The teasing voice broke my reverie. I turned, unsurprised to find Corin leaning against the shadowed edge of the archway, arms folded across his chest. He wore his usual expression: one part affection, two parts exasperation.
I offered a mild smile. “Present and accounted for.”
Corin raised an eyebrow. “You say that, but you’re smiling at smoke.”
“Am I?” I looked back at the incense, now burning in soft, rhythmic threads. “It’s particularly fragrant this morning.”
“Mm.” He pushed off the wall and approached with a slow, knowing stride. “You’ve been drifting like this all week. Floating through your duties like you’re wrapped in clouds.”
“I’ve completed all my tasks.”
“Oh, you have.” He gave the offering bowl a glance and adjusted one of the ceremonial cloths on the altar. “Flawlessly. Efficiently. Radiantly.”
I glanced at him sidelong. “Radiantly?”
Corin’s mouth twitched. “I’m simply repeating what two acolytes said after morning chant yesterday. One of them nearly walked into a pillar watching you rearrange the scrolls.”
I laughed despite myself. “Then they’re either easily impressed or in need of stronger mentors.”
He looked at me for a moment, his expression shifting from play to something more contemplative. “You’ve always carried your bonds well, Auren. But this one… it shows.”
I didn’t answer right away. My fingers brushed the edge of the offering bowl again, grounding myself in the coolness of the metal. “It feels different,” I said at last.
Corin tilted his head. “Good different?”
“I don’t know yet.” I turned to him fully, my voice lower. “It’s as if the bond isn’t just settling—it’s expanding. Filling everything. I feel him even when he isn’t near. I feel him when I wake. When I chant. When I walk these halls.” I paused, searching for the words. “It’s not a pull. Not a need. It’s like the bond has taken root in me, and I’ve stopped wanting to resist it.”
Corin’s eyes softened. “That sounds like peace.”
“It sounds like danger.”
He chuckled. “You always were dramatic.”
But I didn’t smile this time. “If I lose him—if the bond doesn’t hold, or if he leaves the island afterward—I don’t know what that will feel like. But I know what this feels like now. And I can’t lie to myself about it anymore.”
Corin placed a hand lightly on my shoulder. “Then stop lying. Just enjoy it, Auren. You have him. He’s here. Let that be enough for now.”
I nodded slowly, though the knot in my chest didn’t fully loosen.
He was right. Callis was here. Each night he came to me willingly. Each morning I woke to the weight of him beside me, his breath warm on my skin, the bond a glowing thread that wrapped around us like silk.
But there was a fragility to it, too.
Like morning dew on the petal of a flower—beautiful, perfect, and already on the verge of vanishing.
But time, as ever, was relentless.
It moved through the days like water through cupped hands—steady, unstoppable, impossible tohold. I clung to every moment I had with him, trying to stretch the hours between rituals and meals, between moonrises and shared sleep. But the bond swelled with each passing night, and the end of the cycle loomed just beyond the curve of the horizon. There would come a day when Callis no longer walked beside me, no longer waited with a book in his lap and a shy smile in his eyes. I felt it in the way the mornings grew quieter. In the way I counted them.
And I felt it here.
In the bathhouse.
Steam curled upward from the stone pools, filling the air with warmth and quiet. Lanterns flickered along the walls, casting dim halos through the mist. The day’s rites were behind us, and the world beyond the tiled archways had dissolved into stillness.
Callis sat beside me in the smaller pool, his knees drawn up slightly, arms resting along the edge. His hair was damp, curling at the ends, and his skin gleamed gold in the lamplight. Neither of us had spoken for a while. The water hummed around us with its own kind of serenity.
Then, softly, he said, “I used to sit like this back home. Just before evening rites.”
