Chapter Twenty-Five
Theron brought the young reindeer to visit me today.
I sat in the winter sun and stroked their soft fur, and my heart ached as it had not in so many years.
How the goddess would have laughed to see her fearsome storm god with a dozen baby reindeer on wobbly legs following him like the sea hawks chasing after their mother.
I laughed for her, and for the first time since we lost her, I thought he almost smiled.
The lost journal of High Priestess Tona
Einar stood in the heart of the goddess’s temple, the past and the present twining together in a whirlpool that threatened to pull him under forever.
The newly restored tiles beneath his boots were a riot of familiar color—deep sapphires and sky blues and aqua and teal, swirling across the floor around a bronze spiral that circled inward to end directly beneath his boots.
He stared at it until his eyes burned, afraid to close them. Every time he did, his chaotic mind painted newly remembered horrors across the backs of his eyelids, bringing with them pain so sharp it felt like a wound freshly taken.
This was where she’d stood on her last day.
He could see it as if it had just happened, as if the trauma of it had etched so deep in his bones that even after they’d been ground to dust and returned to the sea, somehow that pain had been waiting for him.
Over two thousand years in this new body, and he could feel the storm god’s broken heart beating sluggishly in his chest.
He remembered every moment of it, now. The way Theron had begged her to stop.
How close he had come to crossing an unforgivable line and forcing her to stop.
The two of them could have let the waters wash over them, and survived.
Even if the island itself had been swept away, they would have endured. Together.
Einar could remember being the man for whom that was all that had mattered. The storm god had not cared about the people of this island, not truly. Protecting them made Naia happy, so he had helped her to protect them—until the moment doing so endangered her.
And people said the Kraken had no heart. If they only knew.
For over two millennia, Einar had encased himself in ice, letting those songs become the truth he believed about himself.
But if he’d truly had no heart, he would not have needed the protection of frigid walls.
The storm god certainly had not. There had been no conflict in Theron that day, when he’d been ready to let every soul on this island drown if it meant Naia would live.
She was the only person who had ever mattered to him.
No, it was even worse. Naia had been the only other person in Theron’s world.
The mortals of Rahvekya had existed in the abstract, real to him only as much as their lives impacted hers.
He had rarely considered their dreams, their hopes, their loves.
Until he had been left behind, the vow to protect them binding him to a life he no longer wanted, he had not considered them at all.
Einar remembered feeling that way. And it shamed him.
Familiar footsteps sounded behind him, but with that guilt writhing in his gut, he could not bring himself to turn and face them.
He stared down at the spiral tiles on the floor until his eyes burned, and when he opened his mouth to speak, the ancient language came too easily to his lips.
He had to struggle to use words that would not exclude Aleksi.
“Do you still want to know what happened to—” Him sounded too distant, but me felt wrong, too.
He’d lived too many years as Einar to be the man Naia remembered. “To Theron?”
“Yes,” she admitted gently. “But not if it hurts too much.”
The pain was a knife sunk so deep, pulling it out might mean bleeding to death. But hadn’t she been bleeding this whole time, cut to ribbons by the pain of not knowing? Maybe speaking the words would heal them both. “I remember everything,” he said softly.
Naia moved in front of him, and shame couldn’t stop him from looking up.
It was Theron’s piercing grief that made him hungry for any glimpse of her, and it did not matter that this Naia shared no features with the one in his distant memories.
Dark hair or red, face bold and striking or sweetly heart-shaped, the way she looked at him was the same.
He finally understood how she had looked upon him in this new body and simply known.
“I mean it,” she said firmly, her expression achingly familiar—command and compassion wrapped in an endless love. “There is nothing I need to know so badly that I would be willing to wound you for it.”
Einar reached out to touch her hair, and it did not matter that it was straight and silky instead of a cascade of curls. Somehow, it felt the same. “Not all of it hurts. I remember when you came to steal those ships from me.”
She turned her face to his hand and smiled shakily against his palm. “They tell such a different tale now.”
