Page 63

Chapter 60

IRIS

Inhale. Exhale.

In. Out.

Don’t give in to it.

The room stopped spinning—for now. I clenched and released my fists. Tapped the pad of each finger against my thumb twice, then traced the same pattern up my arm. Again, this time with a squeeze up the length of each limb.

A reminder.

You are here.

You can feel it.

Despite being another rest day, Aspen had left in a rush. He’d pressed a quick kiss to the crown of my head and set a steaming mug of tea on the bedside table before heading to the palace. Some misunderstanding with Marikaim. He’d invited me to come along and speak with Lenys—or to meet him later for sparring with the guard. I declined both.

I should have gone to the healer’s wing. But I’d felt it creeping in, curling its fingers around my ribs, and instead I turned over in bed, hoping a few more hours of sleep would smother the weight pressing against my chest. The wave threatening to crash over the surface.

It hadn’t.

Inhale. Exhale.

I sat on the edge of the bed, running my fingers through the silk sheets.

I am Iris Virlana.

I am safe.

There is joy.

There is light.

Snow drifted outside the window. Mochi lay curled under a heap of blankets. I should feel cold. I didn’t feel anything.

You aren’t helping them.

You aren’t doing anything.

The floor creaked beneath my feet.

You aren’t saving anyone.

I scanned the room.

Find something. Anything to anchor you. Breathe.

The other voice was back. The one that wrapped around me when the edges of the world blurred. The one that talked me down from panic attacks when I couldn’t keep them at bay.

Gideon’s mind healer once said it was my subconscious. That after trauma, the mind sometimes materialized an internal guide—a coping mechanism. Sometimes, I thought it was the only thing keeping me alive. The part of me that refused to stop fighting.

A gleam of white marble caught my eye—the edge of the tub.

A bath. That would help.

I peeled off my nightclothes and filled the tub with scalding water, needing the heat.

Needing to feel something.

When I slid into the water, I realized I couldn’t.

I grabbed Aspen’s favorite bar of soap, but it slipped from my fingers, sinking slowly to the bottom. I watched it descend. Down and down and down.

What would it would feel like to sink like that? To slip into the darkness like a stone in the ocean. To settle at the bottom and never return.

No… no.

Get out. Now.

Not the tub.

I drained the water and stepped out, staring at myself in the mirror. Dark bruises shadowed the skin beneath my eyes. The girl staring back at me looked so tired.

She broke my heart.

I pulled my nightclothes back on. The thought of finding something else to wear was exhausting.

The tea from this morning sat untouched on the bedside table. It didn’t stir any of it’s usual warmth.

I didn’t want this. Not today.

I wanted to feel.

I wanted our rest day.

Snow thickened outside. Heat didn’t work. Maybe I needed the cold.

I had grown fond of the cold.

I scribbled a note for Aspen?—

Don’t worry about me.

I’ll be back later.

The fresh snow was soft beneath my bare feet as I stepped off the back porch. It clung to my lashes, but I couldn’t care enough to blink it away.

I just walked.

Branches scraped the soles of my feet, the wind lashed my skin until it was raw, and still, I walked. Without care or direction. Until a shimmering barrier rose before me.

The sight of the Tundra pulled me a fraction from the depths. I tilted my head at the tree line, sampling the tang of barrier magic on my tongue.

A sharp sting flared across my palm. I glanced down. A thin red gash beaded with blood. A jagged stone, stained crimson, lay beside my leg.

I wasn’t sure when I had sat down.

I wanted to feel it. Needed to feel the sting, the frigid bite of the cold. Maybe if I could feel those things, everything else would return.

Instead, I slipped further.

I pulled my knees to my chest. Snow stopped falling. Ice crystals formed in my hair.

Maybe they needed a friend.

I sank. Further and further.

I would have to leave my snowflake friends.

They wouldn’t survive the sea.

No one could survive the rage of the waves.

It would take them all with it.

Breathe.

Please, breathe.

Maybe if I stayed here long enough, my magic would wear down. Maybe the cold would whisk me away in the night.

Then—warmth.

A soft blanket settled over my shoulders.

Two arms wrapped around my own.

My lungs filled.

It wasn’t water—it was air.

“You’re here,” I whispered. I didn’t need to confirm it was him. I only needed to know it was real.

“I knew,” he murmured, his thumb grazing my forearm.

My breath hitched. I could feel it.

“How?”

His thumb traced circles as he pressed closer. “You asked.”

“I didn’t.”

“You’re quite an expert at asking without words,” he huffed, laughing softly.

Except no one can see it but you.

He gestured toward the spare clothes he’d brought. I shook my head. I needed the cold.

“Your note asked,” he said, voice quiet. “It was just hidden between the lines.”

If I thought I could produce tears then, I would have.

