#handfasting

I. The Final Stitch

There is a needle in your hand, and it is the smallest thing in the world, and it is the most terrifying.

Crimson thread. Silver eye. One stitch left in a gown that took the hands of everyone you love to build, and it must be you—only you, on this morning of all mornings—who closes the seam. Your fingers know the motion. They have known it since your mother first pressed fabric into your palms and said here, this is how we keep things together. But today those same fingers shake, because today you are not keeping a hem in place.

You are closing a door behind you.

One stitch. Good luck, they say. As though luck has anything to do with what you are about to do. As though it is luck and not something far more dangerous—something that looks like courage but feels like falling, feels like the moment before a drop and the moment after, feels like standing at the edge of a cliff and choosing, choosing, to lean forward.

The dress is spread across your lap like a confession. It is not white. It was never going to be white—not for this, not for him. The fabric is the deep, impossible black of a sky that has forgotten its stars, and across it run embroideries in silver and twilight purple, threaded through by hands that are not yours. Here, near the left hip: stitches so small and even they could only belong to Silver, who sews the way he lives—quietly, precisely, with the kind of care that asks for nothing in return. There, along the bodice: a slightly less disciplined but fiercely intentional pattern—Sebek's work, done with the concentration of a man who would rather be fighting but who loves Malleus enough to love what Malleus loves, and Malleus loves his father, and his father loves—

You press the needle through.

The thread catches. Pulls. Draws the two edges of fabric together, and it is such a small thing, one stitch, but your eyes burn with the weight of it, because every stitch before this one was a blessing given to you, and this one—the last, the closing, the seal—is the blessing you give back. It is you saying: I receive what you have offered, and I add myself to it, and now it is complete.

You tie off the thread. Bite it clean with your teeth the way your grandmother taught you, because some things should not be cut with scissors—some endings should be done with your own body, your own teeth, your own certainty.

The dress is finished.

And somewhere beyond the window, beyond the trees that whisper in a language older than the land they root in, a drum begins to beat.

II. The Crown He Made for You

It sits on the small table beside the mirror, and you have not been able to stop looking at it.

Lilia made this. Lilia—who has held swords that sang with ancient magic, who has walked battlefields so saturated with loss that the grass grew back in the color of grief, who has lived centuries and seen empires fold like letters put away in a drawer—he sat down, with his own hands, and wove flowers into a circle for your head.

The blossoms are not from this world. Some of them, at least. You recognize the common ones—night-blooming jasmine, pale and trembling, its scent so sweet it borders on sorrow. Lavender from the gardens, for devotion. Small white roses, because even Fae understand that some symbols are too universal to abandon. But threaded between them are flowers you do not have names for: blossoms that glow faintly, like the last light of a sunset trapped in petals. Flowers from the Valley of Thorns, where the magic is old and does not ask permission to exist. One flower, at the very center of the crown's arc, is a deep, impossible violet—the color of a bruise, the color of healing, the color of something that was once wounded and has transformed itself into beauty rather than decay.

He must have spent hours. You know this because you spent hours on his.

You remember the afternoon—weeks ago now, when the planning was still abstract and the date felt like a distant country you would visit someday but not soon. You had sat in the garden with stems scattered around you like the aftermath of a small, gentle war, and you had woven thornless blackberry vines into a crown because blackberry means protection and healing in the old language of plants, and you had added sprigs of rosemary for remembrance—because if there is one thing Lilia carries more than magic, it is memory, and you wanted him to know that you see that, you honor it, you do not ask him to set it down.

You had added one deep red anemone at the center, and if anyone asked, you would say it was for anticipation, which is what the books say it means. But the books are written by humans who have never loved someone older than the concept of love itself, and what you really meant by that anemone was: I know you have lost. I know the hollow spaces inside you where names used to live. And I am not trying to fill them. I am trying to sit beside them.

You pick up his crown. Lift it. Hold it in front of your face and breathe in.

It smells like him. Not his cologne, not the tea he drinks—but him. The underlying scent of someone who has passed through so many seasons that he has become, somehow, a season himself. It smells like autumn and woodsmoke and the faintest trace of rain on stone, and you close your eyes and press the crown to your chest and let yourself feel, for one unguarded moment, the overwhelming, absurd, terrifying fact that you are loved by someone who has had every reason in the world to stop loving anything at all.

The drumming outside grows louder.

It is time.

III. The Old Journey

In another room—or perhaps the same room, though the walls of this place are old and do not always obey the rules of architecture—Lilia stands before a mirror and does not look at his reflection.

He looks at his hands.

