Part III: The Lantern and the Whisper

They say curses never break. Only change shape.

For years—centuries maybe, or mere seasons; time bends differently for the headless—we rode.

She with her sorrow,
I with my flame.

At first, I thought our ride would never end. That we were bound to this loop of quiet mercy, delivering release to the forgotten and the damned.

But it wasn’t mercy anymore.

It was routine.

It was weight.

Each soul we took, each body we passed over, chipped at something deep inside us. We weren’t cleansing grief anymore. We were collecting it. Wearing it like armor.

She stopped speaking.

Her lantern—her head—grew dimmer in her arms. Sometimes she wouldn’t look at me at all. Just stared into the void ahead like it would swallow her back where she came from.

And I started to wonder: What if the curse wasn’t death?

What if it was endlessness?

They say the Dullahan cannot feel. That she is wrath in velvet, judgment on horseback.
But I saw the truth.

Éirelyn was unraveling.

The heads no longer whispered to her like they used to. She stared at them too long, eyes hollow with something dangerously close to regret. Some nights she didn't ride. We stayed beneath dead trees or among old ruins, her silence stretching like a shadow across the grass.

And when she looked at me, it wasn’t as a companion.
It was as a question.

Her fingers trembled when they touched my face. My face—no longer mine, really. 
A relic. A memory.

“I wasn’t supposed to love you,” she said one night, as mist clung to her cloak like sorrow.

I hovered near, unable to answer.

“There are rules, old and blood-bound,” she continued. “We ride alone. We collect. We do not feel.”
Her lantern flickered, a tired heart behind bone ribs.

But she had broken the rules. We both had.