Page 242 of May: Bloom & Bane

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.” I gesture him in. “Sit wherever you would like.”

He chooses the chair furthest from the hearth, as always, nearest the open window, where the night air moves freely. He sits and smooths the front of his robe four times before he folds his hands over his lap.

I have watched him do these things for longer than some of the realms have existed. I no longer see them as strange. I only see him—the careful, brilliant boy they tried to burn out of the world. The boy who survived it and gathered the ashes of himself back together one perfectly ordered piece at a time.

“I have something for you.” I grab the new wine-colored scarf from my drawer. It’s soft enough to wear against his skin, and long enough for him to wind twice and still drape. His eyes drop to the silk, and something in them softens, just slightly, above the cloth hiding the rest of his face.

“You’ve given me a thousand of these,” he says.

“And I will give you a thousand more,” I press it into his waiting hands. “Take it.”

His fingers test the weight of the weave, his thumb gliding over the fabric, four slow passes before he inclines his head.

“Thank you, Father.”

He withdraws his hands, never lingering in the small closeness of these exchanges. He’s willing to die for me, and still, after all these years, he holds the last inch of himself just out of reach. I have never pushed him for it. Some wounds you do not get to heal by force. You can only keep the room clear, the windows open, and hope that one day he sets that last inch down on his own.

“I need a cloak.”

His eyes lift to mine.

“The spelled one,” I say. “I am going to look in on something, and I would rather not be seen doing it.” I hold his gaze. “Not even by the ones who’d know how to look.”

He understands at once, releasing a shred of his impossible power. It gathers between us, darkening the air. Where there was nothing a moment ago, there is now a cloak: deep and lightless, humming faintly with the same magic that has kept all of us hidden from six searching gods for longer than any of them will ever guess.

“It will hold as long as you keep it closed,” he murmurs. “No one will see you. No one will sense you. Not unless you wish it.” He pauses, his gold eyes falling to the floor. “Wherever you’re going… come back to us.”

“Nothing could keep me away,” I tell him. “There are a few more of those waiting outside your door.” I point to the new scarf in his grip.

I draw the cloak around my shoulders, and the world goes quiet as I step out of my realm into the cold.

The chill of the mortal realm is different from mine. It carries the scent of crushed clover and the copper-and-salt from a great deal of spilled blood.

I drift toward the big house at the meadow’s heart. Ilvaen’s magic holds, to no surprise of my own. I could stand in the middle of all of them and not one of those gods would so much as turn their heads. I stop outside the window, where the light spills warmly against the dark.

There he is, the reaper, the boy I have never met and have, in every way that matters, unmade. He’s laid out on his stomach across a low table, the wounds on his back turned up to the light. I make myself look. I owe him that much. If I will not stop my mission, then I will at least not look away. My eyes trace the gashed lines where his wings were anchored to his spine. The shadow there is mutilated and swollen. Runak kneels over him with his hands buried to the wrist in his wounds. I wonder if his brothers truly know how much it takes from him each time they ask him to do something like this. When you command the flesh, your relationship with blood is never simple. He isn’t just manipulating cells; he is swimming in the intoxicating fragrance of a hybrid. For a being like Runak, a wound this deep isn’t just a clinical task—it is an invitation. An apex predator standing over an easy kill. I can feel the reptilian part of his soul screaming to consume rather than close. The hunger he holds so closely is rattling in its cage right now, practically begging to taste the divine copper spilling over his calloused fingers.

Every single touch of his hand is a supreme act of discipline.

Slowly, the torn edges begin to mend. Therael sits on his knees beside the table, holding the boy’s head in his lap with a tenderness that does something to my chest that I am entirely unequipped to handle. It’s a father’s touch. I know it because I have given it; I know it because I have lived centuries for the sole purpose of shielding my own boys from the very gods currently occupying this room. To see Therael, a being built on the rigid, unchanging traditions of the world, brought to his knees, running his fingers through the boy’s blood-matted hair, cracks something open inside me. I grip the edge of Ilvaen’s cloak, pulling the lightless fabric tighter around myself as if the magic could somehow shield me from the suffocating gravity of my own guilt.

The boy drifts at the edge of waking, moving his lips over and over, repeating the same thing: Keep her safe. Her⁠—

I held something like that once, a long time ago, in another life. I know what it is to love like that. I know what it is to lose it. The difference between us is only this: someone came for him.

The gods knelt in the wreckage of this boy and fought to keep him. Crossed realms. Bled their power into his back. Held his head in their laps.

No one ever knelt for me.

The thought arrives without heat. I do not rage. I am long past raging. I only stand at the glass and watch a broken boy be loved by the family that found him. I let the cold settle back over the part of me that tries so hard to remember what warmth felt like.

My gloved hand hovers a hair’s breadth from the glass.

Soon, I tell myself. Soon they will all know. And then it will stop.

I step back from the window, the gray frost of the meadow swallowing my footprints as I pull the cloak tighter. And I return to the darkness I built for myself.