CHAPTER 13 — “Persephone”
The thing about memories is they don’t ask permission. They just show up, kick down the door of your mind, and make themselves comfortable like they’re paying rent.
I’m sitting on the porch, watching the sun bleed orange across fields I actually care about now, and then I’m not.
I’m somewhere else entirely. Somewhen else.
Two hundred years ago, give or take, back when I was stupid enough to believe in things like love and loyalty and the basic human decency of people who smile at you over breakfast.
Good times.
She had freckles.
I know how that sounds. The great Archmage, destroyer of the Demon Lord, master of seventeen schools of magic, and the detail that survived two centuries of death and rebirth is freckles.
But she did. Scattered across her nose like someone had flicked copper paint at her face and she’d been too beautiful to wipe it off.
She hated them with a passion that bordered on irrational.
Covered them with glamour spells whenever we went anywhere official, which was constantly, because being the Archmage’s wife apparently meant attending every boring function in the realm.
I loved those freckles. Told her so every morning.
She’d roll her eyes and call me sentimental. I’d kiss every single one until she laughed and pushed me away and we’d be late for whatever ceremony required our presence.
Gods, I was an idiot.
We met at the Academy, because of course we did.
Where else do overpowered mages meet their future murderers?
A tavern? Too cliché. A battlefield? Too honest. No, it had to be the Academy, with its marble halls and its pretentious architecture and its complete inability to prepare any of us for the real world.
She was a second-year Healer, all bright eyes and nervous energy.
I was a fourth-year Mage who’d already been called “prodigy” so many times the word had lost all meaning.
It just became noise. Background static.
Oh, there goes the prodigy. Don’t make eye contact, he might lecture you about mana theory.
I was giving a guest lecture—yes, as a student, yes, it was obnoxious, no, I didn’t realize that at the time—on theoretical thaumaturgy. Riveting stuff. The kind of material that makes first-years cry and third-years question their life choices.
The door opened twenty minutes in.
She stood there, clutching a schedule scroll like it had personally betrayed her, and said, “This isn’t Anatomy of Divine Channeling, is it?”
“No,” I said. “That’s in the East Wing. Third door on the left.”
“Ah.” She looked at the thirty students staring at her. Looked at me. Looked at the incomprehensible magical diagrams I’d chalked across three separate boards. “I’ll just… go then.”
She sat down in the back row.
“Might learn something,” she said, when I raised an eyebrow.
I taught the entire rest of that lecture to her. Professor Aldric had to call my name three times to get my attention, and afterward he pulled me aside and said, “Velthar, I’ve never seen you so distracted. Are you feeling well?”
I was feeling something, alright. Just didn’t have a name for it yet.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗║ MEMORY INTERFERENCE DETECTED ║║ ║║ Current emotional state: A mess.
║║ Cortisol levels: Through the roof. ║║ Heart rate: Elevated.
║║ Common sense: Absent. ║║ ║║ RECOMMENDATION: Stop torturing ║║ yourself with nostalgic bullshit ║║ about the woman who literally ║║ helped murder you.
║║ ║║ You're not going to listen, are you?
║║ ║║ ...Didn't think so. Carry on. ║╚═══════════════════════════════════════╝
The System’s not wrong. But the System can also mind its own business.
Courting Persephone was an exercise in controlled chaos. She was stubborn—gods, she was stubborn—and she had this way of looking at you that made you feel like she could see straight through to every petty thought you’d ever had.
I’d bring her flowers. She’d analyze their alchemical properties.
I’d write her poetry. She’d correct my meter.
I’d offer to walk her back to her dormitory. She’d say, “I have legs, Velthar. They work fine.”
But she’d let me walk beside her anyway, and sometimes our hands would brush, and she’d pretend not to notice, and I’d pretend not to notice her pretending, and we’d have entire conversations about absolutely nothing while our fingers did all the real talking.
Three months of that before she finally kissed me.
We were in the Academy library, after hours, because I had keys and no respect for institutional rules.
She was studying some healing text, brow furrowed, bottom lip caught between her teeth in that way she did when she was concentrating.
I was supposed to be reviewing my thesis.
Instead I was staring at her like the lovesick disaster I absolutely was.
“You’re not working,” she said, without looking up.
“I’m observing.”
