Chapter 26
I am only half a being without my Cassandra.
—Qin’s Farewell (Before the Fall of the Mantle)
“Beloved.”
A deeper breath next to her, his hand tightening on hers where they held on to each other through eternity. “Do we wake, my heart?”
Their wakings were mere stirrings to the surface of consciousness.
Enough to be together, to be one, but not enough to rise to the world, for in that rising would come her madness and his desolation.
“One of our wounded fledglings flies free again. It has been a droplet in time yet, but her wings appear strong.”
“Ah.” His eyes looking into hers, the astonishing aurora-striated black awash with light. “What will she become, I wonder?”
“I do not know. I do not see.” The slipstreams of time didn’t always show themselves to her when she rested in this state, a small benediction, a quiet peace.
“She will be who she will be,” her Qin said with the absolute balance that was his nature.
He was so very beautiful in every way.
“I know a secret, my Qin.”
Laughter now, gentle and full of a love that made her whole. “Will you tell me, my curious Cassie?”
It had been such a long time since he’d called her his curious Cassie. Eons since they’d first met, since they’d become each other’s everything. In their eternal torment, they’d forgotten such small pieces of love.
Smiling, she turned toward him in her Sleep in this place that burned with her protective fire, and put her mouth to his ear, her hand cupped as if to hide her words from the world. “The child of mortals will soon be a mother herself.”
Qin’s smile creased his cheeks, for he well knew her partiality for this angel who had once been a mortal. “Should we send them a gift, my love? An owlet perhaps. Young Raphael so loves your owls.”
They both laughed even as their eyes closed, their bodies curled into each other. And so, they held on to one another through the slipstreams of eternity.