I’m crying. Just a few tears, but I’ve been so focused on everything else that I didn’t feel them fall. Gently cinching his fingers around both of my wrists, Rought kisses the rest of those tears away.
“I’ll forge this path with you,” he murmurs. “Happily at your side, whether or not it’s destiny in our footsteps.”
My chest aches, warm but painful where the bond is hooked under my ribcage. “I know now that we’ve loved each other through many lifetimes … but let’s make the most of this one.”
He chuckles. “I’m all in.”
The bond fades in my hands, leaving only a residual coat of energy. I wrap my hand around the back of Rought’s head and tug him down to me in a tender kiss. But before that intimacy becomes something to hide away within, I reach for the final severed soul bond.
Rought steps to the side, giving way to Rath, who’s left his post on the patio. Rath reaches forward, poised to cup my hands the moment after I untangle the bond.
The celestial dragon is bright within the amber flecks in his eyes. I hold his gaze, no more words needed between the two of us, and just allow the bond to dissipate into the aether.
Rath doesn’t look away. He also doesn’t look at the future that was supposed to be ours. Not once. Steady and true. In the now with me.
I don’t cry.
When the energy ebbs, he tangles his fingers through mine and leans in to kiss me gently. “Still together, forever,” he murmurs against my lips. “Not even a goddess wielding the power of the universe could tear us apart.”
His sweet words echo a conclusion that I’ve been slowly formulating for myself. I don’t want that to intrude on this moment, but I also know that the little bits of respite I’ve been gifted are at an end.
“Tempest?” Rath asks quietly.
I huff a sigh, pulling Disa’s black leather journal from my pocket. The journal that she tried to keep the very first year she assumed the power of the Conduit. “I’m going to have to call my father.”
“Your … father?” Rought echoes, with so much confusion and disbelief that he clearly never considered my parentage, as if I’d been born from the aether itself.
Rath takes the journal from me, trying to read it despite the dark starlit sky stretching overhead. Though perhaps his eyesight is good enough to read in this twilight.
I lean back against the cu-sith. And for just another breath, I gather strength from all three of them. Not literally, of course. But simply taking shelter between the people who were meant to be mine, meant to help me navigate this world, this power, this destiny.
I feel that sense of shelter from the cu-sith as well. Even though I have no more than a passing connection with the beast or the man, Reck, who’s retreated so deeply within the cu-sith that I can’t feel his energy. Not without looking for it.
I stand on the bluff where I first died, where my entire destiny was rewritten, and I finally voice the problem I have absolutely no idea how to fix. No idea if it even can be fixed.
Because if it could have been, why would my aunt have left it to me to do so?
“I have to talk to my father,” I repeat, “because something happened when my aunt became the Conduit, when she first found her soul-bound mates … when a crack in the protections that surround the world … in this dimension at least, and as best I can sort out … changed the course of history. And more specifically, my … our … entire destiny.”
“A crack …” Rought mumbles.
Rath just blinks at me, then looks around as if searching for the wound that seethes under our feet.
They can’t feel it. Maybe I can because I died here? Maybe my death widened the crack …
I turn my head to acknowledge the cu-sith. The cu-sith who has been guarding me — and once we returned to the estate, guarding the bluff.
“You feel it, don’t you?” I whisper to him. “The wound, and … that he’s coming.”
Rath’s gaze snaps to me. “He’s coming?”
I sigh, way too heavily. Forcing myself away from the warmth of the cu-sith, from the shelter of all three of them, I start for the house. “He might try for one of the other intersection points first, which is another reason I need to talk to my father. The night my mother died, the Cataclysm tried to take the intersection point in Asia. The fief my father holds.”
“Who the fuck is Zaya’s father?” Rought mutters behind me to Rath, bewildered. “I thought … why did I assume he was dead?”
“Because I was the Conduit-to-be,” I say, trying to be matter-of-fact about it, even though this is an old, old wound. “I belong to the universe.”
“That’s some of Disa’s bullshit.” Rath matches my pace, pressing the palm of his hand against my back. Not pushing or pulling me, but just offering me that touch of support.
