"So you just... cry on me?" She sounded dubious.
I looked down at my hands, pale and slender against the dark stone. "I cannot."
"You can't what?"
"I cannot cry," I said, the confession tasting like ash. "I haven't shed a tear in... I do not know. Centuries? Millennia? The fire inside me? It consumes the water. I feel the grief, Aria. I feel it as a weight that could crush a star. But my eyes are dry deserts. I burned my tears away a thousand lifetimes ago."
She looked at me, and the wariness in her expression softened into something resembling pity. "That sounds lonely."
"It is arid," I agreed. "But there is another way. Another exchange of breath and moisture and life."
Her eyes widened slightly. She knew where this was going.
"I would have to kiss you," I said.
It wasn't a demand, nor was it a seduction. It was a statement of magical fact.
"Your breath and mine," I whispered. "The spark. The transfer of heat from one core to another. I give you my fire to burn away the pain, and you give me an anchor. A reason to stay in this form."
Aria stared at me. The amethyst in her eyes seemed to swirl, the gold flecks catching the dying light of the fire. "Is this... is this necessary for the binding? For the door?"
"This is necessary foryou," I said fiercely. "Unless you prefer to be in agony?"
She searched my face, looking for deception, for the manipulation of the seer. I let her look, let her see the raw, hungry emptiness behind my eyes. I let her see the man who had watched the world burn a thousand times and just wanted to save one small, fragile thing from the fire.
"Okay," she breathed.
Fire blazed in her eyes, a reflection of my own copper heat. It wasn't submission; it was a challenge. A dare.
I moved closer until my knees brushed hers. I reached out, cupping her face in my hands. Her skin was cool, clammy with shock, but beneath it, I felt the erratic, fluttery pulse of the golden veins.
"This will burn," I warned her, my thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones. "But it will be a good burn."
"I'm not afraid of fire," she whispered. "I'm the one who lit the match, remember?"
I leaned in.
Our lips met, and the world dissolved into white.
It wasn't like Kaelen’s kiss that we had all watched from the other side of the Gate. That had been all dominance and consuming heat. This wasn't earth-shattering or violent. It was precise, a scalpel made of light.
My energy poured into her, not a flood, but a directed stream. I sought the micro-fractures in her bones, the torn fibers of her muscles, the raw, scraped endings of her nerves. I found the places where the cosmos had rubbed her raw, and I cauterized them with gentle, humming warmth.
She gasped against my mouth, her hands flying up to grip my wrists.
Heat.
I felt her relief as the pain evaporated, replaced by a buzzing, golden vitality. I felt her lungs expand fully for the first time in hours without hitching.
But then, the flow reversed.
I had intended to give, only to give. But Aria? She was something nature abhorred. A door that swung both ways.
As I poured healing into her, she pulledmeintoher.
I tasted rain. I tasted the smell of old stone and wildflowers pressed in secret places. I tasted a loneliness that matched my own, a hollow ache that had been carved out by years of silence.
But beneath the loneliness, I tasted the fog.
