Arylos walked with Iris, Bellona, and Eir through the makeshift streets of the cavernous ruined city, smiling to himself as the sounds of the three women chatting and laughing pleased his ears like an autumn flute melody. He felt happy in a way that he couldn’t fully explain, nor did he really care to. As the group walked along, Arylos felt himself no longer caring for their words; only the smiles they wore on their faces. He felt a warmth within himself that he struggled to define, content to take it in regardless of what it really was.

He truly felt as though his family had been reunited.

He laughed to himself as he shook his head. Iris was one thing, but would Bellona and Eir be considered ‘family’? One is a warrior with a bloody personal history with him and the other is a lost and lonely girl with a similarly bloody history. After all, he stripped them of their divinity; a stigma amongst the Templarian people of which they will never be able to cleanse themselves. Yet who was at fault; the men who manipulated these soldiers, these women who were too stubborn to realize they were sent to a trap, or the monster that killed what they were?

This fleeting warmth of belonging he felt was more of a lie he told himself now. A fake emotion he gave himself to pretend that he could feel anything at all. He wanted this warmth, he wanted this family, and yet he was too weak to have it.

Am I alive or am I just pretending? A question that the eternal Titan found himself struggling with a lot more recently than he ever realized he would. Is this really what it’s like to be alive or is the Titan just lying to himself to hide the pain? The more Arylos wondered, the more he began to question the reality he made for himself.

“Honey? What’s wrong?” Iris asked, seeing Arylos’s troubled expression.

Arylos sighed and shook his head, clearing the thoughts from his mind. Yet before he could answer, he felt a searing pain in the back of his mind as his ears went deaf. He felt his world spin as the nauseating sensation was joined by a ringing in his ears. He groaned and grabbed his head, leaning heavily onto his staff as he gritted his teeth through the pulsing in his head. He could see Iris grab onto him with a worried expression yet he couldn’t hear her words. Arylos ran through the possibilities as he took mental stock of himself. He was not wounded, he felt no poison, he was not sick, yet the pulsing in his mind couldn’t shake him like a deep heartbeat in his head that pounded like a warrior’s drum.

A pulsing sensation, a rhythmic heartbeat not of his own.

Arylos came to a startling conclusion as his hearing returned yet the pain worsened. He gritted through the familiar sensation as Iris took him by the arm and sat him down on a bench by a nearby table. Slowly, the sensation began to fade yet the rhythmic thumping remained in his head. Eir sat down next to Arylos as Iris took his staff from him and rubbed his temples as Bellona watched with concerned curiosity.

“What’s wrong with him?” Eir asked, wondering what she could do to ease the Titan’s pain.

Arylos struggled to get words out of his mouth yet his clenched jaw prevented him from speaking. Before he could force himself to speak, a group of armored soldiers ran towards Bellona with worried looks in their eyes.

“Lord Commander!” one of them hailed with a quick and sharp salute. “There was an attack out in the city; at least twelve men are injured and our Lord is missing. We believe the attacker has him in custody.”

“Excuse me what?!” Bellona snarled at the soldiers. “Get a search party formed now!”

“Motonobu is forming one near the ruined palace now; he requested your help,” the other soldier answered with a bow.

“Fuck me sideways,” Bellona said while turning back towards Arylos, still holding his head in pain. “Iris, can I take Eir and leave him to you?”

“Of course you can,” Iris answered with a firm nod before gesturing to Eir for her to leave. The valkyrie hesitated for a moment before quickly jumping up and silently following Bellona and the other two soldiers as they ran out of sight; leaving the Titan and his bride alone on the bench as she continued to rub his head. “Are you okay? Can you walk?” she asked softly.

Arylos growled loudly as he gently grabbed Iris’s hands and pulled them away, resigning to the rhythmic pain and knowing full well that he won’t be better until it passes. “Don’t worry about me; it was minor,” Arylos assured with a pained chuckle.

“It certainly didn’t look like that to me,” Iris barked in concern.

“Trust me, we have more important things going on right now,” Arylos said while shaking his head, trying to shake off the denial. He then felt the pain worsen as a thick pressure in his mind that pointed to his left. As he turned towards the pain, the pain moved to the center of his forehead like a compass needle that was stuck pointing at a small wooden shack made of refuse wood. “He’s here,” Arylos said in a deep growl as he felt the ominous presence.

