Eremos didn't know, in the exact moment it happened, how long Vesalia had been gone. He only knew that, in the middle of some mission, something pulled at him from a place that wasn't the mission itself.
The Heartthread never gave him details. It never did. But this time the tremor was different from the one he'd felt the night she died the first time, that sudden, almost electric violence that had dropped him to his knees in the middle of everything. This was something else: a low, sustained tremor, almost like the hum of a string stretched too long, on the verge of losing its note without quite snapping. It wasn't the sound of someone dying. It was the sound of someone fading, slowly, somewhere he couldn't see.
He finished the mission with a haste unlike him — Eremos, who over centuries had learned to move with the deliberate patience of something that grew rather than something built, crossed that pocket-world toward the exit with an urgency that surprised even his own body. He left the mission, felt the thread again, weaker now, and set off in the direction it pointed him, not yet knowing what he'd find at the end of the road.
He walked for what felt like a long time, through stretches of the Between growing emptier and emptier, until the landscape became exactly the kind of place he already knew too well: pale stone, uniform gray sky, a silence so complete that the sound of his own footsteps felt like an intrusion.
And then he saw them.
Two silhouettes, lying together on the stone, asleep — or something like sleep, in a world where rest was never quite rest. One of them was Vesalia; he recognized her immediately, not by any visible feature, but by the certainty only the Heartthread gives, the way her presence felt different from any other in the world. The other was a silhouette he didn't know, smaller, curled against the first with an arm still extended in a protective gesture even sleep hadn't undone.
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He didn't know, in that moment, how long they'd been like that. He didn't know, either, that this unfamiliar silhouette was named Faelia, or that in time she would become one more piece of the strange, enormous family he'd been building around himself. He only knew, looking at them, that something in that scene reminded him, with a force that tightened his chest, of another, much older scene: a hill of pale stone, a motionless silhouette waiting for the sun, and himself, centuries earlier, discovering that sometimes all it takes to save someone is not leaving them alone a second longer than necessary.
He approached slowly, with the same care one uses approaching something that might break if moved too fast. He didn't wake them abruptly. He knelt beside them, and with a gentleness that was, at its core, the same gentleness with which years before he'd wrapped a voiceless stem in his own plant-arms, not yet knowing that gesture would be the first of a lifetime of similar ones, he lifted them — both of them, one after the other, with the exact care demanded by carrying something that had already been too fragile for too long — and carried them with him.
Not to any other corner of the Between. He carried them to the one place where the sun was real, where warmth didn't depend on any mission or any time limit: the World Fragment.
Vesalia didn't fully wake during the journey. Faelia, at some point, opened her eyes just enough to understand, with that same sensitivity that had led her to Vesalia in the first place, that the silhouette carrying them posed no danger — that, if anything, it was exactly the opposite: someone who, for reasons she didn't yet understand, had been searching for the woman sleeping in his arms for longer than either of them could imagine.
Eremos said nothing for the rest of the walk. There was no need. He walked, carrying the two most fragile silhouettes he'd carried in a long time, toward the one place in the entire world where someone could, at last, feel the sun on their skin without having to earn it first with a mission.
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