Chapter 83: The Rescue

TABORLIN THE GREAT knew the names of all things.

That’s how the stories start. It’s the first thing every child in the Four Corners learns about the greatest arcanist who ever lived. Taborlin the Great, who was locked in a high tower with no way out. Taborlin the Great, who was thrown into the darkest pit. Taborlin the Great, who always escaped, always survived, always found a way.

But the stories always leave out the most important part.

Taborlin didn’t escape alone.

He had three things: a key, a coin, and a candle. And those three things---given, not taken; gifted, not stolen; offered freely by someone who loved him---were the real magic. Not the naming. Not the power. The gifts. The faith of another person, manifest in objects that carried meaning deeper than their physical form.

I had always loved the Taborlin stories. As a child, I’d acted them out with my parents’ troupe, playing Taborlin himself, swinging a stick-sword and shouting the names of things in a voice that cracked and wavered because I was seven and my voice was still learning what it was.

I never thought I’d live one.

Auri led me deeper.

Not through the sealed door---that way was closed, bound by magic older than comprehension. Instead, she showed me the other paths. The cracks and fissures and forgotten passages that existed in the spaces between the architecture, the places where the binding had worn thin and the structure had settled and shifted over millennia of patient weight.

She moved through the barrow the way she moved through the Underthing: with absolute confidence, as if the darkness were a room she knew by heart. Each step was precise. Each turn was intentional. She navigated by feel, by instinct, by the deep, blood-borne knowledge of a Lackless guardian who was connected to this place the way a heart is connected to a body.

I followed. Wil followed me. The candle burned between us, its light a fragile island in an ocean of dark.

“The binding that’s holding me is anchored below,” Auri said, her voice carrying the particular clarity of someone explaining something obvious to someone who should already understand. “In the barrow king’s chamber. The lowest point. Where the magic is deepest and the seals are strongest. If you can reach the anchor and disrupt it---not break it, that would be very bad, very bad indeed, everything would come undone---but shift it. Move it aside, the way you move a stone from a stream. Then I can slip through the gap.”

“How do I disrupt a three-thousand-year-old magical anchor?”

“With a key,” she said. “The right key, in the right lock, turned at the right moment. That’s how you disrupt anything. You find the mechanism that holds it together and you give it permission to come apart.”

“Permission?”

“Locks don’t want to be locked. Doors don’t want to be closed. Seals don’t want to seal. Everything in this place is held in tension, Kvothe. Held against its nature. The binding forces things to stay that want to move, to sleep that want to wake, to be closed that want to open. A key doesn’t overpower a lock. It gives the lock what it wants. It says: you can be open now. It’s alright.”

She spoke about locks and keys with the same tender certainty she’d always shown when speaking about the Underthing’s objects---the broken gear that wanted to turn, the stone that wanted to be a cornerstone, the book that wanted to be read. It was her madness, I’d always thought. Her beautiful, functional madness.

Now I wondered if it was something else entirely. Not madness but understanding. A shattered, sideways understanding that saw the truth of things more clearly than any sane mind could.

The passage narrowed.

We had descended through several levels of the barrow, each one older and stranger than the last. The architecture shifted subtly as we went deeper---the precision of the stonework increasing, the symbols on the walls growing more complex, the ambient warmth rising until the air felt like a summer afternoon, incongruous in the deep dark underground.

And then we hit the door.

It appeared suddenly, as doors in the deep places always do---one moment the passage stretched ahead of us, the next it terminated in a slab of grey stone that filled the corridor from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. No handle. No visible mechanism. No seam or crack that suggested it could be opened.

Just a keyhole.

A single, circular keyhole, set into the stone at chest height, ringed with symbols that pulsed with that same nameless blue-silver light I’d seen when the candle went out.

“I can’t go past this point,” Auri said. She stopped three paces from the door, her bare feet at the edge of the warm water that covered the floor. “The binding holds me here. Past this door is the king’s domain, and the binding won’t let its guardian into the place it’s guarding.”

“That seems like a design flaw.”

“It’s not a flaw. It’s the point. The guardian stays outside. The thing that’s guarded stays inside. The door keeps them apart.” She looked at me. “You’re not a guardian. You’re not Lackless---not enough, not in the way that matters. The binding won’t hold you.”

“So I go through alone.”

