Spring Thaw (part 2: Cry!)

Tonight, something pulled him toward it. A restlessness. A feeling like static electricity before a storm.

The scroll sat where he'd left it, innocuous in its silence. Just a piece of ancient parchment bound with silver cords, sealed with wax pressed into the royal insignia of Alaric. Nothing special. Nothing dangerous.

Except it was.

Owen picked it up carefully, feeling its weight in his hands. The memory of the King's fading image flashed through his mind—the dignified voice speaking of a world already gone, a father saying goodbye to a daughter he knew he'd never see again.

His fingers brushed across the surface, tracing the edge of a second seal—one they hadn't opened in the lab. He hadn't even noticed it then, too caught up in the shock of the King's message. But now, in the quiet of his room, it seemed impossible to miss: a smaller seal, marked with a different insignia. More delicate. More personal.

As his finger passed over it, something happened. A soft click, like a key turning in a lock. No light spilled forth this time, no projection formed in the air. Just a voice—clear and warm, filling the room like sunlight.

"If you are hearing this... then my daughter is still alive. Thank you."

Owen froze, his breath catching in his throat. The voice was unmistakably female. Older. Kind. With the same underlying strength he recognized in Lilith's tone, but softened by something that could only be described as grace.

The Queen of Alaric. Lilith's mother.

"I know my husband has already told you what happened," the voice continued gently. "And I know... that hearing it may have broken her heart. Lilith has always carried too much. The weight of expectations. The burden of duty. The responsibility she felt toward our world and its people."

Owen sat perfectly still, afraid that any movement might disrupt the fragile magic that allowed this voice to travel across dimensions, across the death of a world, to reach them here.

"She believed so fiercely in the prophecy. In her ability to save us all." There was a smile in the voice now, bittersweet and proud. "That was always her way—to face the impossible and refuse to accept defeat. To see hope where others saw only endings."

A soft creak from the hallway pulled Owen's attention from the voice. He looked up to find Lilith standing in his doorway, eyes wide and unblinking, her white hair loose around her shoulders. She looked thinner than he remembered, paler, with dark shadows beneath her eyes speaking of sleepless nights. Her clothes—the same she'd been wearing that day in the lab—hung loosely on her frame.

"Mom?" The word escaped her lips as barely more than a breath, fragile and disbelieving.

The voice continued, oblivious to its new audience. "Lilith always believed in things we could not see. She always chased what others feared to imagine. I could not follow her. But I always believed in the path she walked."

Lilith took a step into the room, then another, drawn forward as if by an invisible thread. Her eyes never left the scroll in Owen's hands, her expression a complex mixture of pain and longing so intense it made his chest ache to witness it.

"I am sorry we could not stay," the voice whispered, growing softer now. "But I am grateful you left. That I had the chance to say goodbye, even if you didn't know it then."

Lilith's lips parted, but no sound emerged. She looked like she was drowning in air, struggling to breathe against the tide of emotion threatening to pull her under.

"Live, daughter," the Queen's voice urged, gentle but firm. "Please, live. Not for our sake. For yours. You were always so much more than just our princess, our heir. You were our light. Our hope. Our Lilith."

The voice paused, and when it continued, it was so soft that Owen had to strain to hear it. "And Lilith... if you're listening... we loved you. We still do. Always."

Then it faded, leaving only silence in its wake.

Lilith stood frozen in the center of the room, her eyes fixed on the now-silent scroll. For a moment, she seemed suspended between breaths, between heartbeats—caught in that terrible space where grief meets memory.

Then, as if waking from a trance, she turned mechanically toward the door, moving like someone underwater. Slow. Disconnected. Already retreating back into the silence she'd wrapped around herself like armor.

"Wait," Owen said, the word escaping before he could think better of it. He set the scroll aside and stood, crossing the room in three quick strides to catch her wrist before she could disappear again. Not gripping, not restraining—just a gentle pressure, a reminder of contact, of connection.

She didn't pull away, but she didn't look at him either. Her gaze remained fixed on some middle distance, seeing something beyond the walls of the apartment, beyond this world entirely.

"You're not alone anymore," Owen said quietly, the words falling into the space between them like stones into still water. "You don't have to fight this. Not with me here."

Finally, she looked at him—really looked—her crimson eyes focusing on his face as if seeing him for the first time in days. There was something haunted in that gaze, something lost.

