When the village cat died, nobody found her body for weeks. Despite the decade that had passed since, for some reason that memory poleaxed me in place. That nameless cat liked to shit wherever she pleased—until the day we found blood in her stool, and she limped further away from hands and soft voices, melting into nothing more than eyes in alleys and flashes of fur. Until we found where she'd dragged herself off to die, her body twisted from what the butcher hesitantly called cancer.

Sansen reminded me a lot of that black cat who'd never earned a name.

I knew something was wrong when I returned to find Lucet staring at a map of Knwharfhelm laid on the floor of our rented room. A thread of empathy trailed from her soul, phasing through the wall; it quivered as she looked up.

"Look who finally came back," Lucet said tonelessly. "Had enough of drinking your past under the table?"

"Where's everyone?" I asked.

"Sansen disappeared," Lucet said. "His husband ran off to search for him. Meloai and I set up a spell to keep in touch while she tries to figure out where either of them went. We could have really used your help."

Glass and oil rolled around in my soil, crunching and slipping and grinding. "I'm here now," I said.

"Great. Meloai's working her way inwards from the northern gate. You start from the south, and—"

I'd stopped listening, because ever since I'd walked through that door I'd known what it meant when an oracle with cancer vanished, and it was only now that my conscious mind caught up.

And he had to have seen this far. He had to have known we'd be looking for him. I knew that he'd given up on finding a cure in the time he had left, so what had he been glimpsing forwards to see?

I didn't know the whole of it, but it started with this moment.

I ripped open a rift into the Plane of Hope, just in time for a shard of a good man's soul to fly through and strike my heart, exactly where Sansen knew it would.

#

I could have stopped my death.

There were methods, within the schools of magic we now held. My shattered soul could have been held together by regret, bound to my husband's body; the ravages of the cancer within me could have been regrown through forgiveness; even after my heart stopped beating, time could be stepped back through the bones of repentance.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

But binding my soul to Jiaola's would have spread the sickness to him. Regrowth would only delay the inevitable until my body was more tumor than flesh. And true repentance is a resource rarer than gold.

So if I could not stop my death, I would at least blunt the impact of its fall.

It should have been sunset. Jiaola deserved that. But lining my death up with dusk was too difficult, with the synchronicity needed to push Cienne and Lucet's confrontation into a shape that wouldn't shatter them. So my husband suffered one last indignity, the brilliant Knwharfhelm sun pounding down on our backs, as we sat by the shore and waited for my life to end.

"Tell me it wasn't my fault," Jiaola finally said.

"I already did."

Jiaola glanced at me, looked away as if burned, then finally forced himself to meet my eyes. I was glad. It would be the last time he could look at my face and see someone looking back. "Not in one of the futures you saw. Not tomorrow. I want you to tell me now."

I focused my thoughts, scattered as they were from the divinations I'd done in the days leading up to this end. Had I truly failed to tell the man I loved that he was not to blame?

"It wasn't your fault. And it won't be your fault."

"Won't be?"

"What happens next."

Jiaola waited for me to reply. Gently prompted me. "What happens next, Sansen?"

I shrugged. "Cienne and Lucet fight. Don't stop it. It has to happen."

Jiaola exhaled, and in the soul I'd known and loved for thirty years I saw freshly-settled dust coming to a final rest. "I believe you," he finally said. "I trust you."

"I trust you too," I said.

"I just wish you'd spent more time near the end with me," my husband continued. I wanted to close my eyes, but for Cienne's sake I made myself meet Jiaola's pained, crumpled expression. "I know you were searching for a way to live, at first. But once you proved there was no way out..."

"I wish we had more time, too," I whispered. "But I knew you'd be alright without me. Cienne... Lucet... I feared for them too much. Because this—" I gestured at myself— "is the cost of being a hero. And this—" I gestured at Jiaola— "is what you buy with that coin. The two of them disagree on whether that bargain is worth it, and unless someone intervened, it would have torn them apart."

Jiaola's hand found mine, and I squeezed it back. My arm throbbed faintly.

"How long?" Jiaola asked.

"Long enough." I started to lean my head in his lap, then paused. "Where do you want me to—"

"Here." He draped one arm over my shoulder, guiding me to lie down.

I didn't count the seconds until the heart attack. I didn't track the clot as it slithered through my veins. I simply let the moments sieve by, until they were a third, a half, an infinity and an instant of what we had left.

I just hoped the kids would be okay.

#

The memories hit me in a retroactive flash, a heartbeat passing in real time as my soul absorbed that tiny shard of Sansen's. I stumbled back from the rift just in time to see a matching soul fragment strike Lucet.

I stared at and through her, at the sediment of grief layering thick on her soul, and reached up to press a hand to my forehead, as if to pressure my mind back into my body.

And in a hoarse voice, I whispered, "We need to talk."