Chapter Twenty-One #2
A laugh leaves him, raspy and full of whispered relief and tired regrets. “We’re alive, Anna. I may no longer have forever with you, but the time we do have… it’s enough.”
Hesitantly, Anna relents and lets him dig amongst the ashes in peace. As she helps Silas and Kaia prepare dinner, she tries not to think of the heaviness in the words he left unsaid.
It has to be.
He’s covered in ash and soot when he finally joins them.
It’s raining, the warm air humid as they huddle beneath a rocky overhang.
Water drips down his jaw, his dark blonde hair dark with it.
There’s a reprimand on her tongue, a reminder that whatever he’s searching for can’t be worth the time and energy.
Then he holds out his hand, a ring she’d recognize anywhere nestled in his muddy palm.
The one made of him. The one made for her.
He slips it onto the ring finger of her left hand, and Anna chokes back a watery laugh as she curls it lovingly against her chest.
Khiran doesn’t need his magic to see her, but it’s a nice reminder all the same. Time changes everything, but the ring that once tied them together still fits like it was made for her.
Together is a promise that needs no magic to bind it.
It takes days to climb their way out of Edun’s depths. Anna’s not sure if they would have made it at all if it weren’t for Malik and his knowledge of every cavern and limestone ledge. After thousands of years, the sinkhole was as much his home as it was his cage.
It isn’t until they leave it behind them that Anna realizes they are as lost as she is.
The Tree’s magic was a strange thing. None of them had ever bothered to learn where it stood in reference to the rest of the world.
It had its own magnetic pull, its own magic that led each of them there in different ways.
The desire to be under its branches had always been enough to gain entry from anywhere.
So when they make their way down the mountain and finally stumble on a rural Mandarin speaking village, it comes as news to all of them that the tree of legend actually hailed from the same region that told stories of gods and peaches that grant immortality.
They’re in the Guangxi region of southern China, surrounded by rivers banked by lush forests and towering karst formations that rise from the earth like slumbering stone giants.
Without money, it takes five days for them to travel to one of Khiran’s hideaways in a small coastal town south of Nanning. The only thing they have of value is the golden hoops lining Cassius’ ears. It’s at least enough to trade for food and transportation part of the way.
To Anna’s immense relief, the hideaway is stocked immensely better than the one in Sweden had been.
Instead of a single tin of almond cookies, they find enough food to comfortably share.
They’re all in need of it. They are haggard and travel worn in ways that only mortality can bring.
Anna had taken for granted the way her feet ached but never blistered; the way she felt the fatigue of a journey but not the bone deep throbbing of her muscles protesting every step.
She knows it’s the same for the rest of them, too.
Malik had whined and whimpered, tears stubbornly clinging to his cheeks, until they took turns carrying him on some of the longer stretches.
Cassius had grumbled about it incessantly, but he let the boy curl against his back despite looking as haggard as the rest of them.
Anna suspects it was only watching Khiran stumble, his sallow face twisted into a grimace, when he had carried Malik the time before that prompted the offer.
They are all suffering under the constraints of their mortality, but Khiran seems to bear a weight that they don’t.
He doesn’t utter a single complaint, but Anna can see the shakiness in his steps—can see the way his complexion pales with pain.
And Anna knows, without him breathing a word, that he isn’t fit to travel on foot.
It is with that thought, that fear, that she finds herself flooded with relief when Khiran pulls an old tin hidden beneath the floorboards and filled with small gold bars.
It’s enough to send them all wherever they wish to go, in comfort.
Cassius and Silas leave two days later, but not before the blonde scribbles an address on a piece of paper and folds it into her palm.
It’s in Istanbul—the home she and Khiran had taken shelter in those dark days after Eira’s death.
Silas makes her promise to write, his smile warm and dimpling in the corners when he reminds her that they’ve been friends too long to let something like mortality come between them.
His arms are warm when he hugs her goodbye. Anna finds herself blinking back tears. Strange how a farewell can hurt so much when forever is no longer promised.
