Recognition. Love. Desperation that mirrored my own.
Then the image flickered back to her mother, and I was left holding a locket that shouldn’t exist, that couldn’t exist, that was somehow a bridge between her scattered existence and my linear one.
“She’s in there,” I breathed. “She’s—”
“Not in it,” Eltrien said. “Connected to it.”
I closed my fist around the locket, feeling it pulse against my palm. Feelingherthrough it, distant and fragmented but undeniably there.
“Then I’ll never let it go.”
The vow came out raw, absolute. I would guard this thing with everything I had. Would keep it safe, keep it whole, keep it as a beacon for her to follow home.
“Kaelren,” Eltrien said carefully. “It runs both ways. If you come apart, she’ll feel it across every moment. It will slow her return.”
“Are you saying I can’t grieve?” The words came out sharp, dangerous.
“I’m saying you need to survive. More than that, you need tolive. She needs you to be her anchor, and anchors have to be strong. Stable. Present.”
I wanted to rage. He was asking the impossible.
But looking around the chamber—at the survivors who needed leadership, at the realm that was about to descend into chaos, at the future Elle had sacrificed herself to create—I understood.
She’d given me a purpose. A reason to keep going when every instinct screamed to follow her into temporal flux.
Be her lighthouse. Keep the realm together. Make sure she had something worth coming back to.
I could do that. I would do that.
Not yet.
Now, I needed to feel this. Needed to let the grief have its moment before I locked it away and became whatever the realm needed me to be.
“Give me an hour,” I said, standing with the locket clutched tight. “One hour. Then I’ll be the leader you need. But right now, I need to fall apart.”
Thrak nodded slowly. “One hour. We’ll secure the chamber. Deal with the bodies. You go… do what you need to do.”
I left them there. Walked out of the chamber, through corridors that were already starting to repair themselves now that the Bloom was freed, until I found a small empty room that had probably been a guard station once.
Then, and only then, did I let myself break.
Grief hit like a blow. I doubled over, pressing my back against the wall, sliding down until I was sitting in the dark with my head in my hands and the locket pressed against my chest.
“Elle,” I said to the darkness, to the empty air, to the scattered fragments of her that might be able to hear me across time. “Elle, I’m here. I’m waiting. I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know if you can find your way back. But I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
The locket pulsed once. Warm. Alive.
And through our stretched, thinned bond between us, I felt something. Not words. Not even coherent thought. Just emotion, raw and overwhelming:
“Afraid. Lost. Learning. Still me. Still fighting. Wait for me.”
“Always,” I whispered back, and let the tears come.
You become the lighthouse that guides them home.
Even when you don’t know if home still exists.
Even when the waiting might last forever.
