Page 83 of The Monster's Daughter
I sit in the grass, fingers plucking stray blades one by one. Just breathing. Watching them. Letting the moment soak in like sunlight on old scars.
Maybe healing doesn’t look like battlefields and speeches.
Maybe it looks like this.
That night, I find him in the living room, bent over one of our old storage chips like it’s a relic. When he hears me come in, he straightens, holding up a thumb-sized sliver of crystal.
“Found this tucked behind the console on the old ship,” he says. “Took a while, but I patched it.”
He loads it into the receiver. Static. Then—music. A tremble of violins and synth hums. My mother’s voice, too faint to be anything but memory.
It’s the track I used to play when I thought we were winning the war.
I haven’t heard it since the day we buried half my squad in orbit ash.
I just stare at him.
He steps forward, offers a hand.
“Dance with me?”
I nod, numb. He pulls me in, and we sway in that barely lit room, my cheek against his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath the scars. The music wraps around us like something sacred. Something too fragile for war.
“I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” I whisper.
He kisses my forehead, gentle and reverent.
“You bled for the world,” he says, “Now it’s time the world gave something back.”
And for a flicker of a heartbeat, I almost believe it might.
CHAPTER 46
KAGE
The shuttle’s ramp hisses underfoot. Outside, Xeros spreads out like a wounded lung—scorched plains, new saplings pushing through crater soil, domed shelters shimmering in late sunlight. I step down, dust clinging to my boots. The air tastes of iron and ash, but underneath there’s the faint green tang of regrowth. It smells like hope. It smells like home.
Bella stands beside me, hand buried in mine. Natalie’s eyes dart over everything, absorbing the shape of the world she’ll inherit. She whispers my name, but I answer with a squeeze of Bella’s hand—and then we walk toward the ruins.
The old embassy stairs lie in partial ruin. Some steps missing, others cracked. Someone has cleared paths, though—small stones stacked into cairns, pale moss weaving through the cracks. I kneel, raw in my chest, and place my thumb into a fracture in the stone. Feels colder than I expected.
Bella moves past me, slow, and stops at my side. She lifts the chain around her neck—my dog tags from the war before—even though they don’t belong to her. She lays them on the cracked step, letting them rest in the dust.
“From one soldier to another,” she whispers.
Natalie steps forward, clutching a sheaf of colored shards—colored holo-paper, a child’s art tool. She kneels and presses the drawing into the rough stone, smoothing edges with her fingertips. I see the shapes: three figures. One scaled, one human, one in between. She looks up at me, trembling with pride.
“It’s not how we look,” she says, voice small but steady. “It’s what we do.”
I swallow hard. Couldn’t be more right.
The dusk drops fast. We walk from the ruins toward the settlement’s communal fire plaza. Survivors cluster along broken walkways, lanterns floating overhead, their glow soft in the gathering night. The smell of charred wood and new fires mingles. A hush descends as we arrive; eyes flick toward us, then downward in respect.
At the center lies the ceremonial rack—ancestor armor pieces: breastplates, gauntlets, helmets etched in blood-steel filigree, heavy with history. The Elders call me forward. My steps echo on stone. Bella and Natalie remain behind, her hand brushing mine for courage.
An elder with silver horns—my father’s friend—places the helm in my palms. It trembles weight, as if alive. I feel its presence in my bones. The breastplate slides over my chest—cold at first, then warming to my heat, conforming. The gauntlets click. The boots settle. The full armor clasps tight. It’s like memory given form.
A murmur travels through the crowd, then silence.
