Now Begin Again

“You should stay the night.”

Eshteross looks over them all with a warmly paternal expression and thanks Evelyn in a low voice when she brings him a cup of strong, whisky-spiked tea. “Rooms can be prepared. I would not send you out into a harsh night such as this.”

As though underscoring his point, a bright stroke of lightning fills the room with a flicker that overpowers the warm glow of the fire, and thunder crashes down around the manse. It’s probably the worst they’ve seen since arriving in Jrusar, but Orym would rather go back to the familiarity of the rooms they’ve let in a comfortable section of the Core Spire.

“You’re very kind,” he says, exchanging a look with Dorian, who has been quietly signaling his desire to leave since they finished dinner.

“‘s just a fucking storm,” Ashton mumbles, but doesn’t lift their feet from the plush stool they’re resting on, and their eyes are half-closed with weariness. They took hard hits today. There’s still a little gleam of red-gold where a hard blow crackled along their skin, which will likely fade into spiderwebs of golden scars as they heal.

“Today was much worse than a little rain,” Fearne agrees with him, stroking the backs of her fingers along Mister’s fur. “Although I like the idea of staying a little longer.”

“Dorian could play a little song,” Imogen suggests from her couch, feet curled underneath her and her head resting on Laudna’s shoulder. “Something nice and jaunty. Take our minds off the storm.”

Eshteross sips his tea and says, “What do you think of Lady of the Squall, bard?”

The only one looking over at him, Orym alone catches the startled flash across Dorian’s face: the soft tremble of his fingers, a panicked twitch at the corner of his mouth, muted shadow crossing his eyes. Then it’s gone, replaced with Dorian’s ever-charming, apologetic smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t know that one, my lord.”

“I see. Very well, then.” But there’s a sharp glint in his eyes when he turns back to the fire, even as he allows the subject to pass.

“I think I’ll go back,” Orym says, reaching for his sword scabbard and looking over to Dorian.

Imogen sits up a little, her eyes widening with the same worry she’s borne since the night she and Laudna came breaking down his door in the middle of the night. “Oh, Orym, don’t go alone. Laudna and I–”

“I’ll go with him.” Dorian’s gallant smile makes Orym roll his eyes when only Dorian can see. “Seeing how we shouldn’t be going out alone in a strange city.”

“That would make me feel much better,” she answers, settling back into the couch. She, too, has had a long day. Orym has already come to recognize the weariness Imogen feels when she’s stretched herself too far, and he’s glad to see her stay.

“Mister and I will stay,” Fearne tells them in a low voice, her eyes flickering out toward the rain. “He doesn’t care much for the rain.”

“I’ll go,” Ashton grunts, pulling up on the arms of the chair with both hands and groaning miserably when their bones make a crackling sound that makes Orym’s teeth hurt. “Letters, can you stay here with the others?”

“That’s not my favorite idea,” Fresh Cut Grass tells them candidly. “But I’ll do it if you think that’s best.”

“I’d rather you were with them.”

Orym waits by the door with Ashton and Evelyn, who presses food and an umbrella into his hands and sees them off when Dorian finishes his round of farewells. He doesn’t linger long with Eshteross, although they exchange a few, quiet words, and Dorian looks displeased when he joins them.

It is a miserable night. The stones are slick with rainwater, which sloshes through Orym’s boots. The only thing that stops him from suggesting they give up and head back to the others, the relative comforts of Eshteross’ hearth, is that they’ve already made it halfway there, and the return will be just as miserable as pressing on.

Ashton has gone ahead of them, their skin gleaming like polished gems in the dim lamplight, when Orym falls in step beside Dorian. “What was it Eshteross wanted to talk to you about?”

“Eshteross?” Dorian has a consistent tell when he’s lying about something, or dodging a topic he isn’t comfortable with. Orym is usually comfortable allowing him to do that tonight, but something–

“Something he said bothered you,” he presses, dropping his voice a little lower, in case it’s something Dorian might talk about if they have a little more privacy. “Was it a rude song he asked you to play?”

“No, not–it wasn’t that.”

“If he was making some kind of thing about–”

“It’s not that, Orym,” Dorian interrupts, a hand on his shoulder like a gentle restraint. “There wasn’t anything rude in his request. It was a… a warning, I suppose.”

Unsatisfied and a little irritated by the rain, Orym shakes off his hand and quickens his steps. Talking about this reminds him of all the times Dorian dodged even politely vague questions about conversational details about himself. That would be as good a reason as any to close and lock the door on the giddy sort of joy Orym feels when he’s around Dorian. It’s the harbinger of something deeper, more intense. Something that Orym hasn’t decided if he wants again, not only with Dorian.

