But with her, it felt different. Simpler. She had found him and woken him. She had given him water and food and words. She had touched his face with gentle fingers and called him impossible and laughed her bright startled laugh. She had let him hold on to her.
“Rhyx no hurt Alina,” he said. It was a promise, maybe the first real promise he’d ever made. “Alina is… safe. With Rhyx.”
She made a small sound that might have been agreement and tucked her head beneath his chin as her eyes drift closed.
“Just for a few minutes,” she murmured. “Then I really do need to figure out what to do.”
“Yes,” he agreed, knowing she would sleep longer than a few minutes. “Rest.”
Her breathing slowed. Within moments, she was asleep in his arms, her warmth pressed against his chest, her heartbeat a steady rhythm against his scales.
This is right,he thought. She fit against him perfectly, like she’d been made to rest in his arms. Like he’d been made to hold her.
He shifted carefully, arranging them both more comfortably against the cavern wall. The vines above pulsed a soft purple light, casting gentle shadows across her sleeping face. In repose, she looked younger. More vulnerable. His protective instincts surged, fierce and primal, and he found himself curling around her like a shield.
Mine,something whispered in the depths of his mind.Protect. Keep. Guard.
He didn’t know where the instinct came from, but he trusted it. He trusted the rightness that sang through his bones every time she touched him.
His own exhaustion was creeping up on him now. The aftermath of waking, and of processing so many new sensations and emotions. His eyelids grew heavy as his muscles relaxed.
Just for a moment,he told himself.Rest. Then wake. Watch over her.
He closed his eyes.
The dream came like a tide.
He was flying, wings spread wide against a sky that was the wrong color—too pink and too thin, nothing like the blue he somehow expected. But it was beautiful nonetheless. Beautiful and terrible and achingly familiar.
Below him, Mars spread out in all directions. But not the Mars Alina had described, the dead and frozen world where humans built their colonies and studied their rocks. This was his Mars.
Red forests stretched across the lowlands, their leaves rustling in winds that carried moisture and warmth. Rivers carved silver channels through the landscape, feeding into vast oceans that reflected the pink-orange sky. Cities rose from the cliffsides—not human cities, but structures of clay and stone that seemed to grow from the rock itself.
And everywhere, there was life.
Creatures that flew like him, their scales glinting in the sunlight. Others that walked on four legs or crawled on many. Beings that swam through the seas and burrowed beneath the soil. A whole ecosystem, complex and thriving.
He remembered this. He had lived this life, flown these skies, been part of this world.
But even as he flew, he could see the dying.
The sun was smaller now than it had been. The warmth that should have blessed the surface was fading, year by year, century by century. The poles were creeping southward, ice spreading across lands that had once been green. The atmosphere wasthinning, bleeding away into a void that cared nothing for the life it was slowly strangling.
He watched the rivers freeze. Watched the forests wither. Watched the cities empty as fewer children came and his people sought refuge underground, trying to find some way to survive what was coming.
But there was no survival. He had known that even then, in the deepest part of himself. Mars was dying, and nothing they could do would stop it.
The grief filled his chest, crushing and absolute—the weight of a world’s ending. Everything he had known, everything he had loved, everything he had been… all of it reduced to dust and ice and the fading echoes of what had been.
Gone,something whispered.All gone. Nothing left. Nothing but you. And you slept. You slept while your world died, while your people vanished, while everything you were became nothing but memories in the mind of something that isn’t even truly you.
The dream fractured. Shattered. He was falling now, not flying, plummeting through the thinning atmosphere towards a surface that was red and dead and wrong?—
He woke with a gasp.
For a moment, he didn’t know where he was, still drowning in grief, filling his lungs and eyes and mind with a loss so vast it had no edges. His people. His world. His self. All of it gone, reduced to fragments in the mind of something that wasn’t quite alive and wasn’t quite dead.
Then Alina shifted in his arms, and the grief receded like a wave pulling back from shore.