I didn’t know how to ask him to help.

He had done so anyway.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” he said as Mochi settled between my legs.

Mochi’s wide eyes met mine—one blue, one golden. His voice whispered down the bridge between our minds.

We are here, with you.

It is too dark for you here , I whispered back.

You are light , he responded.

Aspen’s breath ghosted over my shoulder. “Is it a numb day, or a screaming day?”

“Numb,” I answered dully.

A sketchpad appeared beside Mochi, loose pages scattered around it.

Aspen dragged it closer.

“When my sister died,” he began, “I stopped being able to sleep. The nightmares… I did my best to avoid them. I started roaming the halls of the palace, trying to find something—anything—to fill the nights.

“There is a room in the east wing, full of art supplies. I passed by it for weeks, until one night, curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed a sketchpad. I sat in that room until the sun rose, and for the first time in months, I felt peace. After that, instead of avoiding sleep by wandering, I sketched. Drew everything I’d seen, everything that brought a sliver of normalcy back into my life.

“But on the first anniversary of her death, the pain was worse—so much worse. I couldn’t find a reason why I should still be here when she wasn’t. I was so close to walking into this Tundra and never looking back.”

He rested his chin in the crook of my shoulder, brushing his lips against the column of my neck in a whisper of a kiss.

“As I was walking out the door, I saw the sketchpad. It was open to a drawing of my parents. I had wanted to immortalize the first time I had seen them smile again. Even the sight of my father, after everything...that smile made me pause. Before I could help it, I was flipping through the pages, watching a record of the past year unfold. I hadn’t seen it while I was living it, but as I turned the pages, I noticed each one becoming slightly brighter, each memory slightly happier. It wasn’t linear—grief was evident throughout. But each picture reminded me that, although I couldn’t see them at the time, there had been good moments. There were things worth continuing on for. I just needed the reminder.”

He pulled a loose sheet of paper from the ground and turned it over. A woman, framed by trees, sat cloaked in what looked like a blanket of snow, facing a small fox. I ran my fingers across the page, stopping at the long hair billowing around her.

“I don’t know what you consider your bright moments, Iris,” he murmured, flipping open the journal to a page somewhere in the middle. “But maybe mine can help.”

The background of the next sketch resembled fur. A large hand adorned with rings rested upon it. Another, smaller, thinner hand—scarred along the wrist—lay on top.

“I’m sorry if I woke you that night,” he said as he flipped to the next page. Long, thin icicles hung from trees that curved inward toward each other. A woman stood in the center, arms outstretched, her coat furling out around her, her head tipped back in a smile.

“How many nights did you sketch in the Tundra?” I asked.

How little did he sleep?

“Just the first one.” His arms crossed in front of my chest, holding me to him. “I sleep now. Not as much as you,” he laughed softly, running his knuckles along my collarbone, “but now I sleep.”

One hand left my shoulder to turn the next page. The woman’s head peeked out from a pool of silken sheets.

He placed another kiss on my shoulder, and I watched as he flipped through the pages of his sketchbook. A bottle of moonwine and a loaf of bread. Two mugs side by side on a plush floor. The same woman, smiling so hard her eyes were squeezed shut, holding a small fox. Two hands, one scarred, gripping a mortar and pestle. The woman, standing on a bed, staring up at a skylight. A candle at a festival booth.

“We share a lot of the same bright moments, Aspen,” I whispered.

He closed the book, bringing his free arm to rest across mine. His fingers moved in soft circles along the scars there. Swirls and circles and hearts. We watched the sun dip, and I leaned back into him. I was so tired. I could allow him to hold me up.

“Do you know how many people are afraid of the dark?” I asked, eyes fixed on the horizon.

He shook his head, his chin brushing the top of my head.

“I can’t recall the precise number, but I read it once in a book. Nyctophobia. It’s not even in the top five most common fears. As a child, I thought the fear was reserved for a starless night, or a room after a candle had burnt out. As an adult, I’ve seen far more people who fear the darkness inside a person. They cower from the pieces that don’t shine in the light. They run.”

His fingers stopped moving, his grip on my arm tightening. “Did someone do that to you?”

Yes.

Gideon talked me through the panic attacks. My mother sat with me on the dark days I couldn’t hide. And still, I couldn’t show them everything. It was too much—for anyone. They had given me a good life. Sacrificed everything. And yet, there was so much darkness. I didn’t know how to explain it to them. I couldn’t let them see it all. So I kept it in. From them, from Nadya, from Ferrin… it was far easier to push it down than to deal with the consequences of it ever being too much.

I didn’t answer him.

I wondered if he knew what that felt like—if his grief had ever been too much.

“Have you ever been in love?” I asked.

“I—” He stopped abruptly, silence stretching between us. “I don’t know,” he admitted quietly.

