“No,” he whispers. “I can do what you need me to do.”
He’s now right in front of me, one arm sweeping around my back. “There isn’t anything I won’t do for you, Asha. You are my family. You are the one I would embrace any darkness for?—”
“And yet you would break me.”
“Never,” he says, his voice a deep growl.
He sounds so certain, and yet his actions are a deep contradiction to his promise.
He presses his forehead to mine and his voice lowers even further still as he asks me a question I wasn’t expecting.
“If you could create any future for us, what would it look like?”
Tears burn behind my eyes, and I let them fall.
“A home,” I say. “Not in the mountains. Not in the snow. Not in the wasteland. It would be here where the grass is green and the trees give shade and the sky is never red.”
My anvil is within reach of my left hand, and as I speak, my palm brushes up against it. My feelings are so strong that I can’t possibly contain them.
I don’twantto contain them.
My power is mine now. To use as my heart and my conscience dictate.
“And our house?” he asks.
The pain of the past floods me, but with it comes moments of connection and change that I will always cherish. There are good memories among the bad, and it’s those good memories that tug my lips into a smile.
“Not a house,” I say. “Atower.”
A rush of energy flows through my hand into the anvil, and with it, all my wishes take shape around me.
Faster than a heartbeat, the black rock spreads beneath our feet, and the grass transforms into stone.
Walls spring up around us. Strong walls that can’t be breached with a ceiling that’s open to the sky. And still, my power flows as the rock we’re standing on rises upward, more walls and more rooms forming beneath it, giving it strength and structure. I can’t see them from where I stand, but I feel them form, as certain of their existence as I am of Erik’s nearness.
Our upward momentum slows and then it stops, all so effortless that we don’t lose balance.
A window forms in the wall opposite us, letting the moonlight in while the rush of the ocean sounds far away.
The view from the window is breathtaking. Stars sparkle in the distance, and the moon sits high in the sky.
Erik hasn’t taken his eyes off me, but his voice is soft as he asks, “A cage in the sky?”
It won’t have escaped him that there may be a window, but there are no doors.
“Does it need to be?” I ask him, a challenging tone entering my voice.
He shakes his head, a slow, resolute movement, but it’s the tears filling his eyes that freeze me.
“I won’t die in this battle,” he says.
My voice is a whisper. “How can you possibly know that?”
“Because it won’t come to pass.”
My forehead creases and my question is quiet. “What?”
His arms tighten around me, strong arms that are suddenly shaking, while his eyes… his deep-gray eyes that once held so many secrets, are leaking tears he doesn’t try to hide.
