Aiona asked me to come to our domain — the space that existed somewhere inside the depths of my own mind, neither entirely mine nor entirely hers, but shaped by both of us over time. I did exactly as she asked, obedient as I rarely was in waking life. I closed my eyes and let the outside world go — the stone walls, the damp air of the tower, the fading ache in my twitching hands — and drew all of my focus inward, layer by layer, until there was nothing left but the interior quiet.
The familiar sensation came soon after. A loosening, a lightness — something that could only be described as the feeling of stepping out of yourself while remaining entirely whole. I floated upward, or perhaps inward, the direction impossible to name. And then I was moving, drifting through the passage that had become well-worn by now, until the sky of the domain opened above me like a door being pulled wide, and I arrived.
I was standing on the high cliff, looking out over the vast expanse of the domain spread below and beyond me.
It had grown. That much was immediately apparent. It had grown to nearly three times the size I had first encountered — that first time, involuntary and disorienting, when the elf Arandial had been siphoning my magic and I had stumbled into this place without understanding what it was. Back then, there had been only the golden rice fields stretching in every direction, warm and familiar, a reflection of the landscape that had shaped the earliest years of my life.
Now it holds so much more. The high cliff on which I stood. The forest of white-barked trees with their deep red leaves — Rulha's gift, absorbed into this place along with his essence. And the ocean, vast and restless at the domain's far edge, which had come when I had gathered Aiona's essence from her temple deep in the Grand Sand Desert.
Every part of this place was a record. A map of choices made and distances travelled and things that could not be untaken. I stood there looking at it all, and before I was aware of it, a faint smile had settled on my lips — quiet and unbidden, too honest to suppress.
"Does this place finally feel like yours?" Aiona's voice came from just behind me.
I turned.
Her appearance gave me pause. Aiona almost always mirrored me in some indefinable way — in bearing, in mood, in the colours she chose. But today she was my exact opposite. She wore a white lehenga, its fabric catching the light, adorned with silver embroidery and silver jewellery at her throat and wrists and ears. I stood beside her in black, gold embroidery running along every hem, gold at my neck and hands.
I didn't know whether she had chosen it consciously or whether the domain had dressed her according to some logic I didn't yet understand. But it felt deliberate. It felt as though it meant something.
"It does," I answered, turning my eyes back to the horizon.
And then I noticed.
The sun was setting.
A slow, deepening descent toward the horizon, painting the sky in broad strokes of orange and gold and rose, the colours bleeding into one another with the particular softness of a day that has decided to be beautiful on its way out. I stared at it.
This was wrong, in the way that small impossible things are wrong — not dramatically, but persistently. The sun in this domain had always been fixed. Always blazing directly overhead, violent and high and unmoving, radiating the kind of light that belonged to the sharpest hour of midday. Even on the day it had rained here — the day I had nearly been killed by the woman I had trusted, Martha— the sun had simply been swallowed by clouds, still occupying its fixed point above. It had never moved. It had never changed position. That had always been simply the way of this place.
So why was it setting now?
I watched the colours deepen, and despite myself, despite the unease beginning to gather somewhere beneath my ribs, I let the sight wash over me for a moment. Oranges and pinks and warm yellows layered over one another like pigment on silk. It was almost too beautiful. The kind of beauty that asks you to stop and simply receive it, and so I did — my worries suspended briefly, held at a distance by something that felt almost like grace.
"I have been waiting for this day for such a long time," Aiona said softly beside me.
"A day the sun sets in your domain?" I asked, half confused. It was her domain — or had been, before it became ours. Couldn't she bend it to whatever shape she wanted?
The question caught her off guard. She laughed — and her laugh today was different. More melodic than I had ever heard it, liquid and bright, the kind of sound that belonged to someone who had once laughed like that often and had almost forgotten. But underneath it, unmistakably, there was something else. A note of sorrow threaded through the joy, delicate but present, the way grief sometimes hides inside the things that make us happiest.
"You are not entirely wrong," she said when the laugh faded. "But you still don't understand why the sun is setting, do you." It wasn't quite a question. She murmured something under her breath — something that sounded like *of course you don't* — fond and a little rueful.
Curiosity had been gathering in my throat since the moment I noticed the sun's position, and it finally closed around me entirely.
"Why is it happening?" I asked.
Aiona was quiet for a moment. Then she began, measured and unhurried, the way she spoke when the thing she was saying mattered enough to say carefully.
"I can control almost everything within this domain. I placed things as they came — the fields, the cliff, the forest, the water — and I chose not to alter most of them. But if I wished to, I could. Watch."
She glanced toward the tree line. The white-barked trees with their deep crimson leaves shimmered — and then the red drained out of them like ink drawn upward, replaced in a slow sweep by vivid, living green.
I watched them change. Then I looked back at her.
"But there is one thing I have never been able to control," she said, and her gaze moved to the sun. Something passed across her expression as she looked at it — not quite anger, not quite grief. The particular feeling of someone who has long since made peace with a loss but still remembers the shape of it.
"The sun. It has always been beyond my reach." She turned to look at me. "Do you know what the sun represents in this domain? What has it always meant?"
I shook my head.
"Time," she said simply. "The sun here represents time."
She was quiet for a beat, looking back at the horizon.
"I died in my prime. Five hundred years lived, out of the thousand I had been given — half a life, cut short before the midpoint had fully passed. And so the sun in this domain has always sat at its zenith. Blazing. Violent. Fixed. Exactly as I was when I died — at the height of everything, energy unspent, power undiminished, and nowhere left to put any of it." A pause. "I never complained about the sun being still. But I was resentful of it. Half of my time had been stolen from me. Half of my years, half of what I was owed. Even though living on without my mate had become something I could no longer summon a reason for — some part of me, early on, had wanted to continue. Had wanted to see what came next."
She stopped. The orange light of the setting sun lay across her face in warm lines, softening everything.
"And then I spent countless years in the abyss. Waiting in that formless nothing, with no sky and no sun and no passing of time at all. And what I found myself longing for, above almost everything else, was a sunset. Not life — not the return of what had been taken. Just a sunset. Something to mark an ending. A way to say goodbye to all of it and mean it."
Her voice carried no self-pity. It was simply honest, in the way that things become honest after a very long time has stripped away every other option.
The feeling growing in my chest was not comfortable. It pressed against my sternum with the insistence of something that needed to be acknowledged, building quietly, steadily, like water finding the cracks in stone.
*Don't ask*, something in me said. *Don't ask because you already know, and knowing will make it real.*
But I had never been very good at leaving things unasked. And Aiona deserved to be asked. She deserved to be looked at directly.
I turned to face her fully. My voice, when it came, was not as steady as I wanted it to be.
"Why is the sun setting now, Aiona?"
She turned toward me at the same moment.
And she smiled — fully, completely, without reservation. It was the most beautiful smile I had ever seen on her face, or perhaps on any face. It reached everything. It held nothing back.
"What else?" she said, and her voice was warm and bright and full of something that sounded remarkably like joy. "To let the new sun rise tomorrow, of course."
The words landed gently.