The next day, I was summoned to attend a gathering meant to draw companions and warriors closer by having them take part in rites.

I lingered at the threshold, unease coiling tight in my chest, hands clenched at my sides, but the presence of the guards made it clear-I didn't have a choice.

The whole point is to bring pairs closer, isn’t it? The Admiral is off on a mission. So why am I even here? I thought bitterly.

And yet, a sliver of relief cut through the dread. Thank God. I couldn’t imagine sitting through this with him at my side. If he were here, I’d be sweating through my skin, terrified of dropping something, or breathing too loud, or—God forbid—staring at the wrong moment or wrong things. The man didn’t even have to say a word; he could probably ruin me with a single glance for one small mistake. No, this ceremony was good enough without the Admiral nearby to make me wish I could sink straight through the floor.

The program was held in a large, open room, the walls pulsing faintly with that eerie bioluminescent glow. Guards patrolled the aisles, their presence adding to the already tense atmosphere.

I had barely stepped across the threshold when Shraddha found me.

She looked like herself, and that alone loosened something in my chest. Her hair was neatly tied back, bright colour clothes like she usually wears though there was a shadow in her eyes, I hope it wasn't the kind I'd feared. She spotted me, and before I could react, she was in my arms, her small frame trembling against me.

"I've missed you," she whispered, voice thick with emotion.

"I've missed you too," I murmured, my throat tightening, my heart aching with the weight of everything unsaid. I wanted to tell her about Kriudra, about the way the other humans looked at me. But I couldn't. Not yet.

When I asked how she was, her answer came with a pause-one heartbeat too long. Her gaze wavered before she said, softly, "I'm okay. It's... different. But I'm okay."

Something in her tone made me want to dig deeper, but she was standing so straight, her chin lifted as if holding together something fragile. I didn't want to be the one to shatter it.

Relief fluttered in me anyway, a small, guilty thing. I had imagined worse-much worse-and it seemed those nightmares hadn't yet taken root.

"Pitchovas..." She hesitated, and to my surprise, a faint blush touched her cheeks. "He's... different. He treats me well."

Her eyes shifted toward a corner of the room, and I followed her gaze.

Pitchovas sat among a group of Zypherian warriors, but his attention wasn't on them-it was on Shraddha. His posture was relaxed, but his sharp gaze tracked her movements with quiet intensity. He was massive, like I remember the last time, his broad shoulders tense with restrained strength.

The sight of him hit me like a cold wind.

When his eyes landed on me, he inclined his head-an acknowledgment. A greeting. His expression remained unreadable, but there was something... deliberate about the gesture.

I didn't nod. I didn't look away.

I let him see it-the promise in my eyes. If he hurt her, if he so much as dimmed the light in her, I would find a way to make him regret it, Zypherian strength or no.

His expression didn't change, but the faint tightening of his jaw told me he'd understood.

And that was enough. For now.

She caught my sleeve, her fingers squeezing with gentle insistence. "Come on," she urged, tugging me toward one of the long tables set beneath the pulsing glow of the chamber walls.

I still wasn't ready to interact with him. My last encounter with Pitchovas had been... violent in its quietness-but Shraddha's face... God, her face. The open warmth in it, the way her smile bloomed just from looking at him, was almost disarming. Almost. I'd seen her afraid before, and this wasn't that.

Whatever this was-whatever he was to her-she was happy. And that happiness anchored me in place.

Pitchovas rose as we approached, his movement fluid despite his size. And then-without a word-he stepped around the table and pulled out two chairs. One for Shraddha. One for me.

I froze mid-step.

The gesture was unmistakably human-a courtesy from my own world-but there was no warmth in it, none of the casual ease such an act usually carried.

His movements were deliberate, ritualistic, like he was enacting something he had studied in theory, not learned in the blood and bone of daily life.

The memory of our first meeting slammed back into me-the shadow he'd cast, the chill of his voice, the way he'd looked at me as though measuring the exact amount of force it would take to snap my spine. My jaw tightened.

Still, Shraddha was watching me, hope and tension mingled in her expression.

I lowered myself into the chair, stiff-backed. "Thank you," I murmured, my voice tight. Part of me hated giving him even that small courtesy.

The chairs were broad and low-backed, clearly designed for Zypherian frames but adapted for humans with additional cushioning.

Pitchovas's gaze shifted to me, calm but unblinking.

"It is an honour," his voice is a low, liquid thing with a faintly dangerous undercurrent, "And courtesy extended to the T'skiyla of the Admiral. To refuse you a seat would shame my Companion, and him".

The program began with a series of... activities. Games, dances, performances. It was all so... bizarre. Watching the massive, imposing Zypherians attempting to participate in such frivolous human activities was both amusing and unsettling.

