Sweet Romance21 min read
I Burned My Future—and the King Liked the Smoke
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"I light one more," I told myself, and the flame took the last square of paper.
The smoke filled the room like a stubborn memory. I coughed, waved my hand, and kept feeding the little fires until the stack was nothing but warmth and ash.
"You're really doing this?" my maid had asked in the doorway, but she wasn't there anymore. No one was. I kept burning until I couldn't see.
When I opened my eyes again, someone said, "Report."
"I brought her," a voice answered. It was polite and quick, like a servant who knew how to stay alive.
"Bring her where?" another voice asked.
I blinked. A flash of black robes. Then—gold. Gold everywhere. A throne so high I couldn't find its top. A book that smelled like cold ink and old rules.
"Isla Weiß," I said, because a name felt like a thing you could use to steady yourself.
The man on the throne looked down at me without surprise. His hair was black and long. His robe was the color of midnight. He had a red mark under one eye that made him look like he'd been born with a moonlight scar. He held a thin book. When he raised a single, pale hand, letters appeared in the air and sank into the book like rain.
"You burned five years' worth," he said. His voice was lazy, as if saying my name cost him effort. "Enough to throw the whole ledger into frenzy."
"It was for me," I said. "My doctor said—"
"You were alive," he cut in. "By the old rule, alive people can't claim an afterlife house. Rules are for order."
"Then why—" I stopped. My throat was tight. The smoke from my last life was still in my lungs in a way I couldn't cough out.
"He made a change," the man's attendant said. A shorter man bowed and smiled like he meant everything would always be fine. "The lord said: any offerings from the living will be seized. The ledger is full."
I stared at them both. The little booklet that Denver Pfeiffer, the white attendant, held showed a number. My name was there and a sum the size of a small fortune.
"That's mine," I said stupidly. "All of it."
Sterling Patel's thin smile grew into something unreadable. "You did more than fill the ledger, Isla Weiß. You padded the whole market."
"I—I didn't mean to—" My voice was weak. Getting rich after you die felt absurd, but the numbers made my pulse jump anyway.
"Then you will work for it," he said, and I heard it as a sentence and as an offer. "An attendant. Live in my service. Learn the realm. You earned the coin. You may stay in the court."
I almost laughed. "You mean—"
"Close enough," he said. "And you will live in one of the houses by my hall."
Denver bowed. Foster Svensson, who had been standing quiet in a corner like a shadow that kept watch, cleared his throat. "My lord, this is unprecedented."
Sterling shrugged. "I make rules when I like. Orders are written later."
I had come to the underworld with smoke in my hair and five years of paper folded into ash. I had expected a ledger, maybe a queue, maybe cowled revenants. I had not expected favors.
"You're the king?" I asked. Saying it aloud made him seem less like a story.
"Yes." He tipped his head and looked at me properly for the first time, like he was finally reading a page. "Do you accept service?"
"Yes," I said, and meant it because the other option was to be small and nameless in a city that liked its names tidy.
He bade Denver show me my house.
The house was plain at first glance—straw roof, mud walls, a furniture set that would have been modest anywhere else. Denver smiled apologetically. "Lord said you will want sleep. He sends provisions."
"But my—" I lifted a hand, thinking of the gold that had turned up in my little book. "What about money?"
Denver's smile softened. "You have what the ledger gave you. It is enough for the household. Lord made sure."
I tried to be practical and failed. I had never, in my lifetime, had to worry about money after sleep. To spend as if I would be alive forever had been the joke. I had bought paper and paper and paper and convinced myself a heap of ash could be comfort. Now ash sat in books and books sat in the hands of the lord.
When the sun—if you could call it that—did not rise and not set, I walked into the main hall because some part of me wanted to see the man again. He sat as if carved from the pillars of a temple, but his eyes were like a cold lantern that had learned to smile.
"Why me?" I asked, straight to his face.
"You enriched the domain," he said. "You did what no one does—you invested in us without thinking of return. I reward those whose actions change the system."
"Was it really just the money?" I asked.
Sterling's hand moved an inch, and a cup of tea appeared in front of him. He lifted it to his lips and watched me as if I were a taste to examine.