The freefall into love has never been something he especially enjoys, but at least the last time it happened, Orym hadn’t yet known how a heart breaks like bone: rarely cleanly and often shattered into fragments that never entirely come together again. Orym had never once considered how short as long as we live could really be when he tethered his whole life to someone else. Trying to do it again with someone holding back some part of themselves is beyond foolish, and the things Orym doesn’t know about Dorian could fill oceans.

“Hurry the fuck up, you two,” Ashton bellows from ahead, swiping water from their face as they step under the canopy outside their building, but they’re grinning back at Orym and Dorian.

He’s about to call back that the two of them are almost there when he hears Dorian's steps stutter just behind his own. Orym sees the moment Ashton’s face changes, uncharacteristic surprise written in the downward curl of their mouth, a wrinkle forming between their brows. Their mouth opens to say something, but what he hears is a soft noise, between a gasp and a curse, and Orym reaches for his sword as he’s turning around, feels his foot skidding along the slick stones as he does.

The rain bends at the wrong angle in the center of the street, no more than arm’s length from Dorian. Orym has barely enough time to recognize it before he’s pulled his sword free of its scabbard, pushed his foot hard into the ground to steady himself, and grabbed Dorian by his cloak, pulling him back and sliding into his place.

It’s only when he’s done so that he sees the split in the air, like shredded curtains hanging loosely in front of a window, and the shadowed figure beyond. The whole maneuver takes seconds, maybe.

It’s already too late.

The masked figure hisses something in Primordial, something that carries through the rain like a word of power, echoing and vibrating through the air itself. There’s an answering crackle of lightning across the sky, and it’s then Orym sees Dorian’s hand on his chest, the flash of betrayal in his eyes, the dark bloom spreading between his fingers.

Dorian collapses into Orym’s free arm, and he staggers to hold him up. Whatever magic he exerts to make himself lighter is gone, and Orym drops to one knee as he guides him to the stone. The clarity of mind he’s accustomed to in battle has evaporated. Orym had always noticed first how loud battle could be. Now the only thing he can hear is Dorian’s labored breathing; the only thing he can think is but he doesn’t need to breathe.

“Orym, I–” His own name sounds all wrong in the thick, syrupy voice Dorian is using, entirely different from his usual, light cadence. Dorian’s bloodied hand cradles his cheek, palm covering the entire lower quadrant of Orym’s face, fingers scraping along his hairline. Orym has always thought Dorian smelled like the first wind after a storm, earthy and alive, but all he can smell now is blood and the rain.

“Wait,” Orym hears himself say. “Please, wait.”

But he’s already gone, like a candle snuffed out in a window.

The rest of the world comes crashing back around him: his hair plastered against his head, Ashton’s scream of fury when they drop their hammer, the red-blue-purple-red flicker like strobe lightning across the streets.

He’s on his feet without realizing how, although he still has one arm around Dorian’s limp form. The first strike from the shadow figure grazes his shoulder, and Orym twists his arm around to parry the next. With a sharp movement, he jerks his sword down, pulling both weapons close enough to grab the dagger by the blade. It bites hard through the leather of his glove, but Orym never feels the answering sting of pain.

There has to be time for Dorian. There must be time. It’s not over. Orym won’t let it be.

The second blow comes down over his head like the weight of the universe collapsing over him, and Orym’s world shatters like bone.

Orym wakes with a headache splitting out like spiderwebs from the back of his skull and a dull sensation that he's forgotten something.

He doesn’t remember getting into a brawl the night before, although he remembers nursing a single tankard of mead while watching Fearne dancing in her fey manner while Dorian played his lute. It feels like the time someone caught him unaware during sparring practice, brought their shield down over his head and knocked him insensible. He remembers the shudder of his vision when his eyes watered from the force, feeling frustrated with himself in one moment and wanting his mother to hold him in the next.

It’s like that, only Orym is thinking about the night before at the tavern, the crash of thunder, and the wispy streams of Dorian’s blood washing away in torrential rain.

What?

Remembering, Orym shoves up from the bed, ripping aside blankets and grabbing for the sword he’s started keeping next to his pillow since the night they found Bell in an alley. It’s there, waiting for him, gleaming in the unfiltered morning sun. His room is silent, but he can hear snoring a few doors down and far-away shouting from the street below. Rather than wait to pull on his clothes, he seizes the sword, bangs open his door and finds Imogen walking past with a cup of tea and a startled expression.

