Page 51 of Returned to the Vissigroth (The Vissigroths of Leander #6)

T he shrine stood hidden in a valley of glass and fire, carved from pale stone and veined with gold. The air shimmered with heat and reverence. There were no crowds. No throne. No titles. Just the two of us, standing on sacred ground in the presence of Fraysa.

A single flame, equal parts blue and gold, burned low before her statue, nestled in the hollow between outstretched hands and the intricate circlet of the goddess’s crown.

Around it, the walls were covered with sigils old as the planet—unreadable, yet the meanings rang clear somewhere in the back of my mind.

A dish of river stones, impossibly smooth and cold, balanced on the altar’s lip and caught the dancing shadows.

The flame flickered as if it recognized us, as if it had been waiting all these years for us to finally return.

I reached for Mallack’s hand, and he met mine halfway, his fingers warm and rough and entirely, beautifully familiar.

I woke up in the dim cave, alone and devoid of memories, not even knowing my own name.

The first time I saw him, I dashed right past him onto the spaceship.

He followed me, and though I couldn't admit it, it felt as if my soul recognized him even then.

Even before he told me my name, before the fragments of memory pieced together, I remembered his eyes.

The certainty there. The promise. Now, there was no more confusion, no more ache of unknowing; I was Daphne. I was his. He was mine.

For a long moment we stood, not speaking, breathing in the scent of dust and melted wax and the faintest sweetness of crushed stone.

In this place, time was a thread stretched so thin you could see the memories strung along it like beads: Every version of us, every faded echo, converged in a single heartbeat.

Mallack turned to me, and in the strange light, his eyes were blacker than the basalt columns lining the shrine, deeper than any shadow.

They gleamed with tears, and with something bright and sharp behind them, a love so fierce it nearly frightened me.

“You are my beginning,” he said, his voice cracking, almost childlike in its earnestness. “My end. My only ever.”

He held out the candle we’d brought, the one we’d made together before the journey.

I took it in both hands, and together we leaned into the altar.

The flame from Fraysa’s statue reached out, bridged the gap, and set our candle alight.

For an instant, the two flames remained separate, parallel, each burning with its own color and energy.

Then, as the wax softened and the wicks curved closer, they merged.

One flame, feeding on two hearts, burning higher.

That was the moment the past and future collided, and all the things I might have said about the first life and the lives before that, about the pain and the joy and the long, tireless search, vanished. There was only us, and the warmth between our hands, and the light that blessed our faces.

Mallack drew a ragged breath. “I vow, here, now, that I will find you in every world. Every time. Every place the stars scatter us, I will remember. Even if the gods themselves tear us apart, I will not lose you.”

I smiled with tears running down my cheeks and repeated the ancient words from the book of Fraysa.

“I will seek you in the next life. And the next. I will love you even if you do not remember me, even if the darkness comes and you become a stranger, I will find you and love you anyway. I will love you until the end of the worlds and after.”

The words fell into the silence, and the shrine received them.

The air grew heavy, vibrated with the energy of old faiths and older promises, with the loves that came here before us and would come after us.

I closed my eyes and let the heat of the candle soak into my skin.

It didn’t burn; it healed. The hollow inside me that had gaped and ached for so long, that threatened to swallow me from the inside, was suddenly filled, as if some essential piece had at last found its way home.

Mallack shifted closer, and we pressed our foreheads together. The candle flame danced at the edge of my vision, burning a constellation behind my eyelids. When I opened them, I saw myself reflected in his eyes, and him in mine, and thousands of lifetimes rippled between us.

“We’re bound,” he said, a trace of laughter in the words, though his voice still trembled.

“For eternity,” I replied, then, “For longer than eternity. For every story the gods have ever told.”

The flame on the altar burned higher, and a strange wind circled the shrine, swirling my hair, lifting the edges of Mallack’s coat.

The air itself seemed to shimmer with meaning.

I felt it, the veil of the goddess, descend on us like an embrace.