"You worried about your afterlife," he said softly. "That is honest. You showed fear. Why else burn for a living heart? If you had faith, you would not have spent it on yourself."
"I didn't want to be poor," I said, which was an answer and not an excuse. "I wanted to be sure."
He set the cup down with care. "You will be careful now."
"Please call me Isla," I said. "It sounds—easier."
"Sterling," he offered in return. "I prefer that."
"Sterling," I repeated, and the word settled in like a key in a lock.
He could have been a wall. Instead he became absurdly human. He showed me slices of the world: the court, the map with the three borders (Heaven, Underworld, Mortal), the ledger that spent my life with a neat pen. He also kept watch.
"Don't be foolish, Isla," Foster said one evening when he caught me peeking at the door to Sterling's quarters. "Some men with crowns like to test others."
"He is not testing," Denver said quickly. "He is simply amused."
"Amused," Foster grunted. "Amusement is a dangerous thing here."
I did not understand how dangerous. I only knew that Sterling's smile warmed my throat like tea, and his attention felt like a small sun.
When he first restored my taste, I thought he would touch my lips and explanations would follow.
Instead he touched my forehead with two fingertips and the world bloomed like a dish placed in front of me.
"Try," he said.
I bit into something—warm, fat, sweet—and a whole life of hunger poured into me. For one shaky moment, I tasted memory and food and something like safety.
"How did you—" I started.
Sterling shrugged. "I wanted to see if your face would stop tearing. So I gave you a trifle."
"A trifle?" I was angry at how small he made it sound. "You gave me taste."
"And I gave you a bed," he said lightly, watching the corner of my mouth. "Because you liked the wood."
The bed was black and heavy. When I ran my hand across it, Sterling's eyes narrowed the least bit.
"You like the wood," he murmured. "Then it is yours."
That night I slept in a bed that smelled like distance and old storms. I woke to Sterling sitting across the room like a storm that had learned to wait.
"Do you know anything of cooking?" he asked.
"Only how to buy it and how to set it on fire," I said.
"Then learn." He pushed a cloth-wrapped bundle at me, a book bound with twine that looked ancient and heavy. "Read this. If you learn, there will be things you can do on your own."
So I read it. The book felt like a map an old woman had drawn in a language your bones remembered. Words like "breath," "focus," "hand movement" repeated like recipes. When I followed them, small red lights flickered in the dark of my room like coals. On the second day, the lights hurt my head and sleep took me with a swoon.
I dreamed of another life.
A man with the same moonmark—only younger, fierce and undefeated—held my hand as if gravity obeyed him. We stood by a cliff, or a shore, or a battlefield that I could almost remember. He pressed a shard of something warm into my palm and hummed like a child. "Marry me," he had said then, or later, or maybe never. When I woke, my fingers ached as if they had touched metal.
"You dream a lot," Denver observed.
"I remember pieces," I said. "Faces. A song. Someone calling me Snow."
Sterling's face did not change when I said the name. He merely folded his hands and watched like someone who would read every page I offered.
"Snow was the name," he said quietly once, late at night when the hall was empty but for a candle. "Someone else called her that. Once."
I blinked. "Once?"
"Many times," he corrected himself. "Turn the page when you can, Isla. There are doors."
His voice was soft, and it was the first time I'd seen him seem like a man who had waited decades between breaths.
He left for the sky—no, to the edge of the underworld—saying he had a meeting in the world above the upper courts. He came back pale and still, carrying a single white root under his arm.
"Antonia," he said when Antonia Hoffmann, the woman who oversaw stories and lost names, appeared. "Keep this close."
Antonia bowed as if the root was a child. She offered me a smile that looked like sympathy in a world that had little use for sentiment. "You must rest, Isla," she said. "Storms ahead are different here."
"Storms at least give weather to blame," I grumbled.
The truth was I had begun to notice eyes in corners. Whispers that halted when I walked past. Denver's nervous coughs. Foster's too-quick bows. Sterling's hand, always the last to leave, always the first to come.
Weeks went by—or days that felt like months because time forgot itself in the underworld. I read the heavy book until my fingers ached, and I practiced until my palms blistered. Sterling watched sometimes, not as a master watches a pupil, but like a man who wanted someone to be present in the long rooms of his life.
