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“I know that revenge was everything to you,” she said. “I saw it. But you never told me yourself.”

He finally looked at her. “The plan was everything to me. It’s not anymore.”

Maia didn’t move. She couldn’t.

“With you,” he continued before she could answer him, slower now, as though each word had to be dragged into existence, “everything began to… shift. I told myself it was temporary. A distraction. Something I could contain. Something I could choose to walk away from.”

“That’s why you told me we couldn’t see each other.”

“Yes. I thought if I removed you,” he said, “if I put distance between us, I would regain control of it. That I would remember what mattered.”

“And did you?” she asked.

“No. Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“And when I had my assessment,” Maia said, then swallowed. “When they sent the monster. Did you know? Julen told me you looked for me before anyone else knew.”

Something in Caelith’s expression broke fully this time, the pain no longer subtle. “I felt it,” he said.

Her brow furrowed. “Felt what?”

“You,” he said, voice rougher now. “For three hundred years there has been one thing in this world I could feel from any distance, a hole in a cliff that wants me back. But I did not know a human - you - would be the second.”

“You felt me?” she whispered.

“Yes, Maia. And when I felt you, I couldn’t think,” he continued. “Not about the plan. Not about the outcome. Not about anything I had spent centuries building.”

He stepped closer now, the distance between them collapsing without either of them acknowledging it.

“There was only one thought left,” he said.

Maia didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

“What?”

“That you were going to die,” he said. “And I would not be there to save you.”

He looked at the floor.

“So I stopped caring about who saw. I no longer hid that it was me who broke the formation,” he went on. “It was obvious I interfered. I did exactly what I was not supposed to do.”

“That’s why they took you,” Maia whispered.

“Yes.”

“And you knew they would. And you let them.”

“Yes.”

Her voice shook now. “Caelith…”

He looked back up at her without hesitation. “I would do it again, Maia.”

He exhaled slowly. “If you had died,” he said, his voice unsteady in a way she had never heard before, “there would have been nothing left of the plan worth saving. There would be no retribution. There would be nothing.”

She lifted her hand to his face, her fingers brushing along his jaw.

Caelith clenched his fists, but he didn’t pull away. He looked directly at her. “Maia, even if we can stop this,” he said, “there is no version of what comes next that is simple.”