“You go through alone.” She reached into the folds of her dress---the same tattered, colorless garment she’d always worn, the kind of clothing that has been washed and rewashed and repaired and re-repaired until it exists more as an idea than a fabric---and produced the key.

The iron key. The key she’d given me years ago. The key that had come back to her, she said, because things know where they belong.

She held it up. In the blue-silver glow of the symbols, the key’s iron surface seemed to drink the light the way the barrow stone drank the light, pulling it in, holding it, transforming it into something else.

I took it from her, turning it over in my fingers. The weight was wrong. Not wrong---unexpected. Heavier than iron should be for its size, as though something denser were hiding beneath the dark surface. And there, along the shaft, barely visible beneath the corrosion and the years of handling---I caught my breath.

“Auri. Is this---” I held the key closer to the blue-silver glow. The markings I’d mistaken for ordinary pitting resolved, just for an instant, into something deliberate. A symbol. Faded, half-consumed by the transformation, but unmistakable to anyone who’d spent hours studying the Lackless box.

The Lackless sign. The old one, from before the family changed its name.

“It was silver once,” Auri said quietly. “But silver lies. Iron tells the truth. So I listened to what it wanted to be, and I helped it become that.” She met my eyes. “The key didn’t change, Kvothe. It just stopped pretending.”

The Lackless silver key. The key from the box that no one could open. Auri had reshaped it---not with a forge, not with artificing, but with the bone-deep naming awareness that let her see what things wanted to be. She had listened to the silver and heard iron underneath, and the silver had answered.

“Taborlin the Great had a key,” she said.

“Auri---”

“He had a key, and the key opened the door that couldn’t be opened, and he walked through into the dark, and the dark was afraid of him because he was Taborlin and Taborlin was not afraid of anything.” She pressed the key into my right hand. “You’re not Taborlin. You’re Kvothe. But the key doesn’t care about names. It only cares about locks.”

I looked at the key. At the door. At the keyhole, pulsing with ancient light.

“What’s on the other side?”

“The anchor. The center of the binding. The place where the king sleeps.” She paused. “And the thing that needs to be moved aside. The stone in the stream. When you find it, you’ll know it. It will look like a lock. Because that’s what it is.”

“And if the king wakes up?”

“He won’t. He’s been sleeping for three thousand years. He’s forgotten how to wake. But his dreams are strong, Kvothe. They’ll press against you. They’ll try to make you sleep too. Don’t let them.”

I turned to Wil, who had been standing behind me, silent, watching this exchange with the expression of a man who has long since stopped being surprised by anything that happens when Kvothe is involved.

“Wait here,” I said.

“With the girl?”

“Her name is Auri.” I paused. “Or Ariel. She’ll answer to either.”

“Auri is fine,” Auri said. “Ariel is a name I wore when I was someone else. Like an old dress. It still fits, but it’s not mine anymore.”

Wil nodded. Professional. Practical. He positioned himself beside Auri with his knife drawn and his back to the wall, and he looked at me with eyes that said everything he wasn’t going to say aloud.

Come back.

I turned to the door. Put the key in the lock.

It fit perfectly. Of course it did. The key was made for this lock, or the lock was made for this key, or both were made for a moment that had been waiting three thousand years to arrive.

I turned the key.

The lock opened with a sound that wasn’t a sound---a vibration, a release, a sigh. The door swung inward on hinges that hadn’t moved since the world was young, and the air that rushed out was hot and old and tasted of dreaming.

I stepped through.

The barrow king’s chamber was vast.

Not vast the way a cathedral is vast---with soaring ceilings and dramatic proportions that are designed to make you feel small. This was vast the way the sky is vast. An immensity that has nothing to do with intention and everything to do with scale, with the simple, overwhelming fact of a space that is larger than your mind can comfortably contain.

The ceiling was lost in darkness. The walls were distant---I could sense them, feel their presence at the edges of the chamber, but the candlelight didn’t reach them. The floor was smooth stone, warm, dry, carved with concentric circles of symbols that radiated outward from a central point like ripples from a stone thrown into still water.

At the center: a dais.

On the dais: a shape.

I didn’t want to look at the shape. Something in the primal, animal part of my brain---the part that predates language, that predates thought, that exists solely to keep the body alive when the mind has been overwhelmed---that part told me not to look. Told me to turn around. Told me to go back through the door and up the passages and out into the clean, cold air of the Eld and never, ever come back.

I looked.

The barrow king slept.