"You won't be safe if you are strong," he told me once. "But you will be less likely to be stolen."
"Stolen?" I frowned. "By whom?"
He wouldn't say. His silence told me that there were names he did not give. In those quiet moments, I thought of a purple sky and a man who had called me "Snow" in my dreams. A man whose name I could not place.
Then I was gone from underworld's steady roads.
I walked to a pond of purple water because I liked the color and because the map had not told me where else to go. I peered in and the world opened like a cracked pot.
"Hey, watch your feet," a soft voice said, and then hands steadied me. I turned and saw a man in lilac robes, hair and eyes the faint color of bruised grapes. He bowed with a small, practiced movement.
"I am Ansel McCoy," he said. "You look like you took a wrong turn."
"I don't know where I am," I said, honest as ever. "I lost my way."
He smiled, the kind of smile that made every curve of him seem designed to tempt. "Then come. My house is near. I will show you warmth."
Something in me that had not trusted eyes since the day I died tightened. "Why help me?"
"Because," he said, and the word was small and enormous at once, "I am fond of lost things."
He called himself a brother in some older story. He called himself by other names too when the moon was generous. He preferred being called Ansel.
He taught me small tricks in a violet garden at the edge of nowhere. He fed me food that tasted like sugared wine. He recounted stories about a goddess and tears and a thousand-year-old promise. He was eloquent and vivid and disturbingly interested in me in a way that made my skin want to crawl.
"You have light in your pulse," he told me one evening. "Not like the dead, not whole like the living. Like a story missing half a sentence."
"That's not reassuring," I said.
"It is a map," he replied. "And I like maps."
He pressed a coin into my hand and watched how my fingers closed around it as if he were pressing a fastener onto a hinge. I should have left. Instead I stayed and listened to the warmth in his voice. That night I dreamed again and the purple sky moved like a hand, and a certain moon-scarred man arrived and the world thinned into dream thread.
"Snow," the moon-scarred man said, and the word landed in me like a bell.
"You know him?" Ansel asked, casually.
I turned to look for Sterling's face then and found him as if he'd always been there: not in the garden, but at the edge where the sky met all things. He did not shout. He did not demand. He only watched, and in that watching there was a storm he had smothered.
"Don't be foolish," he said when he stepped into the garden and the violet air held still. His hand rested on my shoulder with permission rather than ownership. "Go home."
"Home?" Ansel laughed, the sound thin. "She has a home where she eats flame-colored bread and sleeps in straw."
Sterling's mouth tilted. "I will take care of her," he said. "Is that a crime?"
Ansel's gaze flicked to me. "She feels like something I used to have," he said, softly dangerous. "I will return."
"Not while I stand," Sterling said. There was nothing theatrical in the claim. It was a plain statement of boundary.
Ansel smiled politely and left. "Until our next pleasant disagreement," he said.
After that night, my dreams grew teeth. I saw scraps of memory I could not pin down: a cliff that bled starlight, a woman named Snow clinging to a man like a child holding onto a coat, a promise that sounded like a promise but might have been only a lighter. Sterling's face in those dreams was closer—so close I could have reached out and touched his cheek. Yet when I woke, the pieces scattered.
I left Ansel and his purple sky and returned to Sterling's gold halls because my body had a map and the map returned me to where the heart wanted a watch.
Weeks later, or maybe months—the underworld kept no promise of order—I received a message from Sterling to go with him. He had found a gate to the realms beyond the ones marked on the map. He said it was small, dangerous, and that he'd need a witness.
"Will you come?" he asked with that bluntness that makes polite worlds twitch.
"Yes," I said, for the first time answering a question with less fear than curiosity.
We crossed a door lighter than breath and heavier than iron. The other side was a wide plain of purple dusk and quiet grief—an empty field called the Forgetting Plain by those who feared it, and the Forgetting Plain was the place where lost things gathered like tumbleweed.
"You must stay close," Sterling cautioned. "They take what you bring into your head and make it easy to lose."
We walked and found things that looked like memories but smelled like someone else's life. We passed entire families of shadows who would reach out and mimic the contortions of my childhood laugh. I caught myself smiling at a shadow that sang my mother's lullaby and the shadow smiled back until I remembered that the tune had come from the oven next door, not my mother.
