I Will Love You Forever

Ten years of dust and distance had not managed to dull the shape of Eastern North in Taul Simmon’s mind. The first royal sanctuary rose out of the ruin like a broken tooth-arches snapped open to the sky, columns split and blackened as if fire had worried at them from the inside. Heat still lingered in the stone where sunlight hit, but the shade pooled cold around the broken steps. Somewhere beyond the collapsed walls, the air carried the dry clatter of metal and the ragged scrape of boots over rubble.

Taul kept his hand tight on the strap crossing his chest, feeling the boy’s weight against him through cloth and leather. The child was smaller than Taul expected for someone born in secrecy, all elbows and quick breaths, but he clung with surprising strength. His pulse thudded through Taul’s palm when Taul shifted his grip. The boy’s eyes, wide and too alert for his age, tracked every moving shadow in the sanctuary yard as if he could count the danger by sound alone.

“Steady,” Taul murmured, more to himself than to the child. His voice came out rough, scraped thin by nights that never ended. He didn’t want the boy to hear fear in it. Not now.

Jazim Gonzales Alos waited somewhere ahead-he had promised her that he would find her again beneath these shattered first walls, that he would bring whatever was left of their lives back to her. Taul had said the words like a prayer when the world had been too dark to hold anything else. He reached the sanctuary’s broken threshold and paused just long enough to listen.

Boots. Several sets. Not the wandering sort, not the desperate kind that searched for shelter. These steps moved with purpose, disciplined and heavy. Between them drifted the faint, wrong hum Taul had learned to recognize a head-a tooth-arch. Something in the air that made the hairs along his arms prickle, as if darkness had teeth.

Taul’s throat tightened. “They’re here already.”

The boy’s head angled toward the sound, and for a heartbeat Taul thought the child had mistaken it for birds or wind. Then the child inhaled sharply, and the air around Taul seemed to tighten with it. Small sparks of pale light-nothing more than motes-skittered over the stone where the boy’s breath touched. They weren’t afraid. They weren’t magic that burned. They were finer than that, like frost catching sunlight.

Taul swallowed hard and forced his feet to move. He couldn’t afford to stop, couldn’t afford to be seen lingering in the open. He slipped through a jagged gap where a once-grand doorway had collapsed, guiding the boy behind a fallen slab that still held its shape like a shield. From there he could see into the sanctuary’s inner court-broken mosaics underfoot, a shattered fountain bowl stripped to bone, and the skeletal ribs of a hall that had once held ceremonies.

A torch flared somewhere to the left, and men’s silhouettes cut across the ruins. Taul couldn’t see their faces from here, but he could see the way they carried themselves-too still at the edges, too ready to pounce at the center. Darkar the Great’s forces moved like a net, not like a crowd.

Taul pressed a knuckle to the boy’s shoulder, not to comfort, but to anchor. “Breathe slow. Don’t speak.”

The boy’s mouth opened anyway, as if words were the only way to keep his fear from spilling out. Taul caught his wrist and held it. The child didn’t struggle-just stared harder, the way an animal stares at a trap.

“There,” came a sound like a stone dropping into a well.

It wasn’t a voice. It was the shift of presence, the way the air changed when someone stepped into a place they belonged. Taul’s skin recognized it before his mind did. He turned his head just enough to see past the broken slab.

Jazim stood at the edge of the court where the fountain’s shattered bowl offered partial cover, her dark hair pulled back tight, her cloak snagged on a piece of collapsed masonry. Her posture was all control, but her eyes were the same eyes Taul had carried through a decade of nightmares. He had imagined her in every version of survival-alive, waiting, impossible. Seeing her here, under the sanctuary’s ruined arches, nearly stole his breath.

“Taul,” she said, and the single word carried the weight of years.

He started forward, then stopped. The men in the ruins weren’t the only thing to watch. The boy beside him had gone still. His gaze had locked onto Jazim with a startled kind of recognition, like he was seeing something he’d been warned to fear and something else he couldn’t stop wanting.

Taul lifted his hand in greeting, palm outward, keeping it slow. “Jazim. I’m here.”

Her eyes flicked to the boy’s face, and her expression tightened so quickly it looked like pain. "You-" she began, then cut herself off. She took a step closer, and the air between them seemed to hum with a tension Taul couldn’t name. Her gaze dropped to Taul’s grip on the child’s wrist. “How long have you had him?”

...