before I could cry out, they came back as he rolled himself through the broken window of my tower, and ran to my body.
He tore off his gloves, shoved the canopy aside, and dropped by my body, panting, “I’m here. Fairuza, I’m here. Tell me you are too, please.”
“I’m not there!” I choked through the thorns filling my throat.
He only propped up my body, gently resting my back against his chest, stroking my dark hair off my face as he rasped, “I told you that you could tell me anything. Why didn’t you just tell me? But it doesn’t matter. I’m here now, so come back. You have to come back to me, Fairuza. You have to.”
I couldn’t say anything. Could no longer breathe.
I could only stare at him, learning a new level of helplessness as silence permeated the tower, the only sounds his harsh breathing, the only motion his hand stroking my cheek. My body’s chest was death still.
If I were emotionally detached from this scene, I’d call it poetic, poignant even. A moment to frame in plays or paintings, the tragic hero and his lost love.
But we were never together to be torn apart. We weren’t Sweet William and Princess Marguerite. Those two, regardless of how their story ended, had gotten time to be together. To be in love. What we’d never been, and would never be. It was all too late.
“Don’t tell me I’m too late,” he finally choked, as if answering me. “I just found you, and it felt like you should have been with me all along. We have so much time to make up for. I never got to tell you about my adventures, or hear your music.” He pressed his forehead against mine, cupping my jaw in his calloused hand as the tears escaping his closed eyes flowed down his downturned face and onto my own. “Please, come back. I don’t care if you remain a ghost, or even a part of one, and I’m the only one who sees you, and you haunt me for the rest of my days. I just want you back!”
“Please go!” I found my voice at last, unable to withstand his pain as he cradled my lifeless body. “Forget about me, marry Marian, move on with your life. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“He can’t hear you,” said the Horned God somberly. “This is the River of Memory, and what you’re seeing now are events that will be recorded in the waves of eternity. You couldn’t interfere even if you wanted to.”
“Then why are you showing me this? Why?” I cried, torn between resignation towards my fate, and fury for Robin’s suffering.
“To give you closure before you move on to your afterlife, so you don’t become a true ghost, clinging to the upper world by the false hope that you could still be saved.” He was too close to me now, his hand outstretched. “It’s time for you both to move on.”
But I couldn’t move on until I was sure Robin had left the castle safely, to live his life the way he deserved to.
Instead, he bent to my lips, formed the words, “I love you,” against them, and pressed them with his own.
But nothing happened.
A burst of agony razed through me as I watched him pull back, gaze fixed on my limp form in his arms, before he let out an anguished cry.
He shook me, begging and pleading with me, with the Fates, with all the gods he knew by name.
“Fairuza, wake up. I mean it. I meant every word I ever said to you. I love you. I love you!”
But I still wasn’t pulled out of this pit of desperation and back into my body. Like the Horned God had said, it was too late.
All I could do was watch in futile torment as Robin held me tighter against him like it would kill him to let me go.
This was all I had ever wanted from him, and never thought I could have. His love.
Now I had it, I didn’t want it. Not like this.
Not like this.
I never wanted him to love me and suffer my loss for the rest of his life.
As if he could hear my anguished regret, his tears ran faster, drenching my cold, still face. “You showed me a new way to live, Fairuza, but I don’t want to go down that new path without you. I don’t want that future, or any at all, if you’re not in it. I can’t