The word is devoid of all feeling like his eyes, the swirling silver mystical luminesce gone and replaced by the flat leaded grey of threatening storm clouds. Unyielding like the tense muscles under my hands.
I blink up at him, unable to process his words. “No? What do you mean, no?”
He still doesn’t move. He doesn’t even blink. He repeats, his voice as cold as the North winds blowing down the mountain, “No.”
A tight knot forms in my stomach, frustration spiking. I know he will support me, be happy for me, he just doesn’t understand yet, that’s all. I need to explain it better.
“Eryon, I don’t think you understand. This plant—it’s everything. It’s not just another discovery, not just some academic pursuit. This could save lives.” My voice pitches higher, more frantic. “It could save my life.”
Nothing.
The silence feels like a wall, thick and unmoving. Assuffocating as being trapped under that damn snow and just as hopeless. Just as lethal.
“I have a genetic disorder,” I rush on, my words tumbling over each other. Overexplaining in an effort to get him to understand. “A change, a defect in how I’m made. My body is missing an enzyme, a special chemical. My mother died from it in her fifties. I—” My throat tightens. As soon as he hears this part, he’ll understand. He has to. “I won’t make it past that unless I find a cure. And this plant—Eryon, this plant is the key. Please.”
I grab his hands. He doesn’t shake me off. And for a single agonizing moment, I think that maybe I’ve gotten through to him. I wait the span of a heartbeat. Then two. Three.
But he doesn’t soften. He just stares down at me. Unmoving. Unflinching. Unyielding.
Raw, visceral pain flares in my chest as hope withers like the last bloom of summer.
“Eryon.” I whisper his name, pleading. “Please, just let me take a few. I swear I won’t take them all. I’ll only take what I need. You don’t have to help me—I’ll do it myself. I just—I need it.”
I squeeze his large fingers, and for the first time, his skin doesn’t blaze with its usual heat. It’s ice-cold just like the light in his eyes.
His hands flex beneath my grip, so tight they shake with the effort. His throat bobs, a slow, deliberate swallow audible in the heavy silence between us. His fingers twitch—as if, for the briefest second, he wants to reach for me.
He closes his eyes as if he can’t bear to see my face as he gives his final answer, “No.”
I flinch as if he’d struck me, my hands slipping off of his. The sound isn’t loud. It isn’t cruel. It’s just final. A cold and quiet whisper of death. A fatal blow, in the most literal sense of the word.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eryon
She pleads with me, but I cannot hear her over the slow, splintering crack of my frozen heart. The weight of her words settles like fresh snowfall—soft, quiet, deceptive. She does not know it, but she is now the avalanche. A tremor in the ice, a whisper of movement before the mountain gives way. And I can feel it coming—the collapse, the ruin, the moment there will be nothing left of me but the wreckage.
Her voice cracks, breathless and desperate. Her hands clutch at mine. I look down at them against my own as if seeing them for the first time. They are too small, too fragile. They are human. Her warmth presses against me, but I do not let it in. I cannot. I was foolish to allow her past my defenses, to allow hope and love to thaw my icy solitude.
She is the one who does not understand.
“This plant has already cost lives.” My voice is steady, but the ground beneath me is not. The whole word feels unstable, the eternal foundation of these mountains beneath my feetreduced to quicksand. “Nothing can leave this basin. I am its protector, and I will not allow humans to destroy my family, my home, or the balance of this sacred place again.”
She stumbles under the weight of my confession. “Eryon, I thought you said you’d never brought a human here. What do you mean, ‘destroy your family again’?”
Despair and anger flavor the air, turning the usually sweet scent of her and this sacred place bitter on my palate. The morning sun hides its face behind a cloud, casting my world back into a grey shadowy landscape to match my heart.
I do not wish to speak of it. I’ve never told the tale, never shared this grief. I thought I was honoring my family by locking them in my heart. I thought—I thought she was the next chapter in my story.
But she was always going to leave. She never meant to claim me. She never felt anything for me. Just used me to get to this plant. Another human, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake.
I exhale, slow and deep, willing my rage to still. But it does not. Cannot. It grows and builds, pushing against my skin, clawing at my throat, shredding my heart.
She flinches as my form grows, as I let my presence swell, towering over her, forcing her to feel the weight of what she is asking. The weight of what she is undoing.
She does not know that I am already hers. That I have already chosen her. That I have already been claimed by a small human who is fierce and brave. Who has eyes the color of the cursed plant that has both blessed and plagued my existence.
I tear my gaze from hers and begin to pace, letting the fury escape through me, letting it spill out into my powerful movements.