They have been extraordinary hands. Hands that wielded blades in wars that no history book will ever accurately record. Hands that cradled an orphaned child in the wreckage of a country that did not deserve to survive but did, because someone must always survive to remember. Hands that cooked meals for boys who did not know they were being loved until years later, when the taste of something specific—a certain spice, a certain warmth—would stop them mid-bite and they would understand, suddenly, oh. He loved us. He was loving us the whole time.

These hands made a flower crown.

He almost laughs. Almost. But the sound dies somewhere between his chest and his throat, because what rises instead is something heavier—a grief so old it has become structural, load-bearing, the kind of sorrow that holds up the rest of him like a pillar in a cathedral. You do not remove the pillar. You do not question it. You build around it and hope the architecture holds.

Something old.

He turns the object in his fingers. It is small—a chip of stone from the first wall of the Valley of Thorns, worn smooth by centuries of his pocket, dark as dried blood, warm despite the morning coolness as though it remembers the forge of the land that birthed it. Something old must prove the old journey, and if there is an old journey, it is his. It is the centuries. It is the war. It is the long, aching march from who he was to who he became, and all the graves he left along the way.

He closes his fingers around the stone.

For a moment—a single, slipping moment—he thinks: I should not do this.

Not because he does not love you. Gods, not because he does not love you. The love is the most certain thing he has ever known, and he has known many certain things—how to kill, how to mourn, how to keep breathing when the air itself seemed to conspire against him. But love—this love, the kind that does not burn but roots, the kind that does not consume but builds—this love is certain in a way that frightens him. Because everything he has ever been certain about has eventually been taken from him. That is what time does to a Fae. It gives you the capacity to love deeply and then it takes, and it takes, and it takes, and one day you look around and realize you are a museum of loss and the only exhibit open is the one titled Things I Could Not Save.

He thinks: What if I ruin her?

He thinks: What if my love is a wound disguised as a gift?

He thinks: What if she becomes another name I carry?

The stone burns in his palm. The drumming beats through the floor, through the bones of the old building, through the ancient timber that has stood here longer than most nations. And Lilia Vanrouge—who has faced monsters, who has faced the end of everything he knew and rebuilt it with his own scarred hands—Lilia Vanrouge closes his eyes and breathes, and the breath shakes, and the shaking is the most human thing about him, and perhaps that is why he does it—perhaps that is why he chose you, because you are the one who never asked him to be less than shaking.

He opens his eyes.

He looks at his reflection.

The black garments fit him like a second skin—not the black of mourning, though there is mourning in it, but the black of completion. The lonely walks accompanied now. The solitary flame finds its twin. He wears black the way a knight wears armor: not to hide, but to declare. *I was alone. I am alone no longer. And I mourn the solitude not because I miss it, but because it is *dead, and even the things that hurt us deserve a funeral.

He tucks the stone from the Valley of Thorns into the inner pocket of his coat, close to his heart, where it has lived for longer than most countries have had names.

And then he puts on the flower crown you made for him, and his fingers linger on the red anemone at its center, and he does not know its official meaning in the human language of flowers, but he knows you, and he knows what you meant by it, and the knowing breaks something open in him that he quickly, expertly, seals shut—because there will be time for that later. There will be a lifetime for that later.

If there is a lifetime.

No. He corrects himself. Not if. When.

He has outlived despair. He will not let it outlive this.

IV. The Path of Swords

You step out of the building and the world becomes enormous.

The ground has been blessed—you felt it when the elders came at dawn, their voices low and rolling, a chanting that did not so much enter your ears as press against your skin, like hands pushing warmth into cold stone. The earth beneath your bare feet is alive in a way you have never felt before—not soft, not hard, but receptive, as though the ground itself is aware of what you are about to do and has opened its pores to receive you.

The grass is damp. Each blade presses against the soles of your feet like a small, green kiss, and you are grateful for the cold of it, because your whole body is burning with something that is not quite fear and not quite joy but the liminal space between—the doorway feeling, the threshold feeling, the knowledge that you are in the last moment of the person you were before this day, and in the next moment you will be someone new, and the transition is not gentle.

The path stretches before you.

It is lined with swords.

Not sharpened—not weapons, not really—but blades of steel arranged in pairs, crossed at the hilts, forming a corridor of silver arches that catch the autumn light and fracture it into a thousand small rainbows. Saint George's swords. The irony is not lost on you—Saint George, the dragon-slayer, the symbol of a world that wanted to conquer the Fae, and here his swords stand in service to a Fae wedding, repurposed, reimagined, redeemed. The conqueror's blade bent into the protector's arch. The symbol of destruction turned into a symbol of shelter.

