70. Cassiel
It takes me a few days to go through all of Wren’s belongings. I take my time. I sleep in her bed. Some things I judge to be of little importance, and dispose of those as I see fit. Her older clothes I donate, a few of her dresses I donate to Ru, who I know will make use of them.
I pack up everything else and take them to my apartment.
It might seem foolish to keep them, unhealthy even, as if I expect her to come back, but I can’t help it.
I see her in her polished weapons, in her clothes, in her engraved greaves and little polished rocks.
There’s an old doll in one of her trunks worn smooth with loving fingertips.
How could I get rid of anything she’d loved so tenderly?
After Wren’s death, Hyacinth composed a ballad in her honour. I gave him my full permission, but I don’t hear it until well over a year has passed since its completion. It’s too raw, to begin with, and I can’t bring myself to.
But one evening, when he and Evander are visiting, he stands near the fire and begins to play on the lute Evander gifted him shortly after the end of the war.
It’s a beautiful song, soft and careful, with a melody that feels like memory.
He sings of a girl made of fire and stars. Of wings that lit the sky. Of a miracle given freely, without thought for the cost.
Of a love that outlived even that.
I don’t move while he sings. I don’t even think I breathe.
By the end, the whole place is silent, listening in rapt attention.
I whistle for Wren. I’m here, I’m here, and swear I almost hear her whistling back.
We call it the Wrenwood with very little discussion.
When the settlement is at last completed, some two years after the end of the war, some leave as predicted.
Marnie and Tob stay, together with a handful of others from Brindlewick, and Evander and Hyacinth visit so often it almost feels like they live here too.
Dain, of course, has an apartment right next to mine, which Zephyr practically lives in too.
I suspect, at some point, he will forsake the Moonhollow altogether.
A few others have joined us, and more follow in time, including a human-fey couple who had been hiding in the woods for the last five years, together with their half-blood child.
Although the fey father could conceal his identity, the little boy had trouble shifting, and they were forced to go into hiding to protect their family.
Now, though, they live freely and openly. The little boy—a wolf shifter—runs around with baby Eva on his back. The fey man, a tailor, weaves magic into fabric, and sells his wares in every market he can reach.
How proud Wren would be to see this. How proud her parents would be too, how happy.
I find it hard not to think of the children we might have had, a child with her fire and my steadiness—Fates, what a combination that would have been. Something bright and stubborn and impossible to contain.
I can almost hear her laughing about it.
Almost.
My chest tightens. It is hard not to miss her and the what might-have-beens, but I take comfort in the families that do get to flourish here, the friends that I have, the family that remains and continues to grow.
Evander is going to marry Hyacinth, soon.
One day, Ru might decide to start a family of her own.
I know I could have children of my own if I wanted to, but I don’t have that much interest in having children if I don’t get to raise them with Wren.
I know, with a clarity that doesn’t hurt as much as it used to, that it wouldn’t be fair to be with someone else, to ask someone to stand in the shadow of something they can never be. To give them a half-life, half-love, measured against a ghost.
No. I won’t do that to anyone. The thought settles without bitterness.
I may not ever experience romantic love again, but that doesn’t mean I have nothing.
It just means I have something else.
I paint and build and grow and change. My hair becomes wilder, my palms calloused, my eyesight not as noticeably sharp as it was before. I use spectacles for reading and painting. I remain transfixed by light.
I take part in fey festivals, including the one dedicated to the darkness.
When it is over, I take my single candle back to my rooms, set it by my windowsill, and stare at it until it wears away to nothing and darkness eclipses me once more.
I sit in my seat, and stare at the one opposite, faintly outlined in the pale moonlight.
It’s Wren’s chair, though she’s never sat in it. It’s hers nonetheless.
Like my heart is still.
I close my eyes, and imagine her next to me. I speak of the day, of the ceremony I first learned from her, of my appreciation of the dark.
It makes it easier to imagine her beside me.
I talk of other things. Evander and Hyacinth’s wedding. Of baby Eva’s first word. Of Runara’s latest rune mastery.
“They call her ‘the Rune Warrior’,” I tell her. “You’d be proud of her, Wren. You might even be proud of me.”
I wait for something to answer, but, as usual, nothing does.
“I live a good life,” I tell her eventually. “I’m even happy, some of the time.”
Her reply is silent, but I hear it nonetheless.
“I’d be happier with you, though. But then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
The little rituals keep her close to me, the conversations too, and I have to speak to her and imagine her beside me, because otherwise my gaze circles to her star, and the vast, uncrossable distance between us becomes too much to bear.
One day, the space between us will narrow to non-existence. The separation is not forever. One day, we will be dust again together, and there will be no partings after that. Our happy ever after has not vanished entirely from this world. It is merely delayed.
And I shall be patient. I shall be happy.
When we meet again, I want her to be proud of me.