“Observing what?”
“The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen try to parse Old Vaelish medical terminology.”
She looked up then. Met my eyes. Something shifted in her expression—some wall coming down, some decision being made.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“Undeniably.”
“You’re arrogant and oblivious and you have absolutely no social awareness.”
“All accurate.”
“I’m going to kiss you now.”
“I—wait, what?”
She did. And I forgot every spell I’d ever learned, every theorem I’d ever proven, every achievement I’d ever accomplished. There was just her. Her lips and her hands and the smell of healing herbs and something floral I could never identify.
When she pulled back, I said, very intelligently, “Oh.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh.”
That was the beginning. That was the moment I handed over my heart and said here, hold this, I trust you.
Worked out great, obviously.
The wedding was in spring because she wanted cherry blossoms. The estate where we held it didn’t have cherry trees—minor detail—so I grew an entire grove overnight.
Archmage-level magic, the kind of working that takes most mages a full ritual circle and a week of preparation, and I burned through it all for flower decorations.
The other mages at the ceremony thought I was showing off. Flexing my power for the crowd.
I wasn’t. I mean, yes, there was some flexing involved—I’m not a saint—but mostly I just wanted to see her smile when she walked through those blossoms. That’s all. That was the whole reason. One smile.
She cried during the vows.
Standing there in white, flower petals catching in her hair, tears streaming down her face as she spoke the words that were supposed to bind us together forever.
I thought it was joy. I thought she was overwhelmed by the same thing I was—this impossible, terrifying, wonderful knowledge that we belonged to each other now.
“I promise to stand beside you,” she said, voice breaking on every other word. “In light and shadow. In victory and defeat. Until the stars themselves forget to shine.”
I believed every word.
I believed her the way you believe the sun will rise, the way you believe water is wet, the way you believe the people who love you won’t put a sword through your chest while your best friend watches and your whole party votes unanimously for your death.
She was already sleeping with Dario by then.
I found that out later. Much later. About two hundred years and one extremely personal murder later, specifically. But standing there at that altar, watching her cry, I thought I was the luckiest man in the world.
Funny how that works.
I’m back on the porch. The sun’s gone down while I wasn’t paying attention, and the stars are starting to poke through the darkness like they’ve got somewhere better to be but can’t quite commit to leaving.
My hands are shaking.
Johnson’s sitting next to me—wolf-sized now, silver-furred, all predator angles and impossible evolution—and he’s watching me with those eyes that see way too much for a rabbit. Former rabbit. Whatever he is now.
“I’m fine,” I tell him.
He just stares.
“Seriously. Fine. Totally fine. The picture of mental health and emotional stability.”
More staring.
“You’re very judgmental for someone who eats his own weight in stolen bread.”
He puts his massive head on my knee. Doesn’t say anything, because he’s a rabbit and rabbits don’t talk, but somehow the gesture communicates volumes. Something like: I know you’re lying. You know you’re lying. But I’m here anyway, you disaster of a human being.
Good rabbit.
Terrible therapist, but good rabbit.
The signs were there. They’re always there, aren’t they? That’s the cruel joke of hindsight—you get perfect vision of all the things you should have seen, served up on a silver platter of too late and doesn’t matter now.
The way she’d stiffen, just slightly, when I touched her unexpectedly.
How she started taking longer shifts at the temple, healing pilgrims who probably didn’t need that much healing.
The distance that crept into her eyes during conversations she used to lean into like they were the most important thing in the world.
And Dario.
Always Dario.
My best friend. The Hero. Golden boy with the golden sword and the golden smile and the absolute golden audacity to sleep with my wife while telling me how lucky I was to have her.
“He’s your best friend,” Persephone would say, whenever I mentioned they seemed to spend a lot of time together. “Shouldn’t I get along with him?”
“Yeah,” I’d say, swallowing down the wrongness in my gut. “Of course. Of course you should.”
Don’t do that, by the way. Don’t ignore the voice that knows. It knows. It always knows. You just don’t want to listen because listening means your life explodes into a million pieces and you have to rebuild from rubble. It’s easier to pretend. It’s easier to trust.
It’s easier to die with your wife’s hand in yours and your best friend’s sword in your chest.
At least you don’t have to do the hard work of living with the truth.