It reads like a refusal. Protection.
“When I guided those tiny, pure souls, it occurred to me,” Death says quietly, his jacket melting with the darkness as it spreads and folds, “that love only ever brings loss, grief, and madness.” He looks down at his hand, fingers brightening to bone. There’s no urgency to hide it from me, as if he’s too exhausted to fight the truth tonight. “When Eamon died at the king’s sword, I merely grasped a glimpse of this agony.”
The memory of the ferryman hangs over me like another funeral, quiet at first, then all at once—weight settling intoplaces already torn raw. It isn’t my grief, not truly, yet it moves in, anyway, gentling its shoulder beside Daron’s like it belongs. And perhaps it does.
“And yet it was enough for me to make certain I would never feel such grief again.” Death finally looks at me then, his eyes dark, the whites consumed by the encroaching shadows of his black sockets. “I…I don’t want to love, Elara.”
Nodding, I glance over at Daron’s grave, the sight of the snowy mound making me shiver anew. The grief drives it deeper, a tremble in my bones. Yes, I understand what he means. But given the chance, would I tear that ache of loss out of my chest? If it meant surrendering my love for Daron?
The question summons his voice from the depths of the grave, the echo in my head so clear it almost drowns out the wind. “Daron said that grief is just love hiding in a mourning dress.”
He turns toward me, towering but somehow not looming, just a man seated in the snow beside me. And for the first time, I don’t experience him as half anything. Just Death, and the familiarity of that settles deep in my marrow, letting my spine curl on a long, shuddering release of tension.
With that release, the last of my strength abandons me. I simply stop fighting the pull of gravity and sink sideways, collapsing against the warmth of his arm. And still, a violent tremor wracks my frame, shaking me against him, teeth chattering a hollow rhythm as the snow spirals down in thick, blinding sheets.
Death lifts his gaze to the churning sky. With agonizing slowness, he gazes back down at me to the lifting of his arm. The heavy darkness of his cloak unfurls around me, folding over my shoulders to shut out the wind. His arm curls inward, hooking firmly around my waist. Then he pulls.
He inches me off the frozen ground and onto his lap, crushing me flush against the solid heat of his chest, the sound of his long exhale stuttering from his throat. “Better?”
“Yes.”
I bury my face in the hollow of his shoulder without thinking, tucking my knees up to make myself small within his tightening grasp. The crushing expanse of grief in my chest begins to displace, pushed aside by a languid warmth. A feeling so terrifyingly close to what I felt once before in the tower…
Somehow, my hand reaches up, fingers hooking into the folds of cloth that pool at his chest, the sense of gravity eerily…comforting. “Did you take his soul to a dark pit?”
Death looks down at me, and a dark, ragged brow knits toward his nasal cavity. “What do you mean?”
“Daron.” My brother’s name almost drowns under a sob. “Did you take him to a dark pit like you said you’d do with me?”
He lets out a long sigh, his shoulders slumping. “There are no dark pits, Elara. The place where souls go…it has no boundaries, no structures like this world, but…”
A long pause, followed by a twitch in his exposed jawbone. “No mortal word can describe it. It is simply…rest. A return to the all.” Teeth grinding, he slowly shakes his head. “I…I don’t know why I said that. Anger. Perhaps something else.”
I nod, not even bothering to count the many things I said to him out of anger…or something else. “Mother said you were with him. That you told him not to be afraid.”
“With or without me, he had no fear.” His expression softens into something unreadable. “Because of you.”
“Me? Why would—” A sob catches in my throat. “I wasn’t ever there.”
He tortures the little bit of upper lip he has, bony fingers coming up to comb stiff but gently through my hair. “Daron spoke a lot about you in his final moments,” he murmurs. “Youalways joked with him about death, he said, even when rot climbed his fingers, replacing fear with laughter. And by the time Death came, he embraced me as…his sister’s husband. A relative most welcome.”
A little cry tears out of my throat, barbed and jagged, ripping through days of numbness. Tears well from my eyes, flooding so hot down my frozen cheeks that each pearl seems to scrape into my skin like a prickling shard. I collapse completely, wailing into his chest, a raw, ugly sound of absolute devastation.
Death stiffens beneath me. Then he shifts with palpable unease, as if the sheer volume of my humanity is something he can’t weather.
“I… You should go inside.” His hands shift to my waist, firm and resolute, trying to gently pry me from his warmth and inch me back toward the empty snow. “I shall leave.”
“No!” My fingers clench a fist around his cloak. I yank hard, fighting the shift of gravity, and drag myself deeper into those arms that somehow feel like the only sanctuary—ever-present and reliable. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone again.” I look up at him, his face a blur of smooth skin and bone. “Please stay.”
Death hesitates.
His gaze drags over my tear-streaked face, a thousand different emotions he claims not to feel flitting across his features. He looks at the grip I have on his cloak, then back to my eyes. His hand slides from the tangle of my hair to cup my jaw, his thumb brushing away a fresh tear.
He nods. A single, solemn dip of his chin.
A motion that brings our faces so close. Close enough, even the wind slows in the narrow space between us. And in that heavy stillness, something shifts. It’s a bright expansion. A warm turn. A visceral intertwining.
I don’t know who moves first. Perhaps we both lean, letting the gap vanish. My mouth meets lips and bones in a trembling,desperate urge for contact, a taste of longing and loss, sweet and painful.