It’s all so familiar, but all wrong. Or right.

Imogen’s face transforms from surprise to alarm, one hand ghosting toward her temple, as though she’s trying to hold off the sudden blast of thoughts. “Orym,” she says faintly, and Orym has never figured out if there’s any way he can think a little less loudly, if it’s even possible for him to exist without intruding on the peaceable existence Imogen deserves within her own head.

He’s been here before. This morning. It’s the normal way of things: Imogen and Dorian are the earliest risers among their little group, although she prefers to spend her mornings in the relative silence of her own room. Orym remembers that Dorian brings her tea, so she won’t have to go to the kitchen for it and risk seeing people.

“Did Dorian bring you that?” he asks, realizing he must look frightful: shirtless and barefoot, sword in hand and an unyielding sternness to his voice. Orym tries to take a breath, to slow his thundering pulse.

“Well, yes.” Imogen looks between the cup and his face. “It’s awful nice that he does it every morning, but–”

“Where is he?”

“Down the hall,” she answers, reaching one hand down for him, her fingertips brushing past the tip of his shoulder. “Orym, are you all right? Did you have a nightmare?”

“No,” he says immediately, except that he isn’t sure. He’s still sifting through the memories of the night before, deciding whether the set from the night in the tavern or the night in the rain are true. They feel equally real to him, and his head is still splitting. “Yes. I don’t know.”

Orym has become more accustomed to the prickling sensation along the back of his neck that is Imogen asking permission to reach into his thoughts with the softest brush of her consciousness against his. She’s trying not to alarm him more than he already is, but he’s confused, and he can’t like the idea of Imogen looking around what he isn’t sure he understands. Orym makes his mind blank, thinking deliberately about the shape and form of a stone wall.

Instantly, she withdraws, but keeps her hand on his shoulder.

“He’s fine, Orym,” is all she says, even and soft, but doesn’t stop him when he steps around her.

“Orym?”

Dorian always locks his room, but he’s already opening the door when Orym reaches it and examines him. His mouth is set in a curious frown, hair loosely cascading over the silver and blue silk dressing gown he bought only the other afternoon. There is no blood staining purple across his chest, no stunned horror in his dimming eyes. There’s a cup of tea steaming on the table beside the window, his journal open on the seat of his chair. He looks fine. He’s well. It was just a nightmare.

It’s not, Orym thinks with more certainty than he’s had about almost anything. It isn’t. He watched Dorian die, held him in his arms when his vibrant spirit left him. It’s far from the first time Orym has seen someone die, not even the only time he’s held them when they did. And every time, every death has felt different. He has never needed to imagine the precise way Dorian would die. He emphatically never wants to.

A shout rises up from the street below, followed by another. A flower cart is about to overturn, he thinks, remembering how he’d bought an armful of them from the distressed merchant. Laudna’s astonished delight and Imogen’s quiet pleasure when he offered to make crowns from the somewhat crumpled blooms. Fearne had woven a sash for Dorian, who smiled a little every time he remembered they were there, his long, delicate fingers lingering over the pale blooms. Orym had envied Fearne those smiles and felt absurd for it.

Now, he crosses the room with ringing in his ears so loud he doesn’t hear the commotion on the street, panicked shouts and the scream of a horse. It was what had woken him before, that other time, and now he’s here to see a donkey pull free of its harness, the wagon swaying left-right-left before it tips and the crates of flowers smash open.

“My goodness, what a racket,” Imogen says from the doorway. “Do you suppose everyone’s all right out there?”

“Yes,” Orym says distantly, knuckles white on the window frame. The driver of the cart hasn’t pulled herself free yet, but she will. She hadn’t even been scratched the first time he saw this happen. “They’ll all be fine.”

“Orym.” Dorian’s voice is quiet, carried on his exhale for only Orym to hear when his fingers ghost up his bare arm and settle on the back of his neck. The pounding in his head eases a little, but Dorian had only touched him. “Did something happen?”

He’s still watching as the merchant extracts herself from the wreckage, her face crumpling as it had before. Every moment is the same, except the obvious. What would Dorian say if Orym said that he’d lived this before? That Dorian will die at the end of tomorrow and it's only Orym who knows?

“No,” he says faintly, reaching with his free hand to clasp Dorian’s hand in his own. It’s real, warm as ever. “I think I just had a nightmare.”

