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K ael Elethyr Ardhen, come back to me.

Those words. Her voice. Her voice speaking his name. Her voice commanding him back to her.

Like a curtain being drawn aside, the haze that clouded his mind, his vision, was lifted.

Kael froze where the blackened tip of a stick hovered above Aisling’s bare stomach.

His own hand held it, and his other held her still.

Her skin was covered in charcoal markings, tiny runes he didn’t recognize. She was warm beneath his palm.

“You are not real,” he growled. It was a mimic, a cruel mockery. Just as it had been each and every other time.

“I am,” the vision whispered softly. Soothingly. A shard of ice shot straight through his heart.

“You are not here.” He wished her away, wished she would disappear again and leave him be. This wasn’t Aisling; there was no Aisling. Not here.

“I am, Kael.” She spoke a bit louder this time, more insistently. Her voice broke on his name.

She couldn’t be. “You can’t be.”

“Look at me.”

“I won’t.” Kael shuddered. The tremor wracked his body before he was able to brace himself against it and his grip on the stick tightened until it snapped in half between his fingers.

Those visions had hollowed out a vacuous space in his chest that grew deeper each time he had to watch her die.

Each time he had to watch his own hand, his shadows, his dagger, descend on her.

He hissed through gritted teeth, “I have seen every version of you here, and every version of how I’d kill you.

I cannot face another. I will not look again. ”

Aisling tried to lift his chin but he resisted. So instead, she took his hand and rested it over her heart, pressing it tighter against her chest. Her gentle touch was as comforting as it was torturous.

“Can you feel that? My heartbeat, my breathing? I’m here Kael. I’m alive,” she urged.

He could feel it: the rapid fluttering of her heart, like the wings of a panicked bird. The way she was fighting to keep her breathing slow and deep and even for him. Kael’s eyes fell closed and his lips parted as he loosed an unsteady breath in time with the movement of her exhale.

“Aisling.” His whisper was so faint it disappeared into the space between them almost as soon as it left his lips—a space that suddenly felt as wide as a vast and stormy sea.

“I’m here,” she repeated once more.

He didn’t want to believe it; he was too afraid of the hurt that would follow.

It had happened before, too many times to count, when the visions grew so vivid and all-consuming that he was fully mired in them, in killing her.

Each time he lost a little more of himself—or, maybe, he gave a little more of himself up.

But even the most convincing illusions had never spoken to him like this.

They only repeated words and scenes that had already happened, or those alternate versions of them that he’d played out endlessly in his mind.

And when she touched him, or he touched her, it hadn’t felt like this. It hadn’t felt like this at all.

Finally, finally, he dragged his eyes up to meet hers.

She was here. Aisling, his Aisling, his Red Woman. She was here, she was real, and she was sitting right in front of him.

It took all his strength to hold her gaze even for just a few brief, blissfully agonizing seconds.

His arms itched to pull her to him, to cradle her against his chest. So many words burned unspoken on his tongue, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak a single one.

The precariousness of the moment was nearly enough to break what little was left of him.

So Kael dropped his gaze. He examined her body instead, running the tip of his finger over one of the markings and smearing the charcoal.

She tensed slightly beneath his touch. Some of the runes were raised and red where the stick had been too hot and had burned her skin.

He’d done that to her; he’d hurt her. Again. Every time.

She released his hand she’d been holding to her chest and it felt instantly cold. Kael lowered it to rest on her waist, his movements still hesitant. He was afraid she might vanish if he moved too quickly. But she was still there, warm and solid and real.

“The Low One is not who I thought He was.” Even as he said the words out loud, they sounded wrong.

It felt unnatural now to question the god he’d followed so devoutly since before he could remember.

He’d always known Him to be a merciless god, but this—making a subject so loyal as Kael relive his worst nightmares over and over again—was nothing short of cruel.

“Kael, that’s not—” Aisling started.

“Say it again,” he murmured roughly, cutting her off. “Please. Just once more.”

“Say what?”

“My name. Say my name.” His fingers tightened slightly on her waist. He sounded desperate, but he hardly cared.