“I think I was,” I muttered. “But not in the way I want to be.”

“What do you mean?” His voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it.

“Can you love someone if they never truly see you? Every time I tried to let them, just bits and pieces… it was too much. I was always too much.”

Aspen tensed behind me.

“They can’t run if I don’t let them see.”

I can’t break from the loss if I never let myself have them in the first place.

The night had fully taken over now, but he made no move to hurry us inside.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” I asked, resting the back of my head against his chest.

His fingers intertwined with mine where they held my knees.

“Not one bit.”

Mochi had fallen asleep at our feet, his nose twitching in his dreams. The snow had fallen so heavily I could no longer count the blades of grass poking up from the powder. Petite paw prints speckled the snow beside me. Much easier to count than grass.

One.

Breathe.

Two.

Breathe.

Three.

Breathe.

After seventeen, I ran out of visible prints. Aspen was pressed up behind me, and I could feel his chest rise with his own breath, so I counted these instead, matching my pace with his.

One.

Breathe.

Two.

Breathe.

Three.

Breathe.

Eucalyptus and lavender.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked after his thirty-second breath. “That you have to see this.”

“I’m not,” he replied, tilting my chin up toward him.

It was the first time I had seen his face since he left that morning. His eyes shone bright. They were so blue.

“I’m honored that you feel you can share this with me,” he murmured. “I’m here—for all of it. Not just the pieces of yourself you think are acceptable.”

I shifted, turning until I faced him, his legs caging mine. “It’s not even just the attack. I’ve always felt like my brain was… built differently. When I’m angry, I want to tear down the stars and rage at the Goddesses. When I’m sad, it feels like despair will fill my lungs and steal my breath. When I’m happy, it feels like the sun could explode from my chest and it still wouldn’t be enough. And when I love… it consumes every piece of my soul.

“I think of every way a situation could go wrong, and I hear it over and over and over again in my head. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. You will lose them all. It festers, like a wound that will never close. I want to claw it out with my bare hands, to rip it from the depths of my soul and suffocate it. And on days like today, all I can manage is a crawl.”

I shuddered. He took my hands in his, his thumbs tracing slow, steady circles over my skin. “For a while, I could control it—keep it all within reason. But I’m no longer the person I was. I’m full to the brim with that rage, and pain, and joy, and fear. And that girl who held it all in… she broke. And now, all that’s left are shattered pieces of her lying in a pile at my feet.” My voice cracked slightly, the words shaking loose something in my chest.

Sometimes, I had nightmares about it—screaming until my throat was raw at the broken pieces, coaxing them to somehow fix the mess.

“It’s like a thousand tiny shards of glass. I’ve done my best to put them back together, tried desperately to force all the misshapen fragments into something resembling normalcy.” I took a stilling breath, finally meeting his gaze. “I don’t want you to be cut on my jagged edges.”

Something flickered in his eyes, unreadable yet undeniable. It wasn’t pity. Recognition? Understanding? Determination?

“I don’t know when it happened,” I continued, the words spilling out in a strange, empty relief. I couldn’t stop even if I’d wanted to. “Maybe when I left Solyndra. Maybe when I was old enough to understand just how much I had wanted them to love me. Maybe when Cecily left Vaelithe. Or when Sarek wrote a note, and I didn’t see him for a year. Maybe when I realized I’d be stuck in the Wilds forever. I just know that one day, I looked in the mirror and no longer knew the girl who stared back. That she had no direction, no purpose. Nothing but anger she suppressed as fear.”

“Being a light that remains while sitting among the dark is an immeasurable feat,” he murmured, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

“I can’t always be that,” I admitted, the weight of it pressing in on me. “It’s impossible. And yet I keep plastering on the facade that I can—because if I don’t, it won’t be enough. But I feel like I’m drowning.”

His voice was soft but firm, the grip on my hands tightening. “Let me make something clear. You are light, yes. And you are also the crackle of lightning in a storm. And the soft caress of the breeze. And a roiling, crashing tidal wave. You are endless, and terrifying, and brave, and kind. And you do not need to yield one for another.” He leaned down, pressing a feather-light kiss to my forehead. “I want your dark days, too.”

Aspen encased both of my hands in one of his. “I have something to show you. If you’re up for it.”

I nodded, our gazes locked as my throat bobbed. The sketches he had shown me had already been so much…

He owed me nothing.

He reached for his bag, pulling out a large coat, another blanket, and a pair of boots.

“I have no idea how you aren’t freezing.” Kneeling, he slid the boots on.

I shrugged. “My Threader magic creates some warmth—enough that it instinctually kicks in during times of need. Not much, but it keeps me alive.”

It had almost failed me in the Tundra. His magic kept me from disaster that day.