What else could he say while he’s thinking of someone else he loved, someone else who died in his arms, someone he’ll never see again?

The rest of the morning passes like countryside in fog. Orym skips breakfast to go outside and clean up the broken cart, and this time he pays the woman for the whole cart, handing over the contents of his purse to her. He feels dizzy when Fearne carries the flowers back inside, covering the entire common room with sweet-smelling blooms that she refreshes with a glimmer of magic.

“Are you feeling any better?” Dorian asks him, bent over the crown he’s weaving with a length of vine that Orym provides him. “You looked pretty bad earlier.”

“My head still hurts,” he tells him, because it does, coming and going with his pulse. “But I–”

“Come here.” Dorian sets aside the half-woven length of flowers, his fingers emitting a soft glow that’s barely a shade paler than the blue of his skin. The familiar warmth of his magic washes over Orym, easing the sharpness of the pain.

“Waste of magic to use it on a headache,” he says, eyes closed, swaying off balance into Dorian’s hand.

“Does it feel better?”

“It does.” Orym opens his eyes and sits back. “Thank you.”

“Was the dream like the ones…” Dorian trails off, searching for the right words while looking out at the others. Imogen is adjusting the flower crown in Laudna’s hair, who looks soft and pleased and not even remotely terrifying for once. “Were there spiders?”

“No,” Orym says immediately, but he was the only one who wasn’t visited by the Spider Queen in his dreams. Laying aside his work with the flowers, he considers and rejects it again more firmly now. “No.”

Dorian steals a glance at Fearne, shifting closer so his hair shields them from the room like a curtain. “Do you think it was the–you know who I mean.”

“We’re not going to summon a betrayer god by speaking her epithet.”

“You never talked to her before, though.”

“It was a dream, Dorian.” It’s a bald lie, and Orym hates the way it slides out like oily, black ichor, turning his stomach.

Dorian doesn’t mention it again, but Orym can tell that he wants to push him on the morning intrusion to his room and what triggered it. It isn’t like Orym to come out half-dressed, certainly not because he had a nightmare. Anyway, he’s had the sense for a long time that Dorian’s brush with the Spider Queen had changed him. Frightened him in a way he wasn’t accustomed to, in a way that it hadn’t affected Orym.

That explanation for his discordant memories doesn't fit, though. Like it's something drawing his attention away from the rain distorting around shadows, a knife in the dark, and Orym reliving the day before it all happened.

And it is the same day, he's certain now. Only this time, Orym turns in time to see Ashton’s eyes widen with delight when Fearne crowns them with a wreath of flowers that match the glassy green hue of their skin. He isn’t surprised by the dwarven girl who arrives that evening with a message that Eshteross has work for them in a warehouse somewhere in the lower levels of the Core Spire, or that they agree to infiltrate the warehouse in the morning with almost no reconnaissance.

Everything happens exactly the same way, mostly. Everyone is the same but Orym, really.

Dorian retires to his room early and, rather than bidding him good night over the rim of his cup as he had the first time through, Orym pushes back from the table and says good night to the others. Ashton gives an obvious wolf whistle when he does, and Orym knocks the back of his hand into their shoulder as he passes, only making Ashton laugh harder.

The sound of their laugh follows Orym into the hall, where Dorian is waiting for him, holding open the door to his room.

“Still thinking about last night?”

He is, but Orym doesn’t know which last night it is he keeps thinking about. “You could say that,” is his answer, walking ahead into the darkness of Dorian’s room. He follows his memory of the space, lighting the candles from his palm, drawing deep for the little magic he knows.

The little flame in his hand flickers gray-blue, an augury for the weather they’ll have to contend with in the morning. It suggests a storm is coming.

“I think you should stay behind tomorrow,” he says in the same moment it occurs to him, his back to Dorian as he closes his hand around the little orb of flame.

Dorian actually laughs, although Orym doesn’t think he sounds particularly amused. “And leave you to do something reckless? No, thanks.”

“Letters does a fine job,” Orym argues, although he can’t pretend – well, Dorian has had the nearly singular task of keeping Orym upright since they arrived. “But I can be more careful.”

“You haven’t given me any reason why you think I need to stay here and keep the chairs warm.”

“I think you’d be safer if you did.” He stands up from the fireplace, watching the flames creeping along the dry wood he’s set ablaze. When he looks back to Dorian’s face, he sees as surprise turns to annoyance before steel slides into place and he looks away, brows pulled down tight.

