"Since my shadows awakened, they've been showing me things I'd forgotten. Moments. Sounds. Like they recorded pieces of my life without me knowing." He looked uncertain in a way that made him seem very young. "I think — through the bond — I might be able to push one into you. I've never tried. But I have something you've lost, Ada. Something from before my shadows even existed."
"What do you mean?"
"I saw you once with your father in the Palace of Light and I was only a child then." A flush crept up his neck. "Just a boy. No shadow magic — my mother's suppression spell was still holding. But I was hiding behind a pillar in the throne room after everyone left, and I saw something I never forgot. When my shadows awakened and the suppression melted away, they claimed this memory, wrote it into themselves like it had always been theirs." His eyes found mine, raw and embarrassed anddesperately hopeful. "I think it's because it was the first time I ever understood what love was supposed to look like."
"Show me," I whispered.
"Open the bond between us with the light. All the way. No walls."
I closed my eyes and did. I felt the moment he received it — the unfiltered grief crashing into him, his sharp intake of breath, his fingers tightening around me. He made a low, wrecked sound. Then his hands cradled my face, foreheads touching, shadows pressing warm against my temples — warm, when every lesson I'd ever learned said shadow magic was cold — and he pushed.
It wasn't smooth. It stuttered, flickered, like a man fumbling with a lock he'd never tried before. Then it caught.
The throne room. Seen from below, from behind a golden pillar. Empty, the light dimmed to warm amber. And there, on the throne, was my father.
Not the dying god. The other one — the one who existed only in moments like this, when the divinity was just warmth in his blood and he was nothing more than a father holding his daughter.
I was a child. Small enough to fit entirely in his lap, head on his chest, feet bare and dirty. And he was singing.
The lullaby.
Every note. Every word. Not reconstructed or approximated but exact — preserved first in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy who had never been sung to, and later claimed by shadows that recognized its importance before he did.
I felt the vibration of my father's chest beneath my cheek. The weight of his hand on my back, patting softly in time with the melody. The smell of him — warm and golden and safe. How does a person smell like sunlight? But he did.
And underneath all of it — the boy behind the pillar. No magic, no power, just a child with his hands pressed to cold marble and his throat closing around something enormous and nameless. A hunger that had nothing to do with food. The shape of everything he'd been missing his entire life, suddenly visible because someone else had it.
*I want that. I want to love someone like that.*
The sound that came out of me wasn't crying. It was something more primitive — a keening, the sound of a wound being touched for the first time. Because I could hear him. My father's voice, strong and whole, singing the lullaby I'd been losing note by note since he died.
"Don't stop," I begged, tears blinding me. "Please — I can still hear him —"
"Take it." His voice was strained with effort. "It's yours."
More memories came then, unbidden — not pushed, just spilling through the wide-open bond. My father's garden. A boy's eyes from a garden wall, watching a small girl with tangled hair run through flower beds, laughing. The wonderment of it. The first realisation that she was the most alive thing he'd ever seen.
Then another. My father healing a sick child in the lower quarters. No audience. No ceremony. Just his hand glowing gold on a small forehead, and a boy in the doorway learning that gods could be kind.
And then the last one, arriving like the turn of a key.
Not my father. Me.
Still new enough to the Academy that my calluses were fresh, arguing with Sarp in a corridor, hair wild from training, ink on my fingers. And Hakan just around the corner, close enough to hear my voice.
What he felt in that moment hit me like a fist to the chest.
*I'm going to love her for the rest of my life.*
Not a hope. A certainty. Immovable as the earth.
I was still shaking when the memories faded. We sat tangled together in the dark, foreheads still touching, neither of us willing to move first. Outside, the palace flickered with its grieving light. Neither of us spoke, because there was nothing that needed saying.
Then — and I didn't understand it, couldn't explain it, will never fully be able to explain it — the twilight thinned.
I felt my father.
Not a memory. A presence — warm and vast — pressing gently against the boundary between life and whatever came after. A hand on my cheek. A whisper I felt more than heard.
