Clyde’s Chronicle of the First Gathering Part 2

The Zone in daylight felt different. Less like a throne room, more like a holding pattern between realities. Sunlight poured through the high glass and filtered through hundreds of sigils carved in the ceiling. It painted the long table in circles of Proven domains: rhythm, death, love, war, faith, harmony, water. Where the light overlapped, the surface shimmered like an unresolved chord.

Theseus, Goten, Hermoine, and Hercules stood together near the far side, a crooked line of Saint Estes Wards. None of them wore institutional gray now. Adaptive undersuits from Vontrese flexed with each breath—black, blue, green, and burnt-gold accents hinting at the strange frequencies they carried. Theseus’ EchoThread cape hung off one shoulder, dark and weightless. Hercules’ gear looked heavier, reinforced, built for impact; the ember-pattern scars across his chest glowed faintly under the fabric.

Afro stepped down from the dais like the universe had cued him in.

“Alright,” he said, voice lazy and exact at the same time. “Storytime’s over. Now we decide what you are.”

He walked up to Theseus first. Up close, Clyde could see how the boy’s gaze had changed; it didn’t flicker anymore. It measured.

“You walked through dungeons, highways, void-things, broodspawn, and a politician’s basement,” Afro said. “You held will where grown men drop it. That’s the test we use up here.”

He put his hand flat on Theseus’ chest.

The Zone listened.

“I name you soldier of Heav,” Afro murmured. “Not ‘someday.’ Now.”

Sound vanished for a heartbeat. Then a bass pulse rolled outward, slow and heavy, rattling crystal, armor, bone. Theseus staggered—not away, but in, like something just locked into place behind his ribs. Clyde felt it from across the table: pressure, like standing too close to stage speakers when the band dropped their first note.

Afro turned to Goten.

“You,” he said, “been trying to decide if the world left you or you left it first. I ain’t here to fix that. I’m here to give the part that stayed a job.”

Goten swallowed. The usual smirk was gone. Whatever boyish looseness he’d had left at the start of the month was stripped off.

Afro touched his forehead with two fingers.

“Soldier of Heav,” he said. “Second anchor.”

Green light—not bright, but dense—rose under Goten’s skin like ink pushing through water. It faded quick. When it was gone, his breathing had changed. Slower. Steady.

Then Hermoine.

Afro’s tone shifted. Not softer. Just…intentional.

“You see more than the others,” he told her. “Not ’cause you’re special. ’Cause your line refuses to close its eyes. Death in the veins, refusal in the heart. Balance like that? We need it.”

Hermoine’s fingers tightened on the chair back. “I don’t want to be death,” she said quietly.

“Good,” Afro said. “We got one of those already.”

Julius’ smile widened by a fraction. Nobody laughed.

Afro tapped the center of her chest.

“Soldier of Heav,” he said. “Third anchor. Guardian.”

Hermoine exhaled. Her breath left her mouth as a faint white mist that curled and vanished. For a second Clyde smelled mint, candle smoke, and hospital air still thick with grief. Then it was gone.

Afro turned last to Hercules.

The red-haired ward stood with his hands loose at his sides, shoulders square, eyes level. Close up, Clyde could see the old ember-pattern scars and the new, smaller ones—the kind you get from training to kill something bigger than yourself and refusing to stop.

“You keep telling yourself you’re just a weapon they pointed,” Afro said. “You’re not. You chose every hit.”

Hercules’ jaw flexed. “I chose to survive,” he said. Voice low, rough. “Everything after that was…follow-through.”

Afro nodded once. “That’s what saints are. Follow-through that never quits.”

He set his palm against Hercules’ sternum.

“Soldier of Heav,” he said. “Fourth anchor. Hammer.”

The impact wasn’t visual. It was tonal. For a heartbeat the room hummed in something like a chord—four notes rising from the four wards, finding each other, aligning. Choralith’s heads tilted in unison, as if he were hearing a scale finally completed.

“These four,” Afro said, stepping back, voice carrying across the hall, “now carry what the Ring was always built for: shared burden. One weapon, four hands.”

War’s eyes tracked from Theseus to Hercules like he was mapping firing lines.

