POV: Theron
He knows this grief. He lived it for centuries.
She's kneeling in the ash where the mortal stood.
I've been watching from the position I held through the battle — the Direwolf Alpha assessment running continuously, the centuries of imprisonment not having diminished the specific situational awareness that the bloodline carries even when the capability it was developed to serve has been compressed to a fraction of its full expression.
I know what she's experiencing.
Not through the inference of someone who has watched grief from the outside — through the direct experience of someone who has been in the specific configuration that the grief produces. I lost my mate. Not in the way that a bond rejection produces a loss, not in the way that the incomplete bond produces the specific grief of acknowledged possibility. The complete loss of the person who was the specific weight at the center of my own life, leaving the specific shape of their absence.
I survived it.
