The air is stripped clean, and everyone freezes. No words. Just that sudden vacuum of disbelief.

"Pardon me?" Aston says, voice steady but laced with quiet disbelief. He's as stunned as the rest of us. This isn't just some mission. This is the mission. This room—our so-called headquarters—holds the strongest warriors on the continent, second only to a rare few, yellow-blooded. Many of us here, me included, have slaughtered those false gods, exposing their golden blood for what it is: the same damn fluid, just a different shine. Once, they called themselves divine. People believed it—idiots. They saw gold and heard salvation. I don't laugh at that memory. Not because it isn't absurd, but because there's nothing funny about it.

Even the weakest of our green-blooded could crush a royal guard, assuming those guards bleed orange. If they bleed green, the weakest of us could take ten, maybe more. But we'd win. Even that thick-skulled, short-bladed idiot Lenny could do more in a real fight than one of those pompous noble statues.

For the first time in this entire cursed meeting, I let my voice rise. "In all honesty, Ham, what the hell are you playing at?" I glare across the room. "A blue? You're sending a blue-blooded to assassinate the king in a palace swarmed with royal guards, and that under constant surveillance?"

But as the words gather in my throat, Harmon's glare slices clean through them. One heartbeat of eye contact—enough to paralyze a man—and then his smile returns. Calm, cold, and calculated.

"Erik," he says smoothly, "I understand your concerns. Truly, but Aston is the only one capable of this. Hell to Valhena, he's the only one in this entire chamber who can do it in silence."

Eyes shift back to Aston. He doesn't protest, doesn't blink, doesn't even breathe. He just sits there, chiseled and unmoving, like someone carved him from stone; a statue, a relic, like a weapon waiting to be unsheathed. His lips curl slightly upward—not a smile, but something colder, quieter. Resignation, or perhaps control.

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"Spit the plan already, old geezer," Valea snaps, the youngest among us. No patience, no reverence. Harmon doesn't flinch at the insult, though a vein pulses beneath his jaw. Three hundred years will make you old, no matter how straight you stand. He's twice my age—twice the battles, twice the ghosts, but like me, he has lost everything.

"The gala," Harmon begins, his tone sharp and decisive, "takes place at the estate of Elisia's founding lord. Attendance is restricted to blue-blooded nobles—no exceptions."

He nods toward Vis, who lifts a hand and wipes the glowing green map from the table.

In its place, the light dims and sways like water, and Vis's pale face floats above the surface like a drowned thing.

"Aston is the only one here," Harmon continues, "who not only carries noble blue blood, but also possesses the ability to disguise himself, like half our green-blooded do. He's already been administered the formula." He pauses. "Unfortunately, we've run out of the necessary herbs—none of the leaves from the tree of the hanged men remain. The rest of you can't transform your blood color. Am I wrong?"

Silence stretches like a blade, and he gives everyone whose blood runs green a look.

Then Lenny pipes up, loud and dumb. "Oyá changed from green to gold! A god in her name!" He thumps his chest, proud as a preacher.

Amber, beside him, slaps the back of his head with a sharp crack. "Everyone's heard your bedtime stories, Lenny. Shut up."

He looks hurt, puzzled, and he still doesn't get it.

Harmon raises his voice again. He dismisses the interruption with a breath; his gaze returns to Aston, who's now looking down at his folded hands. There's no defiance in him—just silence, and something that might be grief.

"Be honored," Harmon says, voice deepening, "child of noble blood."

He speaks now with purpose, each word chosen like a blade from a rack. "You will go down in history as the savior of the red-blooded. The sacred blade that pierced the heart of Robertson, tyrant and soon-to-be memory. Lift your chin, Aston. You are the one who will lead us—lead them—into Ruby. Into the night, when Rhea awakens and Astra shuts down. When the moon shifts and the calendar dies. You are the last breath of the old world and the first strike of the new."

My heart kicks once, hard, my toes nearly curling inward at his speech.

He leans forward, voice dropping into near reverence. "This won't be remembered as the start of a calendar; it will be known as the year the world broke. And you, Aston without a name… will be the man who brings justice to the world."

And then—something I've never seen on Aston or any Stoic blue—A flicker of warmth—Aston's stone face cracks; just a fracture, but enough. A single tear slides down that marble cheek of his, and a smile forms itself, blinding like the azure sun itself.