Iris looked at Arylos with confusion as she looked over towards the wooden shack that stood out against the rest of the cavern. As she examined the building, she realized that the bench and table they sat at were made of a similar wood as the shack; a wood that had been long dead. Before Iris could ask a follow up question, the shack door opened with a loud creak and Sentarus exited from the shack, covered in soot and dirt while still wearing his radiation armor. Iris nearly greeted the Kaiyumian king until she watched another shape exit from the shack; a tall man wearing a blue and white cloak covered in gold markings with a hood that shadowed his face, leaving only the glowing blue light of his eyes that stared at Arylos and Iris with a ferocious intensity. As the man walked outside, his thudding footsteps clattered against the ground as strange noises emanated from his body that did not sound human.

“Vyn’jhahe, Auer’makyr,” the man said in a strange tongue with a deep and growling voice that hummed with a strange energy, like a dragon growling under a silent ocean.

Arylos watched the man with a furious look in his eyes that would never break from the man. As the tall man came closer, Iris saw Arylos show nothing but contempt and fury for this man. “Why did you lead him to me, Sentarus?” Arylos asked angrily while keeping his eyes on the man.

“I had no choice, my friend,” Moviron answered nervously, trying to keep his distance from the tall man.

The man let out a growling laugh as he looked back to Moviron briefly. “Sukensa voma’ijhe kovura, Movironn,” the otherworldly man said in his strange tongue that Moviron seemed to understand. While keeping his gaze locked on Moviron, the man grabbed a chair from nearby and set it down at the table without looking before finally sitting down and looking back towards Arylos. Arylos watched as the man took a small dark bottle out from his robes and showed it towards Arylos and gave the liquid inside a little shake with a clawed mechanical hand while continuing to speak in its otherworldly tongue that Iris could not make sense of.

“Dolmajha volusen,” Arylos abruptly barked in the man’s language, silencing him.

Iris shook her head in confusion as she tried to make sense of what was going on as she tried to track this language that they were speaking. She could feel it stir something in her, yet it just sounded like random noise to her. “Arylos, who-”

The man immediately turned towards Iris as his glowing blue eyes turned white for a moment as it stared at her intensely. “‘Arylos, who is this guy’?” the man said in a voice similar to Iris.

Iris was taken back by the man’s action as she felt fear climb into her throat. “Is he–”

“‘Is he copying me?’” the man said again as white light poured out from his eyes and Iris’s voice came from his throat. As soon as he said the words, the white light faded back to blue and the man began to laugh. “Taisovyrne geldoma parasma gevon’kai, Auer’makyr,” the man said while turning his attention back to Arylos while stifling laughter.

Iris heard a deep growl in Arylos’s chest followed by words she could recognize of the Titan’s language reverberating in her mind. “Let us use a tongue that those next to us may understand,” Arylos’s Titanic voice suddenly howled in Iris’s mind as Arylos watched Morivon and the man intently.

The man watched Arylos with a perplexed look in his eyes. “As you wish,” the man said in an ancient dialect of Kaiyumian that Iris had only read and never heard spoken. “However I fail to understand why I must; this is a conversation between the two of us.”

“Everything I know she knows,” Arylos barked while crossing his arms. “Whatever you have to say to me you also have to say to her.”

The man scoffed and waved Iris away. “Please, brother; this is business for us, not for mortals.”

Arylos growled suddenly, startling the man for a brief moment. “If you have nothing you can say to the both of us, then you have nothing to say to me.”

Arylos and the man watched each other with anger, spurred by Arylos’s ultimatum. The man slowly nodded as he looked back towards Iris, the contours of his hidden face barely visible from the reflection of the blue light of his eyes. “Then she will be silent,” he said as he raised his hand, filling the air with a rhythmic hum as orange glowing runes shot forward from his arm and gathered in an otherworldly circle in his palm. Before Iris could do anything, a draconic growl filled the air for just a moment yet silenced the humming as the magic circle in the man’s hand blew apart like shattered glass and worked up a small gust of wind in its wake.

“You will not use my own magic against me,” Arylos warned in a furious growl that accompanied his unmoving crossed-arm posture, giving him the air of an immovable mountain.

“Honey, seriously, who is he?” Iris asked, nervous for her life for the first time in a while as she watched the man’s mechanical hand.

The man chuckled as he withdrew his hand and lowered the hood of his cloak, revealing a face that would be far from human. A long fanged grin with skin made of metal with machinery clicking and whirring through a face with long black and gray rope-like hair and thick braided beard with two large mechanical eyes drowning Iris in their blue glow with smaller eyes in the corners of his eye sockets that moved independently. She watched as beneath the man’s mechanical face, he hosted bright orange and blue glowing lights deep inside of him that continued down his body and arms, lighting up several otherworldly tattoos on his machine body.

“An Eikon!” Iris said with a gasp as she jumped up, preparing for a fight.

“No my dear, not an Eikon” Arylos cut in while gesturing for Iris to calm down. “He is Anoron Sarandiel, High King of Templarius.”