CHAPTER FORTYݍTHREE
A MI÷ROR IN SUFFERING
woke with a violent gasp, consciousness returning like a knife thrustI between my ribs.
My body remembered pain that was no longer there—phantom agony from wounds now healed. My fingers were still entwined with Death’s through the space between our cells, clutching with desperate strength as though his hand alone anchored me to the living world.
I released my grip immediately, horrified at how tightly I must have been holding him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice scraping against the silence.
Death did not pull away. Instead, his fingers tightened around mine, just enough to keep me from retreating. His skin was warm, comforting, like stone that absorbed the last whisper of sunlight before twilight fell.
“Stay,” he ordered, his voice low and steady in the darkness. “How do you feel?”
The question seemed absurd. How did I feel? I had been torn apart by a God. I remembered Valen’s face contorted with desire, remembered the moment he lost control, remembered blood and pain and the strange, terrible triumph of knowing I’d broken through his careful veneer.
I remembered dying. I was certain I had been dying.
I looked down at my body, still naked in the dim light. Where there should have been gashes and bruises, torn flesh and broken skin, there was only the pale expanse of my unmarked form. My fingers traced the places where wounds should have been, finding nothing but smooth skin. The only
pain I felt was deeper, more abstract, an emptiness nestled beneath my breastbone where I knew a piece of my soul had been taken.
“I feel... whole,” I said finally. “My body, at least.”
Death made a sound that might have been amusement. “Your body was easy to mend. It wanted to heal.”
“But I also feel… empty. Where my soul was.” I rubbed my sternum, its hollowness unsettling. “Why do you need to take it? Why must that be the cost?”
His hand remained steady in mine, but I felt something shift in his touch.
A subtle tension, as though my question wasn’t something he wanted to answer.
“My healing is not like mortal medicine,” he said after a pause. “There must be a balance, a push and a pull for each injury I heal. I find your broken parts, and they become mine to mend. The pain I take becomes mine to bear.
And your soul... a part of that strengthens me in return.”
I tried to imagine what that meant, to take pieces of someone’s pain and feel it as your own, to stitch together flesh and bone through will alone. The enormity of it made me dizzy.
Then I realized, I was in no pain. None. He took it all unto himself without hesitation. I was dying and he took all—my—pain.
“You felt it all,” I breathed. “Everything I felt. I was in agony.”
Death was silent as I stared at our joined hands, my eyes drifting to the point where his forearm disappeared into the shadows beyond his cell. I imagined him weighing truth against mercy, deciding how much to reveal.
Finally, he sighed, a sound low and worn and full of surrender. “Yes,” he said simply. “I felt it all.”
My lips parted with my next breath. I had thought his healing was merely a transaction—impersonal, mechanical. A piece of soul for restored flesh.
The knowledge that he had shouldered my torment, felt every lash Valen had inflicted, made my throat tighten with an emotion I couldn’t name.
“Why?” I whispered, my voice cracking on the word.
“Yshera,” he said, and there was a rawness, an honesty, in his voice I hadn’t heard before. “Taking on your pain is nothing compared to the pain I
feel when you experience it.”
I froze.
The cell around me was so still, the darkness so thick, I half wondered if I’d imagined what he’d said—that tenderness in his words. That truth. But his
hand was still there, warm and solid in mine. Still grounding me.
I felt my heart begin to race, the gravity of his admission settling around me. “But you—“ I pressed my free hand against my chest, willing it to slow.
“But you hardly know me. You barely even tolerate me.”
A harsh, startled laugh escaped him, echoing strangely through the stone barrier between us.
“Tolerate you?” His voice dropped to that dangerous register that made my skin prickle with awareness. “Is that what you think? That I merely endure your presence?”
His fingers tightened around mine, not painfully but with an intensity that made it impossible to look away from our joined hands.
“Mireille,” he said, my name reverent in his mouth. He paused, as though weighing something dangerous. “I do not tolerate you. I… quite like you.
More than I should.”
The admission knocked the breath from my lungs. I stared at our joined hands, unable to formulate a response.