"Stop holding it all in," he continued, his voice dropping lower, not with force but with a certainty he hadn't known he possessed. "Cry. Scream. Break if you have to. But don't... don't just disappear."

Even with puffy eyes and wrinkled clothes, she looked just like the first day he saw her beneath that streetlight. Beautiful. Soft. Strong. Fractured. The princess from another world who had crashed into his carefully ordered life and turned everything upside down. The girl who had threatened to kill him and then made him breakfast. The stranger who had become... essential.

"You don't have to carry all of it alone," he said, squeezing her wrist gently. "Not anymore."

She shook her head, a small, desperate movement, like she was trying to dislodge his words before they could take root. Her lips pressed together so tightly they went white at the edges, jaw clenched as if holding back a scream.

Owen did the only thing that felt right in that moment. He stepped forward and pulled her into his arms.

For one terrible second, she remained rigid against him, unyielding as marble. Then, slowly—so slowly he might have imagined it—she softened. Her arms, limp at her sides, gradually lifted to clutch at the back of his shirt. Her head dropped to his shoulder. And the dam broke.

The sound that escaped her wasn't a sob—it was too raw, too primal for that. A keening that seemed to come from someplace deeper than her lungs, a sound of loss so profound it had no proper name. Her body shook with the force of it, tremors running through her like aftershocks from an earthquake.

"They didn't send me to save them," she gasped between ragged breaths, words muffled against his shoulder. "It was never about saving them... it was about saving me."

Her knees gave out then, and Owen went down with her, cradling her against his chest as they sank to the floor together. He held her as she cried—ugly, honest tears that soaked through his shirt and left it clinging to his skin. He didn't speak. There were no words for this kind of grief. No platitudes that could touch the edges of such loss.

So he just held her. Let her break. Let her feel the full weight of a world that had sent her away to live while it died. He stroked her hair, ran his hand up and down her back in slow, steady motions, and simply... waited. Present. Solid. Real.

Time slipped by unmeasured. The light outside the window faded from gold to silver to the deep blue of early night. And still they sat there, tangled together on the floor, her sobs gradually quieting to hiccups, then to trembling breaths, then to an exhausted stillness.

At some point, her body grew heavy against him, her breathing evening out into the rhythm of sleep. Owen shifted carefully, gathering her closer. In sleep, the regal princess of Alaric looked impossibly young, her face relaxed in a way it never was while awake. Vulnerable in a way she would never allow herself to be conscious.

With a gentleness that surprised even himself, Owen lifted her in his arms and carried her to his bed. She stirred slightly as he set her down, a small frown creasing her forehead, fingers reflexively clutching at his sleeve as if afraid he might leave.

"Shh," he murmured, pulling the blanket over her. "I'm here."

He settled beside the bed, back against the wall, watching as her breathing deepened again. The scroll still lay where he'd left it on his desk, silent now, its hidden messages delivered, its purpose fulfilled. A relic of a world that only existed now in memory. In her memory.

Outside, the night air hung thick with the last traces of winter moisture, spring not quite managing to clear away the heaviness that had built up during the long rainy season. Like the sky had forgotten how to be light again after months of carrying storms.

Owen's thoughts drifted to his conversation with Rei from days earlier. Words that had stung because they carried grains of truth he wasn't ready to face.

"Loving someone from another world isn't heroic," Rei had said, his voice blunt. "It's reckless. Dangerous. It's like throwing your heart into a storm and hoping it lands on solid ground."

Owen looked at Lilith, peaceful in sleep despite everything, her white hair spread across his pillow like moonlight, one hand still loosely clutching the edge of his sleeve. The feeling in his chest wasn't heroism or pity or obligation. It was simpler than that. More fundamental. More terrifying.

"Then let me be the one reckless," he whispered to the quiet room.

Outside, a crow landed on the branch near his window—the same one that had appeared every day at noon since the scroll first opened. It cocked its head, regarding him with one shining eye, then settled its wings as if preparing to stay a while.

Owen leaned his head back against the wall, allowing his eyes to close. Just for a moment. Just to rest.

In the morning, there would be decisions to make. Questions to answer. A future to face—one neither of them had expected or prepared for. But for now, in this quiet space between one day and the next, there was just this: a girl from a lost world, finally allowing herself to grieve, and a boy who had never wanted complications finding himself unwilling to let go.

And somewhere, beyond dimensions, beyond death, perhaps the King and Queen of Alaric could see their daughter—still breathing, still fighting, still living. Not alone. Not anymore.

Perhaps that was enough.