Somewhere between silence and heartbeat, I open my eyes.
The world is dim here, not dark, not light, just between. Shapes drift like smoke, and sound moves slower than thought. I stand in the echo of my own kingdom, a reflection half-formed.
Celentra. My Celentra.
It used to hum beneath my feet like a living thing. Now it sleeps, caught between one breath and the next. But something stirs, faint and familiar, like a pulse through stone.
Lyrian.
His name ripples through me, carried by a wind that does not belong to this place.
I move through the fog and find him, not in body, but in essence. He stands in the council chamber, head bowed, hand resting on the back of my chair. The sight pulls me closer until I can almost touch him.
The air trembles where my fingers should meet his.
“Oh, Lyrian,” I whisper, though no sound should carry here. “I have not seen that serious face since the day we met.”
His lips part, as if he has heard me. The slightest flicker of a smile crosses his face, uncertain, searching.
The veil between us shimmers, thin as breath.
I reach again, and this time the world answers. Curtains stir—light shifts. The castle exhales.
The bond holds. Weak, but alive.
“She moves,” says a voice behind me, old and kind, one I have known since the dawn of my reign. Ilina, the Seer Goddess herself, steps through the haze in a robe woven from starlight.
“You were never meant to be gone forever, my child,” she says. “The world remembers you.”
I look down again at Lyrian, radiant even in sorrow, and my chest tightens with something painfully human.
“He carries my heart,” I say softly. “And I carry his.”
Ilina smiles, her eyes bright with ancient knowing. “Then find your way back through it.”
The air around me brightens, the first true light I have seen since death.
Celentra is breathing.
And so am I.