Then…a cry.
Not Elara’s.
Smaller. Sharper. A thin, furious wail that pierces the heavy air of the chamber and drives straight through my sternum like a lance of light.
“A girl!” The midwife lifts a slick, writhing, impossibly small creature into the light. “Healthy and whole, Your Majesty. A girl.”
Elara collapses against the pillows, her chest heaving, tears streaming freely down her flushed cheeks. She’s laughing. No,crying. No, laughing and crying all at once, her hand finally releasing mine to cover her mouth. All while the maids burst into motion.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
Because the midwife rises with a bundle in her arms, so small it barely fills the crook of her elbow. She’s holding it out to me as though this is ordinary, as though handing Death a new soul is something that happens every day.
“Your daughter, My Lord.”
My arms lift on instinct, not thought. Pure instinct, ancient and bypassed by every rational function I possess. The midwife settles the bundle against my chest, and the weight of it—the devastating, negligible, impossible weight of it—stops my heart.
All three strings go still.
She’s so small. A red, scrunched face no bigger than my palm, eyes squeezed shut against a world she’s only just arrived in. Her mouth works in tiny, furious movements, lips pursing and unpursing as if she has inherited her mother’s opinions but can’t speak them yet.
But it’s her aura that undoes me.
I’ve seen thousands of auras. Millions. The dim, flickering embers of the dying. The steady glow of the healthy. The slow fade of the old. I know their vibrancy the way Elara knows the weight of soil.
This child blazes.
A light so bright and dense and ferociously alive that looking at it is like staring into a sun that hasn’t learned how to set. Her entire body radiates with it, waves of luminance that pulse in time with a heartbeat so rapid it sounds like the wings of a hummingbird.
Fear arrives. Right on schedule, settling its familiar claws around my ribs with a grip I know too well. Because that blazingaura is finite. An hourglass. A number of grains I could count if I wanted to, each one a tick toward a silence I will one day have to witness.
My jaw locks. My arms tighten around the bundle.
Then she opens her eyes.
Dark. Unfocused. Blinking against the light with the confused, squinting displeasure of someone who was perfectly comfortable where they were, thank you very much.
She looks at me.
Not through me. Not past me. At me, with a directness that has no business belonging to a creature who is less than a minute old. Her tiny hand escapes the swaddling, fingers splaying wide before they curl around the edge of my collar and grip.
The fear cracks.
It crumbles because I cannot fathom an existence where this moment doesn’t happen. A million years of solitude, of collecting souls in silence, of walking between worlds with nothing but shadows for company, and none of it, not a single second, was worth as much as the weight of this child in my arms.
I carry her to Elara.
My wife reaches for her with trembling, exhausted arms, and I lower our daughter into them with a care that borders on absurd for someone who has handled the dead for eternity. Elara cradles her against her chest, and the baby quiets instantly, her scrunched face smoothing into something closer to calm as she finds the warmth she was looking for.
“Oh…” Elara breathes, fresh tears tracking down her cheeks. “Oh, you’re so angry.”
“She has your temperament,” I manage, though my voice comes out wrecked.
Elara looks up at me, her face blotchy and radiant and beautiful in a way that makes my chest feel like it’s caving in. “Are you crying?”
I lift my hand to my face. My fingers come away wet. Not the liquid silver that has traced bone once before, but something simpler, warmer—human tears, from human eyes. Because whatever this feeling is, it’s too mortal for a god to comprehend.
