Rejected by My Mate, Desired by His Enemy
"She trains too, when she's ready. Her path is different from yours but it runs the same direction."
I look at my daughter's door. The night light inside makes the gap at the bottom glow faint orange. She's fine. She's safe, right now, in this moment.
I stand up.
Sage reaches into her coat again and pulls out a book. Old, the way genuinely old things are, not decorative-old, not vintage-old, but the kind of worn that comes from actual use across actual generations. The cover has no title. The spine is cracked in three places.
She sets it on the table and opens it to a page near the front. The writing inside is in a script I don't recognize but somehow feel, like a vibration in the back of my