A wind rose and something tugged at my mind and a voice inside me said, "Snow," and I almost gave myself away.
"Don't call her by names she can't own," Sterling said tightly. "Not here."
We went on until the ground opened like a mouth and swallowed a fragment of something bright. Sterling reached out. He knelt as if the world's weight could be picked up and put back.
"Hold my hand," he told me.
He squeezed hard and the world pulled. We both stepped through.
We landed in a place that smelled of iron and spice and a faint sweetness that was not quite food. Color rushed my senses. This was the land of the yokai—the realm of beasts that walked like people and people who remembered teeth. We were in a market where people hawked memories with the same fling of a hand as any fruit.
"Here," said a voice, small and bell-bright. A woman stepped out from a stall, small and quick, and introduced herself with a ribbon and a grin. "Hello, I'm Jenny Carson."
"Jenny?" I repeated, surprised. She was the rabbit-girl I'd met a few nights earlier, now less rabbit and more human and already dear. "You remember me?"
"Of course!" Jenny hugged me as if she'd waited all her life for this. She led us through winding streets where creatures bartered for promises and gemstones and compassion. "The king will see you."
She brought us to a palace not like Sterling's at all. It was a place of white fur and silver, and in the great hall lay a creature curled in a heap that was at once a lion and at once a child. When the creature rose it was no longer a pet but a boy with hair like dawn.
"Dirk Legrand," Sterling said briefly. "The yokai king."
Dirk was young and feral and astonishingly simple in his speech. He greeted me like a guest and like an accusation.
"You're the one who's lost?" he asked.
"I am," I said. The simple truth felt right.
He seemed not to care for long words. "Do three good works," he said. "Come back when they're done. If you cannot, then go. If you can, we'll talk."
I should have refused. I had followed kings largely because I had nowhere else to be. But Dirk's face was open and honest in a way rare in kings, and the list he gave me was the kind of tasks a market gossip could solve if you had two friends.
"1. Make peace between the leopard and the vixen."
"2. Help the cat who cannot pay her debt."
"3. Bring back the frog's laughter."
"That's it," he said. "Three small things. If you do them, I'll look."
We went to work.
I learned the underbelly of a world when I was forced to be gentle. The leopard and vixen had a feud that would have made better theater than anything I had eaten alive for; patience and a rabbit's quick gossip solved it. The cat's debts were not about money so much as pride; I used the gold from my book and a lie that said more of love than truth and the woman cried and accepted a new start. The frog's laughter had been stolen by time and by pain; I made a silly show, the kind that would have embarrassed me in life, and the frog laughed so hard that pond frogs came in flocks to listen.
Three works finished, I returned to the great hall. Dirk asked me one small thing.
"What do you like?" he said, simple as he was.
"I like food," I said. "I like warm bread and money and rooms that smell like linen."
"All right," he grinned. "Stay. We have spare rooms."
We were not there a week before trouble found me again—the purple-sky man who called me "Snow" arrived and found Dirk's welcome awkward. Ansel's presence made the air taste different. Sterling's jaw tightened as if the sound of Ansel's voice scratched him.
"She is not your plaything," Sterling said under his breath.
"I never thought she was," Ansel replied softly. "But I do think she remembers you in ways you won't allow."
Sterling's fingers clenched. "You call what you did memory theft," he spat.
"It was a gift," Ansel said. "You stole a comfort you could not own."
The fight that broke after that was not loud. It was a folding of wills. Dirk sputtered like a child offended by grown men squabbling over a cookie. In the end, Ansel left with a promise: he would return when the moon remembered to, and Sterling's eyes told me that he believed the promise more than he wanted to admit.
I completed my tasks in yokai land and something shifted. Dirk didn't ask me for much. One night he handed me a small white thing wrapped in silk.
"It is part of what you lost," he said. "I found it in a dream last month. Keep it close."
I did. It fit in my palm like a pebble. It hummed like a heart in that dead place.
Back in the underworld, I slept like people do when they have something heavy laid on their chest to keep nightmares at bay.
The next weeks blurred into a rhythm of practice and small kindnesses. Sterling kept bringing me food. Denver left notes in my room advising caution. Foster grumbled but offered hand when I needed a heavy thing moved.
