Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
Death
The boy is smaller than I remember.
He lies in his cot near the window, tucked beneath a wool blanket that has been patched so many times it likely holds no warmth. His breath comes in shallow, wet intervals, each one thick as tar pooling in my chest.
Heavy. Suffocating.
Still, I sit beside him, waiting on his soul, as if there aren’t hundreds of other souls waiting for me. Why?
Throughout my existence, my connections with mortals have been few. This orphaned boy was never one of them. He’s not someone I spoke to. Not someone I watched. He certainly isn’t my son.
But he could be. Maybe.
If Death can create life? If Elara falls pregnant with our child? Then I could sit beside my son’s bed in a few years, watching him succumb to a curse born of my rage, my pain, my grief.
My heartstrings shiver. Exhaling a breath that does nothing to calm them, I gaze across the dark orphanage.
Other children sleep in their cots along the far wall, the drafty room thick with the stench of filth.
The matron dozes in a chair by the hearth, chin on her chest, cradling an abandoned infant.
“Now is all we’re ever given.”
The girl’s voice returns to me uninvited. That red-haired, gap-toothed child who had looked up at me with no fear and delivered a philosophy so far beyond this god’s grasp. What is now but the thinnest sliver of time between what was and what will be? A single speck mid-fall, too brief to hold?
The boy’s hand shifts out from under the blanket. The more his small fingers curl loosely around empty air, the more his aura dims—a retreat of life, one sand grain at a time.
Twenty-three.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-one.
“Mama?” The boy’s eyelids flutter open, but his gaze slides through me and settles on the window, where frost has etched across the glass.
Fourteen.
Thirteen.
Twelve.
His breathing changes. The intervals stretch, tension leaving his fingers the way the light leaves his body.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Against the very existence that defines me, I reach out. I push a single finger into his small palm, sensing his hand clench once…then uncurl to the final fall of his rattling chest.
Heaviness settles onto my heartstrings like rust on iron, a dull, spreading corrosion. Over a stranger…
I absorb his soul, the faint, luminous thread that detaches from his body like steam from a cup left out in winter. It curls into me, carries through me, until it expands into the peaceful, vast stillness of all.
A stillness that doesn’t match the quiet chiming in my head—the summons of the dead blending into the familiar, colorless hum of obligation. But one note among them is neither quiet nor colorless. Also, not dead.
I follow it, letting shadows extend, stretch, and part.
Then I’m standing in the lower graveyard of the palace. Moonlight lays itself across the headstones in pale, crooked lines. Fresh soil rests on the snow beside a hole in the earth, and inside that hole, waist-deep and gasping, is my wife.
I walk up to the edge, cloak billowing around my flesh-stripped toes. “You’re doing a poor job of being a queen.”
“It’s for one of the guards,” she says without turning around.
“Took me forever to get through the frost. Everyone else is either sick, exhausted, or too deep in their own grief to lift a shovel. So here I am.” She wrenches the blade free and throws the dirt onto the pile, finally glancing up at me from a flushed face.
“You look…exhausted. Something happened?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
Elara drives the shovel into the soil and leans on the handle, watching me as if she knows I’m calculating whether to tell her the truth or retreat behind something safer.
Something that won’t cost me her affection, or the way she slept tangled with my body last night with nothing but truth between us.
I don’t want to go back to lies.
“The sick boy from the orphanage.” In their heaviness, the words nearly scrape my teeth. “His soul is at rest now.”
Elara doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.
Yet something shifts behind her eyes. Not surprise—she’s buried too many bodies for that—but more subtle, more dangerous. The kind of unresolved quiet that settles between husbands and wives, I’ve observed more than once, hardening into what will one day become distant silence.
My chest hollows. “Elara, I—”
“I have to finish this.” She pulls out the shovel and drives the blade back into the earth with enough force to split the stones beneath. The crack echoes across the graveyard.
I watch her work for a moment. The vicious rhythm of it. The way each hrrk seems to lift out a grave for our marriage, sending a clawed scrape down my spine.
I jump into the grave with her. The space is cramped, the shovel small. My looming height forces me to hunch, my bones clicking as I wrap my knuckles around the handle.
I shake my head. “You don’t understand.”
Elara steps back against the earthen wall, arms folding across her chest, and watches me with an expression I cannot read. “I do understand.”
“No.” I drive the shovel down harder than necessary. The blade clangs against rock, and the impact jolts up through my wrists. “You have—what, sixty years? Seventy? A blink in the span of my existence. What would someone so temporary understand of eternity?”
The words land badly, I know it the moment they leave my mouth. Know it by the way her chin lifts, by the way her arms tighten across her chest, by the barely perceptible anger she tries to bury beneath the dirt on her face.
“But I know what this feels like.” The words snap out of her, hand gesturing between the narrow grave, the frozen dirt, the impossible distance between us contained in three feet of space.
“And I do understand. Just because—” She clenches her eyes shut.
Presses her fingers against her temples.
When she speaks again, the edge is gone, replaced by something more ragged.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… I’m exhausted.
I’ve been digging this grave for three hours in frozen soil, and I just—”
She stops. Breathes. Opens her eyes and looks at me, and beneath the frustration and the dirt and the dark circles carved under her eyes, there is something tender and fraying.
“You’re exhausted, too,” she says softly. “I can see it.”
I scoff. I’m not sure if exhaustion is the right word for the particular weariness of an immortal arguing with his mortal wife about whether love is worth the pain it guarantees.
I lean on the shovel. Say nothing.
Elara is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is shifted—no longer sharp, no longer snapping, but careful. Deliberate. The voice of a woman choosing her words the way she chooses where to place a headstone: with precision, because once it’s set, it doesn’t move.
