Epilogue
Three years later…
An orange sun hung low over the streets of Viali, casting long shadows across the wide thoroughfare. Traffic had thinned as the dinner hour approached, and Xavi was doing his utmost not to glare at the few remaining pedestrians hurrying past the university gates.
He still hadn’t quite adjusted to the sheer, overwhelming number of bodies that filled the streets.
Even in his human guise, his unease with crowds seemed to cause other humans to find him alarming, though Ryn claimed he was doing better.
Better at smiling, better at relaxing, better at not lurking, looming, or terrifying strangers with a single glance.
But if Ryn did not emerge from those brick walls within the next handful of seconds, all of that was about to change. He would be shifting into the largest, most destructive monster he could think of and charging the gates. Tearing the university apart brick by brick until he found her.
She’d been in there since sunrise. Defending her dissertation, she called it. And no matter how many times she had assured him that no one would actually be attacking her, his instincts still insisted that she might be in danger.
Pushing away from the wall where he’d been leaning in his best attempt to simulate nonchalance, he strode towards the entrance, brows lowered, preparing to change form…
A slender figure in black robes came flying through the open gates, hair askew as she came to a stop before him and clapped her hands over her mouth.
Her eyes squeezed shut, and she bounced on her toes as incoherent squeals of joy emerged from behind her ink-stained fingers.
Xavi bit back a smile, unable to resist the opportunity to tease her.
“You appear… pleased. Does this mean they’ve agreed to let me kidnap that truld Hapscombe and drop him into kraken-infested waters?”
Ryn shook with laughter, but did not seem ready to trust herself with words.
“I’m not sure what other news could be quite as joyful, unless you mean to say that…”
She nodded, eyes brightening with happy tears. “Yes.”
“They’ve accepted your work.”
“Yes.”
“You are now a…”
She twirled in a circle, and the ends of her new red stole flared out around her. “I’m a professor, Xavi.” Her smile was bright enough to outshine the sun. “I’m finally a professor.”
He did not care that they stood in the middle of the open gates, or that a cluster of soberly garbed scholars on their way home for the night were eyeing them askance.
Xavi lifted his wife off the cobblestones and enveloped her in a rib-crushing embrace as she flung her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder.
“I finally did it.” She sounded rather stunned by her own accomplishment. “I proved that my father was not a liar. They’ve agreed to grant him a posthumous degree. And”—she pulled back to beam at him—“granted my request for a field study!”
That might be his favorite news of all. To be away from the city, just the two of them…
But he set her back on her feet with an exaggerated frown. “Where are we going?”
“Well, obviously, I was going to ask you, but there are these recently discovered ruins in Katal that no one has had the opportunity to study yet because travel is so difficult. But from the drawings, I believe they may be the best preserved example of an early fae community that we’ve ever seen, and because it’s in a hot, dry climate, there’s a chance we may even find intact writings or art! ”
Xavi somehow kept his expression neutral. “And you’re saying you wish to go there. To Katal. And leave all this”—he waved at the street and the city around them—“noise and bustle and intoxicating perfume behind?”
Ryn rolled her eyes and smacked him in the chest. “Don’t think I don’t know how much you’d rather be literally anywhere else other than here.”
He laughed, took her hand, and stepped out into the street, tugging her after him. “There is only one place in this world that I wish to be, and that is wherever you are. Of course we will go to Katal.”
“Then…” She bit her lip and looked up at him through her lashes. “Would you mind terribly if we stopped by to visit my family on the way?”
“So they can see for themselves that I have neither eaten you nor turned you into a salamander with my unspeakable powers?”
“Yes, those things, but also…”
Xavi turned to watch the emotions playing out across her bright, beautiful face.
Still as obvious as ever. No hiding, no pretense, no polite mask.
Only simple joy and curiosity—shadowed now by hints of sorrow, but it was those shadows that gave life depth and meaning.
That made her joy shine all the brighter.
“I want them to love you as much as I do,” she confessed. “I want them to know that you truly do make me happy, and that this life we have is the most perfect that I can imagine.”
“Then we will go and tell them so.”
“I promise I won’t let them hurt you,” she said solemnly.
“And I promise not to maim anyone you care about.”
“You must also promise not to shift into a gryphon and hunt Ronal Chomley through the garden maze until he cries like a baby.”
“That is a promise I shall most certainly never make in this lifetime.”
“Xavi!”
He grinned.
“If you do any such thing, I swear I will call you Precious Fluff in front of my mother and my brother.”
