Chapter 20 #2
The awareness settled over me. Not as something imagined, but as something remembered that had begun to awaken within me the last time I touched the mural, an extension of the awakening spell from the last time I’d dreamt of the real world.
As though the memory itself acted as a key, the magic within responded to my recognition. A low, resonant strain filled the air, vibrating through the stone beneath my feet. I stepped back instinctively.
“This is a door.” The realization had already taken hold before the words formed. Evander didn’t respond, but the certainty in his expression when I turned to him struck something deep within me. “You knew.”
He held my gaze, and for a fleeting moment I thought he might deny it. Though he hesitated, he didn’t. “I suspected.”
Understanding came not as a sudden revelation, but as a quiet, devastating alignment of everything I hadn’t yet allowed myself to see. “Which was why you warned me the last time I touched the mural.”
“I didn’t want you to come back here,” he whispered. “But now…” He couldn’t seem to make himself finish, but his resulting silence was confirmation enough.
Something tightened in my chest, though it wasn’t quite anger—at least, not in the way I’d expected.
I had been betrayed before and knew the shape of that feeling, the sharp, all consuming pain.
But this was different—the slow, aching realization that somewhere along the way… I had begun to trust him.
“You were leading me here from the beginning,” I said, my voice quieter now, though no less steady. “Every answer, every question all brought me back to this room.” I edged back from the mural as though it might reach out to pull me through.
Still, he didn’t deny it. “I needed you to find it,” he said at last.
His honesty should have made it easier to hate him. Instead, I found myself studying him more closely, searching for the man I had come to know beneath the truth he had just revealed.
I now knew that the charm hadn’t been entirely false, but neither had it been entirely real. It had been constructed and deliberate, designed to draw me in without ever allowing me to get too close. And yet…I had seen the cracks in it, just enough to know they existed.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, averting his gaze with a pained expression. The distance between us remained, but not with the careful control he usually maintained. This felt fractured, as though something inside him had already begun to give way.
A quiet unease curled in my heart. “What is it?” I asked softly.
For a moment, he said nothing, his expression tightening as though whatever answer he might give would cost him more than he was willing to pay. Then, almost as if the decision had been made for him, he stepped forward. I barely had time to register the movement before his arms closed around me.
It was not sudden or forceful, but careful, deliberate, as though he were committing the feel of me enfolded in his arms to memory. My breath caught and I went still in his hold, as though some part of me sensed the weight of the moment, even if I did not yet understand it.
“This is wrong,” he murmured, the words unraveling even as he spoke them. “I should have done it before you realized.”
“Done what?” I asked, my voice barely more than a breath.
His grip tightened to hold me closer, too close…and yet somehow not close enough. “I promised you I would,” he murmured. “Despite my fierce resistance to the idea, I wanted to give you what you asked for.”
A flicker of something stirred deep within me. Not a memory, but the echo of one: His hand clasped tightly in mine, the steady, unyielding warmth of his hold I refused to let go. “Promise me.” The words weren’t spoken aloud here, yet I heard them all the same, felt the desperation behind them.
“What promise?” I asked slowly, but even as I spoke, the question stirred another buried memory deep within me.
“You made me promise,” he continued, his voice strained. “Before everything was taken from you…before you forgot what it would cost.”
Fleeting, disjointed fragments surfaced—a room I did not recognize, and yet knew.
The weight of something terrible pressing in from all sides, the unwelcome yet undeniable knowledge that there had been only one way to end it.
My voice, shaking but resolute: “If it comes to it…you have to choose the kingdom.” His devastated silence, followed by his reluctant promise.
I pulled back slightly, searching his face. “You remembered this…all this time?”
He shook his head. “Not fully, only fragments. It began with a sense that I needed you, that you were the key to something I couldn’t quite reach.” His gaze dropped, his expression tightening. “It wasn’t until you brought me here and touched the mural again…that everything came back.”
Anticipation cinched my chest, but I could no longer turn away from the truth I’d been seeking.
