Raven didn't sleep that night. He didn't blink. Didn't move.
He simply sat there, back pressed to the cold wall of the ruined tower, staring into the veil where Lyra had appeared for the briefest flicker of eternity. The others had left him alone, thinking the strain of war had finally cracked something in him. Maybe it had.
But that look in her eyes…
It had broken him.
And rebuilt him.
He rose just before dawn, cloak heavy with dew and silence, and walked through the frost-covered woods. The trees whispered like they knew. Like they'd seen her too.
He didn't know where he was going—only that he had to move. To find her. Because now he understood.
The war was never just about the realms. Not about thrones or relics or power. It was about her.
And the ache in his chest wasn't grief.
It was memory fighting to return.
Every step he took made it pulse harder. Sharper. Like a heartbeat behind a locked door.
---
Lyra clutched the jagged edge of the mirror shard she'd found buried in the soil of this place—this in-between realm that hummed like a heart trapped in glass. The shard shimmered when she touched it. And tonight, it had shown her him.
For a breathless second, she had seen his eyes. Not hollow and lost like before—but almost there. Searching.
She pressed her forehead to the cold surface of the shard and whispered, "Remember me."
The realm around her answered in stillness. No doors. No path.
Just this endless, trembling space stitched together by fate and forgetting.
Still, she got up.
Still, she walked.
Her steps echoed as if the world were waiting for her to find a way out.
She wasn't going to wait to be rescued.
If the bond was strong enough to reach across realms…
Then maybe it was strong enough to lead her home.
---
The war camps were stirring. Scouts returned with news of border tremors—unstable cracks forming in the veil near the river lines. The final breach was near. And yet Raven ignored it.
He wandered until he found the edge of the Rift, where the veil was thinnest.
There, in a grove where time had once unraveled, he stood alone. The wind screamed through the trees, carrying no sound but his own breath.
He dropped to his knees.
And for the first time in days, he let the silence speak.
"Lyra," he whispered.
The wind stopped.
His fingers dug into the dirt as if it could answer him.
"I don't know what you gave… what you paid… but I'm still here."
The ground trembled. Behind his ribs, the bond pulsed—a warmth he hadn't felt in so long it startled him. He gasped, clutching his chest as a sudden surge of her magic curled through him.
Ice and flame.
Recognition.
The memory wasn't fully back—but the bond was.
And it was burning.
He stood, eyes wild, heart racing.
"She's still alive," he whispered. "She's fighting."
He turned on his heel and ran.
---
Lyra collapsed to her knees in the in-between space, the shard slipping from her grasp. Her veins burned.
Not with pain—but with presence.
She could feel him.
Like a storm gathering on the edge of everything.
Her hands sparked with energy—ice laced with flame—and the entire realm around her cracked. A thin fracture spread like lightning across the air.
She stood and screamed into the rift, voice raw and unrelenting.
"Find me!"
The bond flared in response, lighting the air with a shimmer of memory. Around her, echoes of their past flashed like mirages—first meeting in the woods, sparring, bleeding, almost kissing, losing, dying.
And then—
A door.
A literal door.
Old. Wooden. Carved with a rune only two hearts would know.
She ran for it.
---
Back in the realm, Raven staggered as the pulse hit him like a wave. His knees buckled—but when he looked up, the trees around him had changed. The air shimmered with frost and fire.
"She opened something," he muttered.
Before him, light cracked the air. Not white. Not red. But that impossible color only their bond ever summoned.
He stepped through it.
---
When they saw each other again, it wasn't dramatic.
It was quiet.
Breathless.
Raw.
They stood across a thin sliver of fractured space, hands reaching without moving, eyes locked as the weight of every sacrifice they didn't remember began to crash into them.
Raven spoke first, his voice hoarse.
"I remember… not everything, but I remember you."
Lyra smiled, tears on her cheeks.
"I never forgot you. I couldn't."
The bond flared—one final surge that split the veil open between them. And as they rushed forward, worlds trembled.
Fate didn't smile.
It bowed.
The war had begun.
But now…
They weren't fighting it apart.