Chapter 4: Æon.

Æon. 

He tasted the name before he understood it—soft and sudden on his lips, as if some long-locked throat had finally opened.

“Æon.”

The sound hung in the bright air like a bell. It was not a name plucked from a cradle or a crown; it was a choosing, a verdict and a promise rolled into one.

Images folded through him: a life of small bright things and a life of loneliness, faces that had not turned toward him when he reached out. The memory of absence burned more clearly than any wound. Except one friend. He couldn't remember the face of the friend nor his name..

I was not loved, he thought, and where that truth lived, a new will took root.

“I will do better,” he said aloud, his voice steady. “I will love where I can. If they are good, I will give them the kind of love only  I  can offer—gentle, fierce, and keeping. If they are evil, I will strike them down with whatever power flows through me now.”

The words were not rehearsal. They were law.

Æon dropped from the sky like a shard of moonlight, his wings folding with a sound like distant thunder. The garden around them stilled—leaves paused mid-rustle, the night holding its breath. Gallan could only look up. The power that rolled off Æon was a thing you felt in your teeth: a cold, electric pressure that made the hair on his arms stand up. Where the angel’s light touched the ground, the grass flattened away as if bowed.

The maid—if she could still be called that—stared back, one corner of her mouth curled in a mock salute. Her skin was a blackened crust from the first strike, smoke tracing her hairline. She laughed, a dry, brittle sound that made Gallan shiver. “My army will come,” she spat, voice like gravel. “That failure of a hero is still alive. My army will take notice and then they'll swarm. Your kingdom will fall. Your lives are over.”

Æon’s gaze never wavered. He stepped forward slowly, and when his shadow fell over the maid the charred crust on her skin seemed to smoke anew. The angel reached out—not with a sword, but with a hand that hummed with restrained power. The ogre reared back and lunged, talons seeking flesh, but Æon did not strike to kill. Lightning coalesced along his outstretched palm and fell around the creature like a cage—threads of pure light wrapping fast and humming with binding energy. 

Gallan could only stare. The power laid before him was not spectacle; it was verdict. It pressed at his ribs like the tide.

Æon did not grant her the courtesy of talk any further. Light spilled from his palms and then the world answered: multiple strikes, clean and merciless, like the hammering of a bell across the dark. Each bolt took form and collapsed into the ogre’s shadow, not with drawn-out cruelty but with the precise, awful certainty of a law enforced.

They hit her 

Again

 and Again

Again 

Again 

Again

—crackles that seared the air, not lingering to linger in gore but to rend the thing that wore flesh and disguise. She staggered, hair and rags smoking,.

Gallan watched as the maid who cared for him for eight years agonized in pain. Her grin fell away, as the slit pupils fluttered and went dull. The strikes left her charred, smoking, reduced from human pretense to a thing that could not stand. Her attempts at words dissolved into hoarse, ragged screams; they filled the hedgerows and then were swallowed by thunder rolling somewhere farther off.

Æon’s face never changed. He moved through the motions of judgment with the calm of one who has weighed a life and found the scale tipped beyond remedy. Each crackle from his hands left the ogre less and less able to hold its posture—less a person, more a broken mask. The last of her movement slumped without fanfare; the forest fell into a terrible, expectant silence.

Gallan’s breath came in small, uneven pulls. The smell of scorched earth clung to the air. His fingers were still tight around the hilt of his practice sword, though he couldn’t remember choosing to hold it. He looked at the smoking shape that had once worn a maid’s face.

“She… she was evil,” he said softly, voice cracking. “But… did you have to go that far?”

Æon didn’t move at first. His wings gave a slow, deliberate shift, like clouds rearranging themselves across the moon.

When he finally spoke, his tone held no apology—and no pride.

“She intended to kill you. And when evil declares its intent,” his silver eyes flicked toward the charred body, “mercy becomes something else entirely.” Gallan’s hands trembled. He didn’t know if it was from the pain in his cheek or the enormity of what he’d witnessed.

Æon regarded him a moment longer, then said, almost quietly, “You’re asking the wrong question.”

Gallan blinked. “What?”

The angel’s gaze sharpened—not unkind, but unyielding.

“Do you plan to stand here arguing judgment,” he said, tilting his head toward the castle behind them, “or warn your kingdom that an ogre lived among you long enough to wear a servant’s smile?” 

Gallan’s breath caught. His mind leapt to his mother, his father, the knights, the staff—anyone the creature might not have been alone among.