"You have friends," he said once, when I helped him lift a chest of ledgers. "Not bad for someone who arrived in smoke."
"Why do you care?" I asked.
He paused, his big hands steady. "Because you look like someone who still has sorrow to fix," he said simply. "People like you annoy us when they leave everything unsaid."
One afternoon, when a fire had been put out and the ledger was quiet, Sterling found me in the courtyard learning a new hand movement. It made a line of light swim like a ribbon across the air.
"Show me," he said.
I did. The light made a small circle that fizzed like a bright insect. He watched my hands, the way muscles remembered. Up close, his face was not as stern as the halls; his mouth softened.
"You move like a person who learned because she wanted to," he murmured.
"I learned so I would not be a burden," I said.
He looked at me as if I had missed the obvious answer. "You are already not a burden. Why do you shrink at that word?"
"I don't want to be forgotten," I admitted.
He came closer, close enough that I could count the tiny dark fleck under his eye that looked almost like a star. "Then don't be."
"I can't remember," I said. "Not everything."
He took my hand, not in the watchful way of a lord inspecting property, but in a gentler, accidental way—like someone who had lost his neighbor and finally found him in a market and did not want to let go.
"Then we'll find what you lost," he said. "Together."
He meant it. It was the plainest thing he ever promised.
We went to the realms he'd once told me not to tread. We went to places where fathers left their bones and lovers left bargains. We went to a place called the Forgetting Pool and to a place called the Hollow City and to a small island where the wind whispered names like coins. At every place I pressed a small white thing near my heart—Dirk's gift, small and warm—and the world kept some of itself rather than letting it scatter.
And slowly, like threads knitting into a sleeve, a memory came back.
I dreamt of a man holding me by a cliff, the wind hungry and wild. We were young and older at the same time. "If you fall," he said, "I will hold you. If the cliff breaks, I will break with you."
"Who are you?" I asked.
He smiled with a gentle cruelty. "You will call me Sterling," he said. "And you will call me many things, but never go far."
When I woke, my fingers were stained with ash and the sunlight-less day felt like an answer.
"Isla," Sterling said softly. "Is it coming?"
I nodded. "A face. A cliff. You and me. A promise."
He exhaled. "I was afraid to hope."
"You have been the one who gave me things," I said. "Not just bread. Not just a bed. You gave me taste, and you gave me maps. Why?"
He didn't answer with words. He held out his hand. I placed my palm against his, and for a suspended moment the world eased.
"I wanted you near," he said finally. "I wanted someone who would call me by my name when the ledger was quiet. I wanted a witness to my boredom."
I laughed, a small, surprised sound. "Your ego will cost you everything."
"Then let it cost me," he said simply.
The memory tide picked up. I remembered being stones and then being meat and then being a woman with a silly fear of being poor. I remembered things I had never been told and I remembered a promise that tasted like honey and iron at the same time.
There came the day we found the last piece.
We traveled to the edge of the worlds—the thin place between myth and rumor. Ansel met us at the gate. He was not alone. Behind him came shadows that felt like history, and his eyes were the slimmest knives.
"You cannot take her," he said to Sterling. "You never could. She never was yours to keep."
"She is not an object," Sterling answered. "Don't pretend you think otherwise."
"I think she is the one who was taken from me," Ansel said. "You took her from stories and bound her."
"Testify, Isla," Sterling said.
I stood between two suns. Both men looked older than the ten years they'd admit. Both had wronged me in ways I couldn't label. Both wanted me.
"Do you remember?" Ansel asked, gentle enough to be a trap.
I closed my eyes and felt the white pebble Dirk had given me warm against my palm. The memory unwrapped itself like a ribbon finally loosened. I saw white stones. I saw rain. I saw two tears from a goddess fall on cold ground and then two shapes formed, one dark and proud and one quick and bright. We became two beings given breath. The goddess sang a small tune I felt in my bones. I heard someone shout my name across cliffs. I saw a promise—Sterling’s promise—and a moment when we swore to protect each other.
"It was we," I said. "We were born together. We were called to guard something small and terrible. We promised to stand by one another and to remember. He saved me and I saved him in a hundred small ways. I don't know the full before, but I know the part that matters."