After slinging the coat over my shoulders, he helped me slide my arms into the sleeves. I didn’t have the energy to protest. The cloak wrapped around me, followed by the blanket once more.

I started to stand, but he turned his back toward me, crouching low. “Climb on.”

“Absolutely not. I have two?—”

“Iris Virlana.” His voice was dangerously level. “You have sat in the snow for Divine-knows how long. We have quite a trek ahead of us, and if you don’t get on my back in the next five seconds, I will haul you over my shoulder and carry you ass-first up that hill.”

I huffed. Somewhere beneath his breath, I swore I heard him chuckle, There she is .

Rather ungraciously, I clambered onto his back, throwing my arms around his neck. He hooked his arms beneath my knees and set off toward the distant ridge, Mochi trailing behind.

By the time we reached the base of the slope, the moon hung high in the sky, stars glittering in admiration at its presence. It took time to reach the top, but Aspen’s breath only became marginally labored, as if this were another nightly routine.

When we reached the summit, I slid down from his back, my feet sinking into the snow as I moved toward the edge. Aspen resumed his place behind me, arms wrapping around my middle once again.

Vivid streaks of green, blue, and violet wove through the sky, as if painted by the goddesses themselves.

“We call it the Aurora,” he whispered, his breath tickling the shell of my ear. “This is the best spot in all of Kacidon to view it. That’s why I built the cabin here.”

“The Aurora…”

He nodded. “It is her namesake.”

I blinked rapidly, a sob catching in my throat.

The glow radiated off the snow, casting the entire hillside in incandescent rainbows. It was like standing inside a watercolor masterpiece—like witnessing the fragments of someone’s soul. The colors dipped and melded and bled into each other, dancing together in a waltz of luminescence.

“It’s different every night,” Aspen murmured. “Never once have I seen two the same.” He brushed a hand over the marks on my wrist, then intertwined his fingers with mine. “The most precious things in life are not uniform. They are full of dents and scratches and scars and a brilliant array of colors that shine through.”

The knuckles of his other hand ghosted up and down my arm as we marveled at the sky. “There is nothing—absolutely nothing —you need to change. That you have to fix. We will conquer the pain and burn the numbness to the ground. We’ll stand upon the ashes of everything that ever made you feel unworthy.” His voice dipped to something reverent. “You are a fighter , Iris Virlana. Your ability to experience everything with such fierceness is not a weakness. It is a wonder.”

He stepped around to face me. The glow illuminated the sharp planes of his face, his blue eyes glinting like shards of ice.

He looked ethereal. He looked like home.

“I find great beauty in your stained-glass soul,” he uttered, hands cradling my cheeks. His eyes pleaded, trying to convey everything words could not.

It was the most intimate thing in the Celestos, seeing him hold those pieces. I knew they existed. But I’d pretended that if I just shoved them back in place with enough brute force, they’d stop cutting me. Still, I bled. I bled at every turn, until I stood in a pool of it—crimson soaked gown clinging to my skin.

Aspen didn’t look at me and see blood.

He saw those pieces—fragile, and sharp, and flawed—and did not scoff at them.

There was no expectation to live up to unobtainable perfection. No being foolish or stubborn or rash without consequence either.

Each piece simply existed in his palm, turned over to be examined in the light before tucked somewhere safe—like the most precious of gems. Cherished. Nurtured. Celebrated. My fingers trembled slightly with every emotion I couldn’t put into words as I placed them on his forearms, pressing down slightly to ensure he knew I understood. I couldn’t have looked away, even if I wanted to. I was so far lost to him.

I had considered myself to be many things… but not a fool.

I was wrong.

“I admire every piece of you,” he breathed, voice barely steady. “There is not one facet that isn’t worthy.”

His forehead fell down to mine, and his breath was a puff of white between us. My own exhale met his, twining together in the winter air. “Know that wherever this life leads us,” he continued, and I thought I could spend forever sharing his air, “Whatever awaits us in this fucked up world, that will not change. Even if you cannot see me there.” He paused, inhaling sharply. His fingers tightened, a desperation hiding deep within his gaze. “I will be beside you. On every path. If nothing else, please remember that.”

It felt like a confession, like asking forgiveness for something inescapable on the horizon. I ignored the warning.

I was a hopeless romantic with a cynic’s heart. I adored the idea of love, found it to be the most precious of gifts. I reveled in the joy of those lost to it, celebrated the intricacies of anyone who had been lucky enough to match their soul with another and dance among the stars.

I just never thought it would be something I would experience. Not in a resentful way, only accepted the surety that it was not waiting for me in the future. That understanding quelled the heartbreak that would’ve ensued if I had expected this great, epic romance for the ages. It grounded me.

Hope was a dangerous game, one I often dared not play. But the look in Aspen’s eyes threatened to unravel every constant I had ever held true.

That night, we slept in the snow.