“Do you understand what that makes you?” War asked.

Theseus answered, but Hercules’ gaze didn’t waver either.

“A target,” Theseus said.

“And a hinge,” War replied. “On which unfortunate eras may turn.”

Choralith raised his hand like a conductor.

“We add four mortal notes to the chord,” the Harmonic Proven said. All seven mouths around his crystal frame sang different tones that blended into one. “The harmony expands. So does the dissonance. Acceptable.”

Faith still said nothing. But he moved closer to the wards, bare feet touching the floor with a sound like chalk on slate. For a moment, Clyde saw light gather around the four of them—a ring that wasn’t metal, but intent.

Lazarus Kane unfolded his arms. Up close he looked less like a god and more like what he had been: a thickset, scarred man whose body had learned to refuse every kind of ending. Sunken eyes, old gang ink crawling up his arms, jaw that looked like it could bite through an engine block. Power now rode under his skin in faint dark veins, but the way he stood—weight forward, ready for a hit from any direction—was still dockside enforcer.

“If you die down there,” Lazarus said, voice flat, “I’m going to have to come drag you out. Don’t make me do that more than once.”

It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t poetic. But there was something in the way he looked at them—especially Theseus—that made Clyde recognize it for what it was: the clumsy first blessing of a man who’d never learned to say I care when he was alive.

Hermoine gave him a small, sincere nod. “We’ll try not to waste your time, sir.”

A corner of Lazarus’s mouth twitched. “Good. I got a son to get back to eventually.”

Afro snapped his fingers.

“There it is,” he said, gesturing lazily around the room. “Rhythm. Death. Love. War. Faith. Harmony. Four anchors in the middle. Feels like a band to me.”

“Not a band,” Choralith murmured. “An ensemble. A structure.”

“Structure, band, choir, I don’t care what we call it,” Afro said. “Name still stands.”

“Name?” Hermoine asked before she could stop herself.

Afro pointed upward, as if the word were already carved into the glass.

“Heavbound,” he said. “That’s you, now. Us. The ones tied to this place whether we like it or not.”

Clyde watched the wards’ faces when the name landed.

Theseus didn’t smile, but his posture shifted—like a man straightening under armor that finally fit.
Goten’s smirk came back, small but real.
Hermoine’s eyes shone with something half terror, half belonging.
Hercules just nodded once, like someone had finally given him a label that matched the weight he already carried.

He recognized that look. All of them. He’d seen it in soldiers who realized they’d survived long enough for their choices to start mattering.

He also saw the gap.

Heav had its ensemble now. Its Heavbound. But Nova Prime did not.

Clyde waited.

He waited through Brenpachi’s thunderous congratulations—the Lennix chieftain slapping Each ward on the back hard enough to make their enhanced lungs stutter. Through Tookie leaning over the table to tell them, low and deadly serious, that if any Saint Estes boy came back in a box, he’d personally treat heaven and hell like neighborhoods that needed cleaning.

He waited as the Proven drifted back into side chambers, into silent arguments and old councils, into whatever work timeless beings did when they weren’t saving creation directly.

Then he went to the balcony.

He liked The Zone best from its edges. Out there, clouds moved under his feet and the curve of Nova Prime looked almost peaceful. From high enough, dragon scars looked like dust.

Footsteps approached behind him.

“You’re leaving,” Lazarus said. Not quite a question.

Clyde nodded. “Yeah.”

Lazarus joined him at the rail. It looked wrong, seeing a man who’d once been strapped to death machines leaning on heaven’s balcony like it was a dock rail in Gransport, but the way he gripped the stone was the same.

“You think they can’t handle it?” Lazarus asked, jerking his chin vaguely back toward the hall.

“I think they’ll walk into the Expanse no matter what we think,” Clyde said. “So somebody has to get the ground ready for what happens when they walk back out.”

Lazarus grunted. “Dragons.”

“And the Council behind them,” Clyde said. “And Daemos. And half the Syndicates. And every idiot with a relic they don’t understand. I need people who can stand on the ground while you lot are playing in higher dimensions.”

Lazarus’s jaw clenched. “People like who?”