Ansel's face went very still.
"You lied to me," he said at last. "You are not what I thought."
"I am not for selling," I answered sharply. "I am not a prize."
He looked like someone who'd swallowed a bitter pill. "You sold me a map, then." He smiled with the unhappy compromise of a man who had accepted a thing he did not like yet could not deny. "Very well."
Sterling took my hand. "Isla—"
I stopped him with a look. Both men looked at me as if I were a map that could be folded any way they pleased. They had forgotten that I was the one who had to live with the folds.
"I'm not yours to buy," I said plainly. "I choose who I trust."
Ansel stung. "And what of me?"
"You gave me warmth," I admitted. "You taught me to be bold in words and to accept flattery. You awakened a part of me that liked purple skies."
He bowed, slow, like someone who had not seen defeat before. "Then be happy," he said. "With whoever."
He turned and left, like smoke with good perfume.
Sterling looked as if he'd been punched and then given wine. "I apologize for him," he muttered.
"I forgive him," I said. "But I forgive you too, Sterling."
He nearly laughed, a sound that sounded like someone who had found a ship. "That is not how apologies are supposed to be accepted," he protested.
"Then show me," I said. "Don't promise like a lord and forget like a ledger. Stay."
He took a breath that sounded like a ship dropping anchor, and he leaned close enough that I smelled incense and old books.
"I will stay," he said.
"And when I get my memory back?" I asked.
"Then tell me," he murmured. "I will listen."
Years in the underworld mean different things. To people like Sterling they are numbers and duties. To me they have become afternoons of buttered bread and nights of whispered stories. Months passed with my hands learning to move different light, with my throat learning to sing old lullabies.
One night, when the underworld's lamps were dimmed, I stood in the doorway of Sterling's private garden. He came out and closed the door as if locking a small sun.
"You stole from me," I teased, because teasing could be a home in survival.
He smiled, slow and unafraid. "I took from you only what you would let me."
"Then give me the rest."
He stepped close, and this time the world steadied. "Isla," he breathed, and my name in his mouth felt like the sun finding the shore.
"I am not the same Isla as before," I said.
"Good." His fingers found mine and he guided them to the place where he kept the ledger of names. "Then tell me what to write."
I pressed my forehead to his and felt a warmth like a bowl of broth. My memories had stitched. The goddess, the cliff, the promise—pieces now lay in order.
"Write that I am yours in name and not in chains," I whispered.
He kissed the place between my brows—gentle, quick, a vow.
"I will give you a house and a bed," he said with ridiculous dryness, "and worse, I will give you my time."
"That might be the worst," I replied.
"It will be the best," he corrected, like a man who had tried both.
We married in secret on a day that had no sun and a sky like folded paper. Antonia officiated, not with flourished ceremony but with a simple handful of earth and a paper note burned so it arced like a promise into the ledger. Denver and Foster stood like witnesses who had long ago learned to keep their mouths shut.
"What will the realms say?" Foster whispered as he watched us sign an old book with names that were not yet immortalized.
"They will gossip for a year," Denver said. "Then they'll move on to the next scandal. It is how worlds pass time."
We did not tell Ansel immediately. He came across as if summoned by a calendar. He saw us later and nodded once, like a man who had lost and learned a better way to hold things.
In time, the rest of my memories settled like pages in a book. I remembered the goddess' tears and the promise we had made in some ancient hour. I remembered Sterling as someone both cruel and kind, a being who had learned containment in solitude. He revealed pieces of his life too, softer memories he never shared aloud—nights he had sat on the roof of the world, reading ledgers to feel less alone.
"Do you regret it?" I asked him once, hand in his.
He looked at the little smear of ink on my finger, at the small mark that proved we had written our names. "I regret nothing that leaves you here," he said plainly. "I regret only the nights I went without company."
"And I will be company," I promised.
We lived like that: tending to the ledger so the dead would have their dues, learning to eat food that tasted like home, sharing a bed that had once been heavy as a hill and light as hope when warmed. Sterling learned to smile without the same edge. He sometimes teased me like a brother and sometimes like a man who fell down stairs on purpose to see if someone would catch him.
