“I saw you here once,” he said, voice low. “The first week. You didn’t see me. I came out of morning prayer and saw you just like this—biting into a peach with that same look on your face. The juice was on your chin.”
My lips parted. Later, I had called hisserettardy. He had still picked me for his last bond on the path to ascension.
“I thought… if the gods themselves ever ate fruit, they’d do it like you.”
A small, startled laugh escaped me. But it caught in my throat before it could fully bloom. “Blasphemy,” I teased him.
“To compare gods to your beauty can only be an honor to them,” Auren said.
No one had ever said something like that to me. Not as flattery. Not as a joke. As reverence.
I stepped closer.
“I thought you were distant,” I whispered.
“I was trying not to look,” he replied, reaching up to wipe a smear of juice from my chin with his thumb. “It didn’t work.”
The touch was feather-light. But it struck through me like sunlight against stone—warm, slow, impossible to forget.
The orchard hushed around us.
And for a long moment, all I heard was the bond, thudding gently between us, like footsteps echoing toward something neither of us could name.
Auren brought his thumb to his mouth and licked the juice from it, slow and thoughtful.
“So sweet,” he murmured, his gaze still caught on me. “No fruit should taste like that. It’s unfair.”
I flushed, the warmth curling low in my belly. But he only smiled and reached for my hand again, weaving our fingers together this time. His touch was light, but sure.
“Come,” he said. “There’s more I want to show you.”
We walked deeper into the orchard, through avenues of bowed branches and sun-dappled grass, until the trees began to thin. The path curved toward a low rise, where the ground opened up into windswept fields. The grass here was longer, kissed gold by the sun, stirred gently by the breeze. Far ahead, the sea stretched out—wide and blue and endless—its waves glittering with light. Gulls circled above the cliffs in slow, drifting arcs.
In the center of the field, where the wind sang through a ring of tall stones, stood an obelisk.
It wasn’t grand. Not in the way of temple statues or marble sanctuaries. It was ancient. Weather-worn. Moss crept up its flanks in ribbons, and its inscription was nearly lost to time.
But there was reverence in the way Auren approached it.
“This was where it happened,” he said, pausing just short of the stone. “The first bond.”
I looked up, breath caught. “Here?”
He nodded. “So the story goes. Two acolytes—young men, not long pledged—used to come here to recite the tales of Elyon and the youth in the meadow. They were enamored with the myths. And with each other.”
I stepped closer to the base of the obelisk. “They bonded here?”
“By accident. Or by grace.” Auren’s voice turned quieter. “They weren’t trying to. They didn’t even know how. But something ancient woke in them. Something older than temple rites. When they returned to the temple, a small, crumbling one, they were changed. And here, the stones warmed with sunlight. The villages dreamed of this place, of Elyon himself, and erected the obelisk. The priest said it was a sign that the gods had not left us, after all.”
I let my fingers brush the stone. It was warm from the sun.
“There must have been bonds before them,” I said softly.
“I believe so,” Auren replied. “The gods themselves stepped on this soil, long before the first scrolls were ever written. They made it holy. And their love left echoes. This island knew how to bind hearts before we ever named the ritual.”
A breeze stirred the long grass. Auren turned his face toward it, eyes half-closed.
“But time faded the knowledge,” he went on. “Thescrolls decayed. The rites were lost. Until those two boys found one another—and brought this place back to itself.”
