The temple had never been silent—not truly. It breathed, groaned, whispered. But tonight, its voice had been stolen by whatever Saphine had summoned into existence.
The crackling hourglass behind her had stopped spilling sand. Time was kneeling, watching, waiting. And before her… was Velian.
Not a memory. Not a dream. Not a vision conjured from pain.
He stood there—flesh, flame, and fury—like the universe had torn open a secret just for her. His hair, longer now, shimmered with streaks of silver. His eyes? Galaxies set ablaze.
"Velian..." Her voice didn't sound like hers. It sounded ancient. Hollowed out. Holy.
He smiled—but it wasn't peace. It was pain wrapped in longing.
"You called, and I came," he said.
No fanfare. No thunder. Just truth. The kind that could shatter bones from within.
Saphine stepped forward, though her legs threatened to betray her. "You were sealed beyond the Gates of the Nevermorning. How—how did you—?"
"You broke the rule, remember?" he said. "Time cracked, and I slipped through. Just like you knew I would."
She faltered. "I didn't do this for you."
"No," he agreed. "You did it because the world deserved to bleed for what it took from you."
The tension between them was a wound that hadn't healed right—tender, inflamed, begging to be reopened.
"But I'm here now," Velian whispered, stepping closer. "And everything's about to fall apart."
Behind them, the stars in the sky blinked out. One by one.
Not because they were dying. But because they were watching.
Saphine didn't know if she wanted to run toward him or rip open the veil of magic that held him together just to see if he'd fade.
Velian—real and unreal, death and resurrection, her love and her ruin.
"I bled the moons dry for you," she said, her voice splintering like a brittle candlewick. "I let the Immortal Keep fall, let them carve my name into betrayal."
He stepped closer. "You thought I wouldn't do the same?"
"I didn't think you'd come back." Her hands trembled. "I wasn't ready."
Velian laughed, low and bitter. "That's the thing about time, Saphine. It doesn't wait for readiness. It just unravels."
He reached out, fingers brushing her jaw. Sparks leapt from his skin—not metaphorical sparks, real ones. Fire and light and something ancient rotting beneath it.
Saphine felt the burn in her bones.
She whispered, "Why do you look like you've seen the void?"
"Because I made a pact inside it."
The temple's pillars cracked as if echoing his confession.
"I traded my name, my soul, and my after for a moment of now," Velian continued. "To stand here before you. To burn with you one last time."
"One last—?"
His eyes darkened. "The pact is bound in ash and light. I get one moon's cycle. Then the abyss comes to collect."
Saphine took a step back, shaking her head. "No. No, Velian. We can undo this. We'll find the Gatekeeper. We'll speak to the Woven Judges—"
Velian shook his head. "No judge would spare a soul that's broken fate."
Her lip quivered. "I didn't summon you to say goodbye."
He touched her heart. "You summoned me because love doesn't listen to reason."
Their foreheads met, and the temple wept. Literally. Rain trickled from the carved mouths of forgotten gods.
Behind them, the hourglass resumed its drop. Each grain now a drumbeat of borrowed time.
The night reeked of something old and undone—like ancient smoke sealed in the lungs of ghosts. Velvet shadows dripped from the trees as if the moon herself had wept darkness into the world. Almond's footsteps crunched through the brittle remnants of what used to be a garden—ashes in the shape of petals. Here, beneath the half-collapsed shrine where the runes still glowed with that strange, dying light, she waited.
Aren stood across from her, no longer shaking. His eyes had lost the last gleam of boyhood. Now they held storms. "This isn't redemption," he said. "It's rebirth by ruin."
"I'm not here to be reborn," Almond whispered, voice sharp like the edge of broken glass. "I'm here to remember."
The contract lay between them, not written in ink but in the old way—blood and vow. She reached for the ceremonial blade, its obsidian edge humming low, like a growl in the throat of a beast yet to awaken.
With a swift motion, she dragged it across her palm.
Her blood hissed as it hit the altar, mixing with the ghostlight. "I swear," she breathed, the words ancient and bitter, "to bind myself to the night that bore me, to the hunger that shaped me, to the curse that keeps me."
Aren followed, slower, eyes flickering like a flame trying to decide whether to live or die. When he pressed the blade to his skin, he didn't flinch. He bled willingly. "And I swear," he muttered, "to follow the shadow that calls me, to betray the light that abandoned me."
The pact shimmered, not as a flash but as a ripple—like reality exhaled.
Then the ground split.
A low rumble echoed through the soil, through the stone bones of the forest, and down through the marrow of the earth. The pact had been made. It could no longer be undone—not by gods, not by time.
Suddenly, from the edge of the woods, Velda appeared, wrapped in red flame and her own rage. Her voice cracked across the trees: "What have you done?"
Aren turned slowly. "We chose."
"You chose damnation," she hissed.
"We chose truth," Almond said, stepping forward, her blood-stained hand still glowing. "And we don't need your salvation."
Velda's eyes burned, but something else flickered beneath—was it fear?
The shrine pulsed again. Runes lifted off the stone and floated in the air like glowing ash. They swirled around Almond and Aren, binding them in a spiral of language older than death.
And the wind changed.
No longer a breeze—it howled. Carrying whispers. Names. Lost oaths. Forgotten memories.
Somewhere, deep in the folds of the universe, a lock clicked open.