“When the curse first took hold and before it had a chance to claim you, you asked me to do it,” he continued. “Even then you understood what I could not accept, and possessed a strength beyond my own.”
My heart began to race. “Accept what?”
His hand tightened slightly against mine. “That only one of us could leave this land of dreams.”
The world seemed to tilt beneath me as the words settled into the space between us, quiet and devastating. “No,” I whispered, though I did not yet know what I was denying.
He nodded, expression miserable.
“You saw it before I did, you always did. While I refused to see anything beyond what I wanted, you realized what it would take to break it. You made me promise that when the time came, I wouldn’t hesitate.
But now—” A hollow sound escaped him, a laugh without any trace of humor. “—now I remember what it will cost.”
His arms tightened around me again, as though he could anchor me there and keep me from slipping away before he was ready. I stood numbly within the circle of his arms, unable to react as I struggled to process his words.
“I thought I could do it.” His voice faltered. “I told myself it was my duty, that saving my kingdom mattered more than anything.” His hand came up, fingers brushing lightly against my cheek, his touch unsteady in a way I had never felt from him before. “But I was wrong. I’m not strong enough.”
“Strong enough for what, exactly?” My voice was a ragged whisper; I didn’t want to hear the answer even as I needed to know.
Evander drew a shuddering breath. “To sacrifice you.” He finally met my eyes. “It was never my idea, but you were adamant that it was the only way to save the kingdom, since you were the only one able to activate the portal.”
I frowned. “But I’ve traveled between the worlds many times now. I always come back here when I wake up. Why would this trip be any different?” I eyed the mural hesitantly.
His jaw worked for a moment before he opened his mouth. “You haven’t been traveling through the portal,” he said. “Your magic has allowed you to move back and forth, but when someone goes through the portal, that will end.”
I shook my head stubbornly. “I touched this mural last time, and woke up in the dream—well, in the other world. And then I came back here.”
“You didn’t go through the portal,” Evander explained. “The magic was so strong this close to it that you traveled back to the real world temporarily. But the entire mural isn’t a portal; it’s just that one turret window that holds the key. If you touch it you’ll go through…permanently.”
“What happens to you—to your two halves—if I go through?” I asked.
“The plan wasn’t for you to go through,” he said, compressing his lips. “Just to…open it.”
I stared at him, wide-eyed, as took in his words. “Can’t we go…together?”
He shook his head grimly. “You’re so brilliant, so brave. You figured out that the portal would only allow one to pass before sealing this world, this illusion of reality, off from the true world.”
“But everyone here…your parents?”
“They’re not really here. This is just a dream for them; they don’t even remember me in this world. I’m the only one who is trapped awake here.”
Silence fell between us, heavy with everything he had not done, and everything he still might. Eventually he broke the fragile stillness.
“Why did your curiosity have to lead you here?” he asked, the words rough with something dangerously close to pain.
“It’s one of the traits I admire most about you that I wouldn’t change for anything.
And yet it’s placed you directly in danger.
” His gaze lifted to mine at last, and there was nothing guarded left in it.
“You never should have gotten involved with me.”
I wanted to assure him that for all my mistakes and imperfections, I could never regret meeting him. But before I could find the words, he drew me closer, one hand settling at my back as though to steady me—though whether it was for my sake or his own, I couldn’t tell.
For a moment, he simply held me. Within his arms, somewhere deep beneath the confusion and fear, something in me understood—this was a goodbye he had not yet found the strength to carry through.
He pulled away just enough for his eyes to return to mine. Whatever he saw there seemed to undo him completely.
“I can’t,” he murmured, the words low and unsteady. “I told myself I could lose you for the sake of the kingdom. But beneath every attempt to charm you…I was the one being charmed instead.”
The admission settled between us, fragile and irreversible.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then he stepped closer.
The distance between us closed not with the ease of flirtation, nor with the practiced confidence I had come to expect, but with something far more deliberate, as though each step required a choice he had not expected to make.
His hand lifted, hesitating only a fraction before it came to rest against my cheek with a gentleness almost foreign for everything that had brought us here.