She sighed, then reached out to brush the tips of her fingers featherlight over his scarred cheek. “Kael Elethyr Ardhen.”

She said it so tenderly, with no commands or requirements attached. She knew the weight it carried and what she could do with it. So many times she could have wielded his name as a weapon, and yet she didn’t care to use it against him—she cared only about how it made him feel.

She was so much more than he deserved.

Kael schooled his expression back to neutral and dipped his head, taking up a new stick and holding it over the candle’s flame. He could feel Aisling’s eyes on him as he blew it out. Still without looking up at her, he studied the runes closer. This was not Rhedelas, but symbols far more ancient.

“He’ll expect these to be finished.” Kael tested the burnt end of the stick against his own skin before lowering it to Aisling’s.

The way she flinched at the expectation of pain tore at him, but he didn’t acknowledge it.

He willed his trembling hands to still and began the tedious task of copying those markings he’d already made, turning whatever script he’d been mindlessly following into nonsense.

She was silent for a long moment before she said tentatively, “I’m glad you’re alive.”

He hadn’t really considered that fact: that he was alive.

He wasn’t sure when it happened, or how.

He recalled his last moments in The Cut, looking up at Aisling’s tear-soaked face.

He’d felt her heart breaking even over the pain of the knife biting into his throat.

There was nothing after that—expansive, empty nothing—and then he was whole again. And then came the visions.

“Did they come? Your Silver Saints?” Kael asked. He’d been so at peace with his decision, in the end. He only hoped it had been worth it.

“Yes.” Aisling’s response was a strangled whisper.

A hot tear hit the back of his wrist. There was so much unsaid in her short answer, but he didn’t press further.

Now wasn’t the time for any of it: his questioning, their reunion.

Those things would only distract him from what was now his singular focus. He needed to get Aisling out alive.

“I will lead you out; the Low One will be too preoccupied with me to pay you much mind,” he said.

Her sharp laugh sounded like anything but. The movement jarred his hand, smudging the mark he was making. He wiped off the excess charcoal with the tip of his thumb. He couldn’t ignore the heat that bloomed in his veins at the contact.

“I didn’t come all the way to Elowas, go through all of his stupid trials, just to leave you here.”

Kael looked up at her. This time, her eyes were fierce, blazing with a sort of protectiveness he’d never seen there before. He’d never seen anyone look at him that way before. “Trials?”

Aisling ignored the question and said firmly, “I’m not leaving you here.”

Part of him, the pragmatic part, wanted to chide her for her stubbornness.

But he knew her, and he knew telling her she couldn’t would only make her that much more determined.

And the quieter, kinder part of him wanted nothing more than to leave with her so that they could finally have that moment together he longed for.

“Then what do you suggest?” Kael returned to the runes, finishing the last line of them across her hipbone. She was thinner than he remembered, her bones sharper now. She hadn’t been eating enough.

“I can...do things here,” she said slowly as though searching for the right words. “My affinity, it’s stronger.”

“Is it?” He raised an eyebrow. The movement tore viciously at his exposed scars. He hadn’t noticed the burning pain lancing through the left side of his body until now.

“I made rain.”

“You made rain?” That caught his attention, and he looked up at her once more. Imagining the Red Woman conjuring a weather event was not something he would have ever expected, and his chest swelled with pride. She was extraordinary.

“Twice. Only once on purpose, though. But I could try something like that again.” She thought for a moment, focus distant as her wheels turned. “Fog, maybe? The marine air we get on the island is so thick sometimes you can’t see hardly anything at all.”

Kael hummed. It was a nice thought, if ambitious. He’d let her try, let her believe that he believed in the idea. But he knew there was no chance of the two of them escaping the Low One together, and to truly let himself imagine that they could would only be wishful thinking.

He couldn’t look at her marked skin any longer; the way her body shivered with cold and fear ignited such a savage instinct in him he could scarcely think straight.

Kael blew out the candle and rose, gritting his teeth against the wave of dizziness the pain brought to bear.

Aisling slid off the ledge to stand beside him.