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She turned her face into his palm.

“You said you’d always be with me,” she said into his hand. “And now you’re the one leaving.”

“Yes.”

“And you expect me to survive that.”

“I do,” he said. “Because I know you. You are the person who climbed a mountain of glass in the dark and fought her way through things that should have stopped her and found me in a room that was built to keep the world out.” He smiled. “You will survive this the same way you survived everything else. By being exactly who you are.”

She closed her eyes.

He leaned his forehead against hers, the way he had in the chamber beneath the cliffs, in the Archive corridor, in every moment where the world had been too much and they had found each other in the middle of it.

“I need to tell you why,” he said quietly. “The real reason. Not the argument I made to Safir.”

She opened her eyes. “Tell me.”

“Because you showed me something I had spent centuries refusing to believe,” he said. “That what lives between people - between any people, regardless of what they are or where they came from - is worth more than what divides them. I had built my entire existence on the opposite idea. On the wound. On the grief. On the certainty that difference was the truth of us and that everything else was pretence.” He paused. “And then I met you, and nothing seemed certain anymore.”

She was crying properly now. She didn’t hide it.

“So I am not doing this because I want to leave you,” he said. “I want, with everything I have, to stay. I want the ordinary life. The unremarkable one. No Fractures. No vows. No centuries of planning.” His voice caught slightly. “I want mornings. I want your questions at my elbow while I try to work. I want to watch you find things no one else has thought to look for.”

He stopped. He bit down on his lip, as if trying not to falter.

“I want it so much that standing here, about to walk away from it, is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I’ve lived for over three hundred years.”

“Then don’t,” she whispered again, knowing it would not change anything, saying it anyway. “You don’t have to, Caelith. We can have all of that!”

“If I stay, you die. Eryssan dies. Everything you love and everyone you have ever written a letter to dies. And I cannot live in a world - any world, on any side of any fracture - where I chose myself over that. Over you.” He looked at her. “You taught me that. You, specifically, taught me what it meant to choose something greater than your own survival. You have been doing it since the moment I met you.”

She thought of her father. Of Selinne and her mother. Of Julen behind her on the broken glass. Of a village down the coast where someone was waiting for letters she had not written.

They stood in the Fracture’s light, and she looked at him and tried to hold every detail of him in her memory, the way he had once held the details of her. The glass veins catching the violet light. The angles of his cheekbones, of his jaw. The way he looked at her like she was the most specific and irreplaceable thing in any world he had ever walked through.

“Will you come back?” she asked. The question she had been holding since she understood what was happening. “Is that possible? Is there any way that you—”

“I don’t know,” he said. Honest. Always honest, in the end. “I don’t know what exists beyond the threshold now. My brother believed something still did. He was rarely wrong about things that mattered.”

“He believed in coexistence,” she said. “He believed people could choose better.”

“Yes,” Caelith said. “And he was right. It just took me a couple of centuries longer than it should have to understand it.”

She almost laughed. The sound that came out was not quite a laugh but was not quite a sob either. Something between, something human and imprecise and entirely hers.

“Maia,” he said. Her name in his voice, the way it had always been in his voice, like something held carefully.

“I know,” she said.

“I will do everything I can to come back for you,” he said. “I cannot promise what that means or when or how. But I am telling you, with everything I am and everything I was and everything I might yet become, that I will come back for you.”

She looked at him.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said. “I’ll be exactly here.” She paused.

Her hand went to her sleeve before she had decided to move it. The comb had been there since the night she went into his quarters. She held it out.

Caelith looked at it. She watched him work out where she had got it.