“You sound like you think I–that I can’t look out for myself. Or that you don't trust me to watch your back.”

It sounds like the continuation of a fight that Orym hasn’t ever had with him, that perhaps he's had with someone else. It’s never even occurred to him to imagine Dorian as anything but capable. As for trust–well, whatever it was that made Dorian seem like he was trustworthy, Dariax and Fearne and Opal had reacted to it immediately, too. It had taken more time for the two of them, but Orym hasn’t had cause to regret giving his own when he did.

For the first time since he woke up in the morning, Orym doesn’t actually know what’s about to happen, and it disorients him as much as knowing. He and Dorian haven't fought since that one night over the crown.

“I don’t think that at all. You know that I don’t. I’d be dead ten times over if it weren’t for you.”

The words come loose before he thinks them through, and Orym is back on that street, holding Dorian as he bleeds out because he wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t close enough to realize what was happening. It mingles with that other, older memory, the same failure and loss threading through both. The same detached, self-aware notion that this is something that's going to fuck him up.

He pulls himself straight, pushing the memory away, and reaches for Dorian’s hand.

Dorian walks away without taking it, nervous energy emanating off him like a trapped animal. “Give me a good reason why you want to lock me up in a tower and keep me safe.”

“I’m not trying to–”

“You’ve been acting strange since this morning,” Dorian presses him, wheeling around with a gleam of cold logic in the narrowed corners of his eyes. “Imogen said you woke up from a dream and were looking for me, banged into my room, refused to say anything about why, and then you’ve been my little shadow all day. What is going on?”

The explanation sits like ash on the knife edge of his tongue, but Orym pushes it away. What would he tell Dorian about what’s happening? He has no explanation to offer, no strategy for what he’s going to do about it. He’ll have to do this alone.

“I don’t want you to go,” he says simply, facing Dorian with his shoulders square.

“This is ridiculous,” Dorian rages imperiously back at him, crosses the room and pulls the door open. “And I think we’re finished here.”

“I’m sorry,” says Orym as he passes Dorian, and he means it.

It just doesn’t matter what he says or does, not if it keeps Dorian alive. It doesn’t even matter to Orym if Dorian is angry, at least for now. There’s no way to tell him that he’s afraid of failing, of seeing him die. That he’s seen it once and a second time will take what’s left of him and burn it to ashes.

Dorian ignores him conspicuously the following morning, spending breakfast talking with Imogen without so much as a glance in Orym’s direction. It’s so over the top that Orym nearly pulls him to the side to apologize again, but Fearne is the one who catches him before he does.

“Did you and Dorian have a fight?” she asks, passing some of her breakfast over her shoulder to Mister. “About whatever it was you were talking about last night?”

“You could say that,” he answers, aware that he sounds grumpy and petulant. She’s not wrong, anyway.

Fearne hums very softly, and says nothing for so long that he thinks she’s going to drop it. Then she scratches Mister’s ears thoughtfully and presses on, “Did you have another bad dream?”

Orym hadn’t actually slept very much, leaving little time for dreams, good or bad. When he stole a few hours of sleep, it had been when the sky had just begun to pale at the furthest horizons, and it had taken him like unconsciousness after a bad blow. He shakes his head and turns his dagger in his hand.

Even now, facing down a day where he already has some idea of what waits for him, he hasn’t decided what it is he should do. He doesn’t even understand what’s happening to him, or who it is he could talk to about it.

“I did,” Fearne says distantly, and it takes him a few extra seconds to connect what she’s said with the conversation they were having. “Have a bad dream.”

Orym thinks of Dorian asking about the Spider Queen, revisits the notion once more. “The normal kind, or…?”

“Not the normal kind, I don’t think.” Fearne considers this for a moment, uncharacteristically taking her time to think about what it is she wants to say. “It just gave me a bad feeling about today. The rain. There was a lot of blood.”

Fear spikes like ice somewhere near the back of his head, like an unseen blow in the dark. Orym looks immediately to Dorian, catching the back end of a glance that almost seems like he was watching the two of them.

“Don’t leave him alone today,” Orym tells Fearne in a voice for only her to hear. "He won't let me."

Her fingers pause while scratching Mister, but she reaches over and squeezes Orym’s hand in hers. “I won’t leave either of you.”

But he’s the one who needs you, Orym thinks, excusing himself to go assemble his armor and weapons before they leave.

Orym never catches him looking, but there are a few times where it seems like he’s staring off at nothing in particular with a faintly despondent twist to his mouth, as though something’s gone off that he doesn’t understand. Orym isn’t even sure things were this tense over the circlet. At least Dorian would make small talk around him then.

