By afternoon, the official story inside Helios Gate was already mutating.
The wall assault had been a large-scale raid.
Nothing more.
The Bloodwyrm had been killed by a coordinated Sentinel strike.
No mention of shadow weapons. No mention of strange symbols. No mention of the ancient who had come within sight of the Sunwall and walked away untouched.
Helios Gate survived on structure as much as stone. Panic was bad for both.
Kael understood that.
He still hated it.
He sat at the strategy table with the others while Archivist Sen unpacked a stack of sealed folios from a weatherproof case and spread them carefully under weighted corners.
The pages were old enough to crumble at the edges.
Some were handwritten. Others looked machine-printed in a language half-modern and half-pre-Fall notation. Diagrams of blood flow. Anatomical sketches. Eclipse circles marked over human chests and skulls. Notes about "threshold instability" and "dual-spectrum rejection."
Toren hovered so close over one page that Bram finally shoved him backward with two fingers.
"You breathe on it, you buy it."
"I don't think the archive has a gift shop," Toren muttered.
Sen tapped one brittle diagram with a gloved finger. "These sects believed Star-Blood could be directed toward specific evolutionary outcomes. Most attempts ended in catastrophic mutation."
Malik looked at a sketch of a man with split ribs and extra jaw joints. "You don't say."
Sen kept reading. "But some references suggest one line of study showed… unusual promise."
Elara folded her arms. "Define unusual."
"Stable hybridization potential."
The room went still again.
Kael was starting to hate those words.
"What does that mean?" Sera asked.
"It means," said Sen, looking from the paper to Kael with almost scholarly horror, "they were trying to create something that could survive what should be mutually incompatible Star-Blood states."
"Crimson and Solar," Toren said softly.
Sen nodded. "Possibly more."
Kael leaned forward despite himself. "And they got it?"
The archivist's mouth tightened. "There's no confirmed success in the records I brought."
No confirmed success.
Not no.
Rhyse, who had remained silent for most of the briefing, finally spoke.
"What do they call the result?"
Sen hesitated.
Then: "The fragments use different terms. Most are corrupted. But one title appears more than once."
He looked at Kael.
"Eclipse Vessel."
Bram made a face. "That's not ominous at all."
Kael looked down at his own hands.
They were steady.
He didn't feel steady.
Rhyse moved to the map table. "If this Eclipsed Hand was active near the relay tower and linked to Aurelion, then we assume the recent assault was a retrieval attempt."
"Retrieval?" Malik said. "Not assassination?"
"If Aurelion wanted Mercer dead, he would be dead," Elara said quietly.
Nobody disagreed.
Rhyse slid a marker toward the broken district map.
"Then we hit them first."
Sera looked up. "You're serious."
"I am."
"With what troops?" Bram asked. "We burned half the western reserves last night."
"Not a full strike. A surgical one."
Rhyse planted the marker on Hollow Row.
"We go back."
Every person in the room reacted badly in their own way.
Toren actually laughed once, thin and horrified. "No."
Malik's expression said he was already mentally packing for the worst.
Elara's eyes narrowed. "We don't know what's nesting there now."
"Then we find out," said Rhyse. "The wall won't survive repeated coordinated pushes. If Aurelion has established a forward nest this close to Helios Gate, we cut it out before it grows teeth."
Sera lifted her good hand. "Respectfully, Commander, it already has teeth."
Bram pointed at Kael with one huge finger. "And I'm guessing this mission includes him."
Rhyse looked directly at Kael. "It does."
Elara stepped in immediately. "No."
Rhyse's head turned. "Captain?"
"He's unstable."
"He's targeted."
"That is exactly my point."
Rhyse's face did not change. "Your hunter is the only surviving witness who has made direct contact with the ancient, survived the bite, and displayed an anomalous response to engagement with a threshold-class beast. If the enemy wants him, he goes where I can control the battlefield."
There it was.
Not a hunter.
Not even a soldier.
An asset.
Kael pushed back from the table and stood.
The room tracked him.
"I'm not sitting behind the wall while you send everyone else into something that came for me."
Elara looked furious.
At him now, not Rhyse.
"Kael—"
"No."
He swallowed once, then forced the rest out.
"If this thing marked me, if that symbol means what he says it means, then I need to know why."
Malik studied him for a second that felt longer than it was.
Then he grunted.
"He's right."
Elara looked at him like she might stab him with his own sword.
Bram rubbed one hand over his face. "I hate when the bad ideas start sounding practical."
Toren raised his hand halfway, then lowered it when no one cared.
Sera tilted her head at Kael. "You sure this isn't just the vampire in you making decisions now?"
Kael met her stare. "I guess we find out."
No one smiled.
Rhyse nodded once. Decision made.
"Nightfall. Patrol seven plus selected specialists. Enter Hollow Row, identify hostile nest structure, recover any records or relics tied to the Eclipsed Hand, and destroy what you can't extract."
He looked to Sen. "You're coming."
The archivist stared. "Commander, with respect, I am not—"
"You're the only one in this city who can identify what we're looking at."
Sen closed his mouth.
That was that.
As the meeting broke apart, Elara caught Kael by the arm and hauled him into the side corridor before anyone else could get a word in.
The moment they were alone, she let go.
"What are you doing?"
He blinked. "Helping?"
"That wasn't a joke."
"Neither was I."
She stepped closer, voice low and furious. "You are one bad moment away from turning into something none of us can predict."
"I know."
"No, I don't think you do."
That hit harder than he expected.
For a second he almost snapped back.
Then he saw it.
Not anger.
Fear.
Not of him exactly.
For him.
That was worse.
He leaned against the corridor wall and looked down. "What do you want me to say?"
Elara was quiet.
When she finally answered, her voice had lost its edge.
"I want you to tell me you're still here."
Kael looked up.
The corridor torchlight caught in her bruises, in the tension at the corners of her eyes, in the exhaustion she never showed the others.
He could hear her heartbeat.
Steady. Fast.
Human.
He hated that he noticed.
"I'm here," he said.
It was the truest thing he had.
Elara held his gaze for a long second, then nodded once.
"Then stay that way."
She walked off before he could answer.
Kael remained in the corridor alone, staring at the dark between torch brackets.
Inside him, the hunger shifted.
Listening.
Waiting.
Tonight they were going back to Hollow Row.
And something in him was already afraid of what would feel familiar when he got there.