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Why I expected her to slow down was a slip in judgement.

The massive Tome of Wira was still tucked casually under her arm, but as I drew closer, it felt like I was being crushed from all sides. The sheer oppressive aura that filled the air around her was almost enough to deter me, if I hadn’t already been so desperate to talk to Morrette. Even so, I had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering out of fear. This had to be what it felt like to be in the presence of a god, being so brutally reminded of a mortal's inferiority. Maybe Wira herself lived in that tome.

Finally—after what seemed like an hour of running—my bare feet hit the planks of the long drawbridge. The slapping of skin against the frigid wood was enough to make her slow to a stop and glance over her shoulder.

“You look a little underdressed for the weather, little princeling.”

The pet name made me stop short, the ragged breaths seizing in my lungs. Only one person I knew called me that.

"Haron?" Her name fell from my lips in a whisper. "I can't… this isn't… You can't be Haron, right? You're the Princept Hilj, aren't you? But you're…"

A small smile pulled her full lips up, but it wasn't a happy expression. "You're right on both accounts. I was Haron Val Toric. But beyond that, I am Morrette Hilj. I know it's…" She huffed a weary sigh, turning her gaze to the still water beneath the bridge we stood on. "It's probably unbelievable to you. I'm sure you figured out my little trick when you found my old body, otherwise you wouldn't have suspected I made it here. You would have thought I was dead, no?"

My head bobbed, but my mind was whirring so fast I could hardly find the words to spit out. It was truly a miracle, seeing Morrette in the flesh. Now it made complete sense why she always called me princeling, or seemed overly reckless with how she lived as Haron. However she was able to accomplish it, she was practically immortal. To her, I was a child. And I felt even more childlike, running after her with these pants that were tattered and a shirt barely clinging onto my shoulders in shredded strips. As if I didn’t feel wildly unprepared to face off against someone who had lived over a hundred years, I couldn’t rely on a royal presence either.

Morrette waited for me to collect my thoughts, her weight leaned into a hip with the tome propped on it. The swords she’d just slaughtered a quarter of the Hollows with peeked out from over her shoulders in their sheaths. Up close, she was an exquisite play of light and dark, of masculine and feminine, in how she held herself tall and unwavering. Blood stained her skin in varying shades, flaking off in some places where it had dried. The dark blue trousers and vest hid the majority of gore not covering her skin, hugging every defined muscle along her chest and stomach. Another layer of lustrous silk—silver and bound tightly across her chest—peeked out from the vee of the stiff vest. And the very distinct Julran collar made popular during Morrette’s lifetime wrapped around her shoulders and extendedup to the bottom of a sharp, pale jaw, making her long neck appear even more so.

True, she looked exactly as she had in the portrait recreations, but at the same time was nothing like the stoic noble that stared back at the artists. The only difference between the princept standing before me and the one from my history tome was the length of her hair. It had grown from its short style after decades under whatever spell preserved that body, still long even after she’d roughly chopped it off at the hip. And those eyes—bluer than the water crashing against the cliffs—pierced straight through me as if I had been impaled by an icicle again.

Now it made sense why her eyes were two different colors as Haron. It had to be a side effect of whatever advanced necromancy she used to reanimate those people with her own soul. I could not imagine living so long outside my own body. Living borrowed lives to hide and plot, to resurrect a whole kingdom so long after its people left it in ruins. And yet it saddened me, that a part of Haron I thought beautiful was the consequence of reanimating a corpse.

“You look…” My tongue fumbled with the words I wanted to say, either from exhaustion or disbelief, I couldn’t say for sure. “You’re… my gods. Your body looks like… it’s like you haven't aged a day.”

One black eyebrow lifted on her forehead. “That’swhat you chased me down to say? Excuse me if I don’t take that as a compliment.”

Shit, shit, shit! I was fucking this all up!

“No!” I lurched forward a half-step, afraid she would turn her back and leave me here. “No, I’m just… shocked. And I’m relieved you’re alright. Watching you throw yourself into the fight like that—” Another shudder racked my body. I wrapped my arms around myself in an attempt to disguise it as a chill,instead of fear of what could have been. “Ber’s balls, Har…Morrette. I thought I was going to watch you die out there.”

This unsettled feeling roiled my stomach to the point I thought I would puke at her feet. I would be hard-pressed to fall much lower than I already was, practically sniveling and chasing after her like this. Even worse, boots thudding across the drawbridge at my back meant there was now an audience for my shameless bumbling.

