Page 77 of The Heart of Nym (The Twisted Roots Duology #1)

Aziel didn’t know where to begin. After Nymiria’s confession, it left him feeling just as lost as the souls that were wandering the darkness behind them.

Nymiria’s heart was broken, forever haunted with the choices she made, forever trapped here in the Otherworld watching and waiting for his loved ones to find him.

“She’s stuck there.” Aziel began. “She relives it every single day.”

Owen nodded, fingers digging into his forearms as he turned to look at Aziel. “I never meant for things to go as far as they did, Aziel. When you tasked Desi and I to watch over her, I did my best to view her as a job and nothing more. But I…”

“Fell in love?” It was far more painful for him to say than he’d ever imagined. Even when he recited what he’d say to Owen when he saw him a thousand times over, the blow of those words did not hurt any less.

“Yes, I did.” He stated those words so confidently that Aziel almost felt jealous.

He seemed so proud, even if that love ultimately led him to his death.

“When whispers started of our affair, I took it upon myself to derive the plan to have us caught. If she hadn’t killed me, Nymiria would be dead by now. ”

“No, she wouldn’t.” Aziel retorted. Owen’s brow furrowed in confusion as he turned to look at the bastard prince. “She’s a godling, Owen. No one in Yaar could have killed her. No one, but me.”

The cawing of a crow caught Aziel’s attention. He turned and looked at the dark rolling hills around them and then back to the tempest that was quickly approaching.

“She’s the Anam, isn’t she?” Owen asked, the words more of an answer than a question.

Aziel’s silence was confirmation enough, his hands tightening around his talisman—grounding him as the storm pushed further inland.

“I thought that I did the right thing.” The man continued, smoothing his golden, wind-blown locks away from his face.

“But it was never meant to be me, Aziel. One way or another, she would have ended up right where she is now and I would have been nothing but a memory.”

“She still loves you.”

Owen gave a solemn nod, a faint smile decorating his tired face. “And I will always love her. But,” he sighed, “She never looked at me the way she looks at you.”

“I’m not quite certain of what I should make of that. She looks like she wants to murder me most of the time.” It was an attempt at lightening the atmosphere around them, but Owen’s expression was still just as serious as before.

“When I realized I was in love with Nymiria, I asked the gods what my purpose was in her life. You want to know what they told me?” Aziel wasn’t sure if he wanted to know.

Even if Owen and Nymiria existed on two different planes of reality, he would still leave his friend here in this eternal prison with all of his longing, his sadness.

It felt like a crime. A brutal and harsh punishment for them both.

“They told me that my purpose was to teach her to listen to her heart. A guardian, of sorts. I did the best that I could since I’ve been here, but lately…

” Owen sucked his teeth and shook his head in disappointment.

“You haven’t been able to reach her as of late.” Aziel finished, already knowing what Owen was going to say.

It was a pain that no one should have to face, a fear that no one should feel.

And it was the hardest part of Aziel’s job—seeing the sadness in the faces of those whose loved ones were starting to forget them.

Every living thing experienced two deaths: one being the initial blow, and the other being the acknowledgement that whatever impact they’d left on those still living was starting to fade.

The emotions that Owen was facing now were normal, Aziel had seen it thousands of times on the faces of the souls that wandered here.

He hated it, but there was nothing he could do to lessen the sting.

“You don’t need my blessing, you know?” He turned to Aziel then, bearing the blood stain on the front of his clothes, his grey, lifeless eyes still filled with the sadness of someone who was alive and breathing.

Owen was his friend once. And no matter how many people Aziel talked to in the Otherworld, seeing the people he once knew was like swallowing a handful of sewing needles.

Aziel let Owen’s words sink in, let them roll over him in vicious currents until they settled in his gut.

“I believe in fate, in the old ways of our people, and I know what they say about those whose souls are tethered to one another. Mates. No amount of love I could have offered her would have ever equated to what the two of you can potentially feel for one another.” He released a sigh that was stolen away by the wild wind, thunder rolling in the distance.

