The world does not bear crowns lightly. So many in one place must strain at the unseen chains of fixed reality, or so Atreus imagines, in the flickering half-thought instants of clarity strung through the battle like river pearls on gut-string. Sometimes he thinks he hears it groan, the aching, mechanical wail of a ship twisting in a storm.

Where Noon blazes and Thundering booms, his passage through the battle is marked otherwise by silence only splintered by those he sets his knives against. He does not bring forth the rest of his arsenal strung up on his other-side self, not for a fight like this one, all cramped chaos. When it is done, he is slicked in blood, the blacks of his garb gleaming before they begin to dry in iron scales.

This is what he is striving to mop from his face as he sits cross-legged in observation of his fellow Princes at their conference. This is what he tastes when he watches them fall, eyes blue golden flat as leaves. The outcries of others are like gulls calling in a language he does not know, if he ever did, and when he rises it is supple and untroubled.

He pads across the gore-strewn deck with a singular purpose, one with eyes brighter than blood and hair limed silver in the sunlight.

"It's done," he says, as if he's offering something that anyone could not already know, and he does not understand why it does not feel true.