POV: Lyra
She's mortal. She won't see the end. She's okay with that.
I realize it in the grove's evening light.
Not as a sudden arrival — the understanding has been building since before the battle, since before the war, since the specific moment in the vigil when I sat beside Aphrodite through the night and understood that the time I have to be beside her is finite and the time she has to be beside me is not.
She will live centuries.
I will age and die in the specific way of humans who run on the human timeline — not in decades from now, not imminently, but in the visible future, the future that the human perspective has access to in the way that the immortal perspective doesn't because the immortal perspective's future doesn't have the same horizon quality.
I've made peace with it.
