“Because I loved you,” he said, the words raw. “And you never saw me as anything more than the friend you saved. You chose her instead. She chose you. And I… couldn’t bear it.”
His voice faltered, and for a heartbeat, he didn’t look like a monster at all.
“You think the shadows made me cruel,” he said quietly. “But I was broken long before that.”
Silence pressed in. The jars pulsed softly, their light flickering over his face, painting him in blood and gold.
He had spoken of his curse—of love torn from him, of the emptiness that followed—but he hadn’t known what I had lost the day I ascended.
I turned toward him, my voice rough from years of restraint.
“When I entered the Pit of Shadows,” I said, “the shadows didn’t want love or blood. They wanted my innocence.”
The memory clawed its way up my throat—the stench of smoke, the taste of ash, the echo of my own breath in that endless dark.
“They showed me the boy I used to be,” I continued. “Small. Afraid. Still believing the world could be kind. And they told me to kill him. The boy begged me not to,” I said softly. “He said we could still be good, that we didn’t have to become this. But I had to save Amara, and we had to destroy Severen.”
My voice broke. “So, I killed him. I wrapped my hands around his neck and broke him. The sound of it has never left me.”
The jars pulsed once, bright, the color of old fire.
Salvatore’s expression shifted, the faintest flicker of something human—shock, perhaps, or sorrow. He stepped closer.
“That must have been…” He hesitated, the words dragging like chains. “Unbearable.”
The words hit harder than I expected. No one had ever said that before.
“It was,” I admitted, each word dragging painfully across my throat. “More than anything I could ever describe.”
Salvatore’s expression softened, shadows shifting around his face.
“Then maybe,” he said quietly, “we’re not as different as we thought.”
We stood there for a long time—not as monsters, not as Shadow Lords of ruin, but as the remnants of two boys who had once stood shoulder to shoulder against a world that hated them.
The jars pulsed beside us, their mingled light painting the walls gold and crimson. The sound of the sea below was muffled, as if even the ocean was holding its breath.
For the first time in years, I didn’t feel hatred pressing against my ribs.
Only the hollow ache of something that might one day heal.
* * *
The nights blurred together, and the days followed—first a handful, then a dozen, then too many to count. Weeks ripened into months, and the sea never stopped its whispering. Salt clung to the shutters. The wind carried the same voice of the shadows, urging us to continue.
Each dawn we rose to study the heavens from the terrace, charting the slow drift of the constellations with a reed stylus pressed into wet clay. We watched the moon creep closer to the sun each night, the stars twisting themselves into new shapes, the first signs of the eclipse hidden in their shifting dance. The tome’s words haunted every line we drew—Nine moons, perhaps less.
Each jar we filled drew us closer, even as it hollowed us out. We walked the ruins of Ugarit under torchlight, the smell of cedar pitch and bronze from the old foundries seeping from the earth. We found a grieving mother laying her child in linen near the temple, two lovers parting before the conscription bell, an old scribe carving his son’s name into limestone softened by salt. We captured them all—not through mercy, but through memory. The air shimmered and folded each time, the emotion flowing through us and into the waiting jars until the shadows purred with contentment.
More months had passed. Inside the house, twelve jars were filled—white jars for hope, violet for despair, green for envy, silver for longing, each breathing a different hue, each humming with the stories of those we’d taken. The walls glowed with their light until it seemed the sea itself was climbing the cliffs to join us, reflecting every color in its dark waves.
Through them, we began to remember who we had been—boys racing through fig orchards, sneaking into the temples, stealing dates and copper coins, reliving the war we fought alongside each other. Sometimes we spoke of Amara, sometimes we didn’t, but her name hung in the air between us like the scent of cedar after rain.
“Do you remember the alley by the leather-tanners?” he asked. “When those boys tried to drown me in the trough?”
I almost smiled. “You bit one of them.”
“He deserved it.”