“Your stubborn defiance. Your sharp tongue. The way you refuse to be broken, even when others would be shattered beyond repair.” His thumb traced small circles on my wrist, each touch sending shivers across my skin.
“Even your infuriating gift for provoking every emotion I thought I had buried long ago.”
I swallowed hard, trying to process his words. After everything—our arguments, my provocations, the way I’d deliberately tried to hurt him by turning to Valen—this was what he offered? Not anger or resentment, but...
affection?
“But you said —“ “I know what I said.” Death’s voice dropped lower, edged with regret.
“Words spoken in anger. You… disrupt me, Mireille. I’ve spent millennia mastering silence, control, detachment. And then you arrived, this bleeding, broken, radiant creature, and I find myself... feeling again. It’s maddening.”
I closed my eyes. “But you hardly know me.”
That truth clung to me like a wound. I wanted to push him away. Tell him
he shouldn’t want someone like me.
I was nothing.
A shattered thing.
A wraith in borrowed skin.
How could he feel anything for something so broken?
Death went still, his fingers ceasing their gentle movements against my skin. When he spoke again, his voice held an ancient weight that seemed to press against my chest.
“I know you better than you think,” he said softly. He hesitated, as if weighing his next words. “I know the sound of your breath when you’re barely holding on. I know the rhythm of your heartbeat when you’re lying to yourself, pretending not to be afraid. I know the way your soul recoils and sparks depending on who or what lives in your mind, and I know the strength it takes for you to survive—night after night.”
My breath caught, but he wasn’t finished.
“I know the names of the ones you hold dear. I know you would read to Lysa every night, or, if she was feeling restless, you would sing to her. I know Isolde taught you how to press flowers and how to dance outside of courtly steps. I know you never loved your captain, Darius, but he meant
something to you all the same.”
I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t — “And I know your life was lonely,” his voice dropped to a whisper now, as if in some misplaced form of regret. “I know you were not loved in the way a person should be, unconditionally, without fear of abandonment.
And… I know you wished for that love to find you and I am sorry you did not have that, Mireille. I am so very sorry.”
My throat closed around my next breath.
I could hardly process what he was saying, each revelation felt like a soft blow against the fragile walls I had built around my heart, already splintering from the consuming grip of his words. How could he know so much?
Unless… “You… you listened?” I managed to whisper, each word laced with disbelief and a flicker of something deeper—hope? Fear? Perhaps both. I rolled my lips into my teeth to hold in my whimper. “Since the beginning…
you’ve listened.”
“Yes.”
The nights I’d whispered into the dark when I’d first arrived, thinking no one heard. The prayers I hadn’t meant as prayers. The broken lullabies I hummed to keep myself sane.
“Even as the daughter of my captor, I could not stop myself,” he added, his voice rich with the strain of confession. “You called to me, Mireille. Not with words, perhaps, but with every ragged breath you took in this place.
With every tear you shed thinking no one cared. With every moment of defiance, when you thought yourself alone, I wanted to be there for you.”
My heart stuttered in my chest.
“And then, when you were feverish and dying, when he brought you to my cell,” I heard his slow exhale, “after I held you… I wanted every part of you.” He hesitated, and I held my breath. “But I knew I couldn’t have you, Mireille. I’m in chains. I cannot have you.”
I didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t know how to feel. For so long, kindness had been a weapon to be used. This didn’t feel like that. This felt like a hand reaching into the abyss and not pulling away.
I bit my lip hard, unsure if it was to stop the tremble or the sob. To matter to a god—even one in chains—felt like a dangerous thing.
Still, I wanted to bury myself in his words, to unravel their implications until I understood what he meant. I also wanted to run from them, to hide in the familiar comfort of suspicion and distance.
But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t go anywhere. And even if I could, would I truly want to? He was the first man, god or not, that listened. How could it be that this chained god who took parts of my soul could make my heart feel so
full.
So full it hurt.
I turned my head slightly, blinking hard, as if that might slow the rush of feeling. I couldn’t thank him. I couldn’t say I fully believed him. But I also couldn’t lie and say I didn’t feel the same way.
