Bryn
Isit on the steps for a long time.
The logic is simple. My body near his makes his venom clean.
Clean venom is the one thing this building cannot carry.
Every day I stay, the next pour comes in stronger.
The building was safer before me. He reached the same answer on the steps beside me.
I felt it land. Neither of us said it out loud.
I go inside.
I pack. There is not much. There was never much. My second shirt. My spare pants. The waterskin.
My hand reaches for the drawings.
I look at the roll of clean pages on the ledge. Every corridor. Every channel. Every junction. Over three weeks of work. The best work I have ever done.
I take the channel sheet. The one with every junction, every overflow route, every bypass I found while clearing. I leave the rest on the ledge.
The fragment is at the bottom of my pack. Reka’s page. The serpent jambs drawn from the ground by a woman who crashed a glider into the wards and walked out and never came back. I take it. I leave the rest.
I walk out of the alcove. Down the corridor where my bedroll lay beside his sleeping chamber. The stone is bare now. The moss on the wall where I slept is thick and green. It will keep growing after I leave. For a while.
Through the anteroom where the fire pit still holds coals from this morning’s bread. The iron hook where the pot hangs. The counter where I learned to cut the root small and he stood close enough that his coil pressed against my hip.
My feet stop. I don’t tell them to. They stop, and I am standing at the counter with my hand on the edge of it and the stone is still warm from the fire and I can smell the herb. The one I learned to say in his language. The one I got right.
I let go of the counter. I keep walking.
Through the main hall. Past the stones. Our stones.
They are still side by side at the base of the steps, pushed together, the gap closed.
Past the place on the floor where the green is thickest, where the moss and vines erupted while we were inside each other.
Past the supply room entrance where the chest plate still rests where he left it.
Until today.
I get to the entrance.
He is at the base of the steps. His coils arranged on the stone of the courtyard. The armor is back on. He put it on while I was packing. The chest plate buckled. The shoulder guards in place. The gold catches the late light.
I stop in the doorway.
I look at him. The armor with its darkened seams. The loose shoulder plate he has never repaired. The face that watched me across an auction hall and bid a fortune on a woman who didn’t flinch.
“I love you,” I say.
He opens his mouth. What comes out is not my name.
It is the word he pressed into my hair the first night, the one I never made him repeat.
I still don’t know what it means. Long vowels.
A sound that starts deep in his throat, below where human words begin, and fills the courtyard and the steps and the space between us.
Heavy. Full. A word that cost him something I cannot measure from this distance.
His coils move. The nearest loop slides forward across the stone, toward the bottom step, toward me, the way his body reaches in sleep before he decides to. For one breath I think he is going to ask.
He stops it. The loop pulls back.
If he asks, I will stay. He knows it. That is why he doesn’t.
He holds out the cloth bundle instead. Tied shut. The flatbread cloth.
I take it without looking inside. If I look inside, I will not leave.
I make myself move. One foot. The other. Down the steps, past his coils, close enough that the warmth comes off the scales one last time. I do not touch him. If I touch him, I will not leave, and he will let me, and the thing under the floor wakes while we pretend it won’t.
So I keep my hands at my sides and walk past the man I love while he holds still and lets me go.
I go into the jungle. The canopy closes over me, and the temple disappears behind the green.
The grief starts in my chest. A physical thing. Weight behind my sternum, getting heavier with every step. My hands are shaking. My throat is tight. I keep walking because I have always been good at walking.
There is no trail without him. The way through exists where his body flattens it, and three weeks of green have grown over the line he made. I am finding my own way.
The going gets harder as the light changes, roots catching my feet, a stream crossing that was simple three weeks ago taking three attempts because my hands won’t grip the rocks. I slip on the second attempt. My knee hits stone.
By late afternoon the grief has moved past my hands into my whole body. A vibration in my jaw. I stop at a clearing. I drink from the waterskin and open the bundle.
The food is wrapped in the cloth he uses for the flatbread. The dried meat is the good kind, cut thin, from the upper shelf of the supply room. The flatbread has berries in it.
He wrapped this while I was in the alcove. He knew I was leaving and he made sure I could eat. He put the berries in the bread.
The berries. The thing he does instead of saying what he means. The first time he put something in the bread that was not obligation.
My eyes blur. I eat the bread. I don’t stop eating. The tears run down my face, and I eat the bread with berries in it. I taste the salt and the tart sweetness at the same time and my hands are shaking and I eat until it is gone.
I make camp because I cannot walk in the dark with hands that won’t grip and eyes that won’t clear. I have no bedroll. I have the pack, the ground, and the second shirt rolled under my head.
I lie on my back. The canopy is black above me. The stars are not visible through the leaves.
Reka never came back. She saw this place from the air, crashed into the wards, drew the fragment with a shaking hand, and walked away. She went back to regular commissions and told me stories about the jungle and the serpent jambs and never returned.
I am becoming her.
I close my eyes. The ground is hard and cold and nothing like the curve of his coils against my back. I pull the second shirt tighter under my head. The cloth smells like him. Like mineral warmth and scales and the faint green scent of the moss that grew where we slept.
The man I love is alone in a temple that is dying around him. I left the drawings on the ledge. All except the channel sheet, folded into my pack beside my mother’s page. I have a head full of pieces that will not arrange themselves into a picture.
I am not done with this problem.