I push harder, and the bond screams.
The sky snaps shut, and I stagger under the violence of it.
One moment, there is a tear in the world—a wound held open just long enough to offer something impossible—and the next it is gone, sealed over by the sickly green of this realm as though it had never existed at all. The blue vanishes. The horizon vanishes. The possibility vanishes.
It is so abrupt, it feels like a lie.
Momentum carries me forward before my body can reconcile what my eyes have seen. I hit the ground hard, knees slamminginto wet earth with enough force to jar up through my spine, my hands catching late, breath torn violently from my lungs.
Gone.
The word does not form in my mind so much as it tears through me.
He’s gone.
There is no space for anything else.
No strategy. No command. No battle. No rebellion.
Only absence.
I close my eyes because I cannot bear to see the sky where the rift had been. I cannot bear to confirm it again, to look up and find nothing but green and know, without doubt, that I am too late.
The bond should be empty. It is what I brace for.
It is what I expect—the hollowing out, the silence, the absence of him where he has been since the moment he chose me back.
I have lost people before.
I have buried warriors, friends, allies, family by blood and by choice. I know what loss does. I know the shape it carves out of a life, the way it harrows and leaves sharp edges behind.
But this…
This is different.
This is not the loss of a person who stood beside me. This is the loss of someone that became part of me.
The space where Pax exists inside me does not feel separate. It does not feel like something that can simply be removed without consequence. It is threaded through everything—my awareness, my instincts, my sense of direction, my understanding of the world.
Without him?—
The thought fractures before it can fully form.
Pain floods in instead. It’s not physical but something deeper.
It tears through my chest, intense and consuming, like something vital has been ripped free and the rest of me does not know how to continue without it. Breath becomes difficult. Thought becomes disjointed. There is no clarity, no structure—only the raw, overwhelming reality of loss.
I let it take me.
For a moment—for one brief, devastating stretch of time—I do not fight it.
I kneel in the dirt, head bowed, hands dug into the earth hard enough to tear skin, and I feel it.
All of it.
The fear I refused to name.
The grief I knew would come if he chose what he has every right to choose.
