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My hand dropped.

This is my fault.

He disappeared from beneath my fingertips and he didn't try to stop me.

His eyes opened, something shattering in the depths of them that I urged myself not to piece back together.

“We will go to throne and you two will keep your hands off each other.”

So that I can kill myself to fix this mess.

I had wanted to die not so long ago. Longed for it so achingly that I threw myself off a fucking cliff. Dying to save the person who made me want to live seemed like an easy choice.

I knew my spell would not cling to either of them, though I hoped they would obey me, nonetheless. Not out of force, but out of want.

I let my power ebb from them, receding like the tide slipping quietly back into the sea.

Rythos remained on his knees before me, and I drowned in the endless night of his eyes as he stared up at me. There were no stars left within them. Only the ghosts of every sacrifice he had ever made in my name. Every heartbeat. Every scar. Every impossible choice. Every one of them looked back at me and I realised the darkness I’d always seen in him was something else entirely.

It was grief.

“Sail me to the edge of the world, watch the sea rot my bones, feed me to the monsters beneath the waves... so long as, in the end, I die with your name on my tongue and your hands stained with my blood.”

The wind carried his words out across the Dead Sea.

No one spoke. Even the waves seemed unwilling to disturb what he'd just placed at my feet.

I swallowed the sob that threatened to bubble up my throat.

“I’m not going to let you die,” I whispered.

“How touching,” Helion mocked, grabbing me by the bindings around my wrists and tugging me back towards the shoreline. He stopped abruptly, shoving me behind his back as if protecting me.

Silence fell.

Not the ordinary silence of held breath, but something deeper. Even the Dead Sea seemed to forget how to move.

I frowned.

No one had approached us. No footsteps. No shifting stones.

Yet...

Someone was there.

She stood several paces away, as though she had always belonged to the jagged rocks. Water streamed from dark brown hair in slow rivulets, soaking the white button-down clinging to her body. Bare feet rested upon the stone, unbothered by the razor-sharp edges that had made me flinch moments before.

She didn't blink. Moss-green eyes settled on me with quiet, unnerving recognition.

“What is this?” Helion breathed, fire erupting along his forearms as he instinctively shifted further in front of me.

“A Siren,” Rythos growled, the words sounding more like a curse than an answer.

Impossible.

The woman gave me the slightest tilt of her head, as though acknowledging a command I had never spoken.

She sprinted to the edge of the rock, bare feet slapping against stone before throwing herself of the edge into the clutches of the cursed waters.