Cassius’ grin is crooked and teasing as he instructs her to make sure his ‘brother’ keeps in touch, but there’s a storm darkening his blue eyes that tells her more than he can in words.
He’s worried about Khiran, too.
Kaia fusses over him as much as she does Malik, mothering them both in equal measure.
She has already told them she plans to stay.
She likes the little house—likes that it’s close enough for her to hear the crashing of the waves from the open window.
Between the roof over their heads and the gold, they can live a modest life and give Malik the chance to grow into a person of his own making.
In the end, there is never really a question about where Khiran and Anna will go. In the safety of her pocket, she wraps her scarred fingers around the pit. She can think of no better place to plant it than the home—the roots—she’d left behind.
It turns out Khiran hates flying almost as much as he hates traveling by boat.
His hands clutch the armrests, knuckles white. “Anna?” Her name slips between his teeth, the muscle in his jaw spasming. “This is worse.”
“Worse than what?”
“Anything. Everything. I hate it.”
Carefully, she coaxes his grip from the armrest and threads his fingers through her own.
His grip borders on painful, her fingertips prickling with the beginning signs of numbness.
She’s glad he sits on her left—her right hand is healing, but the burns are still tender.
“It’s the fastest way,” she murmurs, studying his face closely. “Do you feel sick?”
“What I feel is terrified,” he grumbles, a growl in his voice. “We’re flying in a tin can.”
Anna turns to the window, tracing the shapes of the clouds they’re flying over. “You’re concentrating on the wrong thing.”
A moment of pause, filled by the idle chatter of the other passengers and the hum of the engines, before he gives. “What should I be concentrating on?”
Sometimes, Anna still catches herself expecting one face but finding another.
Fleeting moments where she has to remind herself that there are no flecks of blue or green to be found in his irises, no dark curls of hair to twist around her fingers.
Habits, she finds, are hard to change when they’ve had centuries to instill them.
She finds herself thankful for all those years, all those different forms, he’d once visited her in.
Thankful for having already learned to recognize him no matter the face he wore.
Anna squeezes his hand, her smile soft. “That we’re flying.”
When they finally turn the corner and see their pale yellow cottage off the California coast, Anna is surprised to find it in far better condition than she expected.
The garden is in full bloom, tended and cared for.
In the apiary, there are significantly fewer hives, but she spots at least four.
The siding is still yellow, but the hue is just a touch brighter than she remembers it—indicative of new paint.
Someone is living here.
Her heart drops, thinking they’ve journeyed across the world for a home that is no longer theirs to claim.
She wonders if they’ve kept the little treasures she’s painted—the vines and flowers caressing the trim like a mother.
Then the front door opens. A middle-aged man, familiar but not, pauses in the threshold.
It’s only when he smiles that Anna recognizes him.
“Took you long enough,” he says. The years have added depth to his voice, sand shifting beneath the tide. There are wrinkles around his eyes, around his mouth, that she doesn’t recognize—spoils of a life lived well. A life with laughter.
His name is a memory on her tongue, sweet and nostalgic. “Jiro?”
Maybe it’s the question in her voice or the trembling beginnings of a smile, but his expression softens.
“You told me once, that this place was your first home.” There are so many missed years in his gaze, Anna only recognizes the shadow of who he was before—a boy angry at the world that turned its back on him.
He pats the porch rail fondly, like a friend. “I knew you’d come back.”
His eyes move to Khiran, a shadow of confusion passing over his face. It’s not until his gaze falls to their laced fingers that he understands. His expression softens into something gentle, as if he can read all their scars in the gaunt lines of Khiran’s face.
Her throat tightens, tears threatening to spill. “This whole time?” she asks, voice as weak as her heart. She repeats it, because it sounds as wonderfully impossible as it feels. “You stayed this whole time?”
He smiles, and it’s so soft and warm—so at odds with her memory of him. No longer is he a lanky teenager with so much hurt it soured into rage. The man before her is content. Happy. “Welcome home.”