The Sentinels [m]y love is a lifetaker

He did not understand. How could he? He was a man, and the choices that women had to make were so far removed from his own experiences. The way that those choices could be taken away was, too, though he naively assumed that it was similar to how he'd felt when he'd discovered Chakliux gone.

But he understood, he thought, when she confessed her love for him. It made a few of her silences in the distant past more understandable. It made his heart clench as he thought again about losing her, and how it had been the thing to finally break him beyond repair. The endless chipping away at his loved ones was an ever-gnawing wound, even or especially when they'd all run out — but the fear he felt now was undoubtedly worse.

"I have loved you since before I laid eyes on you," he told her, remembering. He looked into her marine gaze and found himself lost again in memories of that starry night. "I carried your name with me for months. At first because you were loved by Chakliux — but when I met you, and when you shared yourself with me..."

That had been the most joyful time in his life. Those few short months. Perhaps even those few short hours, shared amongst the seal hunters. The boys, his Chakliux, Marina —

"I should have stayed there with you," he said, forsaking his wife with those words. "I thought that I needed my own life, my own family to bring to yours. I did not know that I could choose you. You belonged to another. But he was mine, and I think..."

He could see it now.

"I should have stayed," he told her. "I do not regret my children, and I do not regret the love that I had — but I know that my heart belonged in that lodge. And that it belongs here, with you."

He pressed forward, resting his forehead against hers.

"I am here with you, Marina," he told her. "I'm not going anywhere, and I will protect you 'til my dying breath — and perhaps even longer."