He was not what I expected. Not a corpse. Not a skeleton draped in ancient robes. Not a mummified remnant of a body that had been dead for millennia. He was… present. Whole. His body was intact, preserved by the same magic that sealed the barrow, his skin pale and luminous in the candlelight, his features sharp and beautiful in the terrible way that very old things are sometimes beautiful.

He wore no crown. No armor. No insignia of rank or power. He lay on the dais in simple robes, his hands folded on his chest, his eyes closed, his expression one of absolute, perfect peace.

The peace of a man who has been dreaming the same dream for three thousand years and has no desire to wake.

The dreams pressed against me.

Auri had warned me, and she was right. The dreams were physical---not visions, not illusions, but forces. They emanated from the sleeping king like heat from a fire, and they pushed against my mind with a pressure that was seductive rather than aggressive. They didn’t want to hurt me. They wanted me to sleep. To join the king in his eternal dreaming. To lie down on the warm stone and close my eyes and let the silence take everything and leave nothing but peace.

Peace.

The word echoed in my mind, and for a moment I wanted it so badly that my knees nearly buckled. Peace. No more running. No more grief. No more guilt. No more silence eating me from the inside. Just… sleep. The dreamless sleep of someone who has given up everything and found, in the giving up, a kind of freedom.

I swayed.

My left hand---my dead hand, my dying hand---brushed against the stone of the dais.

And the contact was like a slap.

Not pain. Not heat. But a sharp, sudden awareness---a reminder that I was alive, that I was here, that I had come for a reason. The broken hand, the hand that was losing its connection to who I was, served as an anchor. Because it was broken. Because it was failing. Because the sensation of its wrongness---the numbness, the trembling, the loss---was so viscerally real that no dream, no matter how seductive, could compete with it.

I was broken.

And broken things don’t dream of peace.

They dream of being mended.

I circled the dais, keeping my distance from the king’s sleeping form, looking for the anchor that Auri had described. The stone in the stream. The lock.

The symbols on the floor intensified as I approached the far side of the chamber. The concentric circles converged, and at their center---directly opposite the dais, as far from the king as the chamber allowed---I found it.

A small stone column, no taller than my waist. Smooth. Grey-white. Set into the floor with the same impossible precision as everything else in this place. On its flat top surface, recessed into the stone, was a circular depression---a basin, perhaps, or a receptacle. Empty.

No. Not empty.

There was a groove in the basin. A narrow channel cut into the stone, spiraling inward from the rim to the center in a pattern that was simultaneously mathematical and organic, like a fingerprint, like a nautilus shell, like the inside of an ear.

The groove was a mechanism. The mechanism was a lock.

And the lock required a coin.

I stared at it. The groove was the exact width and depth of a coin---not a modern coin, not a Commonwealth round or an Aturan mark, but something older. Something from a time when coins were cut with more precision and meant more than their weight in metal.

“A coin,” I said aloud. My voice echoed in the vast chamber, swallowed by darkness. “Taborlin had a coin.”

But I didn’t have a coin. I’d spent my last drabs days ago. I had nothing in my pockets but lint and a bit of string and---

“Kvothe.”

Auri’s voice. Not from behind me, not from the door. From the column itself. From the stone. Her voice carried through the architecture the way her singing had carried, resonating in the deep structure, transmitted by the magic that connected every part of this place to every other part.

“Kvothe, reach into your left pocket.”

I reached into my left pocket. My right hand, because my left couldn’t manage the fine motor control of reaching into fabric folds.

My fingers found something that hadn’t been there before.

A coin.

Small. Heavy. Old. I pulled it out and held it up to the candlelight. It was Vintish---ancient Vintish, from an era so distant that the face stamped on it was worn almost smooth. A shim. An old Vintish shim, worth almost nothing in modern currency but worth everything in this moment, in this place.

“I put it there,” Auri’s voice said through the stone. “Three years ago. In your pocket, when you weren’t looking. I knew you’d need it someday. It had hidden itself the way Auri’s gifts always hide themselves — in plain sight, in overlooked spaces, shifting from pocket to pocket, waiting.”

Three years. She had slipped a coin into my pocket three years ago, and I had never found it, never noticed it, because it had hidden itself the way Auri’s gifts always hid themselves---in plain sight, in the overlooked spaces, in the places you don’t think to check because you assume they’re empty.

“Taborlin had a coin,” I whispered.

I placed the coin in the groove.

