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This time, I had to love him enough to let him go.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Death

Rythos

Love is not stronger than death, though perhaps that was never the point.

How could something so powerful, so consuming have an ending?

But everything worth having is also worth losing in the end.

And loving her had been worth every fucking thing it cost me.

A thousand years had been stolen from me and somehow given back in the same breath, stretched into an existence filled with blood, shadows, and an endless cycle of finding the same soul only to lose her again. I had spent centuries believing myself enslaved to a curse born from jealousy.

When all this time, I had suffered because she loved me enough to damn everyone else.

I had already accepted my death. Yet saying goodbye still hurt me in ways I did not imagine.

I turned to where Solas still held Cerilla against his chest, her body shaking beneath the force of sobs she could no longer contain.

My stubborn little sister… I hoped she forgave herself one day.

Solas met my gaze over her head. No words passed between us, but we did not need them after so many years of brotherhood.

Then there was Helion.

The fallen god stood only a few steps behind Lyra, a sadness tightening the sharp lines of his face that he tried to keep so carefully hidden while he watched me prepare to leave him with the one thing I had once wanted to keep entirely for myself. I should have hated him for that.

Perhaps some selfish piece of me still did.

But he loved her.

And she needed him. When the grief would hollow her out and she forgot how to breathe beneath the weight of losing me, he would be there to remind her how to live.

That would have to be enough.

Next to us, the throne pulsed with the rot that had lived inside me for a thousand years, fractured pieces of marble lay scattered across the floor like the bones of something ancient.

So much destruction because death had once seemed like the cruellest thing that could happen to us.

I understood now that there were crueller things.

Like a world broken because two people had mistaken forever for the only measure by which love could matter.

Perhaps I had once reminded her how to live, but in return, she had taught me how to die.

Lyra had given me more life than any dying man had the right to demand, and somewhere between the blood and the shadows, between Stonebriar and the Dead Sea, she had given me something even immortality never had.

A life worth losing.

I stared into Lyra’s eyes, sparkling with an ocean of grief.

I leant in, brushing my lips against hers one last time as I tightened my hand around hers and thrust the dagger forward.

Pain exploded through my chest, white and vicious enough to steal the breath from my lungs, but it was nothing compared to the sound that tore from Lyra.