But Corin remembered the careful balance of the arrow whenever Amelia wielded her bow. She recalled the slow, deliberate breaths Amelia took before releasing the pointed weapon. There was purpose in those long seconds, the decision to tilt her aim elsewhere. Too often people mistook violence for strength and bloodshed for proof of it.
The wood dissolved with each step Amelia took until the only things left in this world were the three of them. Her first and only words came as a single breath, one that she had held for centuries.
“The treasure is Gyldan.”
A tense silence passed between them to register her words. Corin didn’t move, even as snow melted around her. She watched Amelia’s arrow descend through water and into the white void, the dart nothing more than a tiny, dissolving speck.
“You’re lying,” Ezran hissed.
“Lilith loved Gyldan more than anything. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing truly is,” Amelia continued. “She wanted to make it better, because she wasn’t afraid of the future on the other side. Not like we were.”
Ezran snarled. “Don’t lump me in with you. She wanted to be with me. She wanted—”
“She wanted so much more, and you didn’t see that.”
He shook his head with gritted teeth, but the goose bumps on his skin betrayed him, prickling with admission that he refused to voice. Hundreds of years had passed, consumed in revenge and hatred, while kingdoms crumbled around him. Centuries of violent invasions and dying children, bitter poverty and fervid disease. An immeasurable amount of suffering that could have been alleviated by an immortal prince and his loyal faeries, if only they had looked at the world around them and done something.
Corin should have felt vindication, yet grief weighed upon her and spread its mass across the others. As Ezran’s face crumpled in agony, so did the dreamscape. Skies crumbled in bits of starlight and dust. The ground broke apart until they stood on nothing else other than a patch of snow. Amelia lifted her chin to the sky, where snowflakes shattered to pieces, their crystals disintegrating into the void. Her eyes turned wet, reflecting oceans long gone in this world.
“But I am worse,” she confessed, “because I knew what she treasured most and ran anyway.”
A tear slipped from her cheek and plummeted past the snow into nothingness. She swallowed hard, then took a closer step to Ezran, who instinctively wrapped a hand around his sword.
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through. I’m sorry I can’t bring her back,” she said. “No matter how many centuries pass, I miss her every day. Only you know what that feels like.”
She reached out a hand to him. There was no bow and arrows, no weapon to defend herself with. Only blind trust.
“I don’t know if it’s too late to change. Perhaps that’s another foolish dream. But maybe the thought of it wouldn’t be so terrifying if we helped one another. Maybe it would hurt a little less if we tried.”
Corin fixated on the empty palm and bare skin of Amelia’s outstretched hand. Guilt twisted her bleeding insides. How quickly Corin had suppressed Amelia’s quiet desires when the girl had voiced them in the boat. The love Amelia sought had waited beyond her buried pain, patient through years of silence.
Amelia’s trembling fingers told Corin she was afraid. Somehow, Corin knew this did not make her a coward.
She couldn’t read Ezran’s expression as he closed his lips in resolution, a decision solidifying behind his silver eyes. He reached out for Amelia, and for a moment, Corin thought this would be a peaceful union. But she was behind him and saw the hand that wrapped his sword. She had spotted the grip of his fingers, the whitening of his knuckles, the answer in his eyes.
As he pulled the hilt, she leapt forward. He swung, and there came the slice of flesh, a cut too deep to take back.
Pain bloomed Corin’s stomach, searing and heavy. It spread through her body, from her slow-beating heart to the tips of her fingers. The pain became more agonizing as she wrapped her hands around the sword, let the blade’s teeth cut into her palms, and shoved with all the strength she could muster.
Her full weight pushed him backward, but Ezran never landed in the snow.
The ground crumbled beneath his feet, and he stumbled into the void with a silent scream. In his descent, the emptiness became a part of him. His blond hair turned so white it disintegrated intostrands of light. His steel armor dissolved into atoms, exposing his skin and bones before they disappeared as well.
He was nothing. And then, he was gone.
Corin felt the weight of her bleeding body fall forward until Amelia pulled her back. They fell onto the last patch of snow floating in the void. White flakes disintegrated around them as Amelia pressed her hands against Corin’s stomach, trying to keep her whole. The ice caps were melting, the sky was fracturing, and Corin, too, was dissolving before Amelia’s arms.
Corin untangled the necklace from her vest and showed the amulet locked safely inside the pendant. She placed the glowing orb inside Amelia’s palm, sensing her own blood reacting to the mixture that swirled inside, as if it knew the next price to pay.
“Malicine left this,” she gasped, “for you to open a new portal.”
Amelia stared at the magic brimming inside the amulet. They both understood the unlimited possibilities of what she could do. It was so easy, Corin thought, to continue this for eternity. People in Gyldan would be abandoned for dead, but Corin had fought so hard and for so long to survive too, hadn’t she? Surely, she deserved to be selfish once more. She could claim this paradise for herself, a bargain better than anything Woodbine or soldiers or kingdoms could offer her.
Not a roof over her head, but endless blue skies. A stomach that was always full. A love that was guaranteed. A world where she was not a failure.
But Corin could no longer be the same person she was when she had entered Amelia’s dreams. Even if it was only imagination, she had to believe she was capable of changing too.
And so, she tightened her grip on Amelia’s hand and said, “I don’t want to run away anymore.”