It fit. Of course it fit. The groove was made for this coin, or this coin was made for this groove, or both were made for this moment, three thousand years in the waiting.

The coin sat in the spiral channel. And slowly, drawn by gravity or magnetism or something older than either, it began to move. To slide along the groove, following the spiral inward, winding toward the center with the inexorable patience of water finding its level.

The lock was turning.

The anchor was shifting.

The stone in the stream was moving aside.

The effect was immediate.

The symbols on the floor flared---not the faint, pulsing glow I’d seen before, but a bright, fierce light that filled the chamber like dawn. The sleeping king stirred. Not woke---stirred. A tremor passed through his body, the smallest shift, the dream equivalent of a sleeper rolling over.

The pressure of his dreams intensified. The seductive whisper of sleep, peace, rest, silence became a shout, a demand, a force that slammed against my mind like a wave against a seawall.

I staggered. Fell to one knee.

Something inside me responded.

Not the good silence. Not the constructive silence of contemplation or focus. The other silence. The hungry silence. The silence that had killed Denna and the King, the silence that was eating my name and my power and my hand. It rose inside me like a tide, and for one terrible moment, I thought it was going to overwhelm me. Thought I was going to speak the Name of Silence again, involuntarily, here in the heart of the barrow, where speaking it would shatter the binding and release whatever the barrow king truly was.

The candle went out.

Darkness.

Absolute, total, the kind of darkness that presses against your eyes like cloth. The kind of darkness that has weight and texture and presence. The kind of darkness that exists not as an absence of light but as a thing in itself, old and patient and hungry.

The barrow king’s dreams were the darkness. The darkness was the dreams. And in the darkness, without light, without bearings, without the simple visual anchor of a flame to remind me which way was up, I was drowning.

The silence inside me surged. My mouth opened. The Name was there, on the tip of my tongue, ready to be spoken, ready to unmake everything within reach.

“Kvothe.”

Auri’s voice. Small. Clear. Cutting through the darkness and the silence and the dreams like a single note of music in an empty room.

“Open your right hand.”

I opened my right hand. The hand I could still control. The hand that still obeyed.

Something was in it.

Something small, and cylindrical, and waxy, and warm.

A candle.

“Light it,” Auri said.

“I can’t. My sympathy---”

“Not with sympathy. With your name. What’s left of it. The part that’s still Kvothe, that’s still the boy who burned, who burned and burned and never went out. Use that.”

I held the candle. Felt its weight. Its warmth. Auri’s gift. The third gift. The gift that Taborlin carried into the darkest places, the gift that turned darkness back to light.

Taborlin the Great had three things: a key, a coin, and a candle.

I reached inside myself. Past the silence. Past the breaking. Past the crumbling ruins of my name and my power and my identity. Down, deep, to the place where the first fire still burned---the fire that had been lit in me the night my parents died, the fire that had kept me alive in Tarbean, the fire that had driven me to the University, to the Eolian, to Denna, to every door I’d ever opened and every name I’d ever spoken.

The fire that was Kvothe.

Not the name. Not the word. The fire. The essential, irreducible core of what I was, buried beneath layers of silence and oath-breaking and grief, but not destroyed. Not yet. Not quite.

I reached for it.

I found it.

I burned.

The candle lit.

Not with ordinary fire. With something brighter. Something warmer. Something that pushed back the darkness of the barrow king’s dreams with a force that had nothing to do with lumens or physics and everything to do with will. With identity. With the stubborn, unbreakable refusal to be extinguished.

The chamber blazed with light. The symbols on the floor sang---I heard them, actually heard them, a harmony of protection and binding and containment that had been playing silently for three thousand years and was now, for one moment, audible. The coin completed its spiral, reaching the center of the groove, and clicked into place.

The anchor shifted.

The shift was subtle. Not an explosion, not a dramatic release, not the kind of climactic magical event that stories are made of. Just a shift. A loosening. The faintest relaxation of something that had been held tight for longer than civilizations endure.

The binding didn’t break. Auri had been clear about that---breaking would be catastrophe, would release the sleeping king, would tear open another wound in the already-damaged network of ancient seals. The binding didn’t break.

It adjusted.

Like a rope with a knot that’s been loosened by one degree. Like a door whose latch has been lifted but that remains closed by its own weight. Like a cage whose bars have widened by an inch---not enough for whatever’s inside to escape, but enough for something small and clever and determined to slip through.