Even the things that tried to destroy us can be taught to keep us safe.

Lilia would say something like that. Lilia has said something like that, once, late at night, when the tea had gone cold and the conversation had gone deep and you had asked him how he could still believe in goodness after everything. He had looked at you with those eyes—red, ancient, young in a way that defied his years—and said: *Because I have seen the things that tried to destroy us become the things that protect us. The thorn guards the rose. The dark shows the stars. I am not optimistic. I am *observant.

The swords gleam. Between them, scattered on the ground like a painter's afterthought, are petals.

You had researched each color. You had spent weeks with books spread across your bed, cross-referencing, translating, digging into the old meanings that predate the ones printed in modern guides—because Fae traditions are old, and the old ways do not always agree with the new, and you wanted to get it right.

Red petals, for passion—but not the human kind. The Fae kind. The kind that means I would burn for you, and I would consider it a fair trade.

Gold petals, for the permanence of the sun. What I offer you will not rust.

White petals—not for purity, not for virginity, not for the hollow virtues that humans stapled onto this color—but for honesty. The old meaning. The true meaning. I come to you with nothing hidden. My soul is bare as my feet on this ground.

And deep, deep violet—scattered sparingly, almost hidden among the brighter colors—because violet is the color of transition. The color of the doorway. The color of the space between what was and what will be.

You walk.

Each step is a word. Each barefoot press into the blessed earth is a syllable in a sentence you did not write but somehow know by heart. The drums beat from somewhere ahead—not behind, ahead—and their rhythm is not the rhythm of a march but of a heartbeat, steady and sure, and you match your breathing to it and you walk and the swords rise on either side of you like the ribs of some great, gentle beast that has swallowed you whole and is carrying you, safe and warm, toward the altar where he waits.

V. The Water and the Gathering

The clearing opens like a revelation.

It is beside water—a lake, still as a held breath, its surface so perfect it does not so much reflect the sky as become a second one, a below-sky, an underworld of light turned gentle. The trees around the clearing are ancient—you can feel their age in the way they stand, the way their roots have sculpted the earth into soft ridges, the way their branches reach not upward but outward, as though they are trying to embrace the space, trying to hold the ceremony in the cup of their wooden hands.

Water is everywhere. Not just the lake—you can hear it beneath the ground, a subtle rushing, the whisper of an underground stream that has been here longer than the trees, longer than the land's name, longer than the concept of names. Water in the air, too, a fine mist that clings to your skin like a benediction, and you understand now why this place was chosen: water is present in everything, in blood, in tears, in the womb, in the rain that feeds the earth, and to marry beside water is to say may you never thirst—may your lives never know the dryness of a love that has run out.

The guests are already gathered.

They are all in black.

The sight stops you. Not because it is grim—though a stranger might think so—but because it is devastating, in the oldest sense of the word. Black, everywhere. Black dresses, black coats, black ribbons tied around black sleeves. Malleus stands at the front, and his black is different from the others'—deeper, richer, as though his garments were cut from the fabric of the night itself—and his face, usually so composed, holds an expression you have never seen on him before. It takes you a moment to identify it. It is tenderness. Unprotected, unguarded tenderness, the kind that a dragon prince rarely allows himself, and seeing it directed at his father—at Lilia—makes your throat close.

Silver is beside him, and Silver's black is the black of a soldier's uniform, clean and precise, and his eyes are bright in a way that threatens rain. Sebek stands rigid on Malleus's other side, jaw tight, and you realize with a start that Sebek is trying not to cry, and the effort is so visible, so painfully visible, that you have to look away for a moment, because if you watch Sebek struggle not to weep at the wedding of the man he has spent years pretending not to adore, you will not make it to the altar with your composure intact.

Your family is there too—on the other side, balanced, as though the ceremony itself is a scale that must be kept level. Your mother in black, your father in black, and they are not Fae, they do not fully understand the traditions, but they understand you, and they wore black because you asked and they trusted you, and that trust is its own kind of love.

And then—then—

You see him.

Lilia stands at the altar, and the world narrows to a single point, and that point is him.

He is in black, and the black makes his skin glow like something carved from moonlight, and the flower crown you made sits on his dark hair and the red anemone at its center is a small, bright wound of color against all that darkness, and his eyes—

His eyes are on you.

And they are wet.

Lilia Vanrouge, who has not cried in front of another person in two hundred years, is standing at an altar lined with the swords of a saint who hated his kind, wearing black to mourn the loneliness that is dying today, with a flower crown on his head that you made with your own trembling hands, and he is crying, quietly, the way a river cries when it finally reaches the sea—not from sadness, but from the overwhelming, unbearable relief of finding where it was always going.