Things go somewhat better than the day before: Orym is a little more familiar with the layout of the warehouse, knows what blows to avoid and when to intervene for the others. Still, they retire to Lord Eshteross’ manor under black skies and dodging the first spattering of cold rain.

Orym finds Dorian before they walk to the sitting room, reaching his hand out to grasp his cape before he passes. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and holds his breath.

“No,” Dorian sighs, with tension rolling off his shoulders when he beckons Orym to one of the soft, upholstered couches by the window.

Orym hesitates before joining him, remembering that it’s the same as the one Imogen and Laudna were on just a few days before – or on this same night. It’s hard to tell now, but it seems like the sort of thing he should take note of. What small changes might change everything. He still can’t shake the grave sense of doom permeating through the night like the chill in the air.

Dorian continues: “I overreacted. I thought – well, you were right. Things could have been really bad today.”

“They weren’t, though,” Orym points out, because the first time had been bad. Today was less so. Neither he nor Dorian had been wounded in any serious way. Imogen is bright-eyed and animated from her chair by the fire, cradling a glass of wine in one hand and gesticulating widely with the other.

“But they always could be, and I can’t – I can’t really blame you for sometimes getting a little skittish.”

Orym snaps his attention back up to Dorian’s face, caught with his guard down. He doesn’t think they’ve ever talked like this, about his husband and everything that happened then. It had just been an unspoken thing, and he isn’t sure he likes the idea that he’s prone to overworry because of it.

“It’s not like that,” he says, and this time he’s the one pushing away from Dorian, heart pounding. Thinking about – no, he doesn’t want to think about that day, not when he’s already thinking about another day much fresher in his memory.

“No?”

Orym recognizes the shrewd expression on Dorian’s face, that it’s a means to ask another question, but he doesn't voice it. They don’t say anything more, but when Dorian announces he’s returning home, shaking off Imogen’s plea for him to stay, Orym stands to go with him.

It will only be them this time. Ashton chooses to stay behind with Fresh Cut Grass, and Fearne watches Dorian so carefully she misses Orym’s pleading expression. He doesn’t want to do this alone. He’s not even sure what it is he’s afraid of. He has no idea what might happen now.

“I don’t like fighting with you,” Dorian says as they wait in the threshold while Evelyn looks for an umbrella. His eyes are soft and a little apologetic to mask something else that Orym doesn’t recognize.

Evelyn brings the umbrella and holds it open for them just outside for Dorian to take with a gracious smile and quiet thanks. The door closes with a dull thud behind them and Orym feels the spike of anxiety return, the ache of foresight throbbing between his ribs.

“I’ve never thought you couldn’t handle yourself,” he says, just loud enough to be heard over the rain.

“But you think you have to be the one to look out for me?” Dorian steps out into the rain and Orym follows quickly, eyes scanning through the miserable dark for something he knows he won’t be able to stop when it comes.

“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”

“Sure, but–” Dorian clears his throat, holding Evelyn’s enormous umbrella out to keep Orym under its cover. “Who does it for you, Orym?”

If he expects an answer, Dorian doesn’t wait for it as they walk. It seems to Orym that he thinks he’s already made his point, but that Orym has missed it. Sometimes he thinks he’s always only catching up with Dorian, like Orym is just grasping sightlessly in the dark for the loosest shape of something Dorian already knows.

Silently, he vows to himself to talk it through with Dorian next time. He’s only just caught himself in that recursive assumption – that there will be some future conundrum to talk about – when Dorian’s hand falls on his shoulder half a step behind him. “Orym.”

The cadence of his heartbeat comes off-time, too fast and then too slow before it settles, and he looks up to see Dorian’s half-shadowed face watching with tortured hope. Orym isn’t used to being so lost in his own head that he misses something obvious. He feels like he’s just finished a footrace, belated and short of breath, to only now realize why Dorian might be hurt and upset that Orym doesn’t have faith in him.

Time runs out on them.

To Dorian’s left, the rain slides sideways across an unseen shadow, moving quickly toward them. Orym reaches immediately for Dorian’s belt, pulling hard as he rushes forward.

Inevitable as this moment feels, Orym isn’t afraid anymore. It feels nothing like the last time he watched as a shadow peeled out from the rain with a gleaming blade that caught on the street lamps. The refracted lamplight across the wet cobblestones is exactly the same, even if he isn’t. He’s only faintly aware of Dorian at his back when he draws his sword, of the rain soaking into his own clothes when Dorian loses his grip on the umbrella. Everything slows around him, the way it does when he has a singular objective.

