Aurelia
Sittingat the edge of the world had a way of making one feel quite insignificant.
Looking out over the vast expanse of forest in front of me, I was reminded of just how small I was. Perspective is strange like that. What felt like the end of the world—losing him, watching him slip—would barely register as a ripple in a place this large. But it was everything.
It was the only thing.
Grief and fear. They do something to your sense of scale. Twist it. Shrink it. Until all your pain fits inside a tiny glass bottle, stoppered tight and swallowed down. But once it’s in you, it’s all you can see. All you can feel. It makes you forget the shape of who you were before.
I carried that bottle with me now, tucked between my ribs and resolve. Because Aeryn was still there, somewhere inside himself. I just had to bring him back.
I’d traded years to keep us steady—mending his shirts by firelight, rising before dawn to bargain at market stalls no onewanted us at, stitching favors together so we could eat when coin ran thin. I’d smiled through whispers, swallowed my own anger so he didn’t have to. Piece by piece, I’d given myself away just to keep what was left of him.
I sat with my boots dangling over the cliff’s edge, the cave at my back, a shallow bite in the stone that broke the wind but left the whole world spread open before me. Below, the forest spread like a dark tide, green at first glance but bruised and shadowed underneath.
Fog softened the edges, and if I squinted, I could just make out the final climb—the last rise before Nyxarra’s gate. Where the trees ended, the clouds hung heavy, a curtain drawn across the world. The forest was mean and bitter, but men on the trade route were meaner. I’d take the forest any day.
Out here, at least, the things that wanted to kill you didn’t pretend to be kind.
Wind knifed across the cliffside, tugging at my hood as I prepared to climb. Looking down, that sensation bloomed in my chest again—warm at first, almost welcome. Then it curdled, rising through my throat and tightening behind my jaw.
The urge to jump.
Not to die. Just… to fall. To see if the trees would catch me.
I pulled my pack around and checked the contents by touch: flint, dried meat, salve, a coil of rope, the iron-bite hooks dulled from summers climbing the sea cliffs back home. I’d left Synnex five days ago, keeping to the hedgerows and deer paths to avoid the main route. Twice I’d thought I caught a trader’s lantern through the mist. Twice I’d left the path rather than risk a man with an easy voice and sly fingers.
By the third day, the forest seemed to slip the map entirely. Sound dragged. Trees leaned where they hadn’t before. A milk-white fog spilled down the gullies and pooled in the low places,swallowing trail marks and making the compass needle quiver. I stopped, closed my eyes, and tried to find true by memory.
“East at dawn, west at fall, trust the moss when you can’t trust at all.” A children’s rhyme. I turned the words over until the sense of them fit in my bones. I moved only when the rhymed beat of the line matched the beat of my feet. The fog thinned. The path returned like it had decided to forgive me.
A bell chimed once—a small silver sound that didn’t belong to birds or weather. The fog shifted. For a moment it drew in, like a single lung filling, before exhaling frost across my face.
A lantern glowed ahead, the light the color of old honey, held chest-high by a shape that swam in and out of the fog.
“Trader’s lane runs east,” the man said, voice smooth as oiled rope. “You’re off it.”
He didn’t look lost. The fog looked hired. His cloak was too fine for a hauler, his boots too clean.
“Name?” he asked pleasantly.
Hayat’s rules beat time with my pulse. Don’t give what you can’t take back. Don’t trade a name.
I smiled like I had one to spare. “I only need the river.”
“River won’t keep you,” he said, drifting closer, lantern tipping. “Not out here.”
He leaned into the light and I saw it—no steam from his mouth, though my breath rose in pale clouds. His pupils were wide as a night road.
“You’ll freeze before dawn. I’ve a tent. Fire. Tea.”
“Kind,” I said, “but I’ve a fire waiting.”
I adjusted my pack and let the iron-bite hook ring once against the haft.
He cocked his head. “Steel’s heavy for a girl alone.”
“Only if you’re holding it wrong,” I said.