🎵 Suggested Music:
"Promise" – Ben Howard
"Wait" – M83 (instrumental version)
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There were no castles left.
Not really.
Just ruins and rivers, fields overgrown with wildflowers, trees that whispered names older than the ones mortals carried. The old world had burned quietly while no one watched—no swords, no kings, no wars—just the soft disintegration of everything that once mattered.
And in the middle of it: two figures.
Lucian sat with his back to a crumbled wall, dark hair pulled loose around his shoulders, the last of the sunlight lacing through his collarbones.
Kyrell lay beside him—barefoot, head resting against Lucian's thigh, fingers twined lazily through his.
"I dreamt," Kyrell said softly. "Of fire that didn't burn."
Lucian brushed the edge of his mouth. "That wasn't a dream."
Kyrell tilted his head. "No?"
"No." Lucian's thumb moved across his cheek, memorizing him all over again. "You set the world free."
A long silence, thick with warmth and wind.
"Are you still afraid of me?" Kyrell whispered.
Lucian didn't answer right away.
He looked at the sky instead, at the silver threads of dusk beginning to descend, painting the air in melancholy.
"I was never afraid of you," he said finally. "Just afraid I wouldn't be enough."
Kyrell rolled onto his stomach, reaching up to press his lips to Lucian's wrist, where the pulse still fluttered despite centuries of being undead.
"You were always too much," he murmured. "That's why I couldn't forget."
They stayed that way as twilight fell—breath to breath, bone to bone, no need to speak anymore.
Because love, the kind that survives burning councils and forgotten gods, doesn't need words.
It needs space.
Time.
And sometimes… just a single moment under a ruined sky, where nothing exists except the one thing they were never supposed to find.
Each other.
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