Page 367 of The Gods Order

Watching.

The mountains. The sky. The people I love piling into my house with the kind of comfort that speaks to how much they visit.

Then Kyzen’s hand finds mine and squeezes. A quiet reminder that I don’t have to stay frozen in beautiful moments anymore.

I get to live in them.

Hours slip by with the same quiet ease they’ve carried for nearly a century. Conversation shifts from one story to the next, laughter rises and falls, empty plates are replaced with cups of tea and slices of pie, and somewhere along the way, the sun quietly gives the sky over to the stars.

Us girls step out onto the porch, letting the cool night settle around us.

The men eventually migrate downstairs to the backyard, claiming they need “one more game” of Landing Stones that none of us believe will only be one. After all these years, I still don’t know why they enjoy tossing flat, polished stones into a raised wooden platform with a circular depression carved into the center.

But whatever.

It keeps them entertained and arguing for hours at a time.

Just like dinner, time simply passes us by. Sometimes we walk down and check on the guys, steal some kisses, but we always find our way back up here.

The creak of the swing swaying is merely background noise behind all the laughter ringing out across the mountains.

I sit smushed comfortably between my mom and Yemi, a single blanket covering the three of us. In a circle at our feet, Mara’s perched criss-cross in front of Rose and Seraphine sits beside them.

The way Mara uses her whole body to tell a story has multiple sighs and smiles falling from Rose’s lips. She’s had to restart the braid she’s been working on at least five times.

“You’re making this impossible,” Rose finally says, laughing as Mara moves again.

“I’m trying to paint the picture for all of you.”

“You’re flailing.”

“I am not flailing.”

“You just knocked the hair tie out of my hand,” Rose huffs.

Yemi and I share a grin as Mara looks down at the floor.

“Oh, whoops.”

The laughter that follows is effortless. It’s the kind that comes from people who have spent nearly a century together learning each other’s rhythms.

My mother smiles between the two of them bickering and Laney and Annalise as they fuss as well.

I blink as I watch Laney groan and throw her hands up.

It’s still hard for me to see her as anything other than the little girl I carried around on my hip. Now, she’s sitting here arguing with the woman who raised her about whether the changes she made to one of her recipes made it better than the original.

Annalise simply won’t accept that.

Kind of like how I wouldn’t accept when she moved out of the Akovas, or when she found the freaking four members of her Starwoven Valtrue, or when we planned her wedding.

I, of course, did accept all of that. To her face.

Internally, I was weeping.

My newest thing that I refuse to accept is that she’s turning one hundred next year.

How is that possible?