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Dark should be here by now.

I wait outside the lecture building afterwards, watching the crowd of students thin out, checking the usual corners, the usual shadows. While waiting for the usual patch of cold that always announces him before I properly see him.

Nothing.

I check my phone, though there’s nothing to check it for, since he’s never once needed one. And the small, ordinary act of looking at an empty lock screen somehow makes the waiting feel worse rather than better. A group of girls walks past laughing about something, entirely oblivious to the particular kind of dread building quietly in my chest, and I envy them, briefly, fiercely, for having an evening uncomplicated by shadow beings and star-shaped tattoos.

I wait longer than I probably should, long enough that the evening properly settles in around me, streetlights flickering on, my own worry building steadily into something closer to panic. He’s never once been late. Not once, not in all these months, careful and steady and always exactly where he says he’ll be.

“Bunny.”

I spin round so fast I nearly overbalance, and there he is, finally. And something in his face makes my stomach drop straight through the pavement.

“What’s wrong,” I say, already reaching for him. “Has something happened?”

“I apologise,” he says, and he sounds it, genuinely, the words coming slower than usual. Weighted with something I don’t yet have a name for. “There is trouble in the Shadow Realm. My brother required me.”

“Your brother. The king?”

“Yes.”

“Is he all right? Is everyone all right?”

“For now,” he says, which is not the reassurance I was hoping for, though I appreciate the honesty behind it. “It is not resolved. It may not be resolved quickly.”

I feel my shoulders drop, all the worry draining out into something quieter and heavier instead.

Trouble in the Shadow Realm. I want, more than anything, for Dark’s home to have absolutely nothing to do with the rising dark of the prophecy. But I can’t ignore the possibility.

“I had a visit today. High Priestess Magdalene. She found a mark on my arm.” I push my sleeve back up, show him the small dark star, still strikingly strange to look at on my own skin. “Apparently it means it’s really happening now. Whatever it is.”

He studies it for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, one finger tracing the edge of the mark so lightly I barely feel it, like he’s checking it’s real without quite trusting himself to press any harder.

We stand there, the two of us, in the last of the evening light. And neither of us says anything for a while, the weight of two entirely separate catastrophes settling in around us both.

“So,” I say eventually, quietly. “There’s this saving the world business on my end. And whatever’s happening with your brother on yours.” I take a breath, hating every word of what I’m about to say even as I say it. “Maybe we should pause. The dating. Just until things settle.”

He doesn’t answer immediately, and when he does, his voice has gone low and reluctant, every word costing him something.

“If that is what you need.”

“It’s not what I need. It’s what I think we should do.”

“I understand the difference,” he says, “and I do not wish to agree with it. But I see the sense of it. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good.”

“That’s very gracious of you.”

“I am not feeling gracious. I am feeling considerably less noble than I sound.”

I nod, throat tight, and neither of us moves for a long moment, standing there in the fading light with two entire worlds’ worth of complications settling quietly down between us.

“For what it’s worth,” I say eventually, “I don’t want this. Any of it. Not the pause, not the goats, not the star on my arm. I just wanted to make lattes and pass my degree and have you walk me home every evening without either of us worrying about the fate of the universe.”

“I know.” His voice is sombre. Expression calm. Amber eyes sad.

“Doesn’t make it any easier.”

“No,” he agrees quietly. “It does not.”