She stood beneath the starlight of a world that should not exist.
A garden of moons—nine silver orbs hovering low over black grass that whispered when we stepped through it. Each orb hummed with memories too loud for silence, and yet none louder than hers.
Lyra.
Moon-born. Blade-tempered. Eyes like eclipse-fire.
She hadn't spoken in hours.
Not since we left the Tribunal's gaze and the newly shattered Cradle Chain still echoing in our blood. Not since Kael said I'd been claimed. Not since I began to wonder what I had once been before I became this.
And then, finally, her voice.
"Do you remember the orchard with the bells?" she asked me, quiet as broken oaths.
"No."
"You should."
I turned to her.
And for the first time, I noticed her hands trembling.
Not with fear.
With memory.
She reached into her satchel and pulled out a folded piece of parchment—not aged by time, but by touch. Worn soft. Ink faded by tears, maybe. Maybe more.
She handed it to me.
One word written in my handwriting:
"Come back."
The moment I touched it, something shattered inside me.
Not pain.
Not even power.
Something gentler. Older.
Warmth.
A memory.
I stood in a different sky.
Not a battlefield.
A home.
The orchard she spoke of stretched beneath twin suns, windchimes made of hollowed shells dancing in the breeze. And there I was—laughing, barefoot, stupidly happy—and she was beside me, smiling with a smile that didn't belong to a soldier.
Lyra.
Not the bladeborn tactician.
The woman who once held my hand without armor between us.
My wife.
I snapped back.
I dropped the note.
She didn't flinch.
She just looked at me, hollowed by time.
"You asked me to run," she whispered. "But I didn't."
She stepped forward, one pace at a time.
"You fought the Radiant Writ alone, and I watched. Hidden. Under the temple steps. I watched as they tore you apart, limb by limb, until your soul bled across planes."
Her voice cracked.
"I didn't stop them."
The stars overhead stuttered.
Not metaphor.
Reality hiccuped.
As if her words rewrote the cosmos.
"I begged the Moondaughters to send me back. To warn you. But they said no. Said time is not a thread—they said it's a knife. And every time you die, it cuts differently."
I stared at her.
At the woman who had been at my side in a life I'd forgotten.
The woman who had loved me.
And left me.
"Why now?" I asked.
"Because your third death comes soon," she said. "And this time, I want to stand with you."
I didn't speak.
Couldn't.
Too many thoughts raced through my mind—flashes of that orchard, of the way she once looked at me, of the way she looked now. Older. Colder. But beneath it, still... her.
I looked at the parchment again.
"Come back."
Not a request.
A vow.
And she had kept it.
She drew a blade—not to threaten, but to kneel.
Its edge shimmered with lunar metal, echoing with the memory of our old world.
"I failed you once, Aetherion," she said. "But if you let me, I will bleed for you now. In this life. In this war."
Silence stretched between us.
Until I stepped forward, and placed my hand atop her hilt.
"I don't want your blood," I said.
"I want your truth."
She looked up.
And her eyes weren't eclipse-fire anymore.
They were human.
"Then here it is," she said. "You died in my arms. And I wanted to die with you."
And with those words, the moons above us began to descend.
One by one, they began to lower—each holding a fragment of memory. Of our past. Of her promise.
The ninth moon cracked.
A voice spilled from it—not hers.
Mine.
From a life long gone.
"Lyra, if I forget, remind me. Remind me who I am. Remind me who you were."
She looked up.
Tears in her eyes.
"I just did."
Suddenly—
A sound like clockwork unraveling filled the air.
From the cracked ninth moon, something else spilled through:
Not memory.
Not light.
A scream.
Feminine.
Familiar.
And from the other side of the fracture, a whisper licked at my ear:
"She wasn't the only wife you left behind, Sovereign."