Page 73 of Golden Bond

“But how?” he asked, voice still hesitant. “Isn’t it too late?”

I took his hand. Pressed it gently to my chest, overthe thrum of my heart. His pulse matched mine, a quiet percussion beneath the skin. The bond had always known the truth. It was we who needed reminding.

“The bond was not destroyed,” I said. “Only released. The days between parting and forgetting have only just begun. If hearts remain willing, the path may be walked again.”

I drew him with me, back to the foot of the obelisk. The grass parted as we moved, as though the land remembered too.

He looked up at the towering stone. The glyphs etched into its surface seemed to shimmer now, kissed by dusk.

I stepped behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist. “This field,” I whispered into his ear, “has known a thousand beginnings. It can hold one more.”

Callis leaned back into me. “Will you?”

I turned him gently. Took his face in my hands.

He wasn’t the boy who’d arrived in shame and uncertainty. He was a man now—fierce in his longing, certain in his desire, tempered by absence and ache.

I kissed him. Slow and sacred.

Our bond surged between us like a sun reborn.

When I pulled away, he was breathless. His hands shook where they gripped my arms. Mine weren’t steadier.

“For as long,” I said, voice low, “as the sun and the moon favor us.”

His eyes welled again, but he didn’t look away.

“Then I am yours,” he said. “Again. Always.”

We stood there in the amber light, wrapped in each other, the wind bending the grass like bowed heads in prayer.

And when the bond settled—not heavy or demanding, but whole—I knew.

This wasn’t a return.

It was a beginning.

Chapter

Sixteen

CALLIS

The wind stirred around us, soft through the grass, as though the world itself were holding its breath.

I leaned into him, still cradling the last echo of the kiss. The bond pulsed between us—not as a demand, but a promise. Not tethered by ceremony, but by choice.

And suddenly, I understood.

It wasn’t the ritual that made the bond sacred. Not the wine or the incense or the rod etched with old prayers. It wasn’t the rhythm of verses I’d once copied under moonstone light in the Temple of Aerius.

It was the truth.

The truth in the words, if they were spoken freely. The truth in the heart, if it offered itself without condition. The bond had never needed robes or witnesses.

It had only ever needed this.

“I don’t think…” I began, my voice quiet, but steady, “I don’t think it was ever about the rites.”