Enough for Auri.

I felt it happen. Not saw---the chamber was still blazing with candlelight, the symbols still singing, the king still dreaming his ancient dreams on his dais. But I felt it, the way you feel a change in air pressure, a shift in the wind, the moment when a storm breaks and the rain begins.

The binding had been holding Auri in place, treating her as a structural element, a living seal. Now it wasn’t. Now it had released her---not completely, not permanently, but for a window. A gap. A moment of freedom in a mechanism that would close again, that was already beginning to close again, the binding reasserting itself with the slow, implacable patience of a system that has been running for millennia and will run for millennia more.

“Kvothe!” Wil’s voice, from beyond the door. Urgent. “She’s moving. The girl is moving. The water---the barrier---it’s gone.”

“Bring her!” I shouted. “Now! Through the door! Quickly!”

The sound of splashing. Running feet. Wil appeared in the doorway, Auri beside him, her bare feet moving with the quick, sure steps of someone who has been freed from a cage and doesn’t intend to be caught again.

She entered the chamber.

The barrow king stirred again. More strongly this time. His hands unclenched. His eyelids flickered. The dreams intensified, the darkness pressing in against the candlelight, trying to reclaim the space that the flame had taken.

But the candle held.

Auri crossed the chamber in three breaths. She didn’t look at the king. Didn’t look at the symbols, the column, the coin. She looked at me. Only at me. With those wide, moonlight eyes that saw everything sideways and understood everything backwards and knew, with the certainty of a broken prophet, exactly what needed to happen next.

She reached me. Put her hand on my arm---my left arm, my dying arm---and pulled.

“Time to go,” she said. “The door is remembering how to be a door again. If we’re still inside when it remembers completely, it won’t let us out.”

“The key---”

“Leave the key for now. It belongs to the lock. That’s where it wants to be.” She paused, tilted her head. “But it will come back to you. Auri’s gifts always find their way home.”

“The coin---”

“Leave the coin. It paid the price. Prices, once paid, are done.”

“The candle---”

“Keep the candle.” She smiled. “The candle is yours. It always was.”

I kept the candle. We ran.

The passage back was not the passage we’d taken in.

The architecture had shifted---the binding’s adjustment rippling through the structure, rearranging corridors, opening sealed doors, closing open ones. The barrow was restructuring itself, settling into a new configuration, and we were moving through it as it changed.

Auri led. She moved through the shifting passages the way she moved through the Underthing---with instinct, with certainty, with the bone-deep knowledge of someone who belongs in the deep places. Doors opened for her. Passages widened for her. The stone itself seemed to make way for her, the architecture recognizing its guardian even as it released her.

Behind us, I heard the barrow settling. The sound of stone moving against stone, deep and grinding, the tectonic rumble of a structure that is finding its new shape. The sealed door was closing. The binding was re-establishing itself. The gap that had allowed Auri to slip free was shrinking, second by second, the mechanism tightening with the patient inevitability of a trap.

We moved faster.

The candle burned in my hand, impossibly steady, its flame unwavering despite our speed. It cast a warm, golden light that turned the grey stone to honey, that made the ancient symbols seem less threatening, that pushed back the darkness with a gentle authority that had nothing to do with heat or combustion.

It burned because I burned.

And I burned because I was still Kvothe.

Not all of him. Not most of him. But enough. Enough to hold a candle. Enough to follow a friend through the dark. Enough to run when running was needed, to trust when trust was needed, to keep going when every shattered piece of me wanted to stop.

Enough.

We emerged.

Not through the archway we’d entered---that passage was gone, sealed by the barrow’s restructuring. We emerged through a crack in the hillside, a narrow fissure in the stone that Auri found and Wil widened with his knife and his hands and the particular Cealdish determination of a man who has decided that stone will move and stone will, by God, move.

The Eld was dark. Stars overhead, visible through gaps in the canopy. The air was cold---properly cold, autumn-night cold, the kind of cold that makes you realize how warm the barrow had been and how far underground you’d traveled.

Auri stepped out of the fissure and onto the forest floor and stood very still for a long moment, her bare feet on the moss, her face turned up to the sky. Feeling the wind. Breathing the air. Existing, freely, in a world that wasn’t made of stone and binding and ancient magic.

“There,” she said, and her voice was small and wondering and exactly like the voice of the girl on the University rooftop who had accepted my gifts with solemn grace and given me gifts in return that I hadn’t understood until now. “That’s better.”

