POV: nomad
Summary
Zellion emerges from the dawn intact, the new-old armour holding against the heat as it was built to. The flight gives him a moment of being someone he used to be — a man who deserved the sky — and he turns the climb into a dive toward the huddle of Beaconites moments from the line of advancing fire. *Aux. It worked.* There is no answer. The friend who began this with him is gone. What remains in his hand is the body of his friend, and a last instruction: defend those people.
He drops into the crowd like an artillery shell, dismisses his helm so they can see his face, and asks for Solemnity Divine. He flips her the sunheart he took from the Refuge with instructions to shave off a sliver, install it in the Dawnchaser, and hand the rest back. Contemplation pushes forward with the obvious plan — load the ships, flee — and he refuses. They cannot get everyone onto ships in time, and even if they could the Cinder King would simply pin them down again. The sunheart is not for escape. He slots it into the back of Auxiliary's shield, plants the shield in the earth, and orders it to grow.
The shield obeys. It pours outward into an opaque dome, mirror-bright on the outside, the heat-shed of his old armour applied at the scale of a small town. Once the dome's floor is laid down beneath them the ground below will turn to magma; the floor is what will keep them off it. He talks Contemplation through the rest while it grows. The recharge trick is small enough to fit in a sentence: prime a spent sunheart with a little body heat, leave it out in the next sun, the world-current does the rest. The TimeTellers had been sitting on this. He tells her to take the news to everyone she can reach. *This changes everything*, she says.
Contemplation hangs back. She has noticed how he looks at her when she mentions Adonalsium; she presses him on it, and when he repeats the old objection — Adonalsium is dead, the Shattering happened, there is nothing left to pray to — she answers that of course they know; their faith is not in any particular outcome but in the idea that the unfolding has a hand behind it. She thanks her god for him; he points out, dryly, that he was not the one who decided to come back. The dome closes overhead and the light in it now is the armour-glow and the sunheart's. He notices, distantly, that his armour is no longer the colour it should be: it glows the dirty red-orange of embers and trails smoke when he moves, as if the dawn at his back has marked it.
Contemplation tells him quietly that they have taken Rebeke. And Elegy. He says he will see what he can do. She thanks him by the title she had once tried to give him — Sunlit Man — and this time he does not push it away. He tells her to keep teaching the recharge prayer until everyone on this world knows it, and then he turns to leave. The Dawnchaser is already moving; Solemnity Divine flies it over for him as he sprints toward the dome's last open mouth. He ducks out through the gap and the dome seals behind him with Auxiliary's body literally standing between the people inside and the wall of fire that closes around it a heartbeat later. There is, he thinks, nothing else he can usefully do for them directly.
The flight back to Union is short. He understands, more clearly than he wanted to, what he is needed for there. It is the thing he was good at long before he could ever fly: killing.