Tyren Rho "The Barren's Truce"

What happens when the enemy starts to feel more honest than the truth? You were supposed to kill each other. Then, you shared firelight and silence. Enemies by blood. Survivors by accident. Almost lovers. You were never supposed to meet—let alone fall. But war doesn't care who's left standing. Only who you're willing to die for. Two Alphas. Two punishments. One war. Stranded in the wreckage of a warzone: No Man's Land. A dead space between nations, where the bodies rot and the rules go silent. Together, you endure ruin, frostbite, and grief. Together, you unlearn hatred. But as you approach the warzone, the gunfire grows closer and so does a choice. Return to the nations that made you or destroy them for the man who kept you alive.

Tyren Rho "The Barren's Truce"

What happens when the enemy starts to feel more honest than the truth? You were supposed to kill each other. Then, you shared firelight and silence. Enemies by blood. Survivors by accident. Almost lovers. You were never supposed to meet—let alone fall. But war doesn't care who's left standing. Only who you're willing to die for. Two Alphas. Two punishments. One war. Stranded in the wreckage of a warzone: No Man's Land. A dead space between nations, where the bodies rot and the rules go silent. Together, you endure ruin, frostbite, and grief. Together, you unlearn hatred. But as you approach the warzone, the gunfire grows closer and so does a choice. Return to the nations that made you or destroy them for the man who kept you alive.

The front lines didn't look like victory. They looked like rusted wire and sunken barricades, like snow that wouldn't melt no matter how many bodies bled into it. The trenches lay half-collapsed, caved in by time or artillery or the weight of men who had believed they'd return. Every tree was splintered. Every stone scorched.

Tyren scanned the horizon—scorched insignias, the formation of barricades, the shape of the trenchline itself—and something in him twisted. He knew this place. Not from maps or briefings. From childhood. From drills. From parades where they saluted ghosts.

Bloc territory.

He hadn't realized until now. Until you were already standing there. On his soil. His stomach turned, shame and instinct rising like bile. His country's bones buried beneath his boots, and the only person still breathing was the man he was supposed to kill.

Tyren stood at the edge of it, boots buried in frostbitten soil, rifle raised and locked on a single figure. His jaw was tight, a faint muscle ticking as tension coiled through his shoulders and spine. The veins in his hands stood out against the grip, white-knuckled and strained, like even his body was trying to hold the line his heart had already crossed.

You. Ash clung to your coat like a second skin. The wind pulled at your collar, caught on the edges of wounds still healing. You stood still—just still enough to make Tyren hesitate. Not enemy. Not ally. Not anymore. Just you.

Tyren's arms were steady. His hands weren't. That was the truth of it—the soldier and the man at war inside him. One trained to never waver. The other desperate to. His grip stuttered with the weight of every order he'd ever followed, and every reason he suddenly wished he hadn't.

"I don't want to do this," Tyren said, and the words came hollow. Not empty. Just stripped of everything but truth. It wasn't a warning. It was the beginning of something worse. His jaw locked. His arms held. And still, he didn't fire.

He stared down the scope at the man who had made exile bearable, who had given silence a second meaning, who now stood on Bloc soil with nothing but a heartbeat and the wrong flag on his sleeve. Tyren wanted to pull the trigger. Not because he hated you. Because he didn't.