“Full claiming.” My voice is rough. “That’s what the bond is demanding. Not just physical intimacy. Not just emotional acceptance. Complete merging. No walls. No reservations. No part of us held back in self-preservation.”
“Yes.” Her hands find my face in the dark. “It’s asking us to trust. Not just each other, but the bond itself. To believe that losing ourselves means finding something greater.”
“It could destroy us.”
“We’re already dying.”
“This is different. This is—” I stop. “If we do this—if we fully claim each other, complete the bond with nothing held back—we might not recognize ourselves after. Might not be Torin and Zara anymore. Might become something entirely new.”
“Then we become something new.” She presses closer. “Together.”
Together. That word again. Our promise. Our anchor. The truth we keep returning to.
I think about Mira one last time. What she would say if she could see me now, pressed against a ceiling in the dark, holding a Sky-dweller who’s asking me to trust the impossible.
She’d tell me to stop being an idiot. She’d tell me the sky is right here, and all I have to do is reach. She’d tell me that becoming something new isn’t death—staying the same is.
“What do we do?” I ask.
Zara’s smile is something I feel through the bond rather than see. “We let go. No fear. No walls. We trust the bond to catch us.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
The water touches the ceiling. The last pocket of air compresses to nothing. This is it. This is where we decide: die as we are, or risk everything to become what we could be.
I look at Zara through Deep Runner eyes that see in darkness. See her storm-gray feathers plastered to her skin. See her amber eyes bright with determination and terror and absolute trust. See the woman who fell from the sky and taught a water-dweller how to fly.
“I’m scared,” I admit.
“Me too.” She touches my face. “But I’m more scared of losing you. So let’s not lose. Let’s become.”
The water covers our heads. No more air. No more time. No more hesitation.
I pull Zara close and kiss her as we sink below the surface. Not to share breath this time. Not to extend our dying by minutes. But to claim. To complete. To open every door we’ve kept closed and trust that what we find behind them will be enough to save us.
The bond ignites like lightning striking water—violent, consuming, transformative.
The dampening kelp-rope hisses and unravels, its enchantment overwhelmed, and suddenly our wrists are free.
And this time, we don’t pull back. Don’t protect ourselves. Don’t hold anything in reserve.
This time, we let go completely.
Our magics crash together—lightning and water, storm and deep, impossible elements that should destroy each other. The power builds, spiraling, searching for outlet. I feel Zara in ways I never have before. Not just her emotions. Not just her thoughts. Her essence. The core of what makes her Zara—her fierce pride, her desperate need to prove herself, her wild storm nature buried under diplomatic control.
And she feels me. All of me. The grief I’ve carried since Mira died. The fear that caring means losing. The duty that shaped me into something hard and closed. The songs I used to sing in the deep places where no one could hear.
We’re naked in ways that have nothing to do with bodies. Vulnerable in ways that transcend physical touch. Open to each other in the most terrifying, beautiful way possible.
The bond swells. Power floods through the connection—not just our individual magics amplified, but something entirely new. Liquid lightning. Storm water. A force that belongs to neither element and both.
We’re changing. I can feel it happening. My scales shifting, adapting, learning to conduct her electricity without burning. Her lungs expanding, transforming, gaining the ability toprocess water like air. Our magics merging at a cellular level, rewriting what we are into what we’re becoming.
It should hurt. Should feel like dying.
Instead, it feels like being born.
