The fire didn't go out when the fighting stopped.
It lingered in the corners of homes, behind the eyes of the survivors, in the smoldering wreckage of everything that had once resembled stability. Kuron walked through Shiyuzawa's blackened ruins like a specter, untouched and unburnt, yet surrounded by the ashes of a war he had orchestrated.
The rebellion had collapsed. Efficiently. Brutally.
Just as he planned.
Bodies lay in silent rows beneath white cloths, some too mangled to cover properly. Children sat beside them, hollow-eyed and soot-stained. Kuron didn't meet their gaze. He couldn't. Not today.
"Forty-seven dead. Twenty-nine missing," a medic muttered behind him. "We think they fled into the marshes. Or…"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Kuron nodded, eyes fixed ahead. He didn't need the numbers. He knew them already. He'd written the conditions.
---
Taiho returned two days later.
His armor was scorched. His hair matted with blood that wasn't his. He didn't speak when he saw the carnage. Just stood in silence, staring at the spot where the old archive tower used to stand.
"You won," he finally said.
Kuron didn't respond.
Taiho turned to him. "Was it worth it?"
Kuron didn't know.
The silence stretched too long.
"Was it supposed to be like this?" Taiho pressed, voice low. "Was this in your plan too?"
"It had to happen," Kuron said quietly. "This…this was the only way they would listen. The only way they'd break."
"They didn't break," Taiho hissed. "They bled. You didn't start a revolution—you handed us a culling."
Kuron didn't flinch. "The province is unified now."
"At what cost?"
Kuron looked away.
He didn't have an answer.
---
That night, Kuron found himself at the riverbank, holding a half-burnt mask taken from a rebel corpse. It was a child's size.
A boy, maybe twelve. He'd watched that boy run through the flames, blade in hand, eyes wild with hope. Kuron had ordered the strike that killed him.
He told himself it was necessary.
But the truth clung to him like the scent of smoke. It soaked his clothes, filled his lungs. It whispered doubts into the hollows of his chest.
You're just like them.
You're worse.
---
In the weeks that followed, Kuron sent glowing reports to the capital.
"Province stabilized."
"Resistance neutralized."
"Loyalty reestablished."
He received commendations. A promotion. A personal summons to the inner circle of the Mist's administrative elite.
He accepted every offer.
Smiled in every meeting.
But something in him had changed.
He began dreaming of Isari again.
Of bells that no longer rang.
Of a flute buried beneath rubble.
Of the moment when he stopped being a son and became a blade.
He had told himself the path was worth it.
That pain was the price of progress.
But as the ghosts multiplied, Kuron began to wonder if he was building a future—or becoming the architect of his own ruin.
---