Your heart does not skip a beat.

It stops. And then it starts again, harder, faster, as though it has been woken from a long sleep and is furious at having missed anything, and your cheeks flush and your hands shake and you are barefoot and you are black-gowned and you are walking toward the only person in the world who has ever made you understand why people write poems.

VI. The Circle, the Blue, the Four Somethings

The ground at the altar is marked in a circle—drawn in something that glows faintly, a Fae chalk perhaps, or something older than chalk, something that comes from the earth itself and will return to it when the ceremony is done. And around the inner edge of the circle, woven into the marking like threads in a tapestry, are two ribbons of blue.

One is yours. One is his.

They are not tied. They are not attached to anything. They simply rest there, inside the circle, and they will remain there after the ceremony is over, after the guests have gone, after the drums have stopped. They will stay. The blue will stay in the circle long after the feet have left it, and this is the tradition—the something blue does not travel with you. It stays where the vow was made, like a signature on the earth, like a root that remains even after the flower has been picked. Proof, the old texts say. Proof that two stood here and bound themselves, and the ground remembers.

You step into the circle. The earth beneath your feet hums—not audibly, but bodily, a vibration that rises through your soles and into your bones, and you understand that the land is not merely a witness. It is a participant.

Lilia's hand finds yours.

His fingers are cool. They have always been cool—Fae run differently than humans, and his blood moves at its own pace, unhurried, ancient—but today the coolness feels like water on a fever, like relief, like the first breath after too long underwater.

Something old.

He reaches into his coat and draws out the stone—the chip of the Valley of Thorns, dark and worn and carrying the weight of centuries. He holds it between you, and you can feel the age of it radiating outward like heat from a banked fire. This is my old journey, he says, and his voice is low, meant only for you, and it breaks on the word journey because the journey was so long and so lonely and here, at its end, is you.

Something old. You reach into the small pouch tied at your waist and withdraw a folded piece of fabric—lace, aged and yellowed, cut from your great-grandmother's wedding veil. She married in a time when Fae were still spoken of in whispers, when the old traditions were already being forgotten, and she kept this piece of lace because she said you never know when the old ways will need remembering. She died before you were born, but you have carried her lace in your pocket for three years, waiting for a moment worthy of it. This is the moment. This is my old journey, you say, and the lace is fragile in your palm, and you think of all the women who came before you, each one adding a thread to the tapestry that led, eventually, inexplicably, impossibly, to this circle, this ground, this man.

Something new.

You look at each other, and the new needs no object. The new is the joined hands. The new is the single entity that did not exist before this moment—the us that is neither you nor him but something that has its own pulse, its own weight, its own right to exist. Something new as the now one soul. You feel it happen. You feel the seam dissolve, the boundary between your story and his story melt like frost in sunlight, and what remains is a single story, co-authored, alive.

Something borrowed.

From behind Malleus, Silver steps forward. He is holding a small, folded cloth—deep green, embroidered with silver thread in a pattern you do not recognize. He places it in Lilia's free hand, and his voice, when he speaks, is the quietest you have ever heard it.

"It is from a marriage in the Valley," Silver says. "From before. From when my—" He stops. Swallows. "From a time when people still believed that happiness could be borrowed and returned, multiplied by the lending." He looks at Lilia. "Father. I borrowed this from a happy dream. I am returning it, so it may become yours."

Lilia takes the cloth. His jaw tightens. His red eyes shine, and he does not blink, because blinking would mean releasing the tears, and he is not ready—not yet—to let them fall in front of everyone. So he holds them behind his eyelids like a dam holds a river, and he nods, once, and the nod contains more love than most people express in a lifetime.

Something blue.

The ribbons in the circle glow a little brighter. You both look down at them—yours and his, side by side, close but not touching, and they will never leave this circle. Long after today, when the grass has grown over the chalk marks and the mist has dissolved and the lake has reflected a thousand other skies, the blue will remain—woven into the memory of the earth, which, for Fae, is the same thing as being woven into the earth itself.

For both sides, it shall never go away from the circle.

A promise that the ground will keep, even if you cannot.

VII. The Candles and the Knot

There are two candles on the altar. Unlit—waiting—wax the color of bone, wicks dark and expectant. They stand on either side of a third candle, larger, also unlit, and this third candle is the destination. The two solitary flames will become one.

But first—first—

The cord.

