~ KAEL ~
Kael couldn't sleep.
It wasn't Pale's letter, exactly — or not only that. He lay in the dark of his small room, Biscuit a warm, heavy weight against his side, and found his mind doing the thing it always did when it had nothing else to chew on: arithmetic.
Specifically: he was thirty-one. Or had been, in his previous life, when a wet floor and a bad sense of timing had ended things rather abruptly. He had no idea how old this body was — the question had simply never come up — but it felt, roughly, similar. Thirty, give or take.
Which meant, if he was lucky — genuinely lucky, the kind of luck that avoided wet floors and debt collectors and Conclave tribunals — he had perhaps fifty years left. Sixty, if he was very lucky.
Nyxara had used the phrase 'seventeen thousand years' so often, by now, that Kael had stopped really hearing it as a number. It was just… a word she used, the way other people said 'a while.'
Lying in the dark, it suddenly felt like a number again.
"You're thinking very loudly," Nyxara said, after a while — gently, the way she said things when she'd been quiet for long enough to notice something was wrong.
"Sorry." Kael shifted, careful not to dislodge the cat. "It's nothing — I mean, it's not nothing, it's just…" he exhaled. "Can I ask you something? And can you answer it honestly, even if it's not… a nice answer?"
"Always."
"Fifty years," Kael said. "Maybe sixty, if I'm careful. That's… roughly what I've got. And you've got—" he gestured, vaguely, at the dark, at everything. "You know. All of it. Forever, probably."
A pause — not a guarded one. Just quiet.
"Yes," Nyxara said.
"Does that…" Kael searched for the words. "I guess what I'm asking is — does that change anything? For you? Knowing that, going in?"
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
She had been waiting for this question — not dreading it, exactly, but holding it the way you hold something you know is coming and want to be ready for when it arrives.
She thought about how to answer honestly, the way she'd promised — the way that had become, somewhere along the way, simply how she answered everything now.
"I've loved a mortal man before," she said slowly. "You know how that ended. Seventeen thousand years of grief, and becoming something vast and distant because feeling it again seemed unbearable."
Kael was quiet, listening.
"So — yes. It changes things. I'd be lying if I said it didn't. Fifty years, sixty years — to you, that's a whole life. To me, it's… less than a heartbeat, in the scale of things I've existed through. And at the end of it, I'll still be here, and you won't, and I'll have to… figure out what that means, again, the way I never properly did the first time."
"I'm sorry," Kael said quietly — and Nyxara could hear that he meant it, not as an apology for existing, but for the weight of what he'd just asked her to say out loud.
"Don't be," she said. "Because here's the other half of it, and it's the half I keep coming back to, every time I think about this. The first time — seventeen thousand years ago — I didn't become vast because I loved him. I became vast because I was afraid of losing him, and the fear was so much louder than the love that I let it decide everything. I spent millennia being careful, specifically so I'd never have to feel that again."
"And?"
"And then I met you," Nyxara said, "and I was careful for about two weeks, and then I wasn't, because being careful turned out to be worse than the thing I was afraid of. Kael — I know how this ends. I knew how it would end before it started. I chose it anyway. I'd choose it again, every single time, because the alternative — being vast, and safe, and never feeling any of this — isn't actually safe. It's just… smaller. And I spent seventeen thousand years being smaller because I thought it would hurt less, and it didn't. It just meant there was less of anything, including the hurt."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
Kael lay in the dark for a long moment, Biscuit's steady breathing the only sound in the small room, and felt something settle — not resolve, exactly. He hadn't expected resolution. Fifty years was still fifty years, and Nyxara would still be here after, and neither of those facts had changed.
But something about the shape of it felt different now.
"I think," he said slowly, "I was sort of asking the wrong question. I was asking 'is this worth it, given how it ends,' like the ending was the thing that mattered most. But that's… that's not how I'd think about it, if it were a person. If I loved someone and knew, going in, that I'd lose them eventually — I wouldn't spend the whole relationship calculating the loss. I'd just… be there. For however long there was."
"Yes," Nyxara said softly. "That's — yes. That's exactly it."
"So," Kael said, and he could hear, in his own voice, something settling into place — not an answer, but a decision, the kind that doesn't need to be dramatic to be real. "Fifty years. Maybe sixty. Let's… not spend them doing math."
"I'd like that," Nyxara said — and there was warmth in it, steady and certain, the same warmth that had answered a cold alley two months ago, except wider now, and rooted, and shared, in all the ways Kael had spent the last month discovering it could be.
"For what it's worth," Kael added, after a moment, "whatever happens with Pale's letter, and whatever 'concerned' ends up meaning — I'd still rather have fifty years of this than seventeen thousand years of anything else."
"Kael—"
"I know," Kael said, smiling slightly in the dark. "Don't push it. I'm saying it anyway."
And somewhere in the dark between stars — closer now than it had ever been, rooted in a small room with a sleeping cat and a man who'd once complained at a wall in verse — something ancient laughed, quietly, and didn't try to stop itself.