I slipped out of bed with the sunrise. Viper reached for me in his sleep, made a grumbling sound, then sighed and snuggled back under the covers. I smiled at him adoringly. We'd recently discovered that his star magic could speak to my Trinity Star. He had saved me from losing myself to one of the Nine Great Magics and then helped me save the entire God race. Alaric—the Consciousness of the Void—hadn't been kidding when he said that Viper had his own destiny ahead of him and it was a great one.
I'd nearly lost everyone I loved that day, including myself. Because of that scare, I had spent the last few months reconnecting with those loved ones, especially my faerie husband, Arach. I'd gone to see him just before the battle with the god Adro—the battle that had nearly destroyed the Gods. Viper had been missing at the time and I was nervous. I thought he'd left me willingly and I'd needed some space from the drama. But I never should have visited the Faerie Realm while one of my men was missing. When I finally decided that I needed to get back to the God Realm, Arach had been busy in a meeting and I didn't want to disturb him. Mainly because the Faerie Realm had been flourishing—as Faerie, the Consciousness of the Faerie Realm put it—and all of the Fey were feeling the urge to flourish along with their realm. In other words, the entire realm was horny, my husband included.
I—likely because of my mixed ancestry—wasn't affected by the fertility of the realm and I knew that I couldn't waste any time fending off Arach. The fact that I considered making love to my fey husband to be a waste of time shows you just how worried I was about Viper. I left without saying goodbye. I figured that Arach wouldn't miss me; I'd be back in a minute. And I did return in a minute, but there had been a space of time when my return wasn't assured—a moment when I thought my life would end.
During that moment, I had held Viper's hand as we watched a severed god reunite his halves—and nearly destroy the entire race of the Gods in the process—and said goodbye to my husbands through our Blood to Heart bond, which allowed us to speak into each other's minds. But I didn't have that bond with Arach because he wasn't a god and he refused to allow me to make a vow to him that he couldn't return. Which meant that I couldn't tell him goodbye. And I had missed the chance to do it in person because I didn't want to deal with his overstimulated libido. That regret haunted me, even after calamity had been averted.
I'd gone to see Arach as soon as possible and groveled. I confessed that I had left without saying goodbye and had begged his forgiveness; I was that horrified by what had nearly happened. He'd forgiven me, of course, and since he was still “flourishing” had demanded that I make it up to him in bed. Over and over. But when he was finally appeased, he insisted that from there forward, I let him know when I used my Ring of Remembrance to travel through time and space.
The Ring of Remembrance was a faerie relic I inherited from my fey father (father from another life). There were a few rings in existence—Arach owns one too—and they had all been created to allow the long-lived Fey to go back in time and relive their past. Refresh their fading memories. When I use the ring to return to a time that I've already lived through, I have no power to change things, I can only relive them—experience them as a passenger in my own body, which is how the rings were intended to be used.
But I'd found a loophole. Every realm was a self-contained system with its own past, present, and future. This meant that I could spend time in the God Realm and then go back in time to the moment I left the Faerie Realm and freely spend that same time there, without being limited by what I'd already experienced. For my husbands and children, who mostly stayed in their home realms, it seemed as if I never left but, in truth, I did leave, and sometimes, it was for long periods.
In case you didn't catch it, I have multiple husbands. It's not a religious thing,