The dark spawns wouldn't come near me.

  My aura was doing that — the holy power bleeding out without me really trying, pushing everything back within a hundred meters like a perimeter I hadn't asked for. They kept their distance. Stayed in the dark at the edges of the ruined streets and watched me pass.

  Part of me wished they wouldn't. At least then I'd have something to think about other than this.

  The old capital was quiet in the specific way that only places that used to be loud can be. Cracked cobblestones. Hollow buildings. The mausoleum ahead, black against the fading sky.

  I walked.

  Kim Yoo-ra didn't need anyone.

  That was the version of myself I'd carried my whole life. The loner. The one who wore other people's contempt like armor and their underestimation like fuel. Strong, sharp, self-sufficient. That was enough. That was always enough.

  But the longer I spent in Josephine's body, in Josephine's memories — the more I started to feel the shape of what Trynda meant.

  I wasn't seeing things from her perspective. I'd been projecting myself onto her this entire time. Taking her life and running it like Kim Yoo-ra in a different costume. Same instincts. Same coldness. Same keep-moving-and-don't-look-at-what-you're-feeling.

  But Josephine wasn't like that.

  Josephine cared. Deeply, painfully, in the way that only people who've never had it reciprocated can care. She wanted her family to look at her. Just — look at her. Not for her talent, not for her achievements, just for her. And no matter how hard she trained, how skilled she became, they never did.

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  Kim Yoo-ra would have cut her losses and walked away.

  Josephine never stopped trying.

  I hadn't really sat with that until now.

  I promised her revenge, I thought. But did I ever ask what she actually wanted?

  I'd been so focused on escaping — on getting the Familial Bond removed, on not dying, on not being executed as the villainess of someone else's story — that I'd never stopped to ask whether revenge was even what Josephine needed. Whether it would give her anything at all. Whether the thing she'd spent her whole life chasing could actually be caught that way.

  The miasma thickened as I reached the inner square.

  The palace loomed ahead — dark, heavy, seeping darkness from every crack in its walls like it was breathing. The air pressed down here. Not uncomfortably, just — present. Heavy with something that had been sitting here for a very long time.

  I looked up at it.

  Once, this square would have been full of people. Nobles in their grand clothes, the best and brightest of an empire that thought it would last forever. Now it was just rubble and echoes and the distant sound of dark spawns keeping a respectful distance from whatever I'd become.

  Even great things end up like this.

  Maybe that was what Josephine felt, underneath all of it. That no matter how much she built, how much she proved, the ending was already written. That she was going to lose. That she had always been going to lose.

  Kim Yoo-ra might not care, I thought. But Josephine does.

  And that was the problem. I wasn't just one of them anymore. I was both. Fused together in a body we'd agreed to share, carrying desires that didn't always point the same direction. I wanted power and survival and an exit. Josephine wanted something that couldn't be quantified in stats or tiers or faith points.

  She wanted to matter to someone.

  Power hadn't made that simpler. If anything, it had made it worse — because now I was strong enough to do almost anything, and I still didn't know what the right thing was.

  I crossed the square slowly. Let Josephine's memories surface instead of pushing them down. Let myself feel the shape of what she felt, standing in places like this. The loneliness of it. The specific ache of someone who kept reaching for something that kept not being there.

  For the first time since I arrived in this world, I wasn't just fighting to survive or to escape or to fix the plot.

  I was fighting for her.

  For the part of us that still wanted something more than revenge.

  I didn't know yet if that would make whatever was in that palace easier or harder.

  I walked toward it anyway.