This is not some distant war in a foreign sky.
This is her world now, too.
Her people, waking in the middle of the night sweat-soaked and sobbing.
Her artists, staring at blank canvases.
Her engineers, losing the spark that made them build anything at all.
It clicks into place behind her dark, luminous eyes.
“This isn’t just Nightfall’s problem,” she whispers.
“No,” I say quietly. “It never was.”
She turns to me then, really looks at me, and the weight in that gaze is enough to shake mountains.
She sees me.
And for one wild, destabilizing heartbeat, I understand Aurel, our fallen Prime.
I understand what drove him to take more and more upon himself, to bear the burden alone, to burn until there was nothing left.
Because when the thing you love is everything, how do you not try to set yourself between it and the void?
Aurel fell doing that.
I remember the way his body collapsed, light torn from it by Idris’ treachery.
The way the earth screamed under my feet as the Prime’s crown tumbled from his head.
I swore I would never let anyone close enough to make me feel that powerless again.
I was a fool.
I thought I would be the lone one of us who would actually trick the Fates into granting a zareth where I could remove my heart from the equation.
But it is already hers.
The power behind the Lord of Earth is already hers.
It sits in the way the land quiets when she walks.
The way the people straighten when she smiles at them.
The way my stone-locked heart keeps cracking open every time she laughs or frowns or mutters under her breath at a data point that doesn’t make sense.
I am halfway in love with her—yes, still trying to pretend I am only half.
It is like trying to argue with a landslide.
Pointless.
“What is it?” she asks, stopping only because I’ve stared too long.
“I believe,” I murmur before I can stop myself, “I must be in love with you, my viyella.”
Her head snaps toward me.
