Page 18 of Aïdes the Unseen
We had just agreed without words. In the distance, the first daffodils opened.
For a long time, we didn’t move. The rain slowed, soft as a caress.
His hand beneath mine was still, cool and steady, like a river stone in shade. Not demanding. Not reaching. Simplythere. Allowing. Trusting.
The quiet between us swelled, full of unnamed things. Wonder. Recognition. Something that had nothing to do with fate, and everything to do with the way stillness sometimes seemed like belonging.
Eventually, he stirred. While he didn’t shift away, he gave the barest motion, enough to askare you ready?
I was.
We stood.
The moss recorded our footprints. This time, when we walked, it was side by side. No path, no plan. Just the rhythm of two steps—mine light, his soundless—moving through a world that bloomed and watched.
He didn’t ask where we were going. I didn’t tell him. The wild knew.
We passed through the whispering grove, where the birches whispered rumors to the wind. Their silver bark gleamed wet from rain, and the sprites hidden in their boughs peeked out, curious. I felt their eyes. Felt the way the forest tried to place him in its memory.
It didn’t, but it didn’t reject him either. Instead, it waited. Maybe it was as curious as I was.
At a low ridge where the ground was soft with clover, I paused and knelt, brushing my fingers across the pale green. The scent of damp petals and earth filled the air.
Aïdes crouched beside me, watching. “You’re not just spring,” he said quietly.
I looked at him, brow lifted. “No?”
“You’re hope.”
A laugh caught in my throat. Not mockery. Surprise. “Is that what I look like to you?”
He shook his head. “It’s not how you look. It’s how things lookatyou.”
Surprised, I went motionless. Even as I tasted his words, I knew hemeantthem. More, it was what he saw.
Not the petals and painted joy others praised, but the stretch beneath it. The stretch that made it beautiful.Hope is only hope when it has something to lose.
I sat back on my heels. “What do you see when you look at yourself?”
He didn’t answer me immediately. If anything, he seemed to weigh his answer. Then: “A question. A boundary. The end of what things dare to imagine.”
My chest ached with the urge to undo something I didn’t know how to name. I didn’t even know why, but theneedburrowed deep.
“Then maybe that’s why you’re drawn to me,” I said, as much searching for an answer as I was trying to offer one. “Not because I’m light. But because Ireach.”
He looked at me like he was seeing the world remade.
Not brighter.
Just possible.
Eventually, I rose and he followed me to stand. We kept walking, slow and unhurried. I showed him the lambs nestled under the thornbushes, their soft wool damp but warm. I pointed out the first blush of elderberry on the vine, the green tips of fennel pushing through mud. Every new thing, every small start,I gave it to him.
I rather doubted he needed any of it, but Iwantedhim to have it. We paused at a broken stone altar, this one long abandoned and overgrown with lichen. Ivy coiled through its cracks, and a wren had made her home in the hollowed center.
“No one remembers who it was built for,” I said.
“But the bird remembers,” he murmured.
