Page 231 of Keldori By Daybreak

I dared to lift my eyes to his face.

The pale skin of his cheeks was pallid, and his dark hair heavy with sweat, but his eyelids fluttered half-open to amber eyes. Tears traced the side of his face to fall into his hair.

“Wren.” A faint rasp scratched at Ciarán’s throat.

“Ciarán!” I pulled my cloak from my shoulders to throw over his naked body, worried he might be cold, then fell on top of him, holding him close as sobs of relief and exhaustion racked my body.

“You’re terrible at listening,” he croaked. “You’re supposed to aim for the mouth.”

“I’ve been told I have terrible aim.” I was trying to make a joke, but the words came out in embarrassing sobs.

“Thank Skal for that.” He raised a shaking hand to my face to wipe at my wet cheeks with his thumb.

I laughed through my tears, held him tighter, and pressed my lips against his.

We’d done it. We’d—

That ever-present pressure in my chest, that magnetic pull that had kept me in its orbit for the last several weeks, suddenly lifted.

A deafening crack! split the atmosphere, then faded into a rumble, which then strengthened into a roar. The dawn sky turned dark as heavy plumes of ash rose in the sky above the mountaintops.

Except the mountain tops were gone, replaced by walls of dirt, mud, and melted snow that ripped into the valleys.

I twisted to look back at the Rift, but the ice had broken. Dark water frothed between us and our escape.

I held Ciarán tighter.

“I’m—I’m sorry, Ciarán. I tried. I tried to help—”

A wave of hot air blew my hair back from my face ahead of the pyroclastic flow barreling towards us. It was as if the mountains had turned liquid, and the ridges and trees and rocks sloughed off the mountain side to join the wave of mud and debris.

The armies on the shore were no longer lined up. The amount of ash in the air had turned the sky back to night, but I could see them by the light of their skalfires as they ran in haphazard directions. Their efforts and their panic were futile. Nothing would survive the oncoming earth.

Hopefully the others would force Mom back through the Rift. I couldn’t imagine she would leave me here, but we were too far and the landslide too quick.

“You were wonderful, Wren. Please don’t apologize.” Ciarán’s hand wrapped around the back of my neck, and he kept his eyes on me instead of the rolling mountains. “You saved the worlds. And you saved me.”

“You’re going to die because of me.”

“I’m going to die with you, which, if you think about it, is what I wanted anyway. To live out the rest of my life by your side, whether that’s a hundred years or only a minute.”

I buried my head in his shoulder, holding him so tight that I was sure my nails were cutting into his skin.

“I love you,” I choked into his hair.

“My Lady, I love you too.”

We would die here, in each other’s arms. Maybe this final embrace would be immortalized forever, like the victims of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii. Maybe it would destroy us completely.

Whatever happened, I would hold onto Ciarán as long as I could.

“Wren, dear, cheer up, my love,” a familiar voice said overhead.

I jerked my head up.

Gams looked like her old self again—wrinkled smile, gray hair, a paint-stained Keel Watch Harbor sweater.

She knelt beside me and cupped my cheeks in her hands.