An elder stepped forward. She was old—truly old, even by Zypherian standards.

Her skin was dark and weathered, folded into lines like riverbeds carved by time, her silver-threaded hair coiled into heavy braids that glimmered under the bioluminescent walls. Despite her age, there was no frailty in her.

"These," she said, sweeping one clawed hand toward the bead kits waiting at every table, "Do you think these are ornaments?" she said, her voice was low and serrated.

"No... these are relics stolen from the jaws of things older than your Earth, older than your fragile lives.

Each pearl comes from Wraiths—creatures lurking where the molten rivers eat breath and the air itself devours flesh.

The colors you see are the creature’s own shifting essence. As a Wraith grows, its pearl deepens, stratifies, and changes—each pearl has a memory of hunger and heat.

If a Wraith reaches full maturity, its pearls harden into something beyond blade and fire.

Then there is no hunt—only a burial. The mature cannot be killed. To descend into their abyss is to wager your body, your mind, your life.

Only warriors who return alive earn the right to stand before you. Only then are they deemed worthy to weave bond with another soul."

Her robes whispered as she walked, claws tracing the stone, pausing at each kit. At the first table, she halted, raising a blue bead that gleamed like fractured moonlight on poisoned waves. "Blue," she murmured.

“Blue,” she intoned. “Born from the hearts of Tide-Wraiths, serpent leviathans that coil in the trenches where light never dares to enter. Their organs, translucent and glowing, shatter into crystals when their bodies are slain. Warriors who go to claim blue descend into crushing dark, bones grind to powder. Blue is constancy—the pull of tide to shore. The vow to return, no matter the abyss that seeks to keep you.”

Her eyes passed over Shraddha and Pitchovas as the blue beads gleaming before them as well. Shraddha’s hand went to her mouth, her expression a startled mixture of awe and something else—something softer.

Pitchovas didn’t move at first. Then a tight breath flared his nostrils, once, as if bracing for a blow he both feared and wanted. His massive hands hovered near the kit, not touching—claws curled in, the restraint almost boyish. He kept his eyes on Shraddha instead of the pearls, waiting—quiet, taut—like a warrior facing judgment.

When her gaze finally tipped toward him—hopeful, shining—something unarmored flickered across his face and vanished. His shoulders eased by a hair’s breadth. He dipped his head, shyly, a fraction too fast for ceremony—an admission that the blue was his, and that her reaction mattered more than any rite.

The elder moved on, fingers brushing verdant pearl that pulsed faintly.

Green,” she murmured. “Harvested from the marrow of Spore-Wraiths, fungal horrors felled in poisoned swamps. It is endurance, the patience to root and rise through poisoned ground. It is the vow to carry another without consuming them."

A human companion from the far corner table—wide-eyed, voice tentative—leaned forward. "But why risk all that? Descending into those horrors... what does it have to do with us, the companions?"

The elder turned slowly, her smile sharp and knowing, the kind that cut and comforted all at once. Her eyes swept the hall, lingering on each table, on each human face drawn taut with unease.

“Risk?” she said, her voice a low rumble that seemed to rise from the stone itself. “It is not an inconvenience—it is the marrow of who we are. To be Zypherian is to live at the edge of danger, to descend into fire, into venom, into void. Our warriors do not brave the depths for conquest, nor for empty glory. They go because the union demands it. Every scar they carry back is a vow made flesh—a testament that they can shoulder the unbearable and still rise again.”

She lifted a strand of pearls from a nearby kit, the faint glow of its beads casting fractured light across her scaled hand.

“These are not trinkets, not ornaments to flatter the eye. Each pearl is born of anguish—of molten caverns that sear the body, of shadows that gnaw at the mind. They are wrested from creatures that would see us undone, and yet we take them… not to hoard, but to give. To offer them is to bare our sincerity, to lay open the truth of our devotion. Do you see? These pearls are intentions laid at your feet. They declare I will endure the abyss so that you may trust the ground beneath your feet. I will carry danger in my body so you may lay your hand in mine without fear.”

Her voice tightened, became almost intimate, as though confiding in each companion personally.

She paused at the next row, lifting a small red bead that seemed to hold a quiet heat. "Red," she said, her voice steady.  "Forged in the veins of Flame-Wraiths, quenched in volcanic death that sears to the bone. Red is metamorphosis. To choose red is to accept that intimacy leaves marks, and to carry those traces without shame or fear.”

At another table, her claw lifted something darker: a shard so black it drank the light.