It is brought forward by Malleus himself, and the gesture is not lost on anyone. The future king of the Valley of Thorns, carrying the binding for his father's wedding, his face a landscape of emotions that he has never been taught to hide—this is what Fae royalty looks like when love is more important than protocol. The cord is long, woven from three strands: one crimson, one black, one silver. Passion. Mourning. Magic. The three things that have defined Lilia's life, braided together into a single thread, and now that thread will bind him to you.

You extend your right hand. He extends his.

Your palms meet.

The sensation is—god, the sensation is—your skin against his, the coolness of him warming against the heat of you, and the contrast is so acute, so deliberate, that it feels symbolic before it even becomes literal. You are fire. He is the place fire goes to rest. You are the storm. He is the ancient stone that the storm cannot move, cannot erode, can only kiss again and again and again, wearing itself down against something that will never yield.

The cord is wrapped around your joined hands.

Once. Twice. A third time.

And then—the knot.

This is the moment. This is the moment. Everything before this has been prologue— the dress, the crown, the swords, the petals, the bare feet, the blessed ground, the old and the new and the borrowed and the blue—all of it has been a path leading to this single, physical act: the tying.

The cord crosses itself. Loops. Pulls tight.

To tie the knot.

The phrase is so common, so worn smooth by casual use, that its original weight has been polished away by centuries of humans saying it at weddings they do not fully understand. But here—here, in this circle, on this ground, with these hands—the phrase is restored. It is not a metaphor. It is a literal knot, and it is tied with the understanding that once tied, it shall never be untied.

Never.

The word does not frighten you. It should—never is the kind of word that humans are wise to fear, because humans are mortal and never is a promise their bodies cannot keep. But you are not making this promise with your body. You are making it with something deeper, something that does not age, does not weaken, does not forget. You are making it with the part of you that looked at Lilia Vanrouge for the first time and recognized him—not his face, not his name, but the shape of him, the architecture of his soul, the way grief and joy had built him into something that should not exist but does, something impossible and beautiful and real.

The knot is pulled taut.

And Lilia—Lilia—

Lilia looks down at your bound hands, and the dam breaks.

Not dramatically. Not with sound. But his eyes overflow, quietly, the tears sliding down his cheeks in two slow, unhurried lines, and he does not wipe them away, does not hide them, does not do anything except hold your hands tighter and breathe your name like it is the only prayer he knows.

"Never," he whispers. And the word is not a vow—it is a confession. A confession that he has spent centuries being untied. That he has watched every bond he ever formed fray, loosen, dissolve. That he has been the loose thread at the edge of every tapestry he touched, never quite woven in, never quite held. And now—now—someone has taken his thread and pulled it tight and knotted it, and the knot is secure, and the knot is you, and he cannot—

He cannot—

His forehead drops to yours. The flower crowns brush each other, petals mingling, and you are so close that his tears are almost your tears, and the bound hands between you pulse with the shared rhythm of two heartbeats that are learning, in this moment, to synchronize.

"I have buried so many things," he says, and his voice is the voice of a man who has carried the dead on his back for so long that his spine has curved to accommodate the weight. "I have buried so many things, and I told myself it was fine, I told myself that this is what immortality is—this long, quiet process of outlasting. But you—" He pulls back just enough to look at you, and his eyes are red and his cheeks are wet and he has never been more beautiful. "You do not ask me to stop carrying them. You ask me to let you carry them with me. And that—is that not the most terrifying thing anyone has ever offered? To share a weight that was never yours?"

"Yes," you whisper, because it is terrifying, and you will not lie to him, not here, not in the circle where the blue stays forever. "It is terrifying. But I am terrified with you, not of you, and I think— I think that makes all the difference."

He laughs. A small, broken, luminous laugh. And then he kisses you—right there, hands still bound, foreheads still close, the knot still tight between your palms—and the kiss tastes like salt and like home and like the first rain after a drought, and somewhere behind you the drums begin to beat faster, and somewhere ahead of you the unlit candles wait, and none of it matters, none of it, because in this moment the only truth in the world is the pressure of his mouth against yours and the cord around your hands and the promise that lives in the knot like a seed lives in the soil—dormant but not dead, waiting for the season to change.

VIII. The Flame

The kiss ends. The world reassembles itself around you— the lake, the trees, the guests in black, the swords, the petals, the mist. It all comes back, but it comes back different, as though the kiss has changed the color of everything, made it richer, deeper, more real.

The candles wait.

Lilia picks up the one on his side. You pick up yours. They are unlit, but in your other hands—the bound ones—you hold a single flame, borrowed from a fire that has been burning since before dawn, fed by herbs and spoken blessings and the whispered names of the dead who are honored by being remembered. The flame dances on the wick of the small torch, and when you look at it closely, it is not orange but violet at its core—a hidden color, a sacred color, the color of the petals on the path and the ribbon in the circle and the flower at the center of his crown.