I stand at the edge of Wrenwood as the sun dips low, casting everything in gold.
Children run past me—human, fey, something in between.
Laughing. Arguing. Playing some game that makes no sense when you’re an adult.
Robin is part of it. Someone calls out across the square.
Someone else answers. A few folks sit drinking Magda’s moonberry mead.
Zephyr is healing the blacksmith’s burn.
Dain is attempting to pipe out Hyacinth’s ballad and is failing hilariously.
It’s messy and loud and imperfect and brilliant.
I fold my arms loosely, watching it all.
“This would have made you insufferably pleased,” I murmur under my breath.
This is the place Wren searched for, that she dreamed of. A place she could have belonged, that never asked her to be too less or too much, that didn’t ask her to choose.
My jaw tightens slightly. Dain sees me pouting, and offers me a drink. I decline, heading back to my apartments. I cross to the box on my desk the way I often do—out of habit more than anything else. Not every day anymore, but often enough that it’s become something like a ritual.
I open the lid, and stop.
The feather is gone.
For a second, I don’t understand what I’m looking at. My mind tries to force it into something familiar, something that makes sense.
But it doesn’t.
Because where the feather should be… there’s an egg.
It’s small and pale, with faint speckles scattered across its surface like fragments of a night sky.
I stare at it before reaching out tentatively, like it might vanish if I move too quickly.
“What—” My voice falters. I clear my throat. “What are you?”
I let out a quiet breath, dragging a hand over my face.
It could be anything. Magic. An ill-thought prank. Or something far more mundane—a bird, confused by the feather, building a nest where it shouldn’t have.
Although how a bird would have opened the lid…
I wonder…
Not wanting to give too much weight to it, I move it somewhere safer and warmer, hoping that a mother bird might return for it… and praying that they won’t. That this means something.
An awful, dangerous kind of hope flares in my chest.
I don’t tell anyone about the egg. It feels too… fragile, too easily broken by being spoken aloud. Instead, I carry on. I build. I work. I paint.
And I whistle.
I’m here, I’m here.
Where are you, where are you?
Days pass, weeks follow. An entire season comes and goes.
The egg doesn’t change. Or if it does, it’s too subtle for me to see.
I swear some nights that I can feel something moving inside it, but I’ve never heard of any egg taking this long to hatch.
I tell myself that it’s a dud, that I’m making it up…
but hopelessness refuses to sink its teeth into me this time.
I check it every morning. Every night. It becomes part of the rhythm of my life, like breathing.
Like missing her.
I’m outside conducting an impromptu fencing lesson when the crack sounds, loud as thunder. Light rays from my windows. I drop my sword and race up the stairs, oblivious to Dain’s calls.
I don’t even remember crossing the distance—only that suddenly I’m there, hands braced on the surface where I left it, breath caught somewhere between panic and something I don’t dare name.
The egg has split, a thin fracture running along its side.
My pulse pounds.
“No—no, wait—”
It’s open. Empty. There’s nothing inside. No bird. No creature. No sign that anything was ever there at all.
My chest tightens painfully.
“No,” I whisper.
It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. I reach for it, like I might find something hidden in the broken shell—
And then I stop.
Someone is behind me. Someone warm, who smells faintly of moonberries and flowers.
My entire being freezes, the universe narrowing to a single point.
I don’t turn around.
I can’t.
Because I know who I want it to be, and I know what it will do to me if it isn’t.
My breath comes shallow and slow. The room fills with the scent of rock cress, warm and earthen.
My eyes sting. No. No, I’m not doing this. I’m not imagining her into existence just to lose her again. I squeeze my eyes shut, hands trembling at my sides.
Don’t turn.
Don’t look.
Don’t break this.
For the longest time, I just stand there, caught between hope and terror, unable to move in either direction.
But I have to do something. I have to know.
So I whistle like I’ve done a thousand times before.
Where are you?
Silence follows, just long enough to make my chest ache.
Until another whistle sounds behind me.
I’m here.
My breath catches. Slowly, I open my eyes and turn towards the sound.
She’s there, standing just a few steps away, whole and unbroken, skin flawless, bones no longer on display. Her hair hangs dark and shining all the way down her back, her eyes are bright, and she’s wearing a gown that shifts like starlight.
She’s here, she’s here, she’s here.
For a second, I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t even think. I’m too terrified that, if I do, she’ll disappear again and be gone forever.
She meets my gaze, face breaking into a smile. She holds out her arms.
“Cassiel,” she whispers.
My hands reach for her before I can stop them, before I can think better of it, before I can remember what happened last time—
But this time…
She doesn’t burn. She doesn’t break. She’s solid and warm and real and here and mine.
A sound tears out of me—something between a laugh and a sob—as I pull her into me, holding her like I’m afraid the world might try to take her again.
She holds on just as tightly.
“I’m back,” she tells me, breath brushing my neck. “I’m home.”