“We’ve been running halfway across the kingdom looking for you, woman!” Beolf’s gruff voice carried through the biting wind. He must have been close enough to eavesdrop on my discovery of Haron being Morrette. “The least you could do is show a little bit of gratitude. We came all this way to find you. Prince Irin was worried sick that Gennel—”

“Spare me, Sir Rocks-For-Brains,” Morrette answered dryly. If I wasn’t trying to keep what little composure I had left, I would laugh at her nickname for him. It wasn’t nearly as charming as ‘little princeling.’ “I was not a frail, defenseless damsel that needed saving, and I have lived too many lifetimes as men and women to be put in one of your gender-bound boxes. If you cannot call me they or their, use my fucking title. I know it is too difficult a concept for someone of Respar to comprehend, but I am neither a man nor a woman by your standards.”

Beolf visibly gawked, clearly startled by the concept. He could do little more than sputter an apology under Morrette's narrowed glare. “Er, a-apologies, Princept Hilj. I meant no disrespect.”

I grimaced from second hand awkwardness just standing next to him. Morrette certainly had a way of cutting a man down at ten paces, something that carried over from her—their, I corrected in my head—time as Haron Val Toric.

“Also, you expect me tothankyou for coming to help me? You’re lucky I don’t take five pounds off your shoulders at theneck for showing up here!” Morrette continued. "What kind of strategist are you, just barreling up onto a battlefield like that?"

“Well, I was hoping for the bare bones of a thanks, if you must ask,” Beolf grumbled. “Glad to see you still have all those jagged edges to scrape against.”

“Apologies for disappointing you yet again. I’m sure I will lose sleep over it.” Morrette rolled their eyes and turned to walk the rest of the way to the open gate to the Clifftombs’ inner courtyard.

I could feel my opportunity slipping away with every fall of their boot against the wood. “Wait, Princept! I need to… I want to form an alliance with you! By marriage!”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized they were the wrong ones to say. Morrette froze mid-stride, shoulders tall and stiff, and only the long hair brushing their waist gave any indication they were not a statue carved from pale stone. But there was something stirring beneath the smooth surface, a monster lurking just beneath the calm waters, and I was the little duckling paddling my way across, about to be eaten.

“Wouldn’t the resurrection of your kingdom be worth the alliance?” I hated the desperation that strained my voice, but I kept going anyway. "If we are bound by marital law, Respar's resources would be yours to help rebuild Julra. And, we would be a united front against whatever could come out of the Hollows." My arms spread wide as if trying to embrace Morrette from a distance, even as their back faced me. “Please… just take a moment, not tainted by the indignation of how other men treated you. This is me, Irin, asking you to rule our countries by my side.”

Morrette’s eyes narrowed into vicious slits over a cold shoulder. It was so tempting to let my eyes drift lower to take in all of their fiery, raging glory. Gods, they would be an amazingqueen and partner. Maybe even the mother to our children. Everything I wanted was right here, just within reach.

Slowly, almost menacingly, Morrette turned on a heel to face me down again. The drawbridge may as well be the battlefield we just left behind, for how they seemed to face off against me now. Legs set shoulder-width apart, fist balled tight at their side while the other gripped the tome even harder, and a fire burning so brightly in their eyes they practically glowed. I braced myself for a through tongue-lashing, or maybe even the sharp edge of one of those swords.That'show pissed off they looked.

Finally, some other emotion beyond aggression broke through Morrette’s expression. They scoffed in equal parts disgust and disbelief. “I’m sure my value as good breeding stock is more appealing to you than that of a ruler on equal footing. You forget I have been alive longer than your infant country,child. I have seen everything Respar has to offer, and I would rather watch it burn to the ground than serve as any kind of figurehead.”

“That isnottrue,” I spat and jabbed my finger at them. “I may have had my preconceived notions from being raised as the ruler of it, but I threw those aside pretty quickly once I saw your side of the disparities. Since then, I did not think you were lesser than just because of your gender, either as Haron or Princept Morrette! I admire you for your contributions to the necromancer profession, and your wisdom, and your ability to hold your own in a battle even though you're reckless to a fault. The fact you cannot see that makes you just as blind by your own indignation as those narrow-minded men you compare me to! How is that fair? Am I not allowed to grow and change as a person?”