Night wrapped the land in silver hush.
The tactical field, now barren of motion, stretched beneath a starlit dome. Dummy targets stood like frozen sentinels in moonlight, their shadows long and soft across the grass. The air had grown cooler, brushed by the scent of stone and jasmine from the northern winds.
Ashardio sat on a low stone wall just beyond the field, legs stretched, cloak unfastened. His eyes weren't on the stars tonight — they were on her.
Kaelith lay on the grass a few feet away, arms folded behind her head, one knee propped, her breath steady. She wasn't asleep, though she pretended to be. The rhythm was too measured, too aware. And every so often, he'd catch the faint twitch of a smile at the edge of her lips.
She was trying to coax him into saying something.
He didn't.
Not right away.
Instead, he watched the wind play through her hair. Listened to the nightbirds call softly in the distance. The peace felt borrowed. Fragile. Like a painting of a moment, rather than the moment itself.
"You're thinking too loud," she murmured eventually, not opening her eyes.
Ashardio chuckled under his breath. "And you're listening too close."
Her smile widened. "You didn't used to guard your thoughts from me."
"I didn't used to have so many worth guarding."
Silence. But not a cold one. The kind filled with shared memory.
Kaelith rolled onto her side to face him, her gaze catching his like the glint of starlight on still water. "You disappeared into yourself again today."
He nodded, slowly. "I found something. Beneath the field. An archive. From my family."
She didn't flinch, didn't press.
Instead: "Does it change things?"
Ashardio hesitated. Then: "It doesn't change what I've chosen. But it explains why I was always meant to choose it."
A long pause.
Then Kaelith pushed herself up, sat beside him on the stone wall, their shoulders nearly touching.
She looked at the sky.
"You ever wonder if we were just meant to live small lives?" she asked. "Not carry legacies. Not unravel truths. Just… run through fields. Steal cakes. Build towers from river stones."
"I do," he whispered.
"And?"
"I think the stars would've wept to lose us."
That made her laugh — softly, but real. "That's a very Ashardio thing to say."
"I've been trying to remember how to be him."
Kaelith leaned her head against his shoulder.
"You never stopped."
They sat like that — unmoving — for a while. No words. Just the pulse of something old and constant between them.
He wanted to say he loved her.
He didn't.
Not because he doubted it — but because some things, spoken too soon, shattered under their own truth.
Instead, he reached down and took her hand.
She didn't pull away.
Her fingers laced with his like they'd never stopped fitting.
And as the wind sighed across the field, Ashardio felt something shift.
Not the world. Not the prophecy.
But himself.
For the first time in a long time, the chaos in his mind softened.
There, in the space between storms, he remembered what it meant to want something… not because it was destiny.
But because it was her.