The knock came just as I placed the tea on the windowsill, beside the chair he used to sit in—boots muddy, hair damp with rain, lips curving into that tired, reckless smile. Even now, I poured two cups. His always went cold.
Three knocks. Slow. Measured. Like someone trying to remember the rhythm of a heart they once heard clearly.
I didn’t move at first. No one ever came to the edge of the woods, not anymore. Not since the wedding, not since the war, not since after. People like me—widows of stories too grand to survive—became cautionary tales, not company.
Still, my hand reached the door before I told it to. Old habits cling like cobwebs; you don’t notice them until you walk face-first into them in the dark.
A man stood outside.
Not him. Not the prince I buried in my dreams and eulogized in every mirror. No—this one was older, or perhaps just wearier. Cloaked in travel, face drawn like a sketch the artist gave up on halfway through. But his eyes…
They were full of memory. Not his own.
“Elira,” he said. My name slipped out like an apology.
I should have slammed the door. I should have asked who he was, what he wanted, why he stood like someone who knew how stories ended.
Instead, my eyes dropped to his hand. And I stopped breathing.
He held a red ribbon—frayed, faded, the silk worn thin. But unmistakably mine.
The last one I ever tied in my hair.
The night before the final battle, I wore it like a prayer. He touched it, smiling, and said, “So I’ll know where you are when everything else fades.”
Then he left. Then he died. Or so I believed.
“Where did you get that?” My voice cracked—not from fear, but from recognition. Grief wears many disguises; sometimes it comes back wearing your own face.
He didn’t answer. Just stepped aside.
The world around us didn’t shift. It peeled.
The garden folded like pressed flowers. The tea slipped from the tray and vanished without sound. My cottage unraveled into smoke and memory. And suddenly I was somewhere else.
The sky was deep indigo, speckled with golden moons. The wind carried music I couldn’t name. Trees pulsed faintly, their leaves glowing like embers. I should have been afraid. But instead, I felt… hollowed. Like I’d been carved to fit this place.
“This is where he went,” the man said. “The prince.”
I blinked at him. “He… died.”
“He made a bargain.”
Of course he did.
You always gave yourself away like a secret, I thought. Like firewood in winter—burning just to keep others warm.
“He traded his death for something else,” the man continued. “They took him here. Where forgotten promises go.”
I tried to speak, but my words tangled.
He walked beside me. I followed.
The world shimmered with strange, aching beauty. Rivers that sang lullabies. Children playing with shadows that didn’t quite belong to them. Mountains shaped like sleeping women, their faces half-buried in snow.
It didn’t feel like a dream. Dreams are careless. This world was precise—deliberate, like someone wrote it carefully and we were only now reading the lines.
And then—I saw him.
Under a willow tree, barefoot, still golden with youth, as if time itself had refused to touch him.
“Elira?” he said.
The sound of my name in his voice was a blade dipped in honey. Sweet. Cutting.
I touched my face. Older. Tired. Wiser, perhaps, but not the same.
He stepped forward like a man wading into a tide he thought had long gone out. His eyes searched mine for something that still lived. I wanted to give it to him.
But what he needed was buried under ten winters of silence.
“I wore your ribbon until it faded,” he said, his voice low.
“I wore your name like armor,” I whispered.
There was no kiss. No rushing into arms. Just a silence that spoke of things too tender to touch and too ruined to rebuild.
He had waited. But I had endured.
I didn’t come here for reunion. I came for truth.
So I stayed. Not for him—but for myself.
I built a quiet life in this strange land. Grew herbs that whispered secrets. Sat beneath stars that pulsed with memory. I did not chase what once was. I buried it, gently, and planted something softer in its place.
One morning, the stranger came again. Said it was time for him to move on—to guide the next soul lost between stories.
I tied my old ribbon to his door.
Not as a farewell. Not even as remembrance.
But as a reminder that some stories do not end. They simply find a softer place to rest.
After the stranger vanished with my ribbon fluttering behind him, silence returned.
But it wasn’t the kind I’d known in the cottage—the heavy, airless quiet of mourning. This silence breathed. It waited. As though the world itself listened now, not for what I had lost, but for what I might become.
I found a rhythm.
I gathered herbs that hummed beneath my fingertips. Learned the songs of the birds that nested in trees with silver-veined bark. The villagers—if that’s what they were—spoke little, but smiled like they’d long ago stopped expecting to be understood.
And still, sometimes, I saw him.
The prince who had once been mine.
We met under the willow tree once every moon-turn. Not to reclaim what was gone—but to speak like old pages left open in the same book. We talked of childhood, of laughter in stables, of the weight of crowns we never wanted but wore because someone had to.
He never asked me to stay with him.
He knew I already had.
But not for him. I stayed because this world, strange and broken and soft around the edges, had become a mirror I didn’t flinch to look into.
Once, I asked him if he regretted the bargain.
He was quiet a long while. Then he said, “I don’t know. I regret leaving you behind. But I don’t regret saving what I could.”
I didn’t answer. I just reached out and touched his wrist—like touching a wound that no longer bled but still remembered pain.
We sat in silence, and it didn’t hurt.
Later that night, I sat by my window—one carved into the bark of a living tree. Outside, the stars formed constellations I didn’t know the names of.
But they didn’t need names. They just needed to shine.
Maybe, I thought, this is the real ever after.
Not a perfect ending. Not a kiss at the closing of a chapter.
Just this: peace in the aftermath.
A place where grief can put down its sword.
And love, no longer burning, can finally rest in the warmth it left behind.
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