He tells me how Reon held me in a loop of time, trying to keep me alive, how they laid me beneath the earth to heal, to wait, to hope. But the only thing waiting was silence.
I cry until I am emptied of sound, until my grief has burned through me and what remains is fury.
I strike him. My fists find his chest and he does not move, does not defend himself. I hit him harder, desperate to make him feel.
“Why?” I choke out. “Why didn’t you bring her back? Why didn’t you do something?”
My strikes grow wilder, my voice hoarse with the effort of breaking him. He does not break.
So I call the vines.
They burst from the moss at our feet, curling up his legs and around his torso, tightening until they bite into his skin. But he summons his smoke, dark and violent, and the two collide, ash falling around us like snow.
“I wanted to,” he says, his voice raw as his hand finds my cheek. “I tried, Amara. Every day, I walked the void searching for her. But I cannot open the gate to An’kel. Only you can.”
Memories stir. Driftspire, the trials, the void, the demon at the threshold of An’kel.
I shake my head, my breath trembling. “The demon…he guards the gate.”
Daed presses his palm to his chest. “That demon will not be waiting for us this time, but there will be others.” He exhales, gathering me close until my ear rests over his heart. “This will be unlike anything we’ve faced, Amara. We may not come back.”
My fingers slide into his. The warmth that left me begins to return.
“I’ve already died,” I whisper, voice quiet but sure. “What more could the darkness possibly take from me that it hasn’t already?”
Daed cups my face and draws me close, not to kiss me, not even to speak, but simply to look. His storm-lit eyes roam over me as though seeing me for the first time. They are wide and reverent, filled with wonder, and he studies me in silence for so long I begin to think he is mapping every line of my face to keep with him always.
“I thought I lost you,” he murmurs at last, his thumb brushing slowly along my jaw. “Forever, this time.”
“If our time together has taught me anything, husband,” I say softly, “it is that we can be torn and broken, our destinies split, our fates sundered, but nothing in this life, or the next, will ever keep us apart.”
I watch the golden threads shimmer faintly beneath his skin, swirling over the steady beat of his heart. They drift down his arm, tracing glowing lines where his skin touches mine, binding us in soft light.
“I should have known then,” I whisper. “That day in the forest. The human who fell from a tree.” His eyes widen with sudden recognition. “I saw the golden ribbons around you that day and didn’t understand what they were. I saw them again when we made lovein Pariseth. I should have known we were never strangers. That this…” I gesture between us, breath trembling “…was always meant to be. You and I.”
He bites his bottom lip as if holding something fragile inside him, and his eyes sheen with feeling.
“Yes,” he says quietly. “The fates always get their way, no matter how hard we fight them.”
“What do the fates say about our daughter?” I ask, my voice barely a breath.
His expression falters, softens. “I wish I knew.”
I exhale, steadying my heart. “Then we will make our own fate.”
That earns me a small, crooked grin. “Will we?”
I nod. “We will find our daughter. Be a family again. Build a new world, one free of war and hate, where she, half human and half Fae, can guide the Sundered Kingdom into something whole.”
Daed’s eyes warm as my words sink in, as belief takes root. “I named her, you know,” he says quietly.
I straighten, brows lifting. “You did? Seems like a discussion I should have been part of.”
He shrugs lightly, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You were half dead. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
A laugh slips from me before I can stop it, small, but real. It startles even me, but it lifts something heavy from my chest, and suddenly I can breathe again.
“Well then, husband,” I say, smiling. “What is her name?”