This time, Dorian won’t die.

His blade twists as an extension of his arm, parrying the first and second strike and pushing back with his full weight. The shadow assassin brushes him off with a simple side step, sending Orym tumbling forward into the ground.

“Stay down,” they hiss down to him in a distorted voice. “Leave the soaring one to Kasyr.”

Orym kicks himself back to his feet and jams the blunt hilt of his sword into where the center of gravity on a larger figure would be. They stagger and recover, feinting down and slashing up as Orym drops back a step to avoid it. He lunges forward with a failed thrust, and the two duel back and forth, matching strike for strike without either getting the upper hand.

Orym doesn’t see it until it’s too late: the gold-hilted dagger dropping from one hand to the other, arcing upward through the light. The blade edge flickers like the flame of a candle, there and then gone again, phasing past his armor and through his ribs. The air wheezes out of his lungs and Orym shudders around the blade embedded in his ribs like a pin in the wing of a bug.

With the last surge of will left in him, he slashes wildly and feels his sword catch the figure in the middle. There’s a muffled click and splintered darkness closes around the shadow again.

They’re alone.

As he falls, Orym feels time hold around him, then stagger on at regular speed. His fingertips grasp listlessly at the handle of the dagger. There’s no preparing for the impact with the ground, which he only knows will hurt, but it never comes.

“Wake up,” he hears before he blinks up into Dorian’s face, rain pooling at the corners of his eyes before traveling on past his hairline. Dorian’s scimitar glows on the stones beside him, close enough to Orym’s face that they must be kneeling in the street, or Dorian is while holding him. Orym is coiled against his chest with numb cold creeping along his limbs like darkness at the end of the day.

“What did I tell you?” Dorian asks, his thumb swiping water from Orym’s face with his heart in his eyes. It’s what he doesn’t say, what’s carried in the minute trembling of his fingers when he lifts Orym’s face to his own, pressing his forehead against Orym’s. “I just said it to you.”

Orym closes one fist around the hilt of the dagger and rests the other around Dorian’s larger hand, trying for a smile he can’t manage.

He says, “It was worth it,” but he’s only hoping that it was.

The morning light is barely a surprise.

Phantom pain blooms from his ribs, but Orym doesn’t need to press his palm to his side to know that the skin there is unbroken. This time, he lies back in his bed, waiting for the echoes of pain from a wound that doesn’t exist yet to fade.

Outside his door, Imogen’s delicate footfalls punctuate the sounds of the street below, fast and a little agitated. He counts the seconds until the panicked shout rises through the window: a screaming donkey, a woman’s shocked cry, the crash of an overturned wagon just outside the building.

Orym dresses silently, hesitating with his hand on his sword before leaving it in the bed. He’ll need it soon enough, but not now.

Pausing at Dorian’s door, Orym stays only long enough to listen to Dorian as he settles back into his place at the fire, a quill scratching across the pages of his journal. Then Orym goes on to tap lightly at Fearne’s door.

“Orym,” she says with sleepy delight, Mister peering through the waterfall of her loose hair, one black hand stroking a satin ribbon in his fist. “Did you hear the noise outside?”

“Flower cart turned over,” he explains lightly. “Can I come in?”

Fearne makes room for him to pass immediately, scraping her hair back with long, clawed fingers. “Is everything all right?”

He failed again. It’s the only thing Orym really knows, or else he wouldn’t be back here. Failure has always seemed final, something that could never be revisited except in moments of self-torturous retrospect. The could have done of a thousand decisions that may have been different if not for him. Only now he has the chance to do something about it and keeps failing, only he doesn’t know what it is he’s supposed to do to fix it.

“Did you have any dreams last night?”

Fearne blinks at him curiously, adjusting Mister in her arms and settling on the edge of her bed so she doesn’t tower over him.

“I did,” she says. “Do you mean a specific kind of dream?”

“The kind about things that haven’t happened yet.”

“I see.” She reaches out a hand for Orym and he hesitates before stepping closer so she can grasp his hand in hers. “I should tell you, dreams are different where I’m from. They don’t feel like the ones you have.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“Well, things that are, or might be, all exist at the same time. Sometimes I dream about them.” Fearne’s lovely mouth turns downward, her eyes tracking over his face. “And I did have a dream like that last night. It wasn’t a good one.”

