The realization arrives with surprise that makes my heart stutter—this woman, this Queen that everyone seems desperate to claim pieces of, lies curled against my chest with theparticular vulnerability of deep sleep. Her breathing carries the steady rhythm of genuine unconsciousness rather than simple rest, each exhale warm against my skin through whatever fabric separates us. Her body has molded itself to mine with the instinctive trust of someone who feels safe enough to surrender awareness entirely.
When did I get to her recovery room?
The question surfaces with confusion that borders on alarm. I can't remember. The hours before this moment exist as fog in my memory—impressions without clarity, fragments that refuse to assemble into coherent narrative. Did I walk here consciously? Was I summoned by something I don't recall? Did my magic guide me while my mind was elsewhere, lost in the particular dissociation that has plagued me since...
Since the separation.
Since Nikki stopped being part of me.
I pout at my own confusion, the expression feeling foreign on features that usually arrange themselves into masks more suited to Fae court politics. The uncertainty should probably concern me more than it does. Memory gaps can indicate magical interference, mental manipulation, the kind of threats that someone with my enemies should take seriously.
But watching her sleep...
Having her in my arms right now...
It brings something I haven't felt in what seems like forever.
Purpose.
Or maybe relief.
Or maybe both, intertwined so thoroughly that separating them becomes meaningless exercise.
The sensation settles into my chest with weight that makes breathing feel both easier and harder simultaneously. Purpose has been a complicated concept for me recently—the particular torment of someone who has lost the fundamental anchor thatonce defined their existence without fully understanding what that anchor was until it disappeared.
I feel hollow.
The admission surfaces from depths I've been trying to ignore, forcing itself into conscious acknowledgment despite my best efforts at suppression.
Empty.
Like someone has reached into my chest and scooped out whatever used to fill the space where feelings should live.
It's the weirdest sensation to describe.
Not pain, exactly—pain has edges, has definition, has the particular clarity of experience that can be analyzed and addressed. This is something else. An absence where presence used to be. A void where substance once existed. The particular wrongness of missing something you didn't realize you possessed until it was gone.
Deep down, beneath all the masks and deflections and carefully constructed personas that Fae existence demands, I hate that I feel this way.
Hate the weakness it represents.
Hate the vulnerability it exposes.
Hate that centuries of training in emotional control can be undone by circumstances I never asked for and couldn't prevent.
But I'm not going to live in a state of delusion.
That path leads to madness—the particular Fae madness that claims those who refuse to acknowledge truth, who construct realities from lies and then become lost when those constructions collapse. I've seen what happens to my kind when denial becomes lifestyle. The unraveling is never pretty.
Nikki isn't part of me anymore.
The thought arrives with the particular weight of truth that refuses to be softened by careful phrasing.
I'm no longer her.
She's no longer me.
Whatever we were—whatever merged existence we shared for so long that I forgot there was ever a time before it—that's over now.
