Night had fallen over the Hall of Kings, but nobody in the room mistook night for peace.
Blue fire burned low in the bowls along the pillars. Their light shook over old carvings—river marks, sun-discs, the signs of Lapi and Ru. Beyond the open arches, Nam Lapi moved under the moon like a long black road.
At the foot of the throne dais sat Eren's sons.
Atum sat straight, too straight for a boy his age. Aru leaned forward a little, eyes on the room, as if he expected it to change shape if he watched long enough.
Their father did not sit.
Eren stood before them in a plain dark robe, not armor, but nothing about him looked soft. Time had cut him into harder lines. Firelight touched the scars on his face and the old damage in one hand.
For a while, no one spoke.
Then Eren turned toward the river and said, "There are truths a prince can be kept from when he is small."
He looked back at them.
"But not forever."
Atum straightened more.
Aru did not move at all.
Eren's voice lowered.
"The songs will tell you the old war ended."
The fire cracked softly.
"The priests tell the people the enemy was broken and driven away. The frightened tell themselves that what still stirs beyond the dark are only remnants."
He paused.
"They are wrong."
The room changed.
Atum's hands tightened on his knees.
Aru's eyes stayed fixed on his father.
Eren stepped down from the dais and stopped in front of them.
"Before either of you were born," he said, "the sky over Iguru Pa Tah did not crack with thunder."
His gaze shifted past them, beyond the pillars, beyond the river, into memory.
"It screamed."
Across Nam Lapi, fishing fires died one by one as a wound of white fire tore open the heavens.
Not lightning.
Not storm.
A scream of light.
Old women dropped prayer bowls in the reed shrines. Watchmen on the eastern towers froze with horns half raised. Children woke crying before their mothers heard the sound itself, because terror reached the body faster than sound did that night.
Then the river rose.
Not in waves.
The water stood.
A wall of dark water lifted itself above the banks and held there, trembling, as if Lapi himself had risen to watch what was coming.
The bronze alarm drums began to roar.
Dum.
Dum.
Dum.
The sound rolled over terraces, docks, rooflines, shrines, barracks.
The old signal.
War.
In the palace, Eren had not yet been king.
He was the first sword beneath the crown, young enough to still think readiness and control were the same thing.
The council chamber had been full of noise.
"It is the old sign."
"The western stars vanished an hour ago."
"The river shrines are calling it a return."
Young Eren stood at the open stone edge of the Hall of Radiance, staring out over the terraces toward the screaming sky.
A woman stumbled in from the inner shrine barefoot, ash on her face, blood at one nostril.
Sila.
She stopped hard enough to catch herself on a pillar.
"The sky-gates are opening," she said.
The whole chamber went still.
One elder asked, too softly, "The light-bearers?"
Sila swallowed.
"No."
That one word turned fear into certainty.
Outside, a second tear opened in the sky.
The first was white.
This one was red.
The white rift burned clean enough to turn the clouds to glass. The red one spread like a wound, pulsing, shedding sparks that hissed when they struck the standing wall of the river.
The city moved fast.
Gates sealed.
River craft broke into defense lines.
Families were driven inward.
Shrine bells rang to Ru.
Water was overturned in Lapi's name.
The Guard armed at every main stair and road.
Young Eren went down to the river terrace with thirty fighters at his back.
That was when the first thing came through the white fire.
Not a ship.
A body of silver metal and flame.
It tore out of the sky and hit the standing wall of Nam Lapi so hard the whole river shuddered. For one heartbeat it hung there, half buried in dark water and steam.
Then it fell.
It smashed onto the landing stones and broke one of the old obelisks in half.
Archers on the walls raised bows at once.
"Hold!" Eren shouted.
The thing lay in broken stone, smoking.
A pod.
Smooth. Oval. Marked with symbols older than any soldier there understood.
The pod split open.
Inside was a dying woman.
Not a god.
Not a spirit.
A woman.
Tall. Pale-gold skin. Light moving under it like something alive in her blood. Armor burned open across the chest. Wound deep enough to kill anything born on Earth.
When her eyes opened, they were rings of shifting light.
Some of the guards stepped back.
Sila dropped to her knees.
The woman dragged herself half out of the pod and looked straight at Eren.
Her voice came broken, layered, wrong with pain.
"Which age... of Earth?"
No one answered.
Eren stepped forward.
"This is Iguru Pa Tah," he said. "You stand among the river kingdom."
The woman stared at him.
Something like grief crossed her face.
"So you survived," she whispered.
Then the red sky tore wider.
A shape came down inside it so huge that, for one terrible second, men mistook it for a second moon.
Not silver.
Black.
A warcraft.
It descended slowly over the river, plated in overlapping dark armor that seemed to breathe. Red fire bled from its seams. Fish leapt from the water below in blind panic. Birds dropped out of the air.
And beneath it, in columns of red light, came soldiers.
Hundreds.
Long bodies. Black war-shells. Faces hidden behind red-slit masks. Weapons that looked grown instead of forged.
The dying woman turned with sudden desperation.
"They found me."
Young Eren's fighters raised shields.
Across the far bank, the black-armored soldiers landed in silence. Then, together, they knelt and drove their weapons into the mud.
Not surrender.
Preparation.
The largest of them rose.
Its mask unfolded.
Its face looked like something that had once been a man and then been ruined by too much war and too much time.
When it spoke, the voice crossed the river like judgment.
"Children of the fallen world," it said, "we have returned to claim what was abandoned."
In the Hall of Kings, Atum's breath caught.
Aru stayed very still.
Eren kept speaking.
"I did not know his name then," he said. "Only that courage became heavier when he spoke."
On the terrace of the past, young Eren stepped to the edge of the landing stone, sword in hand.
"This river is sacred," he shouted back. "You will not cross."
The ruined face almost smiled.
"Sacred?"
Its gaze shifted to the dying woman.
"So Guoga reached you first."
The woman seized Eren's wrist with sudden force.
"Listen," she gasped. "The old defense is still here. Your ancestors hid—"
A blast of red energy hit the pod and blew it apart.
Stone exploded.
Guards were hurled back.
The woman rolled across the terrace in silver fire.
Eren raised his sword.
"Shields!"
Too late.
The first wave crossed the river not by boat, not by bridge, but by tearing short wounds in the air and stepping through them. They appeared on the landing stones in bursts of red distortion, weapons already firing.
Blue barriers flashed.
Men burned.
Archers on the upper walls loosed sun-charged bolts.
Civilians ran for the tunnels below the city.
The alarm drums became war drums.
Young Eren hit the first enemy head-on. His blade struck, jolted, then tore through the seam of black armor. He ripped it free and turned, shouting into the chaos.
"Close the lower stairs!"
"Hold the stones!"
"No retreat from the river!"
More tears opened in the air.
More enemy soldiers came through.
"This," Eren said in the quiet hall, "was how the war came back to us."
He looked at his sons.
"Not with warning. Not with negotiation."
His voice darkened.
"With hunger."
No one spoke.
Outside, the river moved under moonlight.
Inside, Eren went on.
"In the first hour, I learned that what came through the white fire would change my life more than what came through the red."
Atum swallowed once.
Aru's eyes did not leave him.
"And before dawn," Eren said, "I learned something worse."
He turned back toward Nam Lapi.
"The enemy had not crossed the stars for conquest alone."
The blue firebowls hissed.
"They had come for something buried beneath our river."
The room seemed smaller now.
Atum finally spoke.
"What?"
Eren did not answer at once.
That made it worse.
Then he said, very quietly, "Something the world had survived once already."
He looked at both boys.
"And they were willing to drown it again to take it."