Chapter 38.5: Bye-Bye, Don’t Cry Too Hard

They carried me to a room and laid me on a bed like I was suddenly the fragile thing everyone pretended not to notice until it mattered. Soft light; too bright. Voices drifted through the door—accusations, prayers, polite outrage. “What happened?” “Treat the Queen with respect!” All the usual noise I didn’t want to hear. I kept my eyes closed. The world tilted. Nausea rolled through me in slow, cruel waves.

“Your Majesty—is she conscious?” an elf asked, shading my face with his arm so the light wouldn’t knife into my eyes.

“Yeah,” I croaked. “Serine, Cassian, Arkanthos, Aelith, Splinterbutt. If anyone else is in this room in under a minute, I will split the world in two.” My words were a threat that tasted real even to me.

The elf didn’t argue. He bolted. In under thirty beats the names I’d called were there, breathing around the bed.

Serine was first—hands scrabbling at my sleeves, tears streaking down her cheeks. “Rissa, what did you do?” she demanded, voice small and cracking.

I could feel Cassian before I saw him: the tight set of his shoulders, the way his jaw worked like a rope. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He held Arkanthos in one arm like a talisman, the skull tucked close. Splinterbutt stood like a monument in the doorway: unmoving, embers burning behind his sockets. Aelith—her face had gone pale as pressed flowers—was trembling, as if the forest itself had hollowed her out.

“I… pushed reality,” I said, each word scraping. The breath came short. “I stretched the seams and prodded at the cracks. It was necessary. But I think I may have nicked something important.” My voice was hardly mine anymore—thin, ragged, oddly proud. “There isn’t much time left, I’m afraid. Listen to me.”

Aelith’s hand went to her mouth, then she stepped closer, as if proximity could help her swallow the idea. “I feel it,” she whispered. “My Queen… your presence… it fades.” Her voice broke and she sobbed like a child.

I let out a humorless little laugh. “Of course you do. Elves are exquisitely tuned to things breaking.” I raised my hand toward her—an absurd, indulgent gesture. “You always were my porcelain doll, weren’t you? Handle with too much care.”

She crossed to me without hesitation, knelt between the bed and the floor, and took my hand as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Her fingers were small and cold. Aelith pressed my palm to her cheek and trembled against my skin. That display—earnest, terrible—almost undid me.

“Rissa, my Queen,” she sobbed, bowing her forehead to my hand. “I will serve you until the last of my breath leaves me.”

“Save the vows for the funeral,” I muttered, though my lips trembled. “Do what you do best—leave me with that ridiculous, ridiculous smile of yours. Make it bright enough to blind me for a moment.”

Aelith understood. She rose, leaned down, and kissed me on the mouth—soft, reverent—then on the forehead. The kiss was fragile, like moonlight on the surface of water. She made a last, perfect little curtsy, and left without looking back.

When the door shut, it sounded like a finality. The small sound of her footsteps faded into the hall, and the room felt emptier for it.

Serine pressed her face into my shoulder and cried in a way that was honest and ugly and necessary. “Don’t,” she whispered into me. “Don’t go where I can’t follow.”

“Shut up and stop using that voice,” I snapped, softer than I intended. Then I pulled her into a half-hug because she needed it and because I needed the weight of her against me. She smelled like smoke and ink and the faint sweetness of the manuscripts she loved—home, in other words.

Cassian knelt by the bed then, awkward and huge and entirely full of words he wouldn’t say. He reached for my hand and took it like a thing he’d been saving for days. His fingers were calloused; his grip steadied me. He finally looked up. His eyes—stormy, unreadable—broke at the edge and something raw passed through them. “If you go,” he said, voice low enough that only I could hear, “I will find a way to bring you back.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cassian,” I teased, pushing a grin into place. “It’s not me you should be worrying about — I told you that the last time in this stupid palace. It’s Serine you must keep safe. So if I come back as some moaning, rattle-bag of a revenant and she isn’t looked after, I swear to whatever gods are left, the last thing you’ll worry about will be dying, you long-legged fool.” I thrust my arm out and presented my fist for him to bump; he did it without hesitation.

I wrapped my other arm around Serine and pulled her close. “Saying goodbye to you would be the worst thing imaginable,” I said, voice gone thin at the edges despite everything. “So treat this like one of my usual drunken stunts. Be mad at me tomorrow; scream; throw a book. Do something dramatic so I can go in peace, yeah?”

She made no answer—just clung to me and sobbed into my shoulder like the world was breaking into splinters beneath her. Her fingers dug into my tunic and I felt every small tremor, every ragged breath.

“Cassian,” I said, forcing a laugh that wanted to be sharper than it felt, “take her away. If she sees me on a bed with the dramatic death vibe, she’ll never stop. I’m trying to save you all, not start a funeral industry.” I coughed.

Cassian moved without argument. He knelt, awkward and careful, and lifted Serine as if she might shatter into parchment at any wrong angle. She slapped at him, still sobbing, a small hand leaving a bright, helpless print across his cheek. “Nooooo!” she wailed, but her resistance was all tears and half-hearted grabs; he carried her gently, stubborn as a mountain, toward the door. At the foot of my bed, he crouched long enough to set Arkanthos down; the skull clicked softly, watching with its ridiculous, knowing grin.

“Come on, you,” Cassian muttered, tugging Serine along while she smacked and whimpered and then, for a heartbeat, slumped into him as if she had no gas left for fighting as they left the room.

“Splinterbutt,” I said, forcing my voice to be softer than the thunder in my chest. “You’ll serve me, won’t you?”

“Yes, Mistress,” he answered without hesitation, the sound of certainty itself. He bowed, the bones of his neck clicking like distant thunder.

“Elyndor—if he so much as breathes wrong toward Aelith, Serine, or any of my puppies, you don’t waste words. You take his head off that cowardly half-elf body and you cast his shadow after him to the ends of his days. Understood?”

His empty sockets flared with a cold, blue light. “Yes, my lady,” he said again, reverence and steel braided together.

When the door closed, the room felt both smaller and somehow more defended.

I let out a breath that tasted faintly of iron. “Good,” I muttered to the empty air, more to myself than anyone. “Arkanthos, keep them safe. Please. Try not to let my melodrama be the last thing anyone remembers.”

Silence answered me. Then Arkanthos’s skull clicked softly somewhere at my feet, as if accepting the request in his own eccentric way. I closed my eyes and tried to hold the image of all their faces, like a charm against whatever came next.