There were moments of jealousy—Ansel returned sometimes with a cloak heavy with stars and a look in his eyes—moments when the past remembered its teeth. We held each other through those too. I learned names of gods and pacts. I learned that love in an afterlife had to be practical, that promises were not only romance but also ledgers to be balanced.
One day I found something on my pillow: a scrap of the same paper I had once burned, folded into a small swan. Sterling had written only two words inside.
"Stay," it said.
I kept it in a drawer and sometimes slept with the drawer open.
Time in the underworld is an odd, slow thing. It made me patient. It taught Sterling to be clumsy with softness. Once, when I woke with a memory nagging at the edges, he brewed tea and put both hands over my cupped fingers until heat made sense again.
"You are stubborn," he said, and his eyes crinkled.
"So are you," I said.
He raised an eyebrow. "I am not."
"Yes, you are. You kept a ledger of every time I smiled. You checked it last week."
He slapped my knee. "I keep order."
"And you keep me," I said.
Perhaps the bitterest lesson came the day the ledger faltered. Some old quarrel in the heavens bled down. Sterling's power thinned like a reed. He sank into sleep that hours could not touch. Fear like a cold stone dropped in my chest.
"I can't lose you," I whispered at his sleeping face.
You learn many things in the underworld by listening. Antonia said a name—an old bargain Sterling had made with a god of form and debt. To repay it, he had to give away years of his force. He had done it once before for something I had not understood. Now I understood.
I refused to take the easy path. I took his hand and went to the place where bargains are kept—bound in salt and scroll and time. I spoke the truth and offered a coin of my own memory in return for a shard of his life. The spirits considered, then nodded. For one price something changed: Sterling's strength returned a little and my memory lost a single tiny thing I had held to myself for years—a private joke with no great cost.
When he opened his eyes, he smiled at me with snow in his hair. "You are monstrous," he said, and then kissed me like a man who had forgotten how.
"I am only stubborn," I replied.
We had both wanted to be remembered. We created ways to remember each other: a bowl that always had food when we needed it, a ledger entry that always had our names written side by side, a book of notes where I wrote down small things he had said. Sterling would sometimes read them out loud, like a child reading a favorite tale.
Years later, when the three realms came to a fragile peace, when Ansel returned and bowed and found he could smile without wanting the world to break, we celebrated not with great trumpets but with a meal. It was honest and simple: bread, soup, a plate shared. We sat around a table and passed things lightly and told stories that did not cost the living.
Antonia poured the tea. Denver laughed like someone who had not found reason to before. Foster grumbled about the comfort of peace and then added that he liked it. Dirk came with a token of his kingdom—a little white stone. Jenny danced in the courtyard like she always had, eyes alive.
Ansel sat across from me. He looked settled, as if he'd been allowed a place in a house he'd forgotten he had. Sterling took my hand across the table and squeezed.
"Will you keep staying?" I asked him, small and direct.
Sterling looked at me in a way that sent the ledger pages fluttering all at once. "I will stay," he said. "And I will make sure that every ledger knows you are here."
We burned no more for our comfort. We burned for stories. We lit a single page one night, folded small and careful, and let it go into the air. The flame went up and wrote our names in smoke across the rafters. People came, looked, and felt something settle that was not just fear.
On my last waking before something like rest, I stood on the low balcony of Sterling's hall and watched the underworld breathe.
"Sterling?" I said.
He came to me, all deliberate hands and patient eyes.
"Do you ever regret," I asked softly, "anything?"
He thought for a long time. "I regret the nights I let loneliness sit like a guest," he said at last. "I regret that I did not know how to ask for help sooner. But I do not regret finding you."
I let the words in. I found my hand in his. It felt like home.
"Then promise me," I said.
He kissed my palm and placed it over my heart. "I promise," he said.
We did not end with dragons or public proclamations. We ended with the sound of the ledger closing for the night and the taste of the bread Sterling made when he groaned about the nonsense of kneading by hand.
The last thing I remember to write is small and true: I burned my paper, and the smoke became a throne. I died afraid of being poor, and I found a house where I could be rich in ways the dead are not taught to count.
"Isla," Sterling said that night by the bedside, his voice low and sure, "stay."
And I did.
The End
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