You touch the flame to your candle's wick. It catches. Blooms. A small, steady light.

Lilia touches the same flame to his. It catches too. Two solitary flames now, burning on either side of the unlit central candle—two lights that have lived apart, that have burned in their own separate darknesses, that have known the specific loneliness of being the only warmth in a cold room.

And now—

You tilt your candle toward the center. He tilts his.

The two flames lean toward each other like two people reaching across a distance. They touch. For a moment there is a flickering—a hesitation, as though the flames are introducing themselves, as though even fire understands that union requires courage—and then they merge, a single, brighter flame that rises from the wick of the central candle, and the two source candles are lowered, their flames given away, their solitude transformed into something shared.

The single candle burns.

It will burn for seven days. Seven—the number of creation, of completion, of the worlds within worlds that the old stories speak of. For seven days this flame will not go out, fed by the magic of the circle and the ground and the vows, and every hour it burns is another hour that the knot holds, and every hour the knot holds is another hour that the never is true.

You watch the flame. He watches it too. And in its light, his face is not the face of an ancient general or a weary caretaker or a playful trickster. It is the face of a man who has been cold for a very long time and is finally, finally, standing close enough to the fire to feel his fingers again.

IX. What the Song Says Without Words

There is a moment—after the flame, after the knot, after the kiss—when the drums stop.

The silence is not empty. It is full—full of the sound of water, of wind in the ancient branches, of breath, of the small creak of leather and fabric as the guests shift. It is the silence of a held breath, of a pause between movements in a symphony, of the moment when the singer draws air before the final verse.

And into that silence, you speak.

Not vows in the traditional sense—not the rehearsed, measured, approved-by-everyone words that ceremonies usually demand. You speak what is in you, and what is in you is not poetry but truth, and the truth sounds like this:

"I do not only want today."

Your voice is quieter than you expected. It does not carry far. But in the circle, on the blessed ground, beside the water, it does not need to carry far. It only needs to reach him.

"I do not want the flowers more than I want the mornings after— the mornings when you are still asleep and I am awake and the whole world is the shape of your breathing. I do not want the drums more than I want the quiet evenings, when the tea has gone cold again and we do not notice because we are talking about nothing and everything and the talk is the point, the talk is the whole point, because talking to you is the closest I have ever come to being understood."

Your voice cracks. You let it.

"I want the winters. I want the long, cold, dark winters where the roads are hard and the light is thin, because those are the winters that make the spring mean something. I want the summers that are warm and gold and too short. I want the stories we will tell when we are old—when I am old, because you are already old, and I mean that with all the love in my chest, I mean that you have earned every one of your years and I want to hear about all of them, even the ones that hurt, especially the ones that hurt—"

You stop. Breathe. The tears are falling now, and you do not care, because you are in a circle where the ground remembers everything and there is no room for pretense.

"I want the life you will build with me. Not the life that everyone can see. The other one. The one behind the door, behind the veil, where the world grows dim and your light—" You look at him. "Your light never fails. It never fails, Lilia. Even when you think it does. Even when you are certain you have nothing left to give. I have seen you at your emptiest and you were still the brightest thing in the room. That is what I want. Not the brightness. The person who carries it."

The drums have not resumed. The silence holds you both, and Lilia's bound hand squeezes yours, and when he speaks, his voice is the voice of someone who has been handed a gift so improbable that he is still checking it for strings.

"I have lived," he says slowly, carefully, as though each word is a gem he is setting into a crown, "for longer than I can make you understand. And in all that time, I have been many things. Warrior. Guardian. Cook. Trickster. Father." A pause. The word father sits in the air between you, heavy with Silver and Malleus and all the weight of raising children in a world that tried to destroy them. "But I have never been someone's. I have belonged to causes, to duties, to the living and the dead. I have never belonged to a person."

His thumb moves against the back of your hand—a small, slow circle, unconscious, the gesture of someone who is touching the most important thing in his world and cannot stop verifying that it is real.

"Until you. I am yours. Not in the way a sword belongs to a sheath—not containment, not restriction. In the way a river belongs to its bed. The bed does not stop the river. The bed gives the river its shape. You give me my shape. You are the reason I know where I am going."

The flame of the single candle flickers. The mist curls. The water whispers.

