Pain was gone.
There was only light.
Cool and dim, like moonlight through frost-glazed glass. Silence held her in gentle arms, vast and clean. Not emptiness. Not absence.
But peace.
She hovered just above herself. Above the blood. Above the ruined hall and its stunned congregation. She could see her limbs splayed, red pooling beneath her, her eyes closed now, soft, not vacant. A final exhale still clung to her lips.
She did not feel it leave.
It felt instead like being carried. Like the first time she was small and half-asleep, and Grim had lifted her from the hearth and taken her to bed. That quiet shift. That wordless trust.
She drifted.
And the world around her blurred into mist and memory.
A maternal sound rustled. Faint. Familiar.
Wind through tall grass.
When the haze cleared, she stood, barefoot, at the edge of a field.
Golden meadows stretched out in all directions, bending under a breeze that did not touch her skin. Wildflowers bloomed in soft colors, violet and white and warm blood-red. The sky arched wide above, pale and radiant, without sun or stars. And ahead of her rose the veil itself, shimmering and vast, a living curtain of light and shadow stitched with flecks of starlight.
She lifted her arms without thinking. The wind moved with her. Beneath her, the field rolled like waves. The air curled around her ribs the way it once had when she was small and free and brave.
The same girl.
She looked toward the veil.
And there, a figure waited.
The mantle draped loose around his shoulders, the cloth at his wrists lifting in the soft wind. His hands were bare now, no blade, no weight, no duty. Only the faint shimmer of a linen band still circled one finger.
He looked up as she approached and her breath caught. The shape of his smile undid her.
“I waited for you,” he called, voice like the sweetest shade.
She ran to him.
Not stumbling. Not staggering. The grass parted for her, and the sky bloomed open.
He opened his arms and she crashed into them, into him, with the force of everything she had carried. She buried her face in his chest. His arms came around her at once, light and certain, trembling with the relief of a belonging long-lost made real again.
He smelled the same. Felt the same.
Callused hands, warm and sure, curled into her spine.
“Ilys,” he breathed into her hair. “Wife.”
She pulled back just far enough to see him. Her hands rose to cradle his face, prayerful and reverent, tracing the shape of him like memory made flesh. Her thumbs brushed beneath his eyes. She touched his mouth with two fingers, re-learning.
She leaned in and pressed her lips to his forehead, his cheek, the tip of his nose, his mouth. The kisses were not shy, not desperate. They were homecoming.
She rested her brow against his, their foreheads bowed together, as though in prayer.
“Ilys.” He whispered against her mouth. “Ilys.”
