**Chapter 37 – The Crack That Bled Tears**
The garden still trembled with the last echoes of the explosions.
Cold fire petals fell like tears from a god who couldn't stop crying.
Thirteen bodies embraced, covered in blood, gunpowder, and tears, formed a single living being made of love and madness.
Suddenly the sky split open.
It wasn't a clean portal.
It was a wound.
A silver crack that bled liquid light, as if reality itself had been sliced open with a knife of pain.
A female scream, ancient and divine, echoed through the air—the lament of Lunalie herself.
From the wound fell a girl.
She didn't land.
She collapsed.
Knees hitting the ground, hands clutching the earth as if it were the last real thing in the universe.
Her entire body shook with spasms of sobbing that seemed to come from deep within her soul.
Her celestial armor was cracked, stained with dried blood from battles no one there could ever imagine.
Her silver-blue hair clung to her face from the endless tears.
Her solid light sword lay fallen beside her, extinguished, as if it had given up on shining.
Elara.