To Phoebe.
My mouth forms her name like a prayer I don’t know how to pray.
Will she bristle at our customs?
Will the weight of ritual shrink her into the smallness I’ve always feared for anyone in my care?
That’s the thing no treaty covers—the fragile life of another person held inside your hands.
I find I’m not scared of losing power so much anymore.
No, I’m scared of losing the light she brings me, of watching it go dim because I was careless or blunt or simply not good enough.
She comes back to my side a breath later, the distance between us negligible, but the moment apart feels too long.
“Are you okay?” she asks, concern darkening the blue of her eyes.
My heart stutters, because when was the last time anyone asked me that and meant it?
“Yes,” I say too quickly. “Stay with me. The clan elders will bring the priestess and lay a blessing on us.”
I lower my voice so only she can hear.
“And afterwards, I’ll arrange the meeting with the handlers. The whales will like you.”
She nods and smiles. Even better? She stays.
When the priestess arrives—a Demon woman the color of wet stone and dried seaweed—she speaks the old words, sprinkles saltwater over our joined hands, and offers us a thin piece of toasted sea-bread spread with sweet prawn paste.
It is a small, absurd thing, intimate in its own salty way.
Phoebe accepts it without hesitation, splits the toast with me, and takes her bite like a woman who’s decided tonight is for learning, not for fear.
Watching her do it—unfazed, curious, wholly present—something inside the tie that binds us loosens and flushes warm.
The thing around my heart, the hunger-wound I have tried to ignore, answers with heat.
It isn’t just desire. It’s recognition, a slow, steady kind of homecoming.
I can feel the zareth—if it is a true zareth—shift, like a tide finding its proper channel.
I am falling.
That admission is a blade and a promise at once. I am afraid—terrified of the vulnerability, of what I might lose if I fail—but there is a fierceness in that fear I didn’t expect.
A protectiveness that feels like a vow forming before I’ve had the courage to say it aloud.
Tonight First Shore is full of music and laughter, but underneath it all I hear an altogether quieter sound.
The thrum of something binding me to her, and the small, impossible hope that she might not slip away.
Dagan’s warning echoes in my head like a stone dropped into still water.
Claws in soft things. Maybe.
But I am not merely a Lord of storms and borders.
I am also something less tidy.