He’d heard the villagers repeat the story—that when the goddess had defied him and rescued her ships from the storm he’d stirred up, he had followed her back to the island half in love with her.
Naia had laughed at the idea. Now Einar knew it was truer than she’d ever realized.
From the first moment she had challenged him, he had been enchanted.
“I was furious with you for tricking me. I followed you home, thinking to steal something from you. Or that was what I told myself.” He tugged at the loose lock of her hair.
“I lost my heart before I even knew I had one.”
Naia cupped his cheeks, her gaze roving over his face. Searching. “Einar . . .”
“I remember us,” he said softly.
She threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in the hollow of his throat, and Theron’s memories washed over him in a blissful wave, century upon century of tangled, glorious moments.
Learning to know each other, coming to love each other.
Fighting and making up, walks under the starlight and laughter at noon, and the incomparable bliss of losing himself in her touch.
A thousand thousand days of joy, blurring into one another, but other memories stayed crystal sharp, their edges cutting into him until he bled. This was the part that would hurt them both, but he had to do it. “And I remember the moment you fell.”
Aleksi stepped up behind him, settling steadying hands on Einar’s shoulders.
He wondered if the Lover could feel it—if he could see Theron’s pain echoing back across millennia.
The answer came as Aleksi swept out one of his thumbs, a soft caress along the back of Einar’s neck that somehow grounded him.
The Lover’s truest gift—a heart so big that it could carry you when your own heart faltered.
It gave Einar the courage to continue. “I almost followed you,” he said, wishing there was a way to soften the truth for her, and knowing she would not want a gentle lie. “I almost took the island with me. Not even on purpose . . . but you were dead in my arms, and the storm . . .”
He’d held her lifeless body in the spot where they now stood, as thunder rattled the island and lightning shredded the sky. The seas she had calmed with her dying breath had begun to churn again, and the winds he summoned had been strong enough to tear the temple down around them.
Einar wrapped his arms around her and drew in her scent—those impossible flowers that had haunted him for the past week.
Now he knew they were the tropical blooms that had once grown where they stood.
“I’m the one who destroyed your temple,” he admitted quietly.
“In my rage, my grief . . . I could not stop myself. I wanted the final storm to consume me.”
Aleksi made a soft noise of protest and rested his forehead against Einar’s temple. Naia’s breath hitched against his throat, and he felt the hot sting of her tears.
The memory of being alone was just that—a memory. They were here. Now. Together.
“It was Tona who stopped me,” he continued.
He could still remember the High Priestess battling her way through winds cruel enough to tear her robes and rain brutal enough to bruise skin.
“She was grieving your loss, too. But she braved the storm and begged me to stop. And she was yours. I could not hurt her. So I let the storm die.”
“She always was fearless.” Naia lifted her head, tears still coursing down her wet cheeks. “And so fond of you.”
Perhaps she had been. Theron hadn’t been able to see it, though. Naia had taken all the soft emotions with her into death. “I remembered the promise I made you.”
“That you would not let them make a shrine of me.” Naia’s voice was thick with emotion.
She’d extracted it from him in those last tumultuous days, when he’d still been in such deep denial that he’d been willing to swear any oath, as if he could lure her into letting him save her life.
“They wanted to bury you here, in the temple ruins. But I knew you wouldn’t have wanted it.
So I took you down into the depths, where—”
His voice broke. He could see it so clearly—her face, oddly peaceful in death, hair floating in the soft current as he laid her on a bed of the sea glass she had loved so much.
“I scoured the floor of the ocean around the island for a full week,” he managed to choke out.
“And I built your tomb from your sea glass.” In a way, he had made the legend of the island come true.
Every piece of that treasured glass that had washed ashore in the past three thousand years truly had been goddess-touched.
“Thank you.” The words were barely intelligible through Naia’s tears.
He kissed her—the top of her head, and her cheeks, the salt of her tears bittersweet. “I wanted to stay there with you,” he whispered against her temple. When she gasped and tightened her fingers on his jacket, he went on. “But I had made you another promise.”