I looked at the candle in my hand. It was still burning. Still steady. The flame was small now---ordinary---a normal candle flame, nothing more. Whatever power I’d used to light it, whatever piece of my true name I’d reached for in the dark, it had done its job and faded.

But the candle was still burning.

And that was enough.

We made camp that night at the base of the hill, in the shelter of the oaks. Wil built a fire. A real fire, large and warm, because we were too exhausted and too relieved to care about smoke signals and tracker marks and the hundred small paranoid rituals of fugitives.

Auri sat by the fire with her knees drawn up and her chin resting on them, and she looked smaller and more fragile than ever in the orange light. But there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Or something that had always been there but that I was only now able to see.

Steadiness.

Not the steadiness of a stone or a wall. The steadiness of a flame. The kind that wavers and dances and seems fragile but never actually goes out.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You rescued me as much as I rescued you.”

“More,” she corrected. “I rescued you more. You would have drowned in the dreams without the candle. And you would have stood in front of the column forever without the coin. And you would never have gotten through the door without the key.”

“Then why do you need rescuing at all?”

“Because I couldn’t rescue myself.” She said it simply, without self-pity, without drama. A statement of fact. “I could see every piece of the puzzle. I could feel every lock and every key and every coin in the universe. But I couldn’t move. The binding held me. And all the knowledge in the world doesn’t help when you’re the one who’s locked in.”

“So you needed someone to turn the key.”

“I needed you to turn the key.” She looked at me. “Not just anyone. You. The one who’s breaking. The one whose name is going sideways. Because only someone who’s losing themselves can understand what it means to be lost. And only someone who’s lost can find someone who’s hidden.”

I thought about that for a long time.

“Auri,” I said at last. “Ariel. Whatever you want to be called---”

“Auri,” she said firmly. “Ariel was a princess in a story. Auri is a girl by a fire. I prefer the girl.”

“Auri, then. What happens now? The barrow is sealed again. The binding is intact---more or less. But the network is still failing. The seals are still weakening. The scrael are still coming through. The world is still---”

“Breaking,” she said. “Yes. The world is breaking. And your name is breaking. And my mind is broken. And everything is broken, all the time, always, and the only question is whether you spend your time mourning the pieces or picking them up.”

She unfolded herself, stood, and walked to where I was sitting. She knelt in front of me and took my left hand---the dead hand, the dying hand, the hand that had once played music that made the world weep.

She held it between both of hers.

“This hand,” she said. “This hand that played and fought and held and made. This hand that you swore on and lost. It’s not gone, Kvothe. It’s sleeping. The way the king sleeps. The way the doors sleep. The way everything in this world sleeps, waiting for someone brave enough or foolish enough or broken enough to wake it up.”

“Can you wake it?”

“No. But you can. When you’re ready. When you stop mourning the hand you had and start listening to the hand you have.” She squeezed, gently. My fingers didn’t respond. But somewhere---deep, distant, buried under layers of silence and oath-breaking---I felt something.

Not sensation. Not movement. Not the old dexterity returning.

Just warmth.

Just the faint, impossible warmth of a hand being held by someone who cares.

“I’m going to stay with you,” Auri said. “For a while. Until you find where you’re going. Because you’re going somewhere, Kvothe. I can feel it. The story isn’t done yet. Not yours, not mine, not the world’s.”

“Where am I going?”

“I don’t know. But you’re going there.” She smiled---Auri’s smile, sudden and strange and heartbreaking and absolutely, unconditionally certain. “And I have a feeling you’ll need someone who knows the dark places. Who knows the doors. Who knows the locks and the keys and the coins and the candles.”

“Someone who knows where things want to be.”

“Yes.” She settled beside me, curling up against my side with the unselfconscious ease of a cat or a child. “Exactly that.”

Wil sat across the fire, sharpening his knife, his dark face unreadable. But his eyes, when they met mine, held something that might have been the faintest glimmer of hope.

We were three, now. A broken namer with a dying name. A Cealdish man with a good knife and a better heart. A princess who had chosen to be a girl.

It wasn’t much.

But it was enough to keep the fire burning. And in a world that was slowly breaking, in a life that was slowly dissolving, in a story that was still being told---

It was enough.

The candle burned.

The fire burned.

And I, broken and diminished and barely holding on to the fraying threads of who I was---

I burned too.