Six years was an eternity.
Mael had known spans of time that swallowed empires whole, had watched centuries crumble into dust without so much as a tremor in his being and yet this absence, this small, human measure of years, had carved itself into him with a persistence he had not anticipated.
He felt her before he saw her.
Not in the crude way of proximity, but in that quieter sense, like the echo of something once held close, something the world had not quite managed to erase. It drew his attention with a certainty that allowed no mistake.
Her name left him softly, almost as though he were testing its shape after too long without it.
He didn’t move. For a moment, he simply looked at her, as if confirming that time had not distorted her into something unrecognizable. And it hadn’t, though it had touched her.
There was something more settled in the way she held herself, something sharpened behind her eyes. Not lost. Never lost. But changed.
A faint, almost rueful smile ghosted across his expression.
“Seven years,” he said, quieter now, the words carrying more weight than he intended and leaving a heavy ache deep within his chest. “And still, you are precisely where my thoughts insisted you would be...”
Only then did he step closer, unhurried, though something in the movement betrayed a restraint carefully chosen rather than instinctive.
“I had wondered,” he continued, his gaze steady on hers, “if time would make strangers of us.”
A pause. Brief, but filled.
“It seems it has not been entirely successful.”
His head inclined slightly, not quite a bow, not quite anything so formal. Something more uncertain. Something more honest.
“Will you permit me to stand here as though those years were not quite so long? Or must I earn that place again?”
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