I turned the page, bracing for the void of the years she’d missed.
Instead, a new script met me—ragged and pressed so deep into the grain it had nearly torn the paper. The elegant loops of my mother’s hand had vanished, replaced by a desperate, shaking scrawl that suggested a man fighting against a terrible weight. I recognised the slant of every letter from a lifetime of birthday cards and grocery lists.
Dad.
He hadn’t started a fresh journal. He simply continued in the space she’d left behind, a quiet refusal to let her story end at the final page.
The first entry in his hand dated to five days after her last.
It is done.
The thread is cut. I am still breathing, and I do not know why.
The silence in this house feels like an amputation rather than peace.
Liora is gone. And she left me behind.
I know why she did it. I know the logic. Selene was burning alive from the inside out. The Awakening was too violent, too fast. There was no way to stop it, only to bury it—to dig a well so deep inside that child that the world would never see the light at the bottom.
Liora became the vessel. She drew that wild, screaming star into her own body to temper it.
She kept it from me, knowing I would have stopped her. I would have fought her. I would have grabbed that fire with my bare hands and pulled it into my own veins so we could burn together. I would have chosen death with her over life without her.
She knew that. So she didn’t give me the choice.
I felt it happen. One moment, she was there—the hum of her soul against mine, the constant presence I have known for a thousand years.
And then… snap.
A physical tearing in the centre of my chest replaced the sound. Like a rib being torn free.
She looked at me. Her eyes were already fading, but she was smiling. She surrendered the last spark of her life to break the bond. She severed the connection so the death of her soul wouldn’t drag mine into the dark with her.
She forced me to live.
Now I am holding Selene. She is sleeping. She is cool to the touch, the fever gone, the mark on her shoulder cooling to a scar.
She is safe. Liora bought this child’s life with everything she had.
I look at Selene, and I see the cost. I see the hole in the world where my wife used to be.
But I also see the Spark.
I will not let it be for nothing. I will stand in front of this child until the mountains crumble. I will lie to her. I will hide her. I will be the wall between her and the dark.
I am half a soul now. But for her… I will be a whole father.
I lowered the book to my lap.
The room blurred. A tear hit the back of my hand, hot and stinging.
He wanted to die. He wanted to go with her. But he stayed. He stayed for twenty-three years, cooking toast and checking the locks, asking about my day while carrying a wound that never healed.
I turned the pages, faster now.
The rest of the journal was a timeline of my life, written by a man terrified every single day that he would fail.
She asked about the scar today. I told her it was the barbecue. She believed me. I hate lying to her.
