Chapter Twenty-One #2
My knees decide the argument is over, and she catches me before the snow can.
Both her arms come around my chest and take my weight as though she has been rehearsing it.
Perhaps she has. We stand there swaying in the smoking dark, one creature with four legs and a single working heart between us.
Around the clearing, my brothers stand guard over the sudden quiet.
Scout drifts down, trailing dimming silver.
Somewhere east, a dragon’s breath slows.
The emptiness inside me has a shape now, and the shape is final.
Everything is gone.
No trace, ember, or thread remains.
Everything is gone.
I wait for some trace of it to answer, but there is only silence. For the first time in my existence, I am only a man.
All winter, even stripped of nearly everything, some last thread let me feel my brothers.
Vex’s cold gravity, Fury’s hot furnace, the bright old hum of Scout riding the wind.
The thread is gone. Standing in a clearing full of impossible beings, my new ears hear only what any man would hear—wind, one dog barking behind a door, and one heartbeat working hard against my chest, hers.
It is less than I had, but somehow it does not feel poorer.
Lily leans back far enough to read my face. Snow melts in her lashes. Her scope has printed a red ring around her eye, and she is the most beautiful thing any Heaven ever built.
“I’m okay,” I tell her.
“You don’t look okay.”
“No. But I am here.”
Her forehead comes to rest against mine, and for a long moment, the wilderness lets us stand there, unremarked.
Above us, the aurora drifts across the sky, bands of green edged with violet and streaked with deep red.
It moves slowly, almost lazily, while the stars shine beyond it.
The mountain remains exactly as it was, unmoved by any of it.
Then Bear’s barking changes pitch inside the cabin, my eyes lift to the southern tree line, and my breath stops for a different reason.
Fury stands at the edge of his dying fire wall. Beside him stands a man who was not there a moment ago.
Unremarkable at first glance, which is its own warning.
A dark coat of beautiful cut, hands folded at his back, posture as easy as a neighbor’s.
No breath climbs from him into the cold.
The snow will not touch him. Flakes bend around his shoulders in polite curves, declining to land.
Fury yields ground to no being on this earth, yet my brother stands beside him the way a soldier stands beside an old commander, comfortable and known.
The man is looking at the wheel buried under the clearing.
His expression carries the satisfaction of a ledger closing.
Words pass between him and Fury, pitched below even the silence.
Whatever is said, it is brief, and it lands.
My brother’s shoulders drop half an inch, the loosening of a debt carried so long it had become posture.
The visitor’s hand rests on Fury’s shoulder for exactly one moment, a commander decorating a soldier, and the snow around both of them gives up steaming.
Then his gaze lifts and finds me across the open ground, and he smiles. I understand then, Calix came to him once too. He said no too. He inclines his head to me, and I return the gesture.
Lily’s grip tightens on my coat. She sees him too. “Prophet. Who is...” The light arrives before her question can finish.
Warmth moves from the crown of my head downward. My back straightens, the ache leaves my hands, then my knees, and then every joint.
I gasp.
Lily grips my hand tighter as the last of it passes through our joined hands. She feels it pass, her warm fingers grow warmer, and the red ring around her eye fades as I watch.
Time will still find me. My hair stays silver.
The years ahead will arrive one at a time, and they will count, each one, because a gift is only a gift once it is given, and mortality was my asking price.
But the years will come gently now with no arthritis waiting in ambush.
No slow dimming of joints, eyes, and heart.
I’ll grow old beside her, at her pace, however many years we get.
Enough grace to make time kind and not one feather more.
The column holds for the space of three heartbeats.
Across the clearing, my brothers have gone still inside its glow, a bear, a hound, and all the impossible rest, firelight and gold on their faces, none of them speaking.
At the tree line, the visitor watches the light with his head tipped back, and his smile turns wistful.
It’s the smile of a man hearing a song from a home he chose to leave.
He does not bow. He was never going to bow.
But he touches two fingers to his brow, in an old salute.
Then the light withdraws the way it came, without hurry, and the night closes softly behind it.
When my eyes clear, the tree line holds only Fury and the last of his embers. The visitor is gone between one pulse of the aurora and the next, and the snow falls straight again where he stood.
“Prophet.” Lily’s voice is very quiet. Her hands have found my face, checking me the way she checks everything... pupils, pulse, and truth. “What was it?”
A dozen old names come to mind. I use none of them. “A house call,” I say, and feel my mouth remember how to smile.
She laughs, startled at first, then properly, her breath fogging between us. I haven’t heard that sound enough. I intend to change that.
My hands rise to her face, and for the first time, the rising costs nothing.
There’s no grind in the knuckles, and no pain in my wrists.
Her cheeks are cold, and her mouth is not, and the kiss we find in the middle of a battlefield is unhurried, thorough, and earned.
She makes a small sound against me, half relief and half claim.
Around the clearing, eight monsters suddenly discover urgent business with the horizon.
Rooster whistles from somewhere overhead.
Let them look.
Something else did.
It watched it, and found it good.