Her lips part. She doesn’t say sorry. I’m grateful.
Instead, she leans her forehead to my chest, voice hushed. “Tell me.”
So I do.
I speak of Grothak. Of his laughter, louder than war drums. Of his blades, twin-curved and silver-bright. Of the snowstorm where we hunted, where we found the beast, and the silence that followed. I tell her about the black blood, the screaming winds, the way Grothak’s eyes went flat as the spear left his hand and failed to pierce the Vorfaluka’s heart.
“He didn’t scream,” I say. “Not once. Just… dropped. Like a tree in winter.”
Olivia stays pressed against me. “He was brave.”
“He was my better,” I whisper.
She tilts her head, and I meet her gaze. There’s no judgement in her eyes. Just a sadness I recognize too well.
“My dad,” she says. “Cancer. Slow and mean. Like it was chewing him up from the inside for sport. I was in college whenhe got diagnosed. Came home to take care of him. Never left again.”
The silence that follows is a different kind. It’s not awkward. It’s sacred. Like two war-scarred maps being laid side by side.
I brush a strand of damp hair from her face. “You stayed,” I say.
“I had to,” she replies, voice almost bitter. “He raised me. Even when he was sick, he tried to smile for me. I owed him that.”
“Duty,” I murmur. “Honor.”
“Something like that,” she says with a lopsided smirk.
We lie there for a while, breathing the same air, letting the world shrink down to the press of skin and the pulse beneath it.
But even here, in her warmth, my thoughts drift. To home. To the red skies above the Storm Crags. To the sound of the war horns and the scent of oiled leather and burning incense.
To the mountain winds that may never touch my face again.
I shift, uneasy, and she notices. Of course she does.
“Talk to me,” Olivia says, voice low. “What is it?”
I sit up, staring into the dim shadows cast by the lamp near her bed. My spear leans against the far wall. It hums with faint light, but that light is dying. I feel it.
“I am… torn,” I admit. “I came here for vengeance. For duty. I swore on the blood of my brother that I would end the creature. I must. But…”
She waits.
“I do not wish to leave you,” I say, the words sticking like ash in my throat. “Not now. Not after this.”
She sits beside me, sheet drawn around her like a cloak. Her face is unreadable for a long moment.
“Then don’t,” she whispers.
“It is not so simple,” I growl. “The spear. The Veil. They tether me to my world. If I stay too long, I become… stuck. A phantom of neither place.”
“Like the Vorfaluka?”
“Yes,” I say. “But slower. Corruption over time. I would fade. Break.”
She touches my arm. “We’ll find a way. You’re not alone in this.”
The way she says it, like a promise etched in fire.