“What did you think was going to happen?” she asks. “After last night. After everything we said to each other.” She searches my face. “Did you think I would just…accept this? Wake up beside you and agree to watch the rot spread and the realm die?”
My jawbone gives a tight, weary pop. “I…did not think that far in the moment.”
“Neither of us did.” She leans back against the grave wall again, tilting her head to look up at the stars above us. “But the moment is over, and the rot is still here, and people are still dying, and I’m standing in a grave I dug alone because there’s no one left who is well enough to help me.”
She looks back at me.
“I understand, Vale.” Her voice cracks on my name.
The name I bestowed upon myself, but the way she says it…
as though it has become something more personal than any name she’s ever spoken.
“I have compassion for your fear. I understand the weight of grief. But understanding why you refuse doesn’t mean I support it.
Not when the cost is…” She gestures above us, at the graveyard, at the palace beyond, at all of it. “This. All of this.”
Something behind my ribs lurches—a visceral, ugly thing, like a hand closing around my heartstrings and twisting. “What are you saying?”
Her arms squeeze across her chest, a silent conflict playing out across her face. How she drops her gaze to the dirt between us, then lifts to a headstone nearby, then finally, reluctantly, settles on me.
“Maybe you were right,” she whispers. “Maybe we should divorce.”
Another twist, stopping the blood in my heart until it cools into the familiar numbness of years passed. “I beg your pardon.”
“If I can’t break the curse,” she continues, each word sounding like it’s being pulled from her by force, “then I have to feed it. And to feed it, I need a husband.” She swallows. “A real one. Like you said.”
Like I said…
The memory surfaces with sickening clarity: me telling her to find a husband she could love.
A mortal man. Someone with a lifespan and the biological capacity to die with her.
It had been my suggestion. My strategic, reasonable, perfectly logical suggestion, delivered with the cold efficiency of a god who’d not yet remembered how to long.
I remember now. Painfully.
Jealousy hits with a blinding flare behind my sternum, followed by rage at the faceless man who would dare to hold her in my stead. “I refuse.”
Elara scoffs. A short, sharp breath through her nose that clouds white in the frozen air. “Do you love me yet?”
I only stare at her, the words awfully familiar, yet making no sense. “What?”
“You refuse to let me go.” She steps forward, and the grave narrows to nothing between us. “Trapping me in a marriage that forces me to watch the world die. How is that love?”
The pressure builds behind my sternum like a clenching fist, wrenching a shout from my chest. “You are trying to force my hand!”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything!” Her voice rises to match mine, then catches, trembles, steadies. “But neither will I force myself to indulge in a love—however real, however wanted—when it’s costing me my conscience.”
“And what will it cost me?” The word tears out of me raw and ragged, ricocheting off the earthen walls, startling a crow from a nearby tree. “I would die for you!” The words come out low and wrecked and shaking. “If I could, I would die for you.”
The silence stretches between us like the night itself holds its breath.
Then Elara exhales. Slow. Measured. “Dying for someone is easy.”
The words are quiet, almost gentle. Which makes them worse.
“You know that better than anyone.” She gestures at me, all of me, every tendon and bone.
“You’ve gathered their souls. The mothers who threw themselves over cradles.
The soldiers who stepped in front of swords.
The old men who gave their last scrap of bread and called it enough.
” She pauses. “And I know it, too, because I’m the one who buried what you left behind. ”
Her eyes hold mine, steady and unblinking.
“We both know dying is easy. It’s a single moment.
One decision, and then…it’s done. And you never have to feel the weight of what comes after.
” She tilts her head. “But living for someone? Waking up every morning, even when it hurts, even when you can’t fathom to keep going?
” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Try that. If you want to impress me.”
Something cracks in my chest. Not the heartstrings. Something deeper. Something…structural.
“And if there’s a child.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Our child. I will love it. I will hold it. I will watch it grow and stumble and become something extraordinary, and then one day—one day, Elara—I will watch it die. And then their children. And—”
“Stop.”
The word is firm but not cruel. Elara reaches up and presses her dirt-caked hand against my chest, directly over the place where the heartstrings ache.
“Every headstone marks someone who would cherish what you’re afraid of.” Her fingers curl into the fabric of my cloak. “Somewhere in a graveyard, there’s a woman who never met her grandson. A father who died the winter before his daughter’s wedding.”
A tremor runs through my sternum, sharp enough to make me wince. “Elara…”
“They would give everything just to see one wobbly first step. One wiggly milk tooth pressed into their palm. To watch their child fall madly, stupidly in love.” Rough and calloused, her palm strokes up along the tendon on my neck, only to cup my jawbone.
“You looked so happy yesterday during the snowball fight. Were you? Happy?”
My jaw works. I don't even recall when I was last this happy, if ever. “Yes.”
“None of it would’ve happened had you turned down the joy over the sadness that the snow will melt, eventually.
” Tears streak through the dirt on her cheeks, but her voice holds.
“You can’t have love without embracing grief.
Pain is the price we pay for participating in life.
And if you’re not willing to pay that, then maybe…
” Her other hand finds the exposed curve of my sternum, fingers slipping around the bone to rest against the heat.
“Then maybe you’re a corpse after all. Existing somehow, yes. But not living.”
The words don’t just land. They excavate. They dig past tendons and sinew, past ancient bone and godly power, and find the soft, trembling heart that falters in my chest.
Shovel pulled from the ground, she turns her back on me and drives the iron into the dirt. “I have to finish this.”
I stand there, as unmoving as the dead, the shovel biting into the earth with a hrrk that reverberates through the soles of my feet, up through my anklebones, my shins, settling into the marrow like a burial hymn.
I’m standing in my own grave.