So I gave him what I could. A squeeze of my fingers. The smallest gesture. But it was mine.
He said nothing, but I felt the echo of it in the way his thumb stroked mine, reverent and steady.
And that was when I saw them—silver threads, fine as spider silk, shimmering in the darkness where no light should reach. They wove through the air like whispered futures, possibilities made tangible. Some were faint, barely visible even when I strained to see them. Others pulsed with a brightness that made my eyes water.
They were everywhere, these impossible strands. Coming from me.
Flowing around me. Some stretched toward the ceiling and vanished through stone as if the dungeon walls were no barrier at all. Others pooled at my feet like liquid moonlight. And there, most disturbing of all, several threads wrapped around our linked hands—binding my harbinger and me together in
a pattern I couldn’t decipher.
Death’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around mine, as if he sensed my withdrawal.
“You’ve gone somewhere else,” he said finally, his voice resigned. Not a question, but not quite an accusation either.
I focused on our hands to avoid watching the silver threads that now seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat. “Just tired,” I lied. “Being unmade and remade is exhausting.”
He grunted softly, almost in amusement. “Indeed.” A pause. “You should rest.”
Then, with a deliberate slowness that made my breath catch, he shifted his grip on my hand. His thumb massaged the inside of my palm, the pressure a firm caress that sent a shiver racing up my arm.
“I don’t think I can,” I admitted, my voice breathy with his thumb pressing further into my palm. I knew we were treading on dangerous ground, especially as my mind began to turn to how he guided the very hand he massaged to bring me to release. How he commanded me to come for him while Valen was thrusting inside of me. How Valen had lost control before I found any relief just earlier tonight. I was suddenly desperate for something —anything—else to fill the space between us.
“Tell me something,” I said finally, my voice small and raw in the darkness. “Distract me. Tell me...” I grasped for a subject, anything that might pull us away from the precipice of whatever was unfolding between us.
“Tell me about the stars.”
The request sounded childish even to my own ears. Something Lysa would ask for. Stars—as if I could not remember what they looked like after weeks in this dungeon, as if they mattered while we sat in our shared darkness. But I needed something beautiful, something beyond stone walls and pain and lust and ancient souls.
“The stars,” Death repeated, and there was an odd note in his voice, almost wary. “Why?”
I shrugged, deliberately nonchalant. “I want to think of something happy, just for a moment.” My fingers tightened reflexively around his. “Please.”
Death hummed, the sound like wind through ancient ruins, soft but heavy with time. “Do you know much about the gods, yshera? Tell me, what were you taught of us?”
The question surprised me. I’d expected him to indulge my request, not
counter with his own. “I can admit I should have listened to my tutors more,”
I said, a hint of old shame coloring my voice. “Although, they only ever spoke of the twin goddesses. And even then, I did not truly believe they were real.”
A low chuckle emanated from the darkness. “No, I imagine not.” The sound of his amusement did strange things to my chest, loosening something that had been wound too tight. “Very well. Then let me tell you of stars, but first, of the one who made them.”
He shifted, chains clinking softly as he settled against the wall that separated us. Our hands remained linked, his thumb occasionally brushing against my skin in a gesture that felt almost absent-minded.
“In the formless void before time,” he began, his voice taking on a cadence that reminded me of the old priests who had chanted in my father’s temple, “There was only one, the Creator, Zorikhael, who wielded the power of pure essence.”
I closed my eyes, letting his words wash over me. The silver threads seemed to respond to his voice, glowing more brightly behind my eyelids.
“From his primordial force, he shaped the foundations of existence by creating three divine siblings to maintain cosmic equilibrium. To govern the cycle of mortality, he created Vharok, the God of Flesh and Blood, whose domain encompassed the continuation of life and the power of sacrifice.”
My husband, the god who had torn me apart just hours ago. Who governs the cycle of mortality. I shivered.
