Bastien’s grin faded as his gaze returned to me.
“I did. I couldn’t let what was supposed to be our last few moments together be wasted without you knowing. Though now that we’ve survived, I wish that I had kept my mouth shut.”
“Do you regret telling me?”
He shook his head. “I don’t regret anything, Cirian. Not a single damn moment. Besides, you told me that you loved me, too.”
“Aye, I did do that.”
Bastien closed the distance between us, wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me close. “So, you can’t take it back.”
“And neither can you.”
He nodded, then leaned forward, pressing his forehead to mine. We lingered in that moment for as long as we could allow ourselves, before the sounds of the guards in the streets below shook us back to reality.
“We need to find the others,” Bastien said, releasing his hold on me and moving to the edge of the rooftop to peer over. “How on earth are we going to get down from here?”
I unfurled my wings, the edge of one clipping Bastien’s shoulder and spinning him around.
“Climb aboard, Bast.”
He rolled his eyes, a smile creeping across his face.
“Fine, but this is not going to become a regular thing. I don’t like to be carried.”
“Whatever you say.”
With Bastien secure in my arms, I stepped up on the ledge, testing the tension in my wings. So many things had changed since the last dawn, and we still had a long night ahead. But I had Bastien to cling to, and for now, that was all I needed to take the next leap.
The final beat of my heart propelled me upward, layers of glass and stone streaking by in dizzying patterns, till finally I emerged into open air under a sky of impossible colors.
I was dead. Again.
The realization didn’t frighten me. I had spent what felt like a lifetime within the confines of my dreaming. Lynette was there when she could be, but otherwise, I was left to my own devices, surrounded by the machinations of my own mind. But now, I could be free of those walls within my mind. Here, in the Ether, I could breathe. Metaphorically, of course.
Did the others await below the mountain? I hoped they had been close by, at the very end. It was a selfish desire to want them to witness my end, but the idea brought me comfort. To reach the end of one’s life surrounded by those who love you—there was no better end.
When I was still alive, I’d never dwelled on what came after. Even as Bastien brought me back from the edge of oblivion, there was no part of me that wanted to explore what that end would have been without his magic intervening. He’d told me that our magic returns to the Source, so was that where I washeaded next? To rejoin the source of all magics and await the day that I would get to inhabit a form once more? Would I even realize that I’d lived a life before then? Or would my consciousness, much like my body, decay over time, leaving behind nothing but the unrecognizable bones of what came before?
“Do you truly wish to know?”
The voice was quiet, yet in this place of stillness, it was a cacophony. A chorus of harmonic tones distilled into one, all at once frightening and entrancing.
A figure appeared in my periphery, drifting into focus as they came alongside me, head tilted back to view the same sky of chromatic majesty. I knew in an instant I was in the presence of something otherworldly. Could this be Death itself coming to greet me? All of those times I had imagined evading the figure, to see them manifested filled me with an unexplainable excitement.
“Have you come for me?” I asked, not taking my gaze away from the stars overhead.
“I come for all, eventually. You are no different.”
“That’s comforting,” I admitted.
“Most find it so.”
“Are they afraid?”
“Most are not, by the time they reach this place.”
“Was my mother afraid?”
