Marius watches icily as his father moves on to Diomedes. The warrior looks down at his father like a giant child, hoping beyond all hope for the man to perform some miracle and make this all a dream. “I am sorry, Father,” he says, a huge sob stuck in his chest. His father lays a firm hand his shoulder. “I have failed you.”
“No. I should never have involved you in this. But what luck I have to call a man like you my son. It is an honor you cannot understand. One day you will have children and if you have just one who is as dear as you are to me, you will understand how blessed my life has been. Stay true to your own heart, no matter the cost.”
They say farewell and Romulus goes to Seraphina. Guilt and grief rack her. He puts his forehead to hers. “My burning one.”
She recoils from him. “You don’t have to die.”
“If I live, I divide the Rim. You might forgive, but how could the Codovans? How could anyone on Ganymede who lost a son, a daughter? They’ve been denied justice because of my lie. I hope this cools their blood. But…if the Rim does go to war, it must go as one.”
Seraphina says nothing. He touches her face. “The same spirit is in you that was in my brother. Do not let it consume you like it did him. You have nothing to prove. Glory for others is nothing.” He touches her heart. “What matters is in here. Honor your conscience, honor your family.” His eyes crinkle as he smiles behind the kryll. “One day you will understand why I’ve done this.”
“I will never understand.”
He tries to embrace her, but she pulls back from him and walks away from the family across the dune as Diomedes calls to her. Romulus watches her go. He does not move on to Dido, or his mother, who chose not to come watch her son die, but instead he walks to me.
“Lord Raa,” I say, lowering my head.
“There are some who would say I should bow to you, heir of Silenius,” he says.
“Most who’d say that are dead,” I reply. “Besides, I am a guest in your home.”
“Very true.” He motions for me to follow him and we walk a few paces away from his family. The cold wind howls around us, flinging debris into the reflective goggles I wear. The kryll warms the air as it passes through the membrane into my mouth. Romulus looks back to his family. “They wonder why I have brought you here.”
“They’re not the only ones.”
He examines me with his lone eye. “You look very much like your mother.”
“You knew her?”
“Not well.” He sees me look at Seraphina, who sits on the edge of a distant dune watching us.
“Why did you ask me to come here, my lord?”
“There is still a chance to stop this war, Lysander. Maybe not to stop it from beginning. I fear the blood has risen too high for that. Even my death will not stop it. But there is a chance to stop it from destroying us all. Our strength before the Rising did not come from our arms or our ships. It came from our unity. Long ago, Silenius au Lune, your blood, and Akari au Raa, my blood, stood together. One the scepter, one the sword. They gave birth to the Pax Solaris. They freed us from Earth’s dominion. You face a choice that will touch lives far beyond your sight. Run as you have these last years, or become the echo of those great men.” He leans forward, his voice husky and full of emotion. That lone eye seems suspended in his face, celestial and untethered from its mortal body. He sets his hand on my shoulder. “You saved my daughter. Can you now save the worlds?”
He does not wait for a response, which I am far too stunned to give. He walks back to his family to say farewell to his wife. I’m left overcome with the weight of his question. I already took the first step in ignoring Cassius’s dying wish. The second with the betrayal of Gaia. Do I have the strength to take the rest? Can I bear the burden of my blood?
I watch Romulus say his final farewells. The great man looks at Dido with so much love I know I can’t fathom it. I have never known love like theirs. Seraphina sits alone on the dune and I wonder how Romulus felt when he first saw Dido all those years ago on Venus. If he loved her so much, how could he be so brave as to choose to say farewell? Is it really true, pure honor? After having been ripped from my family, I’m at a loss, unable to understand how a man, a father, a husband, could value something more than love.
It awakens something deep inside me. A desire to be as noble as he is now. A need to honor his memory, though I barely knew the man.
“These ten years I’ve been looking for the man I married,” Dido says to her husband. I strain to hear them over the wind. “Now I see him again. The young Moon Lord who burned a city for a girl of the pearl shore. Romulus the Bold. Dido of Numidae. What a pair they were. What an end they had.”
“No,” he whispers. “This is not the end. I loved you before I ever met you. I will love you until the sun dies. And when it does, I will love you in the darkness. Goodbye, wife.”
Stepping close, he removes his kryll and, holding his breath against the toxic air, gently unfastens Dido’s to pull her into one last kiss. Steam billows from their lips as they cling at one another. Then Romulus pulls away and tosses his kryll on the ground to step backward down the dune.
Seraphina watches from her perch on the dune. It does not seem right for her to be alone now. I find myself walking toward her up the frozen sulfur. She says nothing as I sit beside her to watch her father’s last rite.
Under the watchful gaze of two Obsidian adjuncts to the White Justice, Romulus removes his boots. His cloak. His scorosuit beneath. His liner and his undergarments, till he is naked and pale there on the frozen sulfur. Across the waste he must walk for eighty steps to reach the resting place of Akari au Raa, the founder of his house. The Dragon Tomb is a giant black obelisk shaped like a winged beast at the top of a stubby crag of rock. Hunched frozen bodies litter the dune around the tomb and cling to the rock formation itself—Raa who in old age or punishment or shame came here to die and in death seek to reach their ancestor and erect a humble monument to their own strength. Only four have ever made it to the Dragon Tomb. Romulus seeks to join the honorable dead.
It is below negative one hundred degrees Celsius. Convulsing from the cold, he turns to face us, hiding nothing. His chest is scarred and pale. His stomach flat and muscled. His ribs stand out. His remaining arm is corded with stringy fibers. And as the wind ripples across the waste, his extremities begin to purple from the cold. His hair unbound behind his head whips till the moisture in it freezes.
He roars.
“I am a son of Io. A child of the Dust.” Steam clouds his words as he spends his last breath. His fist thumps his chest with each proclamation, leaving a shadow of pink over the paling skin. “I am a dragon of Raa. An Iron Gold. Akari, bear witness!” He whispers something to himself.