His hand shifts at my back. Lifts me.
I rise with him, my body drawn upward, held above the dark surface for a breath that feels suspended outside of time. Water slips from my skin in thin, glistening trails. My arms tighten around him, my head falling back for a moment, the sky wide above me, the moon bright and unblinking.
His gaze finds mine, without question. Only knowing.
Then I come back to him, to the place where he holds me.
Where I belong.
His mouth meets mine. The kiss unfolds slowly, as though it has been waiting far longer than either of us has drawn breath. I feel it move through me, through the places that have been broken and remade.
The water shifts around us. He draws me closer, and the world narrows again.
The lake holds us as we move within it, the surface breaking, reforming, carrying the shape of us in ripples that spread outward and vanish into the dark. The cold wraps around my body, yet the heat remains, rising, answering, something that does not belong to the water or the night, but to us alone.
I hold him tighter.
My breath unravels against his throat, my body yielding and answering all at once. The rhythm finds us, slow at first, then deeper, drawn from something that belongs only to us.
The lake takes what we give and keeps it, blind and silent.
My head falls back, the sky opening above me, the moon blurring as my breath breaks into something I cannot quiet. His name forms without sound, carried in the movement, in the way I cling to him, in the way I do not want the moment to end.
He holds me through it. Steady. Unyielding. As though nothing in this world could take me from him now.
And there, beneath the moon, within the blind waters, we bind ourselves to one another.
***
His fingers close around mine, cool and certain, as we begin our walk through the trees.
The path unfolds beneath us, soft with moss, lined with roots I know by heart. The air is thick with earth and leaf and something deeper still, something that hums low beneath everything.
The trees thin. The dark loosens its hold, and the outline of the village emerges beyond it—roofs hunched beneath the paling sky, smoke rising in thin, uncertain lines.
We stop at the edge, not because he halts me. Something in me does.
His hand tightens slightly around mine, and I feel his gaze without turning.
We stand there, just beyond where the trees end, where the ground begins to change—less soft, less alive, pressed flat by feet that move always in the same paths.
The village sleeps.
My eyes move over it, slowly. The doorways, the narrow paths, the low roofs crouched close together—the shape of something small and contained, something that once felt vast enough to hold my whole life.
His thumb brushes lightly over the back of my hand. I hold it for a moment longer, then I let my fingers slip from his. The ground shifts beneath my feet as I step forward. The air changes—it does not welcome me, it does not resist me either. It simply… does not know me.
Behind me, the trees stand. Before me, the village opens.
I cross without looking back.
Smoke lingers low above the roofs, caught between beams and sky, as though the day never fully left. The paths I have walked since childhood stretch before me, pale under the moon, worn by feet that believed they knew where they were going.
I pass them.
The well stands where it always has, its rope coiled, its bucket resting against the stone. The church looms in the background, its shape heavy against the sky.
Nothing moves. Nothing calls.
