"With her…" the King's voice lowered. "it was different. Her memories of him were not in one place, Edric. They were everywhere. Intertwined. Moulded into every part of her, as though he were threaded through the fabric of her being itself."
Edric said nothing.
He simply watched the King.
There was something almost unbearable in the way the man spoke now, something that sat uneasily between authority and guilt.
This was not the confident voice of a ruler making calculated decisions. It was the voice of a father standing at the edge of a danger he did not know how to name properly. A father who had already tried once, and now feared he would have to try again.
"If I am merely mortal, and she is a god," the King said, quieter now, "then how am I supposed to fight her and win?"
His expression hardened with a kind of grim resolve that was more painful than despair.
