Jade Fern Grove everything costs

As a child, Reverie had always feared adulthood. She looked at her parents and saw them tired and angry with the world; she looked at her oldest siblings and saw them fearful and overwhelmed with new burdens. She looked at her future and saw that she would have to learn to bear the same burdens, to protect the next generation as her brothers and sisters protected her. And she didn't want it. She'd never wanted it; any of it, she realized now. Maybe it made her a bad person, but she wasn't the caregiver she'd always tried to be. It just hadn't ever been possible to be anything else, not for her. And now it was.
Now she could dance through a forest carefree and untethered as the wind, giggling to herself, growing quiet when she heard the song; a quiet thing, a pretty thing, and she could only stop and drift closer, moth-wings fluttering to the light. She spun as golden field grass once... A new song, but she knew that voice, had known it all her life and in her dreams and in every ache in her lungs and throat that called for home. She couldn't breathe. ...would sway upon the plains.
Light blooming under her feet; golden light, dancing light, a whirlwind of song swirling around her to carry her home. Everett. Her wandering sunlight come drifting down to join her, to touch reality as she had. And for a moment, in song and in dance, they were bare to one another; nothing but their bright fractured souls, soft light through cracked glass, joined where the gentle shadows touched. She circled him, surrounded him, a golden halo to his fallen grace.
She hated him. She loved him. It didn't matter. The Gilded Sea had broken them, all of them, but it would not take these beautiful moments from them too.