the Dawn War and the terrible price they had paid. At least one of them, he observed quietly, had done anything but recover.
His eyes fell as he spoke.
He still insisted that he was Fern, not Corellon. Yet Corellon’s grief was beginning to enter his voice as though it belonged to him.
Behzad did not ask him to accept the whole of his revelation. He asked him to recognize the first buried truth beneath it: the Gods were not the beginning of Creation, and the history they left behind had transformed a war between siblings into a story of order defending the world from chaos.
Fern let out a slow breath.
“So I pose the question to you again. What happens if the Primordials come back? What is the end goal that you hope to achieve with this infinite knowledge you have obtained?”
Behzad answered that he did not seek the return of the Primordials.
He did not believe they were entitled to reclaim the world, nor did he intend to replace the tyranny of the Gods with the tyranny of their eldest siblings. If the Primordials returned and threatened Creation, he would oppose them as readily as any divine power that attempted to claim it.
He had not chosen a side in the Dawn War.
He wanted the war to end.
Gods and Primordials alike had continued the same ancient struggle, each convinced that Creation belonged to them. Behzad hoped to gather enough power to break that cycle, restore the Rings of Creation, and perhaps draw J_On’s gaze back toward the children who had spent eternity fighting in His absence.
Fern heard the conviction in his voice and found a new reason to be afraid.
He no longer accused Behzad of knowingly serving Tharizdun. Instead, he asked how Behzad could be certain that Tharizdun had not chosen what to reveal. A lie did not need to be entirely false. The God of Madness could have shown Behzad genuine history, stripped it of whatever context threatened his purpose, and allowed Behzad’s own longing for answers to complete the deception.
Fern was not trying to condemn him.
He was worried about him.
He did not want to watch Behzad fall to something insidious while mistaking the descent for revelation.
Behzad tried to acknowledge the concern, but the old anger rose with it. Every question about Tharizdun sounded like another accusation that his devotion to J_On was fraudulent.
“You insult me and my cause by saying it is nothing more than mere madness to serve Tharizdun. I do not serve Tharizdun!”
Fern had not said that he did.
Tharizdun had been the source of the revelation. J_On remained the object of Behzad’s faith. To Behzad, the distinction was absolute. To Fern, it did nothing to answer whether the source had an agenda.
The conversation had reached the same wall that had divided them the night before. This time, Fern recognized it before either of them rebuilt the entire fight around themselves. He declined to offer another rebuttal and allowed the silence to stand.
Across the cabin, Nys had been listening.
When Behzad first reached toward Fern, she had quietly crossed the hallway and knocked on Fable’s door. She asked the dhampir to join them in the sitting room if she was awake. It might be wise, Nys suggested, to have another person nearby as a precaution.
The last conversation between Fern and Behzad had ended in blood.
Nys returned to the sitting room and leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching for the first sign that words might again become violence. But as Behzad described the true history of the Dawn War, her attention shifted from the two men to the fragments of information she had carried since Wolford.
The murals beneath the underground church-prison.
Tharizdun, God of Madness and father of Primordials.
The Crow’s mocking references to “Daddy Tharizdun.”
The Father of Monsters intended to rise into a position that would soon be vacated. Once he did, he planned to enact the final movement of his play.
The Mutation.
And beneath every part of it was the same word Behzad had used for the event he sought.
Requiem.
The Crow had spoken of a Requiem Squad. Behzad sought the Requiem that would bring about the fall of the divine. Fable carried chain-like scars that formed an inverted Philosopher’s Stone—a vessel made not to create, but to destroy. Sindatari had warned them to remove her from the ritual beneath Hallowed Falls before its power transformed her into something else.
The pieces had existed separately for months. Now Nys could see the threads between them.
She murmured almost to herself:
“So, if this is true, then all things, both good and evil, peaceful and chaotic, light and dark, belong to this god, J_On…”
Behzad agreed. Everything belonged to J_On. God and Primordial, angel and mortal, order and chaos were all parts of the same Creation. It was not Behzad’s place to judge the divine children of his God, only to seek a way beyond the war they had perpetuated.
Nys offered him something Fern could not.
“If it helps…I do not think you are mad, Behzad.”
They had all seen the lights above Hallowed Falls. They had all witnessed the impossible healing that followed Behzad’s prayer. The Archangels existed. J_On existed. The murals beneath Wolford supported parts of the history Behzad described.
The question was no longer whether he had invented everything.
The question was what context they were missing.
Nys then told the others what had been taking shape in her mind. The Crow’s repeated language could not be dismissed as coincidence. He appeared to know that Tharizdun’s place would become vacant. He had named Requiem as part of his own design. His final act centered upon mutation, and Fable’s body had been prepared to contain or release catastrophic power.
If Behzad meant to reach into the machinery of the Dawn War, another player was already moving pieces across the same board.
Fable joined them.
She did not accuse Behzad of fabricating his revelation. Her concern was more immediate. The Requiem might not simply be a philosophy or a single spell. It could be a process whose components none of them yet understood. If Fable herself had been fashioned into one of those components, Behzad’s search for power could carry him toward the Crow’s design without either of them recognizing the road.
Behzad insisted that he did not seek Fable’s destruction. He did not intend to pave his path with her blood or sacrifice her to restore the Rings. But he could not deny that the powers moving around them were greater than any one of them understood.
To Behzad, that was precisely why they had to act.
