Lazarus and Amara.
What once felt like ours became something theirs. Something unspoken but understood. A glance held longer than it should. A brush of fingers. A quiet look that didn’t need to be explained.
She became more than a friend to him.
And part of me—quiet, buried, and aching—had always wondered what it might have been like if she’d picked me instead. If she’d looked at me the way she looked at him.
But I pushed the thought away.
It didn’t belong here. Not when her hands were moving with such care, not when she was gathering what she needed to mend what another had broken.
Amara came to my side and pressed the cloth to my cheek. I winced but didn’t pull away. Her touch was gentle, but not uncertain—firm, practiced, like someone who had done this many times and hated that she had to. Her cool hands pressed against the inflamed skin; the heat rolling off my swelling eased beneath her touch. The iron on my tongue thinned under the rising drift of herbs.
She didn’t treat me like I was fragile. She treated me like I mattered.
“You’ll stay here for the night,” she said firmly, glancing at Lazarus. “He needs rest, not pride.” Her voice held no softness where steel mattered; it was the kind of insistence that made argument useless.
“I wasn’t going to send him back,” Lazarus said, already pouring water into a clay cup for me.
Their harmony was something I had always envied—not because it was loud or perfect, but because it was real. No performances. No bloodlines. No legacy to prove. Just two people who had chosen each other—and kept choosing each other daily.
Lazarus leaned against the table beside me, arms crossed, sun-dark forearms flexing with the small calluses of work. “What happened?” he asked, but his eyes were already reading me like an open tally.
“The Baelric deal fell through,” I said bitterly. “They wanted too much—control over our ports, trade routes, and council. I said no. My father said I failed. He made sure I remembered that with his fists.”
“I’m sorry, brother,” Lazarus said, voice low, the word carrying the dense pity of someone who had seen cruelty too often.
Amara pressed the cloth to my split lip, and I winced. Her fingers smelled of flour and oil and something green—mint or hyssop—and the sting of it steadied me.
“It’s not the pain that hurts the most,” I whispered. “It’s knowing he’ll never see me the way he sees Julian. He’s still out there—fighting wars for our house, killing for our honor. And I’m here, the second son, with nothing to show but bruises.”
“You’re not nothing,” Lazarus said, voice flat with conviction. “You never were. You live in a house that refuses to see your worth.”
I exhaled, the sound reverberating in the warm room. “We should leave—both of us. Start over somewhere that doesn’t know the name Lorian. You and Amara deserve better than this village. I deserve better than him.”
Lazarus hesitated, his eyes darkening as if turning over the map of obligations and ties inside his head.
“I can’t,” he said softly. “My mother’s too old to move again. And Amara…”
He paused, the weight of what he wouldn’t say settling between us.
“She’s only ever known Ugarit. You know her parents died here when we were just children. This is her home—the people, the hills, the air. I couldn’t take her away from it. Wouldn’t.”
His words landed like stones. I could see the grain of truth in them—duty, roots, the stubborn gravity of small, honest lives. They loved each other the way a river loved its banks—shaping and being shaped, not the loud claim of banners but the slow, daily keeping of one another.
They were together. Plain as a hand pressed to a wound. The knowledge sat in my chest like a coal—warm, bright, impossible to unlearn.
I swallowed, throat tight with something heavier than shame. “Then what am I supposed to do?” I whispered. “How do I become more than what he made me?”
Lazarus set a rough palm on my shoulder. “Stay here,” he said. “Just for a while. Rest. Breathe.”
I looked around the small house—hearth still crackling, bowls stacked crooked on the shelf, reed mats worn thin by years of bare feet. This place was made by endurance, not inheritance.
For a moment, I let myself believe maybe this was what peace felt like—brief and fragile, but real. Even if I knew it wouldn’t last.
Amara worked in silence, gently cleaning blood from my face. Her hands moved fast and carefully, the rhythm of repetition. The cloth stung at the split of my lip; yet I did not flinch. Pain was familiar. It was everything else I didn’t know how to carry.
“I know what you’re thinking, Amara,” I muttered, staring fixedly at the fire’s small throat.
