Page 170 of The Immortal’s Mark

The Hungering King’s expression shifts. Something flickers across his ancient face—recognition, maybe. Memory.

My throat closes. Forces me to swallow. Forces me to keep going.

“I couldn’t even bury him properly. Couldn’t stay for the funeral. I ran. First time of many.”

The tomb is silent except for my breathing, ragged and wet.

“After that, I told myself I wouldn’t do it again. Wouldn’t let anyone close. But I’m weak, apparently. Or stupid. Or just too tired to keep the walls up forever.”

I think of all the people I’ve lost. The friends. The lovers. The ones who made me laugh, made me stay longer than I should have, made me forget for a while that everything ends.

I wasn’t there for any of them at the end. I never was. I always ran before I had to watch them grow old, grow sick, grow still. Easier that way. Cleaner. That’s what I told myself.

“I’ve had people who mattered. And every single one of them—every single one—turned to dust while I kept breathing. While I kept going. While I kept surviving whether I wanted to or not.”

I’m crying. I don’t know when I started. The tears are hot on my cheeks, and I don’t bother wiping them away.

“So I stopped. I stopped letting people in. Stopped wanting things. Stopped staying anywhere long enough for roots to grow. Eight hundred years of running, and I told myself it was because I was tired. Because immortality is a curse. Because nothing matters when everything ends anyway, so why bother pretending?”

I look at the Hungering King—really look at him, past the power and the grief and the eleven centuries of obsession.

He’s crying too.

I don’t think he knows it. Don’t think he’s cried in centuries, maybe longer. But there are tears on his face, tracking through the hollows of his cheeks, and his ancient eyes are bright with something that looks like pain.

“But that was a lie. Wasn’t it?”

My voice is soft now. Soft and raw and bloody.

“You know. You understand. Better than anyone in the world, you understand exactly what I’m saying.”

His jaw tightens. Almost imperceptibly.

“I wasn’t running because nothing matters. I was running because things matter too much. Because love is the most terrifying thing ever, and I’d rather die six hundred times than feel it once.”

The silence stretches between us. Two broken things, looking at each other across a gulf of centuries and grief.

“But I felt it anyway,” I whisper. “Despite everything. Despite eight hundred years of practice at not caring, at not wanting, at not staying.”

I turn.

I look at Ren.

His face is a ruin. Tears streaming down his cheeks, mixing with the shadow that gags him. His whole body is straining against the bindings, every muscle taut, every line of him screaming things he can’t say.

His eyes are wild. Desperate. So full of love and terror and grief that I can barely stand to look at him.

I look anyway.

“I am tired.”

The admission scrapes my throat raw. Three words. The truest words. The ones I’ve been avoiding for eight centuries because saying them means admitting that I want something different.

“I’m tired of running.”

One step toward the Hungering King. My boots echo on ancient stone.

“I’m tired of being alone.”