I find myself on the royal balcony that overlooks our domain, and the sight makes my chest tight with something between love and grief.
The gardens below should be blazing with summer abundance—roses and jasmine and honeysuckle creating perfumed riots that speak to our court's prosperity. Instead, I see the first signs of decline that's been creeping through our lands since Maya's condition worsened. Roses that bloom for hours before wilting. Fruit trees bearing smaller harvests each week. The slow death that will accelerate into complete failure if I lose my fertility magic entirely.
But it's not just the plants. It's the people.
Lady Rosemary tends the herb garden with her usual devotion, unaware that her king is considering a choice that will ensure she never bears the children she dreams of. Captain Sage drills younger guards in sword work, not knowing their bloodlines will end with them if I choose love over duty. Master Gardener Ash propagates seedlings for next season's planting, never imagining that next season might be the last time new life springs from Vine Court soil.
Hundreds of Fae. Thousands, if I count the outer settlements. All depending on their king to preserve their immortal legacy, their right to create new generations, their fundamental nature as beings of endless fertility and growth.
Against that, one woman. One impossible, brilliant, stubborn woman who makes me laugh and challenges my assumptions and forces me to be better than eight centuries of royal privilege prepared me to be. One mate who chose to trust me again after learning about my lies, who forgave betrayal because she understood the desperate love beneath it.
My hands grip the balcony railing so tightly the stone cracks.
The rational choice stares me in the face with brutal clarity. Let Maya die, accept her rebirth, court the new version properly. A compliant goddess who would never question my decisions or resist my authority. Someone who would smile and submit and bear my children without the messy complications of free will.
Someone who wouldn't be Maya.
The thought makes my stomach turn. I've tasted what it means to earn love rather than command it, to be chosen despite my failures rather than accepted because of my power. The reborn goddess would love me because she knew nothing else. Maya loves me because she decided I was worth the risk.
There's no comparison.
But is that worth condemning my entire people to extinction?
Another scream echoes from the healing chambers, and the sound tears through my soul like a blade. Maya is dying while I wrestle with abstractions. Every second I waste is another second closer to losing her forever.
I close my eyes and reach through our bond, feeling her pain, her fear, but also her love. Even dying, even consumed by divine power that's slowly cooking her from within, she radiates the fierce affection that chose me over easier alternatives.
She chose me. Despite my lies, my manipulation, my willingness to risk her life for my court's survival—she chose me. Not because I was perfect, but because I was worth fighting for.
How can I do less for her?
"My lord?" Captain Sage's voice interrupts my torment. "The healers sent me to find you. Lady Maya is asking for you."
I turn to find her standing in the balcony doorway, her weathered face carefully neutral. But I can see the question in her ancient eyes, the awareness that whatever decision I'm wrestling with will determine not just Maya's fate but the future of everyone she's sworn to protect.
"If you had to choose," I hear myself ask, "between your own happiness and the survival of everyone you've served for centuries... what would you do?"
She considers this with the gravity it deserves, her gaze moving from my face to the struggling gardens below. "I would choose whatever I could live with, my lord. Because surviving a choice you can't bear is its own kind of death."
The wisdom hits like cold water. I could let Maya die and spend eternity knowing I chose duty over love, politics over the woman who makes existence meaningful. I could preserve my court's immortality while watching pieces of my own soul wither like flowers cut from their roots.
Or I could choose love and face the consequences together—Maya and I building something new from the ashes of what we've destroyed, proving that some bonds are worth any sacrifice.
"Tell Lady Elvinia I'm coming," I say, my voice steady despite the magnitude of what I've decided.
"And your choice, my lord?"
I look out over my domain one final time—the fading roses, the struggling fruit trees, the people whose futures I'm about to trade for one woman's survival. "Love," I say simply. "I choose love."
As I walk back toward the healing chambers and the woman whose life hangs in the balance, I carry the weight of my court's extinction in my heart. But I also carry the certainty that some choices define not just what we do, but who we are.
And I would rather be the king who sacrificed everything for love than the one who let love die for the sake of everything else.
Maya's scream echoes through the corridors again, and I quicken my pace, ready to make the most devastating and necessary choice of my eight-century existence.
"Do it," I whisper when I return to the healing chambers.
"Thorian, no—" Maya tries to protest, but another contraction cuts off her words.
