**Chapter 20: Dawn Over Ruins**
The world breathed again.
Marverick stood atop a ridge where jagged concrete met stubborn wildgrass, watching the fledgling city below stitch itself back together. Scaffolds clung to skeletal buildings like ivy; the clang of hammers and murmur of bartered laughter rose on the wind, carrying the sharp scent of molten metal and freshly turned soil. It was raw, uneven—a quilt of salvage and sweat—but it *lived*.
Ava's footsteps whispered through the brittle grass as she joined him. Her hair, longer now, caught the amber light of dusk, and her hands—still calloused, still stained with soot—settled on the splintered guardrail. "You look like a man arguing with ghosts," she said, her voice a blend of warmth and weariness.
"Just tallying debts," he replied, eyes tracing the labyrinth of lanterns flickering to life in the streets. "Wondering if we paid enough."
She turned his face toward hers, her thumb brushing the scar along his jaw—a relic from their last dance with the Voidborn. "We're here. That's the receipt."
Below, the city pulsed. A child's laugh spiraled upward as a group chased a makeshift ball through the market square. An old woman hung wind chimes from a balcony, their glass fragments pirouetting in the breeze. Cain's voice boomed from the smithy, critiquing a novice's weld, while Abigail demonstrated archery to wide-eyed teens, her arrows finding purpose in peace.
Elijah emerged from a shadowed alley, his hybrid eye glinting as he traded vials of harvested rainwater for seed packets. He'd traded razored edges for roots, his hands now more likely to cradle sprouts than detonators.
Marverick's chest tightened. "What if it's not enough?"
Ava's smile was a blade sheathed in velvet. "Then we plant anyway."
The sun dipped, molten gold spilling over the horizon. Somewhere, a fiddle began to play—a reedy, off-key melody that spun into the twilight. Marverick's wings, long since folded into scars along his spine, itched with the memory of flight. But here, grounded, he found a different kind of weightlessness.
Ava's hand slipped into his, her fingers weaving through his like ink through water. No grand proclamations, no vows—just the quiet certainty of two souls who'd carved hope from the dark.
They descended into the city, where the air hummed with the alchemy of survival. A baker traded loaves for mended boots; a scribe etched names onto the Wall of Remembering, each stroke a rebellion against oblivion.
At the square's heart, a sapling strained toward the sky, its roots cradled in the bones of a Riggs war-machine. Marverick paused, brushing a leaf softer than a breath. "From the Stone's ashes?"
"Elijah's idea," Ava said. "Said it's fed on worse."
Night fell, the stars trembling awake. Somewhere, the Voidborn's echo lingered—a shiver in the void, a crack in the cosmic door they'd sealed but not forgotten. The work wasn't done. It never would be.
But as firelight danced on faces once hardened by loss, as a lullaby drifted from an open window, Marverick let himself believe in the math of small things. In seeds planted in bloodied soil. In fractures mended with gold.
Ava leaned into him, her head resting where his wings once anchored. "What now?"
He kissed her temple, the answer etched in every scar, every healed wound. "We grow."
The world, after all, had practice blooming from cracks.