Page 135 of Property of Scar

‘She loved you. Even through the madness. Even at the end.’

For centuries, I have held that sentence like a closed fist around broken glass, certain I understood its shape. She thanked me, and I built a cage out of it. I made it proof. Made it the fixed point that everything else orbited, the irrefutable evidence of what I was, what I had done, and I carried it like I deserved every ounce of it.

But Astrid was fighting Mordain’s poison when she died. Every moment of the madness, every act of violence, every vacancy in her eyes where she had been, that was his work. And the last clear moment she had, the last thing Mordain’s formula could not reach, she used to look at me and let me go. Not because she was forgiving me, but because she was loving me past what the toxin could touch. The last thing she chose to give me, with everything she had left, was permission to keep living.

She didn’t want me here.

The thought lands differently in the stillness, stripped of the distortion I’ve spent lifetimes wrapping it in, and what it leaves behind is something I haven’t let myself near in all this time. She would look at this cage I’ve built from the shape of her, and she would be furious, because she used her last breath to open a door, and I spent three and a half centuries bricking it closed from the inside.

The loop falters.

Astrid at twenty feet, dissolving at the edges now, her shape losing its terrible permanence, the frost cracking away from the ground in wide, branching fractures as the warmth in my blood pushes outward.

I look at her. The version of her, this place has built from memory, guilt, and all those years of refusing to let the wound close. The truest rendering I have left of someone who deserved so much more than to become the architecture of my punishment.

“I carried you right,” I tell her, and my voice in this place sounds like something surfacing after a long time underwater. “I see that now. You didn’t want me to stay here. You wanted me to go.”

The gray light holds for a moment, suspended. Then the warmth moves through me again, steady and certain, and for the first time, I understand it was never supposed to erase anything.

Astrid is still dead.

The things I regret still happened.

None of that changes.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped treating those truths like scars and started treating them like a life sentence.

The realization lands harder than I expected.

Maybe those aren’t the same thing.

The field fractures all at once, the pale winter light shattering outward like glass finding its breaking point, Astrid dissolving into the white of it, not violently, not with any cruelty, just quietly, like something finally, gently released.

And the warmth in my blood shifts.

Not just heat.

A pull.

It hooks deep and sudden, catching hold of something in me that responds before thought has any place in it, a surge of sensation rolling through my system that doesn’t belong to the cold space I’ve been trapped in.

It shouldn’t feel like this.

There is no reason for it to feel like this.

And yet, it does.

The pull tightens, not painful or forceful, but drawing me toward it with a clarity that cuts through everything else. There’s something in it I recognize without understanding, something that feels aligned in a way that makes no sense here, in this place, in this moment.

Cali.

I don’t question how I know that.

I just do.

The sensation deepens, that same impossible surge threading through me again, carrying something dangerously close to euphoria in its wake, something that doesn’t belong to grief, memory, or anything I should still be capable of feeling here. It burns through me fast and clean, leaving no space for doubt about where it’s coming from, even if I can’t name what it is.

Her.