"I will love you," he says, "when roses bloom and when they fall. When the world is kind and when it is not. When my past catches up to me—and it will, it always does—and when the ghosts knock at the door, I will not answer them alone. I will say: wait. I am not alone anymore. Come back later. Or better yet—come in. There is room at the table now. There is always room at the table now."

A sound escapes you—half laugh, half sob—and he catches it with his mouth, kissing you again, and the drums erupt.

X. The Drums, the Flowers, the Swords

The sound is enormous.

It comes from everywhere—from the trees, from the ground, from the circle itself, as though the earth is drumming with its own heartbeat and the human drummers are merely joining in. It is wild, free, untamed—nothing like the measured percussion of a human wedding. This is Fae drumming. This is the rhythm that was old when the first human drew the first breath. It does not keep time. It is time. It is the pulse of the world, and it says: live, live, live.

The guests begin to move. Not in the orderly way of a recessional—they move, they dance, they are pulled by the drums into something that is half procession and half celebration and wholly alive. Black garments swirl. Flower crowns bob. Someone—you think it might be Silver, though it is hard to tell through the tears and the mist and the movement—is laughing, actually laughing, the kind of laugh that is surprised out of you, the kind that says I did not know I could still make this sound.

You and Lilia walk back down the path of swords, but the swords have changed. They have been rearranged in the time of the ceremony—or perhaps they rearranged themselves, because this is Fae ground and Fae ground does not obey the laws of stillness—and they now form an archway, a tunnel of crossed blades that you pass beneath like a pair of warriors returning from a battle they have won not by fighting but by choosing each other.

And then the flowers come.

From above—from the trees, from the hands of the guests, from the very air itself—petals rain down in a shower of color that is so sudden and so abundant that for a moment you cannot see the sky, cannot see anything except color, red and gold and white and violet, falling around you like confetti, like snow, like the universe deciding that this moment deserves its own weather system.

Lilia catches a crimson petal in his free hand—the other hand is still bound to yours, the knot still tight, because the knot does not come undone, the knot never comes undone—and he presses it to your cheek, and the petal is soft and cool and it feels like a kiss from the world itself, and the drums beat on, and you walk, and you are married, and the word married has never felt so much like a verb—an action, a becoming, a continuing—rather than a noun, a state, a static thing.

You are not married. You are marrying. The present continuous. The ongoing. The forever.

XI. What Comes After the Song

The celebration lasts long into the night.

The drums never fully stop—they fade in and out, sometimes loud, sometimes a distant heartbeat, but always there, like the pulse of the land itself, like the promise that this ground will not forget what happened here today. The guests eat and drink and dance, and at some point Malleus sits at the edge of the lake and watches the water with an expression that is so peaceful, so unburdened, that you want to frame it and keep it and show it to him on the days when the weight of his crown presses too hard.

At some point Silver finds you and hugs you—tight, wordless, the kind of hug that a man gives when he has been taught to express love through actions because words were never safe enough to hold it—and over his shoulder you see Lilia watching, and Lilia's face is the face of a father who sees his son choose love and the sight of it heals something in him that he did not know was still bleeding.

At some point Sebek—Sebek—approaches you, stiff and formal, and says, "You will take care of him," and it is not a question, and you say, "I will," and he nods once, sharply, and walks away, and you understand that this is Sebek's version of a blessing, and it is perfect, and you cherish it.

But eventually—eventually—the crowd thins. The drums soften. The mist thickens over the lake, turning it into a thing of silver and shadow, and the guests drift away in pairs and groups, leaving behind black petals and empty cups and the faint, lingering scent of jasmine and magic.

And then it is just the two of you.

Just you and Lilia, sitting beside the single candle that still burns—still burns, hours later, its flame steady and violet at the core—and the lake, and the quiet, and the blue ribbons in the circle that glow faintly in the dark, proof that two stood here and the ground remembers.

He is leaning against you. His head is on your shoulder. The flower crown has slipped slightly, and the red anemone brushes against your neck, and his hand—his hand, the one that was bound to yours, the one that wore the knot—is resting on your knee, palm up, as though it is still waiting to hold yours.

"Are you afraid?" you ask.

The question comes from somewhere honest, somewhere you do not usually let people see. But it is night, and the candle is burning, and the knot is tied, and there is no room for hiding in a circle where the earth itself is a witness.

He is quiet for a long time. The lake whispers. The candle breathes.

"Yes," he says. And the honesty of it— the simple, undecorated honesty—makes your chest ache. "Not of you. Never of you. Of—" He pauses. His fingers curl, uncurl. "Of how much I have to lose now. For centuries, I had nothing to lose. That was the— the gift of loneliness, you see? It is a terrible gift, but it is a gift. When you have nothing, nothing can be taken from you. And now I have—" His voice fractures. "Now I have you, and the boys, and this life that we are going to build, and the mornings you spoke of, and the cold tea, and the old stories, and I have so much, and I am terrified, because everything I have ever loved has eventually—"

He stops.

