The smoke stung my eyes this morning—not the sacred kind that coils up from temple fires, nor the perfumed incense of forgotten rituals—but the acrid, enthusiastic plume of a breakfast gone spectacularly wrong.
Billy, bless the chaos in his bones, had tried to make flapjacks.
The result resembled a burnt offering to the gods of charcoal and stubborn optimism. Each puck hissed when it hit the plate, black as betrayal, stubborn as sin. He flashed that grin—mischief and apology braided into one expression—and muttered something about being distracted by a particularly flirtatious cloud.
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scold. Instead, I wanted to protect him.
Not from the smoke. Not from the breakfast. But from everything else—the jagged, grinding weight of reality. That feeling took me by surprise. I’ve carried lovers and kingdoms and dead stars in my arms without ever once feeling this precise kind of ache. It wasn’t just fondness. It was guardianship. Fierce. Primal. I wanted to wrap him in myth and magic and make the world small enough not to touch him.
And he—he doesn’t even know what he’s doing. How each laugh, each soft moment, each clumsy kindness burrows deeper into my spirit and makes the impossible feel—just briefly—like it could be possible.
Last night… last night was a beautiful catastrophe.
The kiss. Stars forgive me, the kiss. It was a spark struck too near dry parchment. A thing of impulse and fire and terror. His lips—tentative, warm, a question half-asked—met mine, and I shattered. For one beat of eternity, I stopped being old. I stopped being burdened. I was just Tak, kissing a boy beneath a sky too wide for lies.
I almost told him.
The truth was right there—clinging to the back of my throat, trembling at the edge of my breath. That I am not a man. That I am not even a thing with years. That I have no business holding a mortal heart like it’s something I could keep safe.
But the words died.
I couldn’t bear the look he might give me. Not fear—that I could endure. But pity? No. Not from him. I’d sooner let the stars burn me clean than see that flicker in his eyes.
And so I let the lie bloom in silence. Let it curl between us, unnoticed, like a shadow that only shows itself when the light is strongest.
The distance is safer, or so I tell myself. A protective measure. But he is already beneath my skin. He is written into my story now, inked on the underside of my ribs. I fear that if I tried to remove him, I’d bleed stardust until there was nothing left.
I’m not built for this. For loving something fragile. For watching it wither. I have seen the flickering ends of countless mortal lives, each one a brief candle in the gale of time. And yet…
He does not feel brief.
He feels like a reckoning.
I dread what comes next. The moment he learns. The moment he sees. That I am not the boy he kissed beneath the stars. That I am something old and strange and perilous. That my love is not safe—it is a tide. It pulls.
Perhaps Eirikr was right. Perhaps mortals should be admired from afar, like sunsets. Like art. Not touched, not loved, not held.
But it’s too late. I am loving him. I am already burning in the center of that flame.
And here’s the worst of it: I don’t want to leave.
I should. Gods, I should. But when I imagine walking away, the pain feels sharp enough to carve my name from the bones of the world. And so I linger. I stay. I pretend.
I must protect him. From the chaos I carry. From the gods who watch. From the past that never forgets. But how do you protect someone from yourself?
That question spins inside me, maddening and unsolvable.
I want to believe we can thread the needle. That our footsteps can carve a safe path through the labyrinth of fate. But I have danced with inevitability before.
And it always leads back to ashes.
Later, as the sun pressed higher and the shadows gave way to a bleached brightness, Billy brought out a battered harmonica from somewhere in his gear. He played like someone who didn’t believe in talent but had faith in sound—discordant, charming, a little mournful. The music wrapped around the campsite like a memory that hadn’t happened yet.
I closed my eyes and let it wash over me. In those uncertain notes, I heard echoes of stories not yet told: the timbre of future laughter, the cadence of parting, the swell of a name shouted in grief or joy. He didn’t ask if I liked it. He didn’t have to. That too was a kind of understanding between us.
At one point, he stopped and looked over, brow furrowed like he was trying to decide something hard. “You ever want to go someplace no one can follow?” he asked.
“I’ve lived most of my life in places like that,” I replied, quieter than I meant to.
He nodded, not in agreement but in recognition. “Still,” he said, “seems to me some places are only worth going if you got someone to go with you.”
There it was again—his stubborn belief in companionship. In choosing someone to walk beside, even if the road curved toward fire or flood. I had never understood it. Still didn’t. And yet, I was beginning to want to.
He finished eating the last ruin of his breakfast and leaned back against a sun-warmed boulder. “Maybe we’ll find a new trail tomorrow,” he said, like it was nothing.
But everything in me knew it was something. And I didn’t know how to follow without falling.
