"No." The word came out of me before I had decided to speak. "No. No way. No. It can't be."
I heard myself saying it — the words spilling out involuntarily, one after another, as though repetition could push back against what I had just understood. That couldn't be right. It wasn't right. It couldn't be.
"You said you would be with me forever." My voice was already unsteady. "We talked about our future — about living with Arvid, about what came next. All of it. You were there for all of it. So where are you going? How can you be going anywhere?"
The impulse moved through me before I could check it. I crossed the space between us and took hold of her by the shoulders, not roughly, but without giving her the option to step back.
"You cannot leave me." I looked directly into her eyes. "You are half of me. You told me that yourself — you are me and I am you. That is what you said. So how can you possibly think of leaving? How can you stand here and smile and talk about sunsets, and—" My voice cracked. I stopped.
"I am not going anywhere," Aiona said. Her voice was so soft it felt like something placed very carefully in a quiet room. She raised her hands and took my face between her palms, her touch unhurried and sure. She leaned forward until her forehead rested against mine, and for a moment we simply stood like that — her steadiness meeting my trembling, the way she had always steadied me, from the very beginning.
"Listen to me," she said. "We use the temporary merge constantly — we have for a long time now. But we are still two separate beings when it ends. We come back to ourselves. What is coming is different. When we merge fully, there is no coming back to two. We become one being. Whole. Complete." She paused. "I won't be able to hold a conversation with you the way I do now. I won't be able to laugh at you, or offer advice you didn't ask for, or argue with you when you're being unreasonable." The ghost of a smile moved through her voice. "But I will always be inside you. Every piece of knowledge I carry, every memory, every instinct — it will all be yours. Already yours. You won't need to ask me, because I will simply be part of how you know things."
Her thumbs moved gently against my cheeks.
"I will always be with you, Rhia. Because we will be one." She held my gaze. "Having my soul bonded to yours was the best thing that ever happened to me. I need you to know that. I need you to carry that."
I had not noticed I was crying until the tears had already gone past the point of hiding. They fell freely, without asking my permission, and then the sob that had been building somewhere behind my sternum finally broke through, and I stopped trying to hold any of it back.
She pulled me into her arms, and I buried my face against her shoulder and wept. Properly wept — the kind that shakes through your whole body and doesn't care about dignity. She held me through it, one hand moving in slow, steady circles against my back, patient and present, the way she had always been when it mattered most.
"There is no banquet that doesn't eventually end," she said quietly, while I cried. "Everything that is born into this world must one day leave it — that is the truth of things, and neither of us is exempt from it. So, my girl — be good, and let it happen. This is our fate. And it is not the ending you are imagining it to be." A pause, thoughtful and certain. "This is a beginning. A new one."
Another pause.
"The age of new dragons is here." Her voice was full of something vast and old and deeply at peace. "Who am I to stand in the way of that?"
She drew back then, holding me at arm's length, looking at my face with the unhurried attention of someone memorising something they love.
"Come on," she said gently. "The Rhia I know are strong. You can do this."
She let go.
"I don't want to." The words fell out of me, smaller than I meant them to be. "I really don't want to do this. There must be another way — there must be something we haven't thought of — there must be—"
"There is another way," Aiona said. Her voice had gone very still. Not cold. Just honest.
"You know it as well as I do. Kill me, and you will be free. The dragonification would stop. You will remain as you are." She held my gaze without flinching. "But even if you chose to do nothing — even if neither of us acted at all — the process would continue on its own and complete the merge regardless. It doesn't require our cooperation. It only requires time." She let that sit for a moment. "If we do it ourselves — willingly, on our own terms — it will be faster. Far less painful than what your body is already beginning to go through. And we would get to say a proper goodbye." Her eyes didn't leave mine. "So tell me, Rhia. What do you choose?"
There had only ever been one answer. I had known it from the moment I understood the question. Perhaps I had known it even longer than that.
I drew a breath. I wiped my face with the back of my hands — an imperfect effort, but an honest one — and I straightened, and I looked at her with everything I had left.
"What do I need to do?" I asked.
Something moved across her face. Something warm and proud and very quiet.
"It is exactly like the first time we attempted a temporary merge," she said. "Place your hands in mine."
She extended her hands toward me, palms upward, open and waiting. I reached out and took them. Our fingers intertwined, fitting together the way they always had — as though the gesture had always belonged to us, as though we had been practicing it for exactly this moment.
"Now let the pull do its work," she said softly. "Don't direct it. Don't resist it. Just wait for it to begin."
She was smiling. A full, unguarded smile, the kind I would spend the rest of my life trying to remember precisely.
"For me too," I said. My voice was barely above a whisper. "Being bonded to you was the best thing that ever happened to me."
Her smile deepened, and for just a moment her eyes glistened — the only acknowledgement she allowed herself.
Then she laughed. That melodic, particular laugh — the one that had always sounded like water over stone, like something alive and glad. It rang through the domain one last time, and in it was joy, and in it was sorrow, and in it was the particular sound of something complete.
"Goodbye, Rhia," she said.
And then the pull began.
It came from somewhere beneath sensation, deeper than physical feeling — a gravity between us that had always existed and was only now being allowed its full expression. We were drawn toward each other and into each other simultaneously, and then the boundary between us — the line that had always marked where I ended and she began — dissolved.
I had experienced the temporary merge many times. I thought I had understood what merging felt like.
I had understood nothing.
This was not a temporary merge. This was not two things moving closer together and then apart again. This was two things becoming the same thing — irreversibly, completely, in a process that did not pause or soften or allow for second thoughts. It felt as though I had been shattered into millions of fragments, each one distinct and particular, and she had been shattered too — and then something larger than either of us had begun the work of weaving those fragments back together into a single, new whole. Our memories collided and merged and overwrote one another and became shared. Her centuries of knowledge poured into me, and my twenty-odd years of living poured into what had been her, and somewhere in the middle of that enormous exchange, the line between *my* memory and *her* memory stopped meaning anything.
It was like watching a cosmic hand write two lives onto one vast parchment simultaneously, the ink of each bleeding into the other until no one could have said where one story ended and the other began.
The fragmentation was the worst of it. Souls broken apart feel like shattered mirrors — every piece still reflecting something real, but the wholeness gone, and the edges sharp. And then the artisan's hand — patient and unhurried and utterly without mercy — gathered every shard and began pressing them back together, and the rejoining was as violent as the breaking.
I had no way of knowing how long it lasted.
Then, at some point, it was over.
I opened my eyes.
I was in the tower. The stone ceiling arched above me, grey-green with damp, the narrow windows letting in slants of fading evening light. I was lying on the floor, flat on my back, though I had no memory of falling. I had been sitting when I closed my eyes and reached inward. I was certain of it.
But there was no time to wonder about that — because before the question had fully formed, it became irrelevant.
The transformation had been waiting.
Whatever had been restraining it — whatever the final barrier had been — it was gone now. The process descended with the force of something that had been held back too long, a dam giving way all at once, water that had been patient finally becoming a flood. It did not approach gradually. It arrived completely.
My muscles shifted beneath my skin in ways that bore no resemblance to anything natural. My breathing tore itself ragged in my chest. I was aware of pain the way you are aware of weather — it was everywhere, and it was absolute, and it had no interest in what I wanted. Thousands of needles pressing inward from every inch of skin simultaneously. Pressure from beneath, as though my body had finally decided it was a temporary structure and had begun the work of rearranging itself into something it had always been meant to become.
I opened my mouth.
Whether I screamed or not, I couldn't say. The sound, if it came, was somewhere outside the boundary of what I could register. The world was narrowing to sensation and away from everything else.
And then my skin began to tear.
---