He said nothing.Because he could not.
The Great Luna stepped closer, her bare feet silent against moss and stone.The hem of her gown trailed across the burnt line his magic had carved into the earth, and where it passed, the moss knit itself back together.
“You feel Myanin through the book’s distortion, not through the fullness of the bond I blessed between you.”
Gerick’s chest tightened.“Then what is this?”
“A tether,” she said.“A path formed by blessing, choice, and need.It kept her life tied to yours when death should have claimed one or both of you.It gave her time.It gave you both shelter.”
Shelter.
The word struck him strangely.Not cage.Not claim.Shelter.
Gerick lifted his eyes to hers.“You said our lives were tied.”
“They are.”
His breath left him slowly.
The Great Luna’s eyes softened.“But tied lives are not always tied destinies.”
Peri went utterly still beside him.He heard her breath catch and hold.
Gerick felt the words enter him like a blade so sharp that the wound came before the pain.
“I don't understand.”
“You do,” she said.“That is why it hurts.”
His hands curled again, but this time no magic answered.The leather of his gloves whispered against itself and went silent.
“I love her.”
“I know.”
“I would never harm her.”
“I know that too.”
“She is my mate.”
The Great Luna did not look away.“Yes.”
The single word should have comforted him.Instead it tore something open in his chest that he had been carefully, stubbornly, foolishly holding closed.
“Then how,” he began, voice roughened beyond recognition, "can her heart be answering another?”
The question hung in the clearing.
There it was.No pride.No command.No claim.Just the broken center of a male who had loved with everything he had and still felt the ground shifting beneath him.
The Great Luna’s expression held sorrow, but not regret.
“Because Myanin’s heart was fractured long before she met you.You did not fail to heal it, Gerick.You gave her safety enough to discover where the wound truly was.”
He looked away.The forest blurred at the edges of his vision, every shadow softening as moisture rose he refused to acknowledge.
He would rather have faced an army.He would rather have bled.
