Dusk between worlds

Veylan’s POV

He dreamed of light.

He always did, at first.

A memory of silver on skin, of laughter echoing through the first night, of fingers that once traced constellations across his chest and named them mercy.

Then came the ache.

The reminder that light no longer touched him — that it had been sealed away with her forgiveness, buried beneath roots and stone and silence.

He had forgotten the passage of years. The Bloodwood had no time, only pulse. Its heart beat with his own, slow and endless.

He did not hunger. He waited.

And now, after ages of quiet, something stirred.

A tremor through the roots.

A thread of warmth cutting through the dark.

Not the goddess — no, not her.

But her echo.

Child of my light, he thought, the words not spoken but formed in the breath between worlds. Born of her mercy and my fire. I can feel you.

Images flooded him — fragmented, half-formed.

A girl with silver-threaded hair and eyes that burned like dawn breaking through mist.

Her laughter was his goddess’s — her defiance, his own.

He felt the bond she carried, pulsing through her veins — another heartbeat tethered to hers. Mortal. Male. Protective. Possessive.

He almost pitied the boy.

She was never meant for cages of flesh.

His awareness drifted through the roots, searching, tasting. Every tree in the Bloodwood was a vein, every leaf an eye. Through them, he saw the faint shimmer of silver — a mother’s desperate prayer reaching through his cage.

Seren.

He smiled, though it was a broken thing.

Still trying to save what you doomed, little moonling? You came seeking truth and found me instead.

The forest shivered as his consciousness stretched further, reaching for the faintest thread — the daughter’s heartbeat.

It was there, bright and strong, burning through the distance like a flame too pure for shadow.

He recoiled at first. It hurt to feel light again. Then he drank it in.

You carry her warmth but my hunger, child. You are the answer to what we were. The balance she feared to create.

The Bloodwood pulsed, roots glowing brighter as his awareness surged. The rogues kneeling among the trees gasped, their eyes turning black with reverence.

Soon, he whispered through them. Soon she will come. The moon cannot ignore her reflection.

The forest answered with a low moan, sap bleeding red into the soil.

He closed his eyes — if they could still be called that — and let himself remember the sound of the goddess’s voice.

“You were my dusk,” she had said once, when love was still their only language. “But dusk was never meant to eclipse the dawn.”

He had told her then, “Without dusk, there can be no night. Without night, you cannot see the stars.”

He had meant it as devotion.

She had taken it as warning.

Now the stars were gone, and the moon shone cold without him.

But not for much longer.

His essence sank deeper into the roots, spreading outward like veins through the world. He could feel her power rising far beyond the forest — light that refused to be dimmed.

The bond between them was still forming, unclaimed by either divine will or mortal fate. He would wait until it burned brightest. Then he would reach through it.

When the moon blesses your union, little one… I will be there to bless it too.

The Bloodwood whispered in reply — the sound of devotion, of death, of worship reborn.

And far above, in the waking world, the petals of every moonlily shivered, bending toward the same horizon.