I have seen men die.
I have watched kingdoms crack at their foundations, have stood at the edge of battlefields where the ground itself seemed to mourn. I have held a man's hand while he burned out from the inside and told myself afterward that I would never again mistake closeness for something survivable.
I have always been right about everything.
Until her.
She is on the floor of my war room and she is not moving and every wall I have spent six years constructing with my bare hands is coming down so fast I cannot track the collapse. My shadows are everywhere. I am not controlling them. I have never not controlled them.
Someone is saying my name. Valenhart maybe. Or Luna. The voice doesn't reach me properly — it arrives muffled, like sound through deep water, like the world is trying to speak to me from very far away.
I cross the room.
I don't remember deciding to.
I am on my knees before I understand that I have moved at all and she is—she is breathing, I can see that, the slight rise and fall of her chest that tells me she is breathing, but her face is too pale and there is something wrong with the atmosphere around her, something fractured and thin like glass after pressure has been applied to it for too long.
Her reality bending.
Turned inward.
The memory of another person doing this moves through me like a blade and I press two fingers to her throat to feel her pulse and it is there—faint, unsteady, but there. And something in my chest that has not moved in six years cracks straight down the middle.
My hands are shaking.
I become aware of this distantly, the way you become aware of soft breeze. My hands are shaking and my hair is falling across my face and I have not moved to fix it and there are people in this room watching me come apart at the seams over a woman I was assigned to protect and I cannot make myself care.
I cannot make myself care about any of it.
"Lucien."
Luna's voice this time. Closer. Her hand on my shoulder, careful the way she is only ever careful when she is frightened.
"She's alive," I say. My voice comes out wrong. Stripped of something.
"I know," Luna says quietly. "But you're scaring people."
I look up.
The room is watching me. Valenhart with his brown eyes too wide and his elements flickering at his fingertips uncontrolled. The council members pressed against the walls. Every face wearing the same expression — something between shock and the particular discomfort of witnessing a private thing in a public space.
I look back down at Rishe Alaric Waterhaven.
Her blonde hair spread across the stone floor. Her green eyes closed. Her chest rising and falling in that thin, fragile rhythm that is the only thing standing between me and something I have no name for.
I should stand. I should compose myself. I should be Lucien Valdmere — lord commander of Vacío, watcher of shadows, the man who has not been seen to flinch since he was twenty years old and the world took the only person he had let himself keep.
I stay on my knees.
"Let them look," I say.
Luna is quiet for a moment.
Then, very softly, so only I can head—she says: "I knew it."