All around, tiny motes of light—diamond-bright and spinning—filled the air, catching on our skin, crowning us.

We had found Fraysa’s blessing once again.

Mallack kissed me, and the old world ended. The new world began.

We knelt side by side at the altar and offered our vows, and in that moment, there was no separation. Two bodies, maybe, but one soul, one story, finally at peace.

Mallack spread out his coat on the ground where furs had been placed to receive the goddess’s last blessing.

Without a word, we began to undress. No matter how many times I had seen my mate now without clothes, he still managed to amaze me.

Old scars didn’t mar but, instead, accentuated his thick muscles.

His aqua skin gleamed darker in the candlelight, and the scales on his right arm and shoulder glimmered like diamonds.

Slowly, I moved forward and put my hand on his chest to feel the taut stretch of his ropey muscles and the strong beat of his heart slamming against my palm.

Mallack’s hand settled on my hip, steady and warm and so careful, as if I might break in his hold in stark contrast to his hot gaze that carried a hunger that went so deep it was nearly animalistic.

The holy fire of the shrine cast wild patterns over our skin, painting us in blue and gold.

I watched the way his gaze traced every new inch of me, reverent, worshipful, almost desperate to map each memory of my body to those lost to time and pain.

He kissed my collarbone, and the world around us blinked out for a moment, all the centuries and previous selves folding down into this single, white-hot instant.

His tongue lingered over the scar on my neck—an old wound I had no memory of, but it didn’t bother me at all—and when he pulled back, his teeth dragged gently, just enough to send a shudder chasing through my limbs.

We fell together over the pile of furs, limbs tangling, laughter and sighs echoing in the silence of the shrine.

My body was alive in his arms, blood singing with the thrill of something both new and eternal. There was no script or choreography, just the raw wonder of rediscovery. His hand threaded into my hair, his lips split open on my shoulder; softly, we mumbled each other’s names.

His hands covered both my wrists with ease; his legs curled around mine so I couldn’t even tell which belonged to whom.

It was easy, in these moments, to believe in the way the Leanders spoke of soulbinding: the idea that each mating was the first and the last, origin and destination, the whole circle of existence contained in the seal between two bodies.

Ever so slowly, he let go of my wrists and slid down my body.

My legs opened for him just like my heart had.

I heard him take a deep inhale as he took in my scent, “Sweeter than Illis flowers,” he said hoarsely.

Anticipation filled me when his tongue slipped between my thighs, the hot silk of it, tasting and teasing until I swore aloud in a voice I half-recognized as my own.

He licked me like a starved man finding water after a desert, careful at first but soon losing composure, the rhythm grew deeper with every breathless gasp I spilled into the shadows.

His hands gripped under my thighs, fingers notched into the muscle with a greed that defied the careful poise he showed me in the waking world.

I arched beneath him, and he pressed me down, holding me open with the whole weight of his need.

The shrine glimmered in my periphery, the walls alive with candlelight and the shimmer of godly dust, but all I could register was the hot, insistent circle of his mouth as he lapped and sucked, working me with a patience that bordered on torture and then abruptly abandoned it.

Two of his fingers slid inside, thick and inescapable, and I felt myself clench around them, the pressure magnified by the rough callus along his first knuckle.

Each stroke went deeper, angled forward in a way that forced an involuntary moan out of my chest and filled my vision with little lights.

He alternated his tongue and his hand, sometimes both together, sometimes letting his mouth devour higher while his fingers curled and pumped, never once relenting.

My hands scrambled for something to anchor me, found the smooth scales of his shoulder, and dug in.

I reached the edge with a velocity that stunned me, a rush so overwhelming it left my lips numb, my arms trembling. He held his mouth against me until I finally whimpered, until I pressed at his head and he came back up, dragging his mouth along my stomach, his face slick and flushed with victory.

It should have been ridiculous, the way he looked at me—like a conqueror who had just won a world and was too grateful for the fact to brag of it, but it wasn’t. It was perfect. He kissed me, full on the mouth, and I tasted myself on his tongue, wild and new and fiercely alive.

