The ash still smoked beneath his boots. The city's lights were glassy eyes, melted and dull, and the smell of charred banners clung to the air like a curse. Jhonathan walked without a destination, as if the world itself had been erased of meaning and he needed only to keep moving to prove it real.
He did not notice the star at first. It was small — a pale pinprick high above the ruined square — but it sang like a memory. Not with sound, but with pressure at the back of his mind: a tug that was almost a name. He had seen that light before, the same bright thing people wished upon. Now it felt like it was watching him back.
When he reached the river that used to pass behind the palace, the water was black with ash. Lanterns floated like dead moons. Jhonathan crouched at the bank, set his cracked helmet beside him, and for the first time in a long while he let himself look. The helmet's dented steel reflected the star, a pinhole in the night. Something moved beneath that tiny light — a ripple not from wind or current but from a pulse, as if the star's glow were reaching down and tapping the world.
"Brunhilde." He said the name because it steadied his hands. The woman that had answered him before had been a weapon, merciless and pure. He could call it again if he wanted to burn the horizon, but the pulse from above tugged at something older than rage.
A figure approached quietly, the soft padding of boots muffled by soot — not an enemy, not yet. When the newcomer stepped into the weak starlight Jhonathan recognized a silhouette he had thought gone forever. Not exactly the same face he remembered. War and grief had carved new edges into it.
"Where did you come from?" Jhonathan asked. His voice had the gravel of someone who had not slept in days.
The visitor tilted their head. Beneath a hood, eyes reflected starlight — calm, careful. "From where such things come," she said. "You burned houses for a reason, knight. You broke the law for one. And you carried something with you even after it died."
He flinched because the woman's words picked the scab of memory. He had not known he carried anything. He had been certain there was only emptiness where his party used to stand.
"You speak like you know me," Jhonathan said. "Prove it."
She smiled without hospitality. "You called Brunhilde and spared no one. You tore a wound into this city and then walked away with the hollow on your chest. Citizens called you monster and martyr in the same breath. People die because of you and because of them."
Jhonathan curled his fists, the old instinct to meet hatred with steel rising in him. "Then judge me by the only honest thing I know: I survive. I move."
The woman crouched and placed both palms on the river's edge. She whispered something in a language older than any marketplace prayer. The water at her touch brightened, and where it brightened a small piece of light peeled free from the star's reflection and sank like an ember.
It bobbed between them — no bigger than a child's coin — and hummed with the same pulse that had reached him from the sky. When Jhonathan reached for it a shock ran up his arm: images — not visions of future glories, but a handful of faces and laughter and the taste of the same bread he had once shared with companions. The feel of a hand in his, quick and light. Not a memory he owned, but one he had carried since long before: compiled years of other people's hope.
He blurted, "Sylviana?"
The woman's hood dipped. "Names are slippery. But yes. A piece of what you lost lives in that light. It is tied to the star — a fragment of something larger. You were bright enough to draw it close and blunt enough to make it hurt."
He should have been angry that she used his pain as a riddle. Instead some small, stubborn thing in him clenched at the idea of recovery. If a piece remained, maybe more than ashes could be recovered.
"Why me?" he asked.
"Because you are an echo-point. Your curse — or your blessing — makes you more than a single life. The star marks the places where the world keeps its broken promises. You've been collecting them, Jhonathan, whether you wanted to or not. People call you undying, but perhaps what you are is a vessel for the world's unfinished things."
He had no answer to that. Words like curse and blessing were a web in which he was both fly and spider. "I don't want to be a vessel."
"No one wishes to be the thing that pulls at the skirts of the world," she said. "But there is work. The seven gods you meant to slay — they are not only patrons of glory. Each keeps a shard of this place's story. The star is one of those shards, and the star's pieces don't always stay neat. When they fall, they lodge in people, in stones, in ruins. Sometimes they die like fire. Sometimes they learn to burn."
From the hooded woman's belt she drew a small mirror. It was obsidian on one side and, on the other, a polished surface that bent the starlight into a map of small silver lines that crawled like veins.
"You could take the shard and let it be," she said. "Or you can follow its pull. If you follow, you'll be traced by those who would claim the pieces for themselves — gods who keep chapters closed and men who traffic in the power of fragments."
He closed his fist around the tiny ember. It did not burn him. It fit into his palm like a second heartbeat. For a moment, in that small, careful light, the city's ruins faded and the memory of laughter uncracked the shell around him.
"What do you want from me?" he whispered.
"Not what I want," she replied. "What it wants. And what will happen if those who hunt shards find you while you carry one."
Above them the star twitched, like an eye turning its attention. Jhonathan rose, the ember warm against his skin. Brunhilde's shadow shifted at his back — not summoned, simply present, as if one part of him had already agreed to the road.
"Then let them come," he said. The words were not bravado. They were a choice, small and heavy. "If this world saves pieces of itself in lights, then I'll carry them. If they push me to the edge, I'll find out what else I can be."
The woman nodded once. "There are gods to find. There are men to stop. And there is a star that is not done watching you yet."
They left the river together: him with something to guard, her with a name that meant she would not be a stranger for long. Far above, the mysterious star pulsed as if pleased — or amused. Below, the city's fires had gone out for now, but embers always remembered how to flare.
And somewhere inside the small shard, a voice that was not quite remembered uncoiled and said a single quiet thing: not death.