You wait.

"Eventually what?" you whisper, though you know. You have always known.

"Eventually it has ended."

The words hang in the air like smoke. Like the last note of a song that has no encore. Like a grief so old it has become part of his skeleton, part of the architecture that holds him up.

You take his hand. The hand that held swords. The hand that cradled orphans. The hand that made you a flower crown. You turn it over and press your lips to his palm, and you taste salt—his tears, still there, always there, a thin layer of ocean on ancient skin.

"Then we will love it while it lasts," you say against his palm. "And we will love it so completely, so thoroughly, that if it ends—if— we will have emptied ourselves into it fully, and there will be no regret. No I wish I had loved more. No I wish I had been braver. We will have given everything, Lilia. Everything. And if the ending comes, it will find us with empty hands and full hearts, and that—that is not a tragedy. That is the opposite of a tragedy."

He is silent. The candle flickers. And then he turns his hand in yours and interlaces his fingers with yours—a knot, another knot, smaller than the first but no less meaningful—and he pulls your joined hands to his chest, pressing them against the place where his heart beats, slow and steady and alive, alive, alive after everything, alive because of everything.

"The knot," he says softly.

"The knot," you agree.

"Never untied."

"Never untied."

And in the circle, the blue ribbons glow a little brighter—as though the ground, hearing this, is adding its own voice to the vow, is saying yes, I remember, I will keep this, I will hold this for you when you cannot hold it yourselves.

He lifts his head from your shoulder. Looks at you. And his smile—his smile—is the smile of a man who has walked through endless dark and has finally, finally, found the light. Not because the dark is gone. Not because the grief is erased or the graves are empty or the past is rewritten. But because the dark is no longer alone. The dark is now a place where two people stand, hand in hand, and the darkness itself becomes a kind of intimacy—a shared night, a shared sky, a shared space where the stars are visible because it is dark, and the stars were always the point, and you cannot see stars in the daylight, and sometimes the most beautiful things require the deepest shadows to be seen.

"I love you," he says. "Not as I once imagined. In ways my dreaming never knew."

And you recognize the words—not from any book, not from any tradition, but from somewhere deeper, from the place where the song lives before it is sung, the place where all true things wait to be spoken.

"I love you," you say back. "Every rise. Every stall. Every season heaven sends."

The candle burns.

The water whispers.

The blue stays in the circle.

And somewhere high above the mist and the trees and the sleeping world, doves unfold through the sky—white wings against the dark—rising, rising, rising, like prayers that have finally found their home.

Long after the celebration quieted, while you slept beside the single burning candle, Lilia found a pen and parchment. Spoken words are carried away by the wind, even here, even on blessed ground. But he wanted something permanent. Not a grand declaration for the world—just a quiet truth for the two of you. A spell woven of ink instead of thread, to keep in the drawer beside his bed. For the nights when the centuries feel heavy, so he could read it and remember the exact shape of the knot. He wrote:

For every dream I ever dreamed that wandered through the long, dark years, for every hope I folded up and hid beneath my tears—

they live now, shining in your eyes, not as phantoms, not as pain, but as rivers that remember the sea they'll reach again.

And if someday I find you— but I have found you now, in black silk and in bare feet, in the sacred, breathless vow.

I'll spend a lifetime proving every dream was leading me here— through the valley, through the thorns, through the silence and the fear,

through the wars no books remember, through the graves I still attend, to the knot that will not loosen, to the love that will not end—

because you did not try to heal me. You did not ask me to be new. You only knelt beside my ruins and started building too.

I was a museum of all I could not save, and you walked in and did not ask to see the polished things. You asked to see the wings of the moths I thought were dead—and you said:

these are still flying. In the dark. Toward the light. Just like you. Just like you.

So let the blue stay in the circle, let the candle burn its days, let the swords stand as our shelter, let the drumming find its way—

for I have walked through centuries and I was never truly known, until a dream looked at my damage and did not look away.

It stayed.

For every dream I ever dreamed lives shining in your eyes, and every dream was just the night that taught the stars to rise—

and I will spend a lifetime proving every road was worth the ride, every dark was just the sky before the morning opened wide,

and every dream was leading me— not to peace. Not to an end. To you. To the knot that holds. To the blue that stays. To the one who looked at centuries of grief

and said: there is room at this table. There is room. There is room. There is room.