“You learned for me, Erevos. You did not know how to speak gently, so you tried. You did not know what comfort was—so you studied it. You did not understand humans—and yet you listened.”
Each word settled into him.
“You created air for me because you were afraid I would die.” Her lips trembled. “You built spaces I could sit in. You watched the way I reacted to things and adjusted. You have never once forced me to kneel. Never once demanded obedience.”
“You wanted me to choose you.”
He did. That was his greatest desire.
“And I am angry,” she admitted. “I am angry that the choice feels smaller than it did before. I am angry that the path back to my village no longer exists in the way I believed it did.”
Her hand rose slowly, pressing against her own chest. “But you did not do this to trap me. You did not feed me your shadows with the intention of stealing my future. You did it because you did not yet understand the consequences of loving something fragile.”
Loving.
Erevos felt something inside him fracture quietly.
“I was a girl in that village,” she continued. “I would have married. Been beaten and enslaved. Grown old beneath the same roof where I was born. I would have believed the world ended at the edge of those fields.”
Her lips curved. “You showed me it does not.”
She stepped closer to him.
“You taught me that fear can be faced. That darkness is not always cruelty. That power does not have to mean harm.”
Her fingers lifted slowly and pressed against the center of his chest, where shadows coiled beneath the surface of him. “You helped me become more than I would have ever been allowed to be there.”
His chest burned so much he was afraid he would harm his songbird’s hand.
“Do I wish you had told me sooner?” she asked.
“Yes.”
A tear slipped down her cheek, though she did not look away.
“But do I believe you meant to steal my will?”
She shook her head.
Erevos lowered himself then, their eyes aligned without her needing to tilt her chin upward.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I would undo the harm if I could.” His massive hand hovered near her waist but did not touch.
“If you walk away from me now, I will not stop you.”
The shadows trembled at the lie his nature wanted to tell, that he would drag the world down before he let her go.
“I will endure it,” he finished quietly.
“I choose you, Erevos.”
And with those words, he knelt, and both of them leaned against each other, completely forgetting about Rolam.
Epilogue
In the seasons that followed in the human world, The Void changed as well.
Not in structure, its endless dark still stretched vast and ancient, but in texture.
