Romans & histoires 3000 Years Of Longing Book

"She would have liked who you are because of him. And in spite of him. Both." "Both," I agreed. We sat on the training yard wall until the morning had fully arrived and the packhouse began its day around us, and then Nyx stood and adjusted her coat and walked back inside as if the conversation had been ordinary. I sat for a while longer. Three days. Three days and we'd walk into the largest, strangest, most important meeting of my life and try to end something that had been running for two thousand years. I thought about Isolde. Suspended. Unknown to herself. Two thousand years of waiting for someone to say: you can go now.

My body stiffened; I stumbled as though I had been struck by something unseen yet undeniable. It was a violent, magnetic pull that made the hairs on my arms stand on end, prickling with an unnatural sensation. I’d lived thirty-two years without meeting my fated mate. I’d already resigned myself to the idea that the Moon Goddess had overlooked me, that my scars, both physical and emotional, had sealed my fate to be alone. But that voice. That fragile, broken whisper of longing and despair. It was a key twisting in a lock I hadn’t known existed, a rehearsal of a life I had never dared to hope for. It was promise and curse, temptation and destiny, all at once.

The halls still being built and the communities still growing and the specific traditions still developing. But the full reach of the network. All thirteen answering. The circuit complete. I opened my eyes. The hall was very quiet. Sixty two people. The carriers feeling what I was feeling. The non-carriers feeling the shift in the room. The particular quality of something that had been reaching toward completion finally closing. Adaeze was beside me. Her face. Sixty years she had carried the book. Sixty years she had been looking for me. Sixty years she had been waiting for the day that came.

Tired enough to have aching bones. Thirty years is a long time to endure a thing. It takes even longer to get to the end of it.

He let her feel all of that. He let her feel the ten thousand years of it, the accumulation of longing that had started as a vague celestial restlessness and had been building through every Dreamveil crossing and every watchtower night and every almost-touch and every moment of her reaching and him reaching and the distance between them shrinking until it arrived here, at her fingers in his light and his awareness in her and the Dreamveil blazing around them in colors that had never existed before this specific moment generated them.

Then I looked at the thirty-day notice in my memory, at the sale list, at Dalisay's name sitting six spots below mine on a caravan manifest that would take us both somewhere we would not come back from. I pressed my bleeding palms together, let the pain ground me, and began the third circulation of the night. The pendant burned against my chest like a coal refusing to go cold, like something waiting for the moment a door that had been shut for thirteen years would finally, irrevocably open — and behind it, not safety, not peace, not the comfortable ending that the weak allowed themselves to want, but something vast and merciless and entirely hers. Thirty days. She would be ready in twenty-se

Thirty days suddenly felt both too long and too short. She had no idea how much harder it would get.

"Thank you for asking. Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for waiting when I was gone." "Three years, two months, and fourteen days. And now we have forever." "Forever is a long time." "Not long enough." --- EROTIC CLIFFHANGER: He carries me to bed. Our bed. Our room. Our castle. Our forever. "I've waited three years for this," he says. "Three years, two months, and fourteen days. You said that already. At the ceremony." "Exactly. I've been counting. I've been waiting. I've been dreaming. I've been imagining this moment."

So, I ran harder toward the city, toward destiny and hopefully toward a king who had waited three thousand years… Without realizing that the woman he had searched for was already running toward his world. —--------------------------------------

Repeated in each turn of summer, each fall of the leaves, even when winter kisses the ground, over and over he speaks as if a shadow in his own life. My lips tremble as I read on. Page after page. My gaze shifts upward as I check the date. 15 years. 15 years of longing. I hug my knees, and rest my chin on them as I read. Sometimes I think I am hiding from his words when my hand blocks the pages just to give myself a moment. The rain is like soft music and I am far too soon consumed. I have forgotten entirely. I do not exist. Shade Shadows does not exist. Xirrian Adonis Prime is alive, and he shows me his heart.