Page 69 of Here Be Dragons

“It gave something back.” I leaned into him, feeling the steady beat of his heart against my shoulder. “Not everything. Just…the beginning. The Sight I was born with, before everything else.”

“Can you feel the ley line again?”

“A little. It’s like hearing a radio from another room.” I looked up at him, at his worried, hopeful face, and smiled. “It’s enough, Ben. It’s more than enough.”

He pulled me closer, and we stood together in the fading light, watching the place where the unicorn had vanished. The snow continued to fall, soft and silent, covering our tracks and the unicorn’s non-tracks and everything else with a blanket of white. In an hour or two, there would be no evidence that anyone had been here at all.

But we would know. We would always know.

“We should head back,” Ben said at last. “Your mom’s probably wondering where we are. And I believe there’s a solstice dinner waiting.”

“There is.” I looked at the ring still clutched in his hand — he hadn’t had a chance to put it on my finger before everything happened — and held out my left hand. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

He laughed, a sound of pure joy, and slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit perfectly, the diamonds catching the last light of the setting sun and turning it into fire.

“Better?”

“Perfect.”

We walked out of the clearing together, hand in hand, leaving the standing stones and the sleeping ley line behind us. The path home wound through the snow-covered forest, familiar and strange at the same time, and I found myself noticing things I hadn’t seen on the way in — the subtle distortion of air where dimensional energy had pooled, the distant hum of the portal network that I could now just barely perceive.

It wasn’t the fire I’d lost. It wasn’t a vast cosmic awareness or the ability to channel enough power to challenge a dragon. But it was something, a connection to the world my family had protected for generations, a reminder that the magic was still there, still flowing beneath the surface of ordinary reality.

And it was mine again. A gift I hadn’t known I needed, given at a moment I couldn’t have predicted.

The house came into view through the trees, its windows warm with light, smoke rising from the chimney into the darkening sky. I could see figures moving behind the glass — my mother, my grandmother, my father — and I knew that they were preparing for us, setting the table with the good china, opening the wine, filling the house with the smells of a celebration.

My family. My home. And my future, walking beside me as I wore his ring on my finger and snow caught in his hair.

“Ready?” he asked as we reached the edge of the forest.

I looked at the house, thinking of my family waiting for me there, and then at the man I was going to marry. But rather than think about everything we’d been through to get here — the battles and the losses and the sacrifices — I let my mind and my heart range forward to everything that lay ahead, all the ordinary days and the extraordinary moments and the quiet magic that would weave its way through it all.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”

We stepped out of the forest together and walked toward the light.

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The End

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