When he entered me, it was slow at first, drawn out, and I felt every inch, every ragged breath.

I clung to his waist, his back, pulled him until there was nothing remaining between us.

Mallack braced himself over me, his arms trembled, and he bent his head until our foreheads touched again.

He murmured my name—Daphne, mate, beloved—over and over, old words given new meaning with each repetition, as if he could inscribe them into my skin and onto the bones beneath.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and held tight, unwilling to let go.

We moved together, the rhythm clumsy at first before turning sure and inevitable, and it was less like sex and more like remembering a song I’d forgotten.

The world spun away. All the broken pieces of memory and soul made a new pattern, a mosaic in which every fracture was essential, nothing wasted.

We stayed joined so long I lost track of everything but the slow rising promise, the electric heat building between us, until at last we fell together, neither leading, neither following, just two parts of one endless, burning whole.

After, we lay tangled in the patchwork of furs, hearts stuttering back to a manageable tempo.

The shrine was quiet, the only witness to what we had made in the hollow of its ancient hands.

Mallack brushed his palm over my cheek, over my collarbone, and I saw that his eyes were clearing, the usual gravity replaced by something softer, even peaceful.

“Every time,” he said, as if we were still at the altar. “Every time, it is you.”

The silence that followed was golden, gentle, not a thing in need of being filled. It hummed in me, in us, more profoundly than any vow could manage.

Mallack shifted to his side and propped his head on his hand, surveying me as if newly made. Candlelight traced his cheekbones, dulled the fierce whites of his teeth when he spoke. “Do you believe me now?” He asked it almost shyly, as though the question itself was a fragile animal.

I nodded, not trusting my voice. When I reached out, he caught my wrist and pressed it to his mouth. The kiss that followed was almost nothing, a brush of air, a benediction.

“I am only real because you see me,” he said. “Without you, I would wander the stars, empty.”

I laughed, the sound awkward but genuine. “I think you’d find some way to cause endless trouble for the Fourteen Planets.”

He grinned, slow as the dawn. “Then at least the trouble is shared.” His tongue dipped into the hollow of my wrist, lingered at the pulse. “All the gravity in the universe could not keep me from you.”

I rolled to face him, my fingers mapping the ridges of his shoulder where man gave way to scales. “I was so afraid I would never remember,” I confessed. “That I would see you and know nothing.”

“But you remembered,” he whispered, “in every way that mattered.”

It was my turn for shyness. “I love you,” I told him, the words rising like steam in the cold air. They felt small compared to what buzzed between us, but I said them anyway, and didn’t regret it. “I will love you longer than time will allow.”

His breath hitched, and he touched his forehead to mine. “You always say it first.”

“Liar. I was reborn yesterday, and you still beat me to it. That’s not fair,” I accused, but I could not hide my smile.

His voice gentled. “Let’s start over, then.” He gathered my fingers to his lips once more and said, “I love you, mate of my soul.”

I repeated it, unsure if it was blasphemy to speak so loudly in the goddess’s shrine, but it felt right anyway. “I love you, forever and every time.”

“Every time,” he echoed, and then, softer, “I think the world was made only so we could meet again.”

I traced circles on his chest. “And again. And again.” The notion was dizzying and yet grounded me faster than any anchor. All the lifetimes, all the losses and beginnings, they were just the miles we’d traveled to get back to this moment. Back to each other.

Later, when the candles burned low and our skins cooled, we dressed again and sat shoulder to shoulder at the altar, watching the twin flames gutter and lean into one another.

When we emerged from the sanctuary, the world outside the valley was new and glittering, as if dawn had been waiting for us alone to open it. I took Mallack’s hand, and we started down the path toward the future, slow and sure, each footstep its own prayer.

Whatever the next world would bring, I knew with crystal certainty that we would find each other. Again. And again.

And again.

THE END

of book 6 in the Vissigroths series.

I hope you enjoyed this book, and if it is the first you picked up in the series, you can find the rest here: The Vissigroths of Leander