A full month had passed.
And still, she had not woken.
Niegal sat hunched over the strategy table, red lines and glyphs inked in blood and mana. The map was smudged from restless fingers and sleepless nights. His shoulders trembled beneath the weight of decisions, of grief barely held in check.
Around him, his generals whispered war.
The final retaliation.
The last stronghold of the Church.
Not just a fortress, but a shrine to their cruelty.
Their sanctum of torture.
The birthplace of Inquisitor blades and execution decrees.
They would burn it down.
And Niegal would salt the ashes.
He said nothing.
He didn't need to.
Every soldier in the tent could feel the storm in his silence.
He owed her that much.
He was grateful, more than he could voice, for Alejandro, who had ridden through the backroads alone to bring the location of the stronghold. His hawk Azura had confirmed it by air.
And it was there.
A fortress surrounded by mountains carved with glyphs of blood.
A perfect place to end it.
They'd strike from the ruins and disappear into the Marisiana swamps, Alejandro's old trading post now reborn as a haven.
There, the red cedars stretched high into thick fog.
There, the spirits of the wetlands whispered to the root-born.
There, the Church dared not tread.
But through it all…
Esperanza never left her father's side.
Tucked into his cloak like a second heart, she rarely cried. Rarely laughed.
She only watched. And listened.
Her wide silver eyes glimmered with magic.
They didn't understand.
But they nodded.
Some even wept.
A quiet talisman of hope.
In the infirmary tent, time did not move.
Elena lay motionless. Her body burned clean, her spiraled scars glowing faintly. Her back blistered with feathered marks, still pulsing with remnants of divine lightning.
The Behike and Aurora kept the eternal vigil.
They never left her side.
Not even to sleep.
Not even to weep in private.
Her wounds had stopped steaming, but her skin was raw- touched by something more than fire.
Touched by Guabancex herself.
They changed the soaked cloths hourly, whispering invocations as they worked.
"Great Mother of Storms," the Behike would murmur, "return what you borrowed."
And the people came.
In long lines.
Shoeless. Silent. Holding candles wrapped in charms and string.
They approached the tent like pilgrims before a relic.
A child whispered thanks for saving his sisters.
A widow left her husband's death charm tied to the bedpost.
A mother dropped a small carved bird, hand-painted with red clay.
No one spoke loudly.
Because the air inside the tent was holy.
Because Elena was not simply unconscious.
She was in between.
Caught in the space where saints were born and burned.
And all knew it.
Phineus and his soldiers came in shifts. They never spoke inside the tent.
They stood with heads bowed, blades reversed in their hands; an old warrior rite for the nearly dead.
Even grizzled commanders wept as they watched her chest rise and fall in shallow rhythm.
Elena was alive. Just not here.
But the hardest moments came at night.
When Niegal came.
His cloak dragged behind him like a funeral shroud.
Esperanza tucked against his chest.
His boots always slowed near the threshold.
As if afraid to see her like this.
Again.
He'd sit beside her.
Sometimes he didn't speak.
Other nights he whispered stories.
Tales of a sandcastle Esperanza made in a dream.
Tales of their life at the once proud Windswept Manor, and what they'll do together when she awoke.
He would trace her fingers with trembling hands.
And sometimes-
He would break.
Silently.
Utterly.
Shoulders shaking as he kissed the curve of her jaw.
"I should've protected you," he'd whisper, again and again.
"I'm your Léon Negro… I should've known. I should've-"
But she never answered.
And still, he stayed.
Sometimes until dawn.
The soldiers never disturbed him.
Even the bravest wept when they saw his head bowed in silence, Esperanza curled against his chest like a second heartbeat.
Because they loved her too.
Because Elena had become myth.
Doña Guabancex reborn in flesh.
The one who called down stormlight and split a mountain to save a child.
Who healed rebels with kisses to their foreheads.
Who never stopped until everyone was safe.
And so they waited.
All of them.
Holding their breath in the lull between thunder.
Because they knew-
She would rise again. She has before.
Just as storms always do.