He merely raised an eyebrow. “This coming from the woman who goes by Tiddlywinks.”
Her adorable glare was about as punishing as her attempts to punch him.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said abruptly. “If there’s nowhere else you need to be.”
Ryn smiled up at him and leaned closer to his side. “Tonight I’m just happy. Bring on your surprises.”
He tugged her after him towards the waterfront, and as they strolled past the docks, a crew of sailors began disembarking from a merchant ship for an evening in port.
The dying sun glinted off the long, pale-gold hair of a man with a pack slung over his back, and Xavi paused to stare for a moment, heart pounding as he searched the man’s face for any hint of recognition.
But the human simply passed on by without a word and melted into the crowd. Just as they always did.
From time to time over the past three years he’d caught glimpses of others—a hunting dog with wise golden eyes, a sea-bird with brilliant golden feathers, or some other creature that stopped his breath with reminders of the friend and brother he had lost.
None of them were Kel. He knew that, and yet some part of him wanted to believe that his king still lived. That he’d somehow escaped the mountain’s collapse.
Ryn squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I know you miss him.”
“Yes,” he acknowledged, continuing down the waterfront towards the warehouses that marked the harbor’s edge. “But I keep reminding myself that wherever he is, he is finally free. He defeated his greatest enemy and protected his people one last time. And if he is out there somewhere…”
He turned one last corner, and their path ended behind the largest warehouse in all of Viali—in a dark alley that opened towards the sea.
“Uh, Xavi, what does this rather terrifying corner of the city have to do with your surprise?”
He did not answer with words, but dropped her hand and shifted into the enormous white gryphon she’d first seen the day that they met.
“Xavi! You can’t let anyone see you. They’ll…”
He snagged the back of her robes in his beak, tossed her onto his back, and leaped into the air.
She shrieked and grabbed at his feathers as he rose higher and higher, arrowing away from the pier before banking to the left along the coast. The setting sun turned the sky to flaming orange and pink as he flew on, descending at last only when they reached a small sheltered cove with a tiny sandy beach.
He landed, and Ryn tumbled off his back into the sand with a groan.
“Saints, Xavi, you know I love flying, but what if someone had seen you?”
“Then they are now convinced it was nothing but a dream,” he said, once he’d shifted—not to his human shape, but to his true form—and sat beside her. “I found this beach while I was exploring a few weeks ago and wanted to bring you here.”
He expected her to smile or leap to her feet to examine every sandy corner, but instead she bit her lip again, lying back to stare up at the sky with a troubled look.
“What is it?”
“Nothing but a dream,” she murmured softly before turning her head to look at him.
“I dreamed about Kel a few days ago. I didn’t want to tell you because…
Well, sometimes dreams are just dreams, and even when I’m trying to pay attention, I’m not that good at knowing how to tell the difference yet.
But it felt so real. And he seemed happy.
I just… I wasn’t sure if you would want to know that or not, but I felt like I needed to say it. ”
Xavi leaned back to lie beside her in the sand, feeling oddly as if a weight had been lifted from his chest. “No matter where he is, whether we see him again someday or not, he is at peace.”
“And,” Ryn said, turning on her side to face him, “I believe he would want you to be at peace as well.”
“I could not be more so,” he said earnestly, rising to one elbow to look down on the face he loved more than any he’d known in all his long existence.
“Those centuries I was trapped within the curse felt like a nightmare I could not wait to wake from, even if the only way to awaken was death. I only wished that story to end. And now…” He bent down to press a kiss to her forehead.
“I cannot wait for this one to be written. I count myself impossibly fortunate to have met you, and would…”
Small, sandy fingers suddenly covered his mouth.
“Don’t say you would gladly go through it all again in order to meet me,” she said quietly.
“If you say that, I will cry, and I don’t want to cry on a day this happy.
No one should ever suffer as you did, and I will stab anyone who tries to hurt you again. ”
“My bloodthirsty scholar.” Xavi kissed the tip of her nose. “Just be sure to sharpen your pencils first. Better chance of actually drawing blood.”
She scowled as fiercely and adorably as only Ryn could, and then he could hold back no longer, but kissed her for real, as her golden hair mingled with the golden sand, and the last rays of the sun painted their sheltered cove with a glorious riot of color as it sank beneath the waves.
But even in darkness, his world was still bright, because the only sun he needed was right there in his arms. The light that had dispelled the mist, driven back the shadows, and illuminated his heart.
She was his ending, his beginning, and all the best stories in between, and he could not wait to face the future by her side.