The world woke slowly.
The lands once shadowed by war began to stretch, to breathe again. Trees along the borders of the Drowned Valley began to bud, their branches no longer blackened by creeping decay. Rivers ran clear where they once choked on ash. Villages that had boarded their windows and hidden underground began to open their doors again.
The silence that had lingered after the final battle gave way to tentative birdsong, the rustle of wind through green fields, and the sound of people—living, rebuilding, remembering.
It was in this fragile, new morning that the great gathering was called.
They called it the Dawn Accord.
In the neutral plains of Nareth's Crown—long claimed by no kingdom and touched by every road—a massive stone amphitheater was raised. Not by magic, but by hand. By farmers, carpenters, masons, and healers. Soldiers laid their weapons aside to haul stone. Mages channeled their power not into flame or fury, but into song, rain, and growth.
For once, the world built something together.
Laila stood at the center of it all, her face gaunt but her eyes aglow with quiet strength. Weeks had passed since the rift sealed. She had recovered much of her strength, though the Echo, now inert, lay in a velvet-lined case in her tent.
She no longer dreamed of the void.
She dreamed of fields. Of laughter. Of children chasing birds across hills that had once echoed with war cries.
Mira stood to her left, radiant in a new mantle of deep red and gold—the chosen emissary of the Flameholds. Lucian stood to her right, one arm in a sling from the final clash, but smiling for the first time in what felt like ages. Elyra, ever serene, now carried no staff, no spellbooks—only a journal in which she chronicled the rebirth of the world.
They had come not to lead, but to listen.
One by one, the surviving leaders of the realm stepped forward. From the Sylvan enclaves came silver-robed seers, bearing living vines braided into their hair. From the sea cities of Nyssara arrived sun-browned merchant princes and tattooed tide-callers. The mountain kings came down in cloaks of sable and frost, offering the ore and steel of their mines freely for the rebuilding.
No longer rivals. No longer strangers.
All now shared a single loss—and a single chance.
"We cannot return to the way things were," spoke Eldran Maer, high druid of the Western Grove, his voice carried by wind and leaf alike. "But we can choose something better."
"We must build a council," declared Eira Kassan, Iron Queen of the North, her silver helm held respectfully under one arm. "
The End