Gods, monsters, angels, and the Crow were playing dragonchess with mortal lives. Perhaps the party’s greatest advantage was that those powers still regarded them as pieces. The game would continue whether they participated willingly or not. Behzad would rather gather the strength to move than remain helpless upon the board.
Fable understood the fear beneath that belief.
That did not mean she trusted where it might lead him.
She told Behzad that she was worried about him. He had spoken of power as though obtaining it were automatically better than refusing it. He had treated the harm it might cause as a cost that could be weighed after the fact. Worse, when he looked at the power inside Fable, he often seemed to see what it could accomplish before he saw the person forced to carry it.
Fable had spent her life being treated as a tool.
Octavian Scarletblood had carved the runes into her body for a purpose she still did not understand. The Crow called her his favorite performer. Sindatari placed wagers upon what she might become. Every great power that entered her life seemed to look past Fable and see a vessel, a weapon, or a door.
When Behzad asked why she would not embrace what had been placed inside her, she heard another person asking why the tool refused to be used.
Behzad went quiet.
Then, rather than answering with another revelation, he admitted something about himself.
“I haven’t been the nicest to any of you, perhaps from this deep-seated jealousy I’ve had…”
He looked at Fern and saw a god, even if Fern wanted nothing to do with the name. He looked at Fable and saw power beyond anything he could ever hope to possess. He looked at Nys and saw someone whom the Raven Queen had personally restored.
Behzad had spent his life reaching toward the divine.
His companions had received the touch of divinity without seeking it, while he had begged the heavens for answers and heard only silence. He had envied what they carried without understanding what it had cost them.
The admission did not excuse his anger, but it finally made it possible for the others to answer the person beneath it.
Fable told him that his envy was part of what frightened her. What Behzad saw as unused power, she experienced as the work of the people who had violated her and tried to determine her purpose before she could choose one for herself.
Behzad acknowledged that it was not his place to choose her path. He had pressed because when he saw the power within her, he thought of all the powerless people who might benefit from it. He imagined the lives that could be saved by gifts beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
Fable heard the noble thing inside that desire.
Behzad, in turn, began to hear why using power for good did not erase the violation of reducing a person to the power they possessed.
Nys warned him not to mistake disagreement for betrayal. A friend who never challenged him was not necessarily a friend at all. The party questioned him because they feared where his path might lead and because they still cared whether he survived it.
This time, Behzad accepted the warning.
“I can’t say that I am immune to falling into the same winding path that has misled all those who took this path before me…”
He could not prove that he would remain incorruptible. He could not promise that knowledge, power, or the desire to repair Creation would never convince him that any cost was justified.
“I need you all to keep me from that same trap…”
The words changed the terms between them. Behzad did not abandon his faith, his search for Requiem, or his belief that the Dawn War had to end. Instead, he finally gave the others permission to challenge him without treating every question as an attack upon J_On.
Fern answered the jealousy rather than the theology.
He told Behzad not to discount himself. Behzad might not command the elements, carry an ancient divine soul, or return from death transformed by a goddess, but he had survived harpies, gnolls, dragons, and horrors that had torn ordinary men apart.
“You really shouldn’t discount yourself like that. After all, you are still here, are you not?”
The power Behzad possessed did not come from a relic or a forgotten life. It came from somewhere inside him. Fern could see the strength in Behzad that Behzad had spent so long searching for elsewhere.
Then Nys explained what Behzad had mistaken for a gift.
She had not been born into divine power. She had died terrified and helpless, calling out to Corellon and receiving no answer she could perceive. Her soul had been damaged beyond the reach of an ordinary resurrection. The Raven Queen offered her a way back, but Nys did not know whether she had been chosen because she was worthy or simply because she had been available, desperate, and willing to accept the price.
She returned changed. Pieces of her former Elven self had been stripped away. Some people regarded her as an abomination. Her family had to reconcile the woman they loved with the Shadar-kai who came home in her place. Her afterlife belonged to the Raven Queen, and if Nys died again, there would be no third chance.
From the outside, Behzad saw a goddess reaching down to choose her.
From inside, Nys remembered being murdered.
She did not condemn him for his jealousy. She only asked him to understand that the divine attention he envied had not felt like a blessing to those forced to bear it.
For a long moment, the cabin was quiet.
Then Nys told Behzad what she needed.
“I need to go home, Behzad.”
The Mincer still haunted the Charmed Cove. Nys had fled the city after her death, and more than a year later, people continued to suffer in the place she had left behind. She needed to return. She needed to face the life, family, and unfinished duty waiting for her there.
But she could not do it while the party remained broken.
She could not survive another night of Fern and Behzad treating one another as enemies. She could not face the Mincer while Fable waited for the next person to turn her into a weapon. She could not continue holding all of them together while each insisted upon carrying every burden alone.
“I cannot even begin to do that if we remain fractured, if we cannot work as a team. I can’t do this alone. I need you. I need all of you.”
No one in the cabin had surrendered their beliefs.
Fern did not accept responsibility for Corellon’s ancient choices. Behzad did not abandon his search for the Requiem. Fable did not embrace the power others had placed inside her. Nys did not pretend that any of them were safe from becoming the very thing they feared.
They did something smaller and, for the moment, more important.
They allowed themselves to be understood.
The Dawn War could remain unresolved. The Gods could remain silent. The Crow could continue moving pieces beyond their sight.
Before the party could decide the fate of Creation, they had to remain a party.
And when the work in Dunedrift was finished, Nys was going home.