Just long enough.
That’s the thing about moments. They’re only that bright because they go out.
Daron knew.
He must have.
Why else did he laugh the loudest with rot climbing his fingers? Why else did he crack jokes at corpses, and grin at funerals, and hoard every ridiculous, stupid, beautiful second like it was coin? Because he felt the hourglass in his chest. Because he knew the sand was running, and so he spent every grain like it was gold.
Vale’s breath is slow against my hair, tingling so nicely at my scalp. He’s terrified of the very loss he brings. Of standing at whatever small, unremarkable grave I will get, his whole heart intact, grieving my death for a hundred years, two hundred…an endless compounding of centuries.
I understand that in my marrow now. But outside these walls, children are eating pebbles. Mothers are laying their weighted little bodies to rest.
The rot doesn’t pause because Death is afraid. It doesn’t hold its breath while we lie here in the dark, warm and whole for one stolen night.
I have to die.
And he will have to let me.
I pull his arm tighter around me. Tuck my chin down. Not tonight. Tonight, I let him have this. Let us both have it, this one ordinary night where we both fall asleep. Together.
Chapter
Twenty
Death
The boy is smaller than I remember.
He lies in his cot near the window, tucked beneath a wool blanket that has been patched so many times it likely holds no warmth. His breath comes in shallow, wet intervals, each one thick as tar pooling in my chest.
Heavy. Suffocating.
Still, I sit beside him, waiting on his soul, as if there aren’t hundreds of other souls waiting for me. Why?
Throughout my existence, my connections with mortals have been few. This orphaned boy was never one of them. He’s not someone I spoke to. Not someone I watched. He certainly isn’t my son.
But he could be. Maybe.
If Death can create life? If Elara falls pregnant with our child? Then I could sit beside my son’s bed in a few years, watching him succumb to a curse born of my rage, my pain, my grief.
My heartstrings shiver. Exhaling a breath that does nothing to calm them, I gaze across the dark orphanage. Other children sleep in their cots along the far wall, the drafty room thick with the stench of filth. The matron dozes in a chair by the hearth, chin on her chest, cradling an abandoned infant.
“Now is all we’re ever given.”
The girl’s voice returns to me uninvited. That red-haired, gap-toothed child who had looked up at me with no fear and delivered a philosophy so far beyond this god’s grasp. What isnowbut the thinnest sliver of time between what was and what will be? A single speck mid-fall, too brief to hold?
The boy’s hand shifts out from under the blanket. The more his small fingers curl loosely around empty air, the more his aura dims—a retreat of life, one sand grain at a time.
Twenty-three.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-one.
“Mama?” The boy’s eyelids flutter open, but his gaze slides through me and settles on the window, where frost has etched across the glass.
Fourteen.
