Wings
COLSAR
The doors stood closed.
Great panels of ivory wood rose above Colsar as the guards dragged him down the corridor, their hands locked beneath his arms while his boots scraped helplessly across the polished floor.
Fever blurred the edges of the world, bending light into pale halos and stretching sound into strange echoes, yet the murmur drifting from beyond those doors carried through the haze with cruel clarity.
The throne room.
Asharin might be inside.
The guards spoke in urgent tones about the bites along his ribs, about sickness spreading through his blood, about taking him below the palace before the poison had time to infect anyone else.
Their words barely reached him. None of it mattered beside the single thought pounding through what remained of his strength.
If they took him below before she saw him, she would never know he had come.
Colsar twisted violently, wrenching one arm free from the guard gripping him. The motion tore open wounds that had barely begun to close, pain spreading through his side, yet the sudden movement carried him forward. A shout rose behind him as he lurched toward the towering doors.
They remained closed. The panels rose before him like the final barrier placed between him and the promise that had carried him across mountains and frozen valleys.
He gathered what little strength remained in his body and drove himself forward.
The impact rolled through the corridor. The doors gave way. The panels swung inward with a violent crash that spread through the vast chamber beyond and silenced every voice inside it.
Colsar staggered across the threshold.
Sunlight flooded the vast chamber, pouring through towering windows until the marble floor gleamed like pale water. Courtiers stood frozen throughout the hall, their attention snapping toward the blood-covered stranger who had just forced his way into their court.
Colsar saw none of them.
At the far end of the chamber Asharin rose from the throne.
White and gold silk moved around her as she descended the steps, sunlight catching in the bright fall of her golden hair. Fine chains threaded with rubies traced across her face, the delicate chains resting against her skin as she moved.
Colsar stared. For months, her face had been the only thing that kept him moving.
She stared back, her eyes glistening.
Seeing her like this made something in him falter. Beautiful. The word left him in a breath he barely heard.
The guards rushed in behind him.
Hands seized his shoulders again as alarm rippled through the chamber.
“He’s been bitten.”
“Your Majesty, you must keep your distance.”
Colsar resisted them with the last stubborn strength left in his body, forcing the words through his throat before they could drag him away.
“I need… the princess.”
Asharin had stopped halfway across the hall. The distance between them felt too far. In that pause a single thought moved through Colsar’s mind.
What if she no longer wanted him?
The journey had taken months. The endless fields of undead had kept him from her far longer than he ever intended.
If she looked at him now and saw only the man who had failed to return in time—
The idea tightened painfully inside him.
“I came,” he said.
Asharin’s expression broke.
Light burst outward from her in a brilliant surge.
Her magic filled the throne room in a sweeping wave that pushed the gathered court backward.
Guards staggered away from the center of the hall while nobles cried out in startled confusion as the invisible force cleared the space around the stranger who had collapsed upon the marble floor.
Colsar felt warmth brush across his skin.
His strength failed completely. The floor rose up beneath him.
Asharin reached him almost immediately. She dropped to her knees beside him with a breath that trembled between relief and disbelief, her gown spreading across the marble as her hands came to his face with desperate tenderness.
“Colsar.”
His name left her lips as though it had lived there for months waiting to be spoken.
He forced his eyes open. His eyes moved slowly over her. The crown. The gold-threaded gown. The light still faintly shimmering in the air around her.
“You look…” His voice barely formed the words. “…like something my mind invented.”
Asharin let out a quiet breath that might have been a laugh if it were not tangled with tears.
“I am very real.”
Her hand trembled slightly where it rested against his cheek.
Emotion moved through her with a fragile intensity as she leaned down to him, lowering her forehead until it rested against his, as though the simple contact grounded them both after everything that had nearly torn them apart.
“You crossed the world.”
“Tried to.”
A quiet, trembling laugh escaped her through tears, the sound carrying disbelief and relief in equal measure. She searched his face, still struggling to reconcile the man before her with the impossible distance he had crossed to reach her.
“I love you,” she said softly.
The words moved through him, warm and disorienting after months of cold.
“Love you,” he said.
The vast hall surrounding them receded from his awareness until the shouts of guards and the uneasy murmuring of the court felt distant and hollow, as though the entire kingdom had been pushed to the edges of the moment while the world narrowed to the woman kneeling beside him.
His attention drifted to the white silk of her gown resting near his temple.
At first he did not understand what he was seeing.
The shape pressed close enough that he could feel its warmth against his temple.
Then the full, undeniable curve beneath the silk drew his focus upward, and realization followed.
Slowly, painfully, his eyes lifted back to her face.
Asharin watched him quietly, her hand resting against the soft rise beneath the fabric as though guarding something precious. Tears slid down her cheeks even as she smiled. “Yes,” she whispered softly.
The word answered the question he had not yet managed to ask.
For a long moment he simply looked at her. A laugh broke from him then. Half hysterical, half disbelieving. It turned into a cough that rattled painfully through his chest.
“You’re serious,” he rasped.
“Mine,” he breathed, his hand tightening over her stomach.
“Yours.” Asharin smiled through the tears finally slipping down her cheeks.
The long journey flashed through his memory in fragments. Frozen valleys, endless marches through the dead, nights when the cold pressed so deeply into his bones that he wondered whether he would ever see another sunrise.
Yet every mile had carried him toward this moment.
Toward her. Toward the life she now carried.
With visible effort he lifted his hand and placed it over hers, his palm resting against the curve of her stomach.
Warmth greeted him there, living and undeniable, and something deep within his chest shifted in response, filling the hollow ache left by cold and distance with a quiet wonder.
“I told you, we are not broken,” Asharin whispered, tears slipping down her cheeks.
“We’re matched,” he murmured.
She nodded, her fingers tightening beneath his hand.
She leaned down and kissed his forehead, then pressed his hand more firmly against her stomach. “I told you I would give you everything.”
For several long seconds he simply looked at her, committing the sight to memory with a reverence he had never felt for any throne or title: the brightness of her golden hair, the softness of her smile, the impossible truth that she had survived the cruelty of the world and still remained here beside him.
“Wings,” he whispered.
Darkness closed over his vision, gentle now, because the only thing that had ever mattered was finally within reach.
He had found her.