LOGINI gasp, surprised and he leans towards me. I catch the scent of his cologne and the faint scent of the cigarette smoke, lingering around him. But underneath it, there’s the scent of earth and rain. I see his muscles flexing under the thin linen of the shirt. I also notice the outlines of a scar, running down his forearm. I imagine his hands on me, his lips on mine. What is happening… Why am I thinking this? “Oh, don’t worry, Lily. “ his smile is canine, the words that come out of his mouth are a snarl, “I won’t touch you. I don’t want to. “ When her mother got sick, Lily had no choice but to marry a man she never met. At that time she didn’t know Arthur Stark was not only beautiful but as cruel as the rumours said. Her husband is a cold billionaire involved with the mafia. He never touches anyone. Not even his own mate.
View MoreI was the lakebed, the constant upon which these gentle changes played out. The sharp, personal ache of loss had long since weathered into a smooth stone—a permanent, bearable weight at the center of my being. It was no longer a wound, but a foundation.The Warden came less often now. Their work, too, was largely done. On this day, they found me not in the garden, but in the heart of the Sanctuary, where the light from the oldest, most stable worlds filtered down in soft, cathedral shafts. They did not speak for a long time, simply standing with their hands clasped behind their back, observing the perfect, quiet chaos.“The systems are in optimal equilibrium,” they said finally, their voice not a report, but a meditation. “The deviation rate has fallen to 0.0001 percent. It is… self-sustaining.”I understood. They were not just talking about the weather patterns or the energy flows. They were talking about me.My consciousness, once a bright, specific point of awareness, had diffused
It is not a single perspective. It is the gentle, patient pressure of root tips against dark, moist soil. It is the dappled pattern of sunlight filtering through the canopy of the Thought-Trees, their leaves whispering secrets in a language of photosynthesis and memory. It is the slow, crystalline growth of the Singing Geodes in the northern caves, their harmonies a geology of sound. I am the rain that falls on the fledgling worlds, and I am the dry stone that waits for the rain. I am the boundary that holds it all, a membrane of remembered love and will.I am the Sanctuary. And the Sanctuary is me.I feel the Warden, often. They walk the paths not as a ruler, but as a steward. Their steps are measured, their presence a quiet hum of order that no longer fights the chaos, but tends it. They prune the branches of the Narrative Vines when they grow too tangled, ensuring the stories don’t choke themselves. They sometimes pause by the patch of blue asters, and I feel a ripple of complex dat
The world is too bright. Too loud. The Sanctuary thrives around me, a symphony of weird, wonderful life, and I am a dead note in the middle of it. A ghost in the machine I helped build.The Warden comes. They stand beside me as I stare at the blue aster, the one he saw last. Their offer is gentle, born of a logic that has learned compassion.“The grief parameter is destabilizing your core functions,” they say, their voice not cold, but soft. “I can recalibrate it. Suppress the emotional data. You could live in peaceful order. A quiet end to the story.”It would be so easy. To let the sharp edges of this pain be sanded down to a smooth, grey nothing. To be a well-maintained monument.I look at them, this being of order who became a friend, and I shake my head. “No,” I whisper, my voice raw from disuse. “The pain is the proof.”The proof that it was real. That he was real.So I learn to live with it. It’s a slow, brutal education. I tend the blue aster. I water it, talk to it. I tell it
It’s not a battle. It’s a slow tide, and it’s going out.I’ve cheated this so many times. Fought gods, rewound time, grafted souls. But this… this is just a body. His body. The one he was resurrected in, the one that has carried him through all our wars and all our quiet years. It’s worn out. There’s no enemy to fight. No spell to break. Just the slow, inexorable closing of a circle.He’s in our bed. The same bed we’ve shared for decades. His hand in mine is light as a bird’s bone. I can feel every one of his years in the paper-thin skin, the prominent knuckles. I memorize the topography of it. The familiar scars are pale ghosts now.The stakes are not cosmic. They are the size of this room. The size of my heart.The temptation is a snake coiled in my gut. I still have power. I am still a conduit. I could pour energy into him, force his heart to beat, his lungs to draw breath. I could make a puppet of the man I love, drag him behind me for a few more years, a decade, a century of suff
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