Even as she says it, Orym feels something swelling in his chest, compressing his lungs. Until now, this conversation has felt more like a theoretical exercise to solve a puzzle.

“Mine wasn’t either,” he says, because it seems like the only thing he could, the only way to test the idea that this mad thing is real. He’s never seen Fearne with fear masked behind her typically placid exterior, not even in her worst moments, but she looks a little afraid now. For him, he realizes with a fresh stab of pain in his ribs.

“You died, Orym,” she breathes, and Orym allows her to draw him closer with one hand. “It was terrible.”

“It was,” he agrees, resting his cheek in her palm for a moment before drawing away, back into himself until the tight sensation in his chest disappears. “I think it’s going to happen again.”

Her eyes look briefly to the sunshine outside, and then back to Orym. “Do you know why you think that?”

“I don’t, Fearnie.” He paces the length of the room. It was him the last time, but it was Dorian before. The assassin hadn’t wanted Orym, had only engaged him as an obstacle to their goal.

The soaring one.

The words seem strange now, but he’d never questioned that the assassin wanted Dorian. It’s apparent enough that they meant him, that Orym can’t prevent it from happening. He still doesn’t understand why.

“Do you know Kasyr?” he asks on an impulse when he looks back to her.

“No, I don't think so,” says Fearne very slowly, then tosses her head like she’s shaking off a fly. “No, I don’t. But if I can help you, please know you don’t have to do this alone, Orym.”

Fearne, of course, is entirely right. Whatever is happening isn’t the sort of thing he’s going to figure out alone, and he doesn’t know enough about Jrusar to know where to start looking. Which doesn’t matter, because he knows someone who does. Someone who isn’t likely to ask questions Orym still can’t answer.

Ashton is drinking a tankard of dark ale at the tavern when Orym finds them, pulls himself up into the chair next to theirs and signals for a drink of his own.

They cock one eyebrow up, but Orym thinks he catches a faintly pleased smile when they say, “You didn’t strike me as an early starter.”

“I’m not.” He pays for both their drinks with a few coins and takes a short drink from his own tankard. The pain in his ribs has gone duller, but it’s still there, a pulsing reminder of what the stakes are. “What do you know about assassins in the city?”

Ashton drops their tankard on the counter with a hard thunk. “I know that I don’t fuck with that kind of work.”

“But you might know who does.”

“Yeah, but–” Their face colors emerald as they sputter through a few more words. Ashton shakes their head hard. “Who are you trying to knock off?”

“Think about it the other way.” Orym looks over his drink with one eyebrow up. “Gold dagger, weird time shit, name might be Kasyr.”

Ashton straightens with renewed curiosity. “Discretion’s not really my thing, but I can… put a word out. I know someone who probably knows someone, who might – enough that it won’t get back on you.”

Orym thinks how little time he has, really. How soon it is before it won’t matter. “I don’t need it to be all that discreet,” he says. “Might expedite things if they do know it’s me looking.”

“Let me get this straight,” Ashton says, leaning back in their chair while pinching their nose between two fingers. “You want to find an assassin who fucks up time, you don’t care if they can find you, and then you’re going to… what? What’s your plan?”

Orym pushes his drink toward Ashton and leaps down from the chair. “Let me know if your friend finds anything.”

“Not my friend,” Ashton calls after him just before draining Orym’s tankard.

Ashton disappears mid-afternoon and doesn't return until evening, but they exchange a silent nod with Orym when they do, straddling the chair across from Fearne with their elbows on their knees. In case Orym didn’t get the message that they disapprove of what he’s doing, Ashton frowns when they gesture upstairs with their chin that they want to talk away from the others.

Ever perceptive, Dorian catches this and looks between the two of them. “Ashton needs you for something?”

“I asked them for a favor,” answers Orym, but he doesn’t move from where they’re sitting together as Dorian tunes his lute. Waiting for the news that they’ll be working the following day is much worse now that Orym knows it’s coming, or that he might not be there.

He’s worried about sending the rest of them into that warehouse without him. There are necromantic constructs and corrupted elementals waiting for them, and they got their asses kicked the first time around. But what if Ashton’s contact comes back and Orym has to choose between chasing the lead and going with them?

Well, Orym’s already made his choice. The only surprising thing about it is how easily it came to him, how viscerally he jumped to abandoning what he knows he should do to take a single chance of preventing Dorian from–

“Orym?”

“Yeah,” he says, startled back to the present. Or, at least, the present he’s living in for the moