~ APPROACH ~

BONUS — The Widow: The Approach

POV: The Widow

The city knew her footsteps.

Even after all these years, New Eidolon shivered when her boots hit wet concrete—soft, deliberate, the way a blade whispers through silk. Rain slid down the back of her coat in thin silver ribbons, catching on the hem where fire had eaten the fabric long ago. She never replaced it. Let the burn marks speak.

Streetlights flickered as she passed beneath them.

Not from electrical faults.

From recognition.

A pack of gutter wolves—young Várgr initiates with fresh paint on their faces—stood guard at the mouth of an alley. They stiffened when she stepped into view. One reached for his weapon before the oldest caught his wrist and shook his head hard.

The Widow didn’t break stride.

She didn’t need to.

Fear parted her path like scripture.

She walked until she reached the rusted scaffolding behind the safehouse—close enough to hear raised voices inside.

Her daughter’s.

His.

Eirwen’s fury was a wildfire she knew by memory.

Domenik’s denial was an old song sung by a boy who’d mistaken power for inheritance.

The Widow closed her eyes.

Little ghost, she thought.

You finally woke up.

For a moment, she saw Eirwen as she once was—bare feet on cold tile, clutching a chipped mug of cocoa, whispering stories to the cracked wallpaper about the heroes she wanted to be. Her child had believed in truth back then. In justice. In mercy.

The Widow had watched those beliefs burn with their home.

She stepped back into the shadows as the safehouse door rattled under Civic Shadow fists. Inside, Eirwen’s voice cracked on Domenik’s name. The Widow’s jaw tightened; old wounds, long cauterized, ached like reopened scars.

She did not go to them.

Not yet.

Instead, she walked.

Her hand slipped into her coat pocket and closed around the Cayde Seal. Its silver surface was warm from Eirwen’s touch. It pulsed faintly—blood recognizing blood.

Her daughter was awakening.

And the city wasn’t ready.

She reached a dead intersection, the old subway grate beneath her feet glowing faintly with the ember-red of heat vents. There, in the hiss of steam and the rattle of loose bolts, she heard him.

Lucianus.

Not his voice.

Not a ghost.

Just memory wearing a familiar shape.

You know she’ll choose him, he once told her, laughing softly in the half-dark of a Covenant chamber.

Yes, she had answered. And then I’ll make her choose herself.

She touched the metal grate with her boot, sending a quiet tremor down into the abandoned rails below—a coded signal older than Domenik’s empire, older than Lucianus’ rebellion, older than the Covenant’s teeth.

A silver flame symbol erupted briefly beneath the grate—her mark—then vanished.

Her faction would move.

Her shadows would shift.

Her daughter’s path would clear.

She continued through the rain, her reflection splintered in every window she passed. The city wanted her dead. The Civic Shadow hunted her name. Laev loyalists whispered her as a myth. The Várgr swore she was a curse.

Good.

Myths were harder to kill than kings.

At the edge of the Crown District, she paused beneath a rusted lion statue. Its obsidian plating had cracked since she last stood beside it. She laid her fingers on its broken mane.

“Your bloodline ends soon,” she murmured. “But hers is about to begin.”

Lightning split the sky, bathing her in white fire.

The Widow lifted her hood and turned toward the path only she and Eirwen could walk. Her coat snapped in the storm. Her pulse stayed steady.

“Come find me, little ghost,” she whispered into the rain.

“When you’re ready to stop being owned.”

She walked away without looking back.

The city trembled behind her.