Death’s fingers tightened around mine, as if he could sense the direction of my thoughts. “To oversee the flow of time itself,” he continued, drawing me back into the story, “he created the twins. Lumara of the Dawn, keeper of beginnings, and Nyxis of the Dusk, guardian of endings.”
These were names I knew, who I had attended temple for. Who I had been made to worship. The silver threads seemed to pulse in time with each syllable, weaving more complex patterns in the darkness.
“Long before the first kingdom rose, before more gods were created, before they turned on one another and bled into the mortal world, there was only them.” Death’s voice softened, becoming almost reverent. “Lumara created many things. From her breath, clouds began. From her tears, the ocean. From her flesh, came earth. Nyxis, on the other hand, could only bring about endings. Except… except her grief...” He paused. “From her grief came the stars.”
I opened my eyes, drawn by the raw emotion in his tone. The silver threads had grown more numerous, filling the space between our cells with their ethereal light. Death couldn’t see them—or at least, he gave no indication that he could—but they seemed to respond to his words, coalescing into shapes that hinted at the story he was telling.
“The Primordial Goddess of Dusk once loved a being of pure light,”
Death continued, “a celestial spirit who could never take form. A creature fractured from the same essence that created the primordials. She called him Eiros, meaning ‘hope’ in our ancient tongue.”
I tried to imagine it—a goddess of endings falling in love with a being made of light and hope. The contradiction of it was beautiful in its impossibility.
“But when Nyxis tried to shape him into something earthly, he withered,”
Death said, his voice filled with ancient sorrow. “She begged her sister, begged Vharok, begged even… the Creator, to use their abilities. But they could not help her, for mortal form could not contain him.”
One of the silver threads near my face twisted into a spiral, then dissolved into motes of light that scattered like dust.
“In despair, she shattered what remained of his essence into a thousand pieces, flinging them across the blackened sky so she would never forget his radiance.” Death’s thumb traced a slow circle on my palm. “These fragments became the stars—each one a dying ember of what could have been.”
My chest ached at the beauty and tragedy of it. I’d never heard of stars described that way—as fragments of a lost love, scattered across the darkness as a monument to grief.
The tale of Nyxis and her shattered love had struck something raw within me—perhaps because I too knew what it meant to hold pain inside until it transformed into something else entirely. I had my own constellation of grief, each star a person lost, a dignity stripped away, a choice denied. But there was nothing beautiful in my suffering, no cosmic poetry in what had been done to me.
“That wasn’t a very happy story,” I said, my voice rough with emotions I didn’t want to name.
Death’s fingers tightened against mine, a gentle pressure that felt oddly like comfort. “I’m not finished,” he chided, and something in his tone made me think he was smiling in the darkness. “So impatient.”
The accusation startled a small laugh from me, the sound strange and
rusty in the dampness of the dungeon.
“I prefer to think of it as eager,” I countered softly, surprising myself with the almost playful response.
A huff of air escaped him, too soft to be a laugh, but a genuine sound regardless. “So eager, then,” he conceded. “Shall I continue?”
I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Please,” I said, settling back against the cold stone wall, adjusting so our hands could stay linked.
The silver threads seemed to pulse more vibrantly now, weaving intricate patterns in the darkness. One curled around our joined hands like a living thing, its light casting shadows across my skin. I forced my gaze away from it, focusing instead on the comforting weight of Death’s fingers against mine.
“Nyxis had never stopped looking for a love like her first,” Death continued, his voice taking on that same storyteller’s cadence that made it impossible not to be drawn in. “She searched for centuries, millennia perhaps. The other gods mocked her obsession, calling it weakness. But Nyxis, being the guardian of endings, understood better than most that some things were worth waiting for.
“Eventually, she descended into the world of mortals, clothed in shadows, searching for something she could not name,” Death said, his voice dropping lower, as if sharing a secret. “And she found it. Not in a god. Not in a throne.
But in a mortal man—one who laughed like her Eiros, whose soul shimmered with familiar light.”
The silver threads behind my closed eyelids formed shapes that mimicked Death’s tale—a figure wreathed in darkness bending toward a smaller form that glowed from within.