Aziel should have been comforted by his sentiments, but the words felt heavy.

“You were made for one another. But if a blessing is what you came to receive, I will give it to you under one condition.”

Anything. Aziel would have agreed to anything Owen had to say—would have given his life for it, if that was what it took. “Name your price.” He said softly.

Owen looked out at the dark waters, thoughtfully watching the souls pass through the currents. “Sunlight, Aziel.” He smirked. “Some of these souls have spent their lives and their afterlives shrouded in an unforgiving darkness. Perhaps a little light could help them find their way.”

Sunlight. He could do that.

As he left the Otherworld behind, Aziel spared one final glance over his shoulder to watch as Owen walked to his cabin by the river. He walked inside with his head hung between his shoulders, his hand pressed against an ache that could not be healed.

Ten years had passed since he’d seen her and the moment she walked into that damned game room, he knew who she was immediately.

If not by her face, it would have been her smell—like freshly picked flowers and sweet nectar.

He would have known her by the blue of her eyes and how the world felt as if it’d stopped turning when their gazes met.

He felt shame at that moment. Shame he hadn’t felt in years.

He felt guilty and treasonous, hatred towards himself that the first time she saw him, he was between the legs of another woman.

Recounting that moment, he would have preferred that they formally met by crossing paths in the market or bumping into one another at the engagement. Anything else would have been better.

He’d never known what it was like to love something.

Of course, he loved those closest to him, but it was never anything quite like this.

For years, his heart was filled with love that flowed through him like a river—in the most purest of ways a child could love something, Aziel loved those around him. Even those who were undeserving of it.

With each heartbreak he received, a stone was placed around his heart, turning that flood into a tiny stream until, eventually, there wasn’t a drop of it left to give.

When the first stone was removed from around his heart, he felt it. It was the day he’d cornered her in his mother’s garden, when she looked at him for the first time and said those dreadful words:

“I am nothing.”

The second stone was dislodged when he saw her crying at the pedestal in the forest. When he saw the longing in her eyes as she traced over the weathered runes that undoubtedly called to her soul.

The third stone was larger than the ones that came before and he felt it remove itself from the walls guarding his heart with a painful pop.

When Dorid hit her in front of him, he’d done all he could to suppress the innate response to deliver his father’s death, nearly doubling over in pain at the fire that spread through those blasted runes on his back.

Each moment spent with her, in her presence, pebbles and stones came crumbling down.

The way she looked up at him with such hope when he promised to take her weakness from her, how she smiled when he secretively watched her tuck a small pink flower into Trio’s pocket, when she hugged and kissed the old woman who lent her shoes on that dreaded walk back to Yaar—all of those moments broke down that wall.

The final stone fell away when he saw her standing on the stairs leading into his palace during that celebration.

And it was not because she looked scared or alone, he felt no joy in her fear, but because she looked at him.

That was all it took. That one look, that one moment.

And when she turned and ran away, it felt like she’d taken his entire heart with her.

She ran from him in a way that pleaded for the chase, that demanded he try harder to reach her rather than simply being handed her heart.

Nymiria needed to know that she was worth the fight.

And she was.

He believed that to be the moment he realized that his feelings for her went beyond a sense of duty and care.

It was then that he came to the conclusion that he’d never stopped loving her, never stopped fretting over her safety.

Those stones were not preventing anything.

They were protecting something—saving it from a world that would take it and tarnish it, leaving him with nothing to offer her at all.

It didn’t matter that she’d loved another before him. It didn’t matter that her lips touched someone else’s before his own. Everything she’d done, everything she was, was because of what she’d experienced. And he could not hate a single part of her, not even if he tried.

He loved her. Completely.

And they did not need to be complete to be loved completely. A thought that was simple enough to think, but harder to believe.

Although he had no idea how to love someone properly, he assumed that there was no wrong way to do it if you had the best intentions. If you loved someone entirely and you did everything in your power to ensure that they never felt pain because of you… that had to be love, right?