Page 258 of May: Bloom & Bane

“Stop,” we gasp. “Eden—stop! Don’t run into it, please, gods, stop⁠—”

With a sickening crack of bone and a burst of dark magic, we wrench our right arm to the side. The massive scythe slices through the air, missing Eden by mere inches. The curse screams in frustration.

“Ash! Sage! We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she gasps, her chest heaving as she skids to a halt. Her hands are clamped tightly over her belly.

Our eyes drop to the dimming mark across our chest.

Minutes. We have minutes.

“Eden, we didn’t know if we’d ever see you again. We didn’t know if we’d reach you before⁠—”

She takes a step closer.

“No!” we cry out. “Wait. There’s something you have to hear. There’s something we have to tell you, and we have to tell you now⁠—”

“I already know.” She steps closer, and the scythe trembles in our grip. “Ash, I know. Lumi told me everything. All of it. I know. And I don’t⁠—”

“No.” The word tears out of us. She flinches, and the sight of it guts us. “You don’t know. This isn’t something Lumi can give you.” We shake our head. “She can’t tell you what it felt like.” Our eyes find hers. “She can’t tell you what we became.” The mark on our chest sheds another thread of gold. “If these are the last minutes we have with you… then we won’t spend them hiding behind someone else’s words. You deserve something we weren’t able to give you in any other lifetime… the truth.”

Our words hang in the freezing air, her moss-green eyes searching ours.

“When we told you we didn’t know who we were…” we rasp. “That was true. But we know now.”

Her brow furrows.

“And in every life we’ve lived—it has always been you.”

She takes another step.

“But—to get to you… we lied. We hurt people in ways you can’t imagine. We stole things that were never ours to take…” A shuddering breath rattles our ribcage, the scythe groaning against the stone as the curse tries to force the blade upward.

“The curse lied to us. But we chose how to answer that lie. The curse stole you from us in our first life. We never even knew you existed. But it left your sister carrying enough of your soul that every instinct we had pointed to her. And every god who knew the truth… was cursed not to say anything.” Flaming tears spill down our skull. “We were victims of that. And Lumi became one because of how we handled it.”

“Stop.” Tears brim in her eyes. She takes another step forward, her boots crunching on the frost.

“Eden, no—stay back!” we plead, the scythe vibrating with hunger beneath our palm. The mark on our chest is nothing but a dying ember.

“I said stop,” she repeats. “Stop confessing to me like I’m going to run.”

She closes the distance between us, her small arms wrapping around our waist. The warmth of our daughter presses against our shadows.

“You keep bracing for me to leave, waiting for me to look at all of this, and decide it’s too much. So let me save you that fear.” She lifts her hand, pressing it flat over the guttering mark on our chest. “I am not going anywhere.”

“Eden—” Our voice cracks. “You don’t understand what we⁠—”

“You never loved the wrong thing, Ash… Sage. You loved the only part of me the curse would let you reach, and every lifetime it tore me away before you could find all of me—so you followed the fragment. You kept reaching for the only soul that was ever yours.”

The mark pulses weakly.

“You have always been finding your way home. Over and over, lifetime after lifetime, in the dark, cursed, forgetting—and you still came looking. There was never anyone else. Fragment or whole, first life or this one—” She reaches up to cradle our skull. “—it was always me. It is still me. And it will always be me.”

And then she says the thing the curse cannot survive.

“I don’t forgive you.”

Our breath catches.

“Because there is nothing to forgive. You didn’t betray me across three thousand years—you were trying to get back to me across three thousand years. And you finally made it.” A sob escapes her. She smiles through it. “You’re home. And I’m choosing you—all of you, the bloom, the bane, and every broken piece in between—knowing every single thing you just told me. I choose you because of the truth, not in spite of it.”