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Rythos closed his eyes and rested his cheek against the crown of her head as though allowing himself one final moment to simply be her brother.

He glanced up at Solas, the smallest nod passing between them.

Solas gently pried Cerilla’s arms from around Rythos and pulled her against his chest, restraining her as she fought to reach him again, tears slipping freely down his own face.

“No,” Cerilla sobbed, twisting in Solas’s hold. “Rythos, please. Please don’t⁠—”

Rythos turned away before she could finish.

Every staggered step towards me seemed to slow time, until he stopped beside the dagger lying abandoned across the marble and bent slowly to retrieve it.

My breath lodged painfully in my throat when I recognised the dagger Helion had driven through Rythos’ heart a thousand years ago.

Rythos stared down at it for a moment before lifting his gaze to mine, and something inside me began to splinter beneath the tenderness I found there.

He turned the dagger in his hand and held the handle towards me.

I shook my head before he could speak.

His expression softened, his eyes pleading with me to understand what my heart refused to accept.

“She is going to need you,” Rythos murmured, looking over my shoulder at Helion. “When she hates me for asking this of her, when the grief becomes too heavy for her to carry alone, you keep her standing.”

Helion’s arm tightened around my waist.

Rythos swallowed, his gaze lingering on him with the quiet acceptance of a man surrendering the one thing he had spent a thousand years refusing to share. “Love her when I cannot.”

“You have my word, Commander. For whatever that is worth,” Helion murmured.

His arm disappeared from around me as he stepped to the side, and I thought my legs might give way from underneath me.

“It is all right, my love,” Rythos murmured, stepping close and dipping his head to lean his forehead against mine. “I have something for you.”

He reached into his pocket, pulling out the journal I’d once made a blood bargain with him to read.

“I’ve written in it every day since I took you from Stonebriar…” He paused, placing it on top of the throne next to us. “I want you to finish our story, but do not make it tragic. Any lifetime where I got to love you is worth dying in.”

He reached for my hand and gently curled my fingers around the hilt of the dagger.

“Please stop,” I sobbed, my grip loosening immediately, but his hand closed around mine, keeping the dagger between us. “I-I can’t do this. Please. I just want you.”

“Maraveth broke the world to keep me from death. Lyra, you are not her. Please. Love me enough to let me go.” He almost begged, “I need to go.”

He guided my hands, hovering the blade over the blackened skin above his heart.

Then he leant down and pressed his icy lips against mine, the scent of fresh night air and something sweeter I could never quite name wrapping around me for what I knew would be the last time.

I kissed him with everything I was.

With every piece of the broken princess who had fallen into the Dead Sea and somehow found him waiting on the other side, with every shattered fragment of the goddess who had once broken the world rather than watch him die, and with every lifetime my soul had spent finding its way back to his, only for death to tear us apart again.

My fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck as I kissed him harder, desperately committing the shape of his mouth to memory while tears slipped between us, because no matter how many pieces of him he had left behind in drawings and journal…

Nothing would ever be enough.

But when he finally pulled away, keeping his forehead pressed against mine, I understood that loving him could no longer mean finding another way to keep him.

“I love you,” I sobbed.