Chapter Nine
Some loves outlive the blade and grave
But the Stars still bind what death can’t save
He looks like a man who has already decided how this ends.
Not defeated—accepting. And the realization turns her gut.
Elyssara doesn’t move. She only stands over Kael’s frame sprawled on the floor next to a stack of dusty books. She reads the spines. Curses. Divine Afflictions. Magical Possession.
Dread settles into her bones.
“El—” Kael starts, but he cuts himself off when Elyssara’s hand snaps up.
“I said…” she begins, voice too calm to be trusted, “why didn’t you tell me something was wrong?”
He drops his head back, looking up to the Stars for guidance, and blows out a long, heavy breath. Maybe he knows the Stars will never answer. They never have before.
“Because… I didn’t want to concern you. I didn’t want to hurt you,” he answers, voice strained and real.
And for an instant, churning black mixes with the ocean-lightning of his eyes. A tempest of warring elements.
“You didn’t want to hurt me?” she snaps, incredulous.
She scoffs, grabbing her temples as if his words physically pain her.
“So instead of hurting me, you just… cast me aside? Shut me out? Silence our Starbound tether? Stop touching me? Stop loving me?” Her voice breaks, fracturing in the same way her heart already has. “We are far beyond hurt, Kael.”
Kael drags himself to his feet, face twisting with repulsion.
His eyes are a whirling storm of clashing blacks, blues, and silvers, and they fix on Elyssara like a promise.
“Stop loving you? Elyssara, I crave you like the breath in my lungs. Like the blood in my veins. Like fucking survival itself!”
His voice echoes through the high ceiling of the library, muffled only slightly by the thick dust in this forgotten corner, but he doesn’t soften.
But her rage, persistent as it is, doesn’t cower. It rises to meet the moment like a beast waiting to be unleashed from its cage.
“And yet, you’ll shut me out? Leave me to feel the loss of you in every fiber of my being?
Leave me at the perimeter of yourself? Leave me to wonder what in the fucking Stars could make me so unlovable that you would recoil from my very touch?
All without a single word!” She rasps the words like a curse.
A growl rips from his throat. Animal, savage, instinctive.
But Elyssara steps closer. Unafraid. Unwilling to concede. She bares her teeth.
“I have made a home in every darkness, Kael Thorne. I will make one here with you, too.” Her words rip the tension like a knife through parchment.
Kael lets out a breath, closing his eyes, drinking her words like absolution. Like the sound of her loyalty is his antidote.
Elyssara leans in a little more, hungry for understanding. For him.
“I absorbed a fragment of the Decay, my love. It has burrowed into my veins, my marrow, my mind. It… tries to control me. To direct me toward destruction. Violence. Death.” He looses the explanation and his shoulders drop. Instantly soothed by his own admission.
He absorbed the Decay.
Elyssara’s skin breaks out in gooseflesh. Unsettled. Unnerved by the truth.
She thought it was grief that leashed him. Guilt that he could not save Nalya. Not this. Not the Decay. Not something that had already taken so much from them.
Maldrak’s words hit her like a warhammer.
This isn’t the end. Magic can’t be destroyed, it just finds somewhere else to exist.
The words crawl through her veins like a parasite—insidious and undeniable.
“Death said I am the Endbringer. Perhaps this is what he meant. I would call forward my own end if it meant letting you live,” Kael breathes. “But our fates are woven together. My death is yours.” The words slip from his lips like an admission drudged up from the depths of him.
Not just bound in love, but in consequence.
Fuck.
Emotion snags in his throat, but he forces the words out.
“I will be your end.”
She recoils—not from him, but from the truth of it. Elyssara closes the gap between them, tilting her head back to look at him.
Belly to belly.
Heart to heart.
Mind to mind.
Starbound to Starbound.
“No. You are my Sky—constant, endless, unyielding. You will endure this until I can find you in the dark. Just as you did for me.” The first tear falls, then another, until they run freely down her cheeks.
A snaking, onyx vein pulses in Kael’s neck, lashing and fighting to burrow deeper.
Kael shakes his head.
“Our lives are bound, El. But we will not go to the same place in the After. There is no redemption for me. But you? You will know peace.”
Elyssara lifts her hand, placing it over the pulsing vein, cupping his neck with tenderness, as if she can stop fate with her bare hands.
And it… recedes.
“You are my peace,” she promises, threading her hands through his hair.
He huffs a pained laugh. “That will end.”
“You found me in the dark, Kael. You reached me when I was unreachable. When you are lost within yourself, I will reach for you until I find you again,” she breathes, pressing her forehead to his, and dragging her hands through his stubble.
“There is no cure, my love. I’ve been in this library all day. I am destined to a fate of madness, violence, death. I beg you—lock me up in the vaults and let me go,” he pleads, but he leans into her, desperate, aching for her touch.
“Never,” she promises. “You should know better than to wield fate like a weapon, Kael. I will bring the fates to their fucking knees before I let them take you from me.”
Kael huffs an affectionate laugh into her forehead. “I know. I don’t think the fates know it yet, but they are most definitely under your instruction.”
Elyssara quirks a smile at Kael’s jest—a glimpse of her Starbound peeking through the clouds of this infestation.
But levity rarely lasts long under the heaviness of reality.
Her eyes find his—solemn, desperate, reaching. “Will you keep loving me?”
Kael’s brows furrow in an instant, and he shakes his head in disbelief.
“I will love you even when my bones have long since gone to dust, Elyssara. Even when this rot claims me, I will always—always—love you.” He pauses, soaking up the full depth of her touch. “From now until the Stars claim me.”
Elyssara chokes on a sob. “In this life and the next.”
Kael pulls her in, wrapping her in his embrace.
Muffled in the nook of her Starbound’s arms, Elyssara murmurs, “But you’d be a fucking fool to think I’d give up just because something seems impossible. It’s never stopped me before.”
Kael laughs. A rich, gravelly chuckle that warms her chest like strong liquor. She’s never heard a more beautiful sound.
“I know,” he murmurs, pressing the words into the cascading waves of her auburn hair. “There is no stronger force than your will, my love. You could make the Stars themselves kiss your feet. I’m sure of it.”
Elyssara pulls back, emerald-green eyes opening vibrantly for the first time in weeks.
“The sun is setting, my Sky. Will you hold me until we have to leave?” Desperation creeps into her tone.
A need for him. His presence. Because with the absence of the tether since the Battle of Kryntar, Elyssara has felt starved, desolate.
“It would be my honor, my light,” he vows.
And once again, his eyes are made of the ocean and lightning—the tempest swallowed by something greater.