Chapter 105

Chapter 105
The moment we stepped through the gate, the world shifted, but it wasn’t the way it had been before; there was no blinding light or thunderous surge of magic, only a deep, quiet silence that settled over everything like the hush between heartbeats. The city around us breathed in low twilight, familiar yet softened, as if time itself had paused to see what we’d become. The air smelled like damp concrete and jasmine vines after rain, like home filtered through memory. But something felt wrong.

Kael’s hand remained in mine, warm and steady, but the tether between us, so bright and certain even moments ago, flickered at the edges of my senses. His grip didn’t falter, not at first, but when I turned toward him, he wasn’t looking at me. He was watching the sky, as if something in it might anchor him.

We walked three blocks without speaking, past the bakery with its closed shutters and the ivy-covered bookstore where the bell above the door had once rung every time I passed. The light shifted with each step, not unnaturally, but out of sync somehow, as though Kael’s shadow didn’t know how to fall in this world anymore. He moved with his usual strength, his usual grace, but I noticed the slight hesitation in his stride, the half-second pause when his boot hit the sidewalk like he expected it to crack beneath him.

I said his name once, softly, like a question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered. He glanced at me and smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, not the way it used to. His gaze was too far away, fixed on something I couldn’t see, and when I reached for him, not just physically, but through the bond, I felt the delay. The heartbeat of distance that hadn’t been there before.

It wasn’t pain, not yet. It was an absence. Thin and stretching.

And I was terrified that if I let go, even for a breath, he might vanish into the place he now belonged more than here.

The next morning, I found him standing at the edge of the balcony with the early light brushing against his shoulders, casting his outline in a gold that didn’t quite seem to hold. He wasn’t doing anything, just watching the city below, unmoving, like a statue waiting for someone to remember it existed.

I called his name, and it took him a moment to respond, just long enough to make something cold settle in my chest. When he finally turned, his smile was warm but tired, and his eyes, those eyes that once anchored me in fire and chaos, looked older somehow —not in age, but in weight, as if time had touched him more deeply than it should have.

“Did you sleep?” I asked, keeping my voice low, careful not to disturb whatever thread still tethered him here beside me.

“I think so,” he said, and the way he said it, uncertain, distant, made my heart ache. “I closed my eyes and woke up here. But something in between felt… wrong. Like I wasn’t fully inside it.”

I stepped closer and reached for his hand, needing to feel that his fingers were still solid against mine. They were, but only barely. His warmth felt muted, as if the space between our palms was beginning to remember another shape.

Later, as we walked to the studio, he paused in front of the mural I’d painted before everything began. It was faded now, edges blurred by wind and time, but still mine. He touched a streak of color, fingers reverent, and said, “You used this hue in the corridor of glass, didn’t you?”

I froze, because that corridor hadn’t been part of any painting. It was something from the realm—a trial we’d never spoken of aloud. He shouldn’t have remembered it, not like that.

“You’re slipping,” I whispered, afraid of saying it too clearly, afraid he would agree.

Kael didn’t deny it. He just lowered his hand, gaze still locked on the paint, and said softly, “Some moments feel like they happened centuries ago. Others haven’t happened yet.”

And though I stood right beside him, I felt the truth curl between us like fog; he was here, but time no longer held him the way it once had.

I didn’t want to name it, not yet, not the thing I had begun to feel rising in the space between us like a tide I couldn’t stop. But by the time we returned to the apartment, Kael’s steps had slowed, and his shoulders carried a weight I had never seen in this world, only in the echoes of his past.

He sat at the edge of the bed like he wasn’t sure it would hold him, his hands braced on his knees, eyes closed. I stayed near the doorway, watching, afraid that if I moved too suddenly, I might scare him into some space I couldn’t follow.

“I think the realm is calling me back,” he said quietly, the words so gentle they could have been a confession or a goodbye.

I crossed the room and dropped to my knees in front of him, my hands reaching for his, gripping them tightly even as they felt a little too cool, a little too light. “No,” I said, my voice cracking. “No, you don’t belong to it anymore. You chose to stay.”

“I did,” he whispered, and his thumbs brushed mine like he was trying to memorize the shape of me all over again. “But something in me... it was forged in that realm, Ava. My bones remember it. My breath was shaped by its silence. I don’t know if I can stay, not unless—”

He stopped himself, but I knew what he was afraid to say.

Not unless I gave him something to hold him here. Something stronger than the pull of where he came from.

I touched the center of his chest, right above the place where the tether used to hum the loudest, and I felt the tremor there, faint but growing. “Then let me anchor you,” I said. “Not with the past. Not with the gate. With us. With what we’ve built.”

His eyes met mine, storm-gray and full of sorrow. “That choice... it won’t be small.”

I nodded slowly, because I already knew. Whatever came next would ask more of me than any realm ever had.

But I was done letting anything, past or future, take him from me again.