And then I feel it.
It comes in slowly, like a tide rather than a wave. Grief. Not sharp and immediate the way grief usually is when it hits, but old and vast and bone-deep, the kind that has been carried for so long it has become part of the landscape. Pain threaded through with loss, loss threaded through with more loss, and underneath all of it something that might be longing or might be the memory of longing, the ghost of a feeling that belonged to a self that no longer exists quite the same way.
It fills the flat the way cold fills a room when a window opens. Inevitably and totally.
My chest tightens. I set my tea down on the side table very carefully because my hands have gone slightly unsteady.
We’re connected, Dis and I, in ways that have been building since the first feeding. I’ve felt his emotions bleed into mine before, flashes and edges of things. This is different. This isn’t a flash. This is everything he usually holds back, flowing out of him unchecked because whatever is happening with him right now is too big to contain.
I look at him. At the restless shadows. At the effort I can see him making to hold himself together.
And I understand.
Not-despising someone, makes you vulnerable. It’s a weapon you carve out of your own heart and give to them. For them to shatter and destroy. Or simply to discard.
Even if they cherish it and treat it tenderly, they can still be taken away from you, along with the piece of your heart.
Dis doesn’t not-despise me enough for it to really hurt. Just enough to stir old memories.
“Dis,” I say quietly. “Did you lose someone?”
The shadows surge. His whole form shudders, and for a moment he loses it entirely, dissolving at the edges into something less than a shape, less than a presence, all of that vast and ancient power coming apart at the seams.
“I lost everything,” he whispers.
The words are so quiet I almost don’t hear them. But the grief that comes with them isn’t quiet at all. It crashes into the room and into my chest simultaneously and my eyes sting with tears that aren’t entirely mine, that belong to centuries of carrying something that was always too heavy to carry alone.
I stand very still and let it move through me. I don’t try to redirect it or diminish it or fill the space it leaves with words, because there are no words. There have never been words for this. Anyone who’s ever lost everything knows there are no words for this.
After a moment I set down my tea and I walk up to the circle.
I sit down on the floor at its edge. The chalk runes are invisible under the carpet but I can feel the magic of them humming against my awareness, the boundary between his world and mine, the line I drew that has been both prison and protection and something else entirely that I don’t have a name for yet.
I look at him. He has drawn himself in. The vast, restless shadows have contracted, pulled close, and what’s left of him in the circle is small. Startlingly small. No face, no form, no burning blue eyes. Just a dense concentration of shadow, coiled on the futon, still radiating that presence that is unmistakably and entirely him, ancient and blazing and absolutely, heartbreakingly real.
As small as a kitten.
As present as a star.
I reach my hand across the runes.
I push it through the boundary of the circle, past the humming, invisible edge of the binding, into the space that is his. My hand sits there in the air, open, palm up, not asking for anything. Just there.
Stepping into his space, into the circle, would be wrong right now. But this offering feels gentle, feels right.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then the shadow moves.
It comes to my hand slowly, tentatively, the way something small and hurt approaches something it isn’t sure it can trust. It touches my fingers first, cool and strange, and then settles in my hand the way smoke settles on a thing, without weight but with presence, absolute presence. Every particle of attention and awareness Dis has, focused entirely on this one small point of contact.
I don’t say anything.
I know he can still speak like this. I know he’s capable of language and understanding and sharp dry observations about television and baking shows and the structural integrity of layered cakes. I know the intelligence and the will are all still there, banked down under the grief, waiting.
But words aren’t what this is.
I sit on the floor of my living room with my hand across the boundary of a summoning circle and an ancient shadow king curled in my palm, and I don’t say anything, because there is nothing to say. Some things are just true and terrible and old and the only honest response to them is to stay. To not move. To not flinch from the weight of them.
