Qeya River do i wanna know?

blackfell falters.

will you leave me again?

his jaw clenches.

he should say yes.

he should turn, leave, rid himself of the ghost that she has become, the phantom weight of a past he will never stop carrying. but she is looking at him like that, with the same eyes he once knew, the same eyes that once held him in the halls of blackmarch.

a time before war, before betrayal, before the weight of their names crushed them beneath duty.

he had spent years convincing himself that he hated her. that she had chosen her fate, that she had forgotten him as easily as the court had dismissed blackmarch. that she had never been his to mourn.

but gods be damned, damn her, because part of him is still hers.

he feels it now, burning beneath his skin. it sickens him, the way her voice still cuts through him like a blade, the way his heart clenches at the tremor in it. she should not have this power over him.

but she does. she always has.

but she is not his. she is sun eater’s now, belly swollen with the weight of a future that does not belong to him.

a claim that should be a comfort. a boundary he should never cross.

it does not stop the ache in his chest.

i never should have come. words ripped from a wound that has never quite closed. his voice a fragile whisper meant for only her ears, as their foreheads come to hover only a breath away. it is steel wrapped in grief, in anger, in something far too deep to name.

but i did—and i will leave only when you ask me to.