“Black,” she said gravely. “Ripped from the eyes of Shadow-Wraiths, blinded in eclipsed hunts that warp the mind. Warriors return shaken, haunted by fleeting visions and nightmares, yet they recover clarity with patience. Black is silence—the unseen vow to protect, bearing burden without breaking.”

My hands hovered above the lid of my kit, but I didn’t open it. Not yet.

Because I couldn’t stop wondering.

The Admiral. Which pearl had he brought back?

Blue? No. Please. He doesn’t exactly scream 'Blue type guy'

Green?

…Or black. The void-colour. Silence.

I chewed the inside of my cheek. Blue? No. Green? Maybe. Red? Terrifying...err...Black?

But then again, this was the Admiral. He never quite fit into categories. He made them.

And then her shadow fell across me.

The elder had returned to our table again. She loomed, eyes narrowing at the still-closed kit in front of me.

"Child," she said, voice rumbling like distant stonefall, "why have you not opened your kit?"

Heat jolted through me. I fumbled with words, none of them coherent.

Her gaze sharpened,"Do not delay with trembling hands. The pearls cannot be woven while inside kit. Show us. Show me. Who is your warrior?"

My warrior??

Heat rose in my chest. My lips parted, but no sound came. My tongue stuck against the roof of my mouth refusing to say it?

That Ms Elder my warrior is

The warrior.

Him.

Admiral.

"I do not see him," the Elder pressed, her tone calm, merciless. "Where is your warrior, child?. The Council decreed every warrior's presence. His absence speaks louder than your silence. It challenges the council itself. It challenges the authority of the Admiral whose seal declared this gathering mandatory."

My lips parted, uselessly. "He—"

Her voice lowered, each word deliberate, ringing with the force of law itself.

"Answer me clearly, child. Who is the warrior that dares to absent himself this night? Who would risk not only your shame, but the shame of standing against the Council’s command?"

"Admiral's T'sk—" Pitchovas’s voice rumbled suddenly, deep and certain.

The elder’s head snapped toward him. Her hand lifted, silencing him before the word could finish leaving his mouth. Her gaze was cutting, her tone a command forged from stone.

"We do not invoke the Admiral without grave cause," she decreed, words sharp as fractured obsidian. "The Council has not uttered his name, nor have I demanded it from your lips. Do not presume to drag him into this chamber's light unbidden, warrior. Restrain your tongue."

Pitchovas stilled, Nostrils flared, then flattened, nodding like a kid caught with cookies, his eyes flicked to me I tried.

The elder turned back to me. "Now. Once more, child. Speak. Who is your warrior?"

"Admiral!" I blurted, far too loud, the word cracking in the air like a dropped plate.

The elder’s brows lifted, the smallest tilt of her head betraying surprise—but her composure did not falter. "The…Admiral?" she repeated, the word drawn slowly, as though tasting its edges.

Heat rushed to my face. My hands flailed uselessly above the table before I dropped them back down, trying to look anywhere but at her. "Yes. I mean—well, he’s technically—uh—my warrior."

The elder’s gaze lingered on me, unreadable. Then, with deliberate precision, she reached down. Her claws slid the lid of my untouched kit open.

The bead within shone in the pulsing light—gold, bright as captured sun.

The elder froze, for the first time, her composure wavered — only for a heartbeat, but enough for the silence to deepen into awe.

Her eyes rose to mine, sharp and searching, as if measuring something far beyond me.

"I… have spoken of blue, of green, of red, of black," she said slowly, her voice rasping with a weight it had not carried before. "But there is one more. One I had not thought will be required to name this night."

Her claw hovered over the golden bead, not daring to lift it. Her voice lowered, almost reverent, almost reluctant.

"Gold," she whispered, and the syllable seemed to still the chamber. Even the pulse of the walls dimmed, as though the world itself bowed its head. "The death-pearls of a Vein-Wraith—formed only in its last fury, when it thrashes against mortality itself.

The cavern collapses, fire pours from veins in the rock, and the creature’s wrath scorches all who dare to steal from it. None return from such places whole. Warriors who reach for gold are swallowed in flame, their bodies ash in the fissures. Except…"

Her words hung, heavy as stone dragged across the heart.

She scanned the room once, deliberately, her eyes flicking across the guards before settling back on me.

"Among the living, only one warrior has ever returned with gold pearls in his kit. One. The Admiral. His survival is not spoken of as triumph, but as a miracle. Some even whispered it was not he who conquered the beast, but the beast who chose him."

Her gaze cut sharply to me then, drilling through flesh and bone. "To weave gold is to bind a vow that defies time itself. It is devotion so absolute it ceases to be love and becomes worship. Worship is dangerous, child. It consumes the worshipper more surely than the flame consumes the moth."