“He was not Eiros as he was before, but a fragment of her lost love,”
Death clarified, his voice gentle but firm. “One she had missed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, opening my eyes.
The silver threads scattered at my movement, reforming into different patterns, less defined but no less beautiful.
“When Nyxis shattered his essence, casting the pieces of him across the sky as stars, she kept nothing for herself,” Death explained. “But one piece— one tiny fragment—fell to earth instead. It grew there, settling into a mortal body.”
The thought was both beautiful and troubling. A piece of divinity, lost among mortals. Growing, changing, becoming something new.
“Did she tell him what he was to her?” I asked.
Death’s thumb traced a slow circle on my palm, contemplative. “No,” he said finally. “She did not want to burden him with an identity he had never asked for. She loved him as he was—mortal, fleeting, precious in his impermanence.”
I considered this, the idea of a goddess loving someone not in spite of their mortality, but because of it. It was a strange thought, counter to everything I’d learned from experience with the divine.
“Nyxis did not fall into despair this time,” Death continued. “She did not try to shape him into something he was not. She simply loved him—quietly, fiercely, completely. And he loved her.”
The words resonated within me, stirring something I’d thought long buried. To be loved like that—not for what you could become, not for what you represented, but simply for what you were. It seemed a fantasy more impossible than gods themselves.
“So now you know the story of the stars,” Death’s voice ended on a rhythm that felt like waves against a distant shore.
“That’s still not a very happy story,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “She loved him, but he would die, wouldn’t he? Being mortal.”
Death was silent for a long moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “He died, as all mortals must. But death is not always an ending, yshera.”
The words sent a shiver down my spine. Coming from any other, they might have been empty comfort. From him—the embodiment of death itself —they carried a weight that made my heart stutter in my chest.
“Sometimes,” he continued, his voice so soft I had to strain to hear it, “it is a beginning.”
The silver threads pulsed more brightly at his words, some of them stretching toward the high window of my cell, reaching for the night sky beyond. Others wrapped more tightly around our joined hands, binding us together in ways I couldn’t understand but could feel with every breath.
We sat in silence then, neither of us willing to break the strange peace that had settled between us. Somehow, in that moment, it felt like something had shifted. Just slightly. The thread of something new, quiet and unspoken, had begun to stretch between us.
“Thank you,” I said finally. “For the story.”
Death’s fingers adjusted against mine, his touch gentle despite the strength I knew he possessed. “It’s an old tale,” he said, something almost wistful in his tone. “Few remember it now.”
“How do you remember it?” I asked. “Were you there?”
Another silence, longer this time. When he spoke, his voice held a distance that hadn’t been there before. “I remember many things. More than I sometimes wish to.”
There was a weight to the words that made me hesitate before pressing further. Instead, I found myself asking a different question altogether.
“Is it true? About the stars being fragments of something divine?”
Death’s thumb brushed across my knuckles, the gesture so sweet, so comforting. “What is a star but distant light reaching across the void?” He asked softly. “What is divinity but energy that refuses to fade? What is a soul but a spark that burns beyond its time? Believe what you want, for it does not change reality.”
The silver threads seemed to be responding to his riddles, or perhaps to the emotion behind them—forming connections between us, between the stone walls of our cells, between the stars above and the earth below.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I admitted, watching as one particularly bright thread curled around our linked fingers.
“Then believe what brings you comfort,” Death said, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it. “In the end, that is the only truth that matters.”
I let my head fall back against the stone wall, suddenly exhausted despite my healed body. The emptiness where pieces of my soul had been taken ached dully, but it was a clean pain now, not the raw wound it had been before.
“I think,” I said slowly, watching the silver threads shimmer and dance, “I’d like to believe that even broken things can become something beautiful.
That even pain can transform into light.”
Death’s hand tightened around mine, a pressure that felt like understanding. “Yes,” he said simply. “So would I.”
And all around us, the silver strands shimmered brighter—like stars I finally knew how to see. Not distant, cold points of light, but fragments of something once whole, scattered across darkness but still connected, still reaching for each other across distances that may never be closed.
