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“Please.” His voice cracks. “Don’t make me do it again.”
“It’s our only hope.” He already knows. “It has to be you, Khaslana. I know you can do this.” He doesn’t know if that is true anymore. His hands shake as he reaches out, tenderly grabs her hand. Cyrene squeezes back tightly, and in her eyes he sees the pain and regret. Not for making him do this, but that it had to be this way, that it’s taking so long.
Her hand is replaced with her sickle. The pristine white feels dirtied in his hand, the blade of it suddenly sharper than it should be. Something in him curdles at the sight. His knees ache from kneeling on the stone.
His gaze rests on the ground between them. It’s hard to look up at a face he’s failed hundreds of times already.
Cyrene is still holding onto the sickle as well, he can tell from how it tugs slightly in his hand as she shifts on her feet. “Phainon. . . Khaslana.” He will not look up. “It will work, okay? You can do it. This is all. . .” She’s stalling. Trying to encourage him, even in the midst of fire and debris, when there’s no one else left to do so. She doesn’t actually need to say anything, really—he wouldn’t have gone through cycle after cycle just to stop now. He might not ever be able to stop. Not until they’re free.
“. . . It’s just one, long story about the power of love, right?”
He mumbles it after her. She’s said this more than a handful of times before, and he likes to think he distantly remembers reading those stories with her, even with how distantly removed he is from his own time. He closes his eyes to let the bare impressions of memory wash over him, before finally meeting her eyes again. “Cyrene,” he says, eyes dark and steely, “I swear to get to the romantic ending you want. Promise.” The pinky he points out to her seems like a joke, but they both know it’s the most serious thing he means right now. She still giggles wetly, struggling to see through the sheen on her eyes.
She locks their fingers together. “This is so unromantic,” she jokes. Phainon stands up from the ground, still holding on.
“You know it was never like that.” He says softly.
She nods her head and turns towards the basin, letting go of his finger but keeping hold of the sickle. Slowly, she tugs him forward as she walks toward it. “Of course,” she agrees, but Phainon doesn’t look at her eyes again. “I was never that end for you, was I?”
He doesn’t answer. The guilt that would have invoked has long been made peace. He feels the ghost of it anyway.
In front of the basin for the thousandth time, he gives one more look around the Vortex. It doesn’t inspire the feelings in him it used to, not the awe when he first saw it, or the pride and relief he once felt when the constellations lit up. There isn’t even the melancholy or sadness anymore. He stares into the vortex, but it’s only another look into the stars.
Cyrene waits patiently for him to look back. She wiped her tears while he wasn’t looking, and fixed her smiling. There’s blood on the corner of her dress. Gold and red smeared together into a drying, rusty patch.
“I know you’ll make it. The Deliverer we always dreamed of will find you.”
With telegraphed movements, she brings the sickle’s blade up to rest against her chest. It presses into her clothing, just shy of tearing skin.
Phainon steadies his grip.
“See you tomorrow, Khaslana.”
It only takes one push.
She falls to the ground, her eyes crinkling and mouth pulling into a faint smile one last time.
And it is only him left. And it is only the rage that burns furiously, and the Aeons watching them, and for the hundred-thousandth time, he feels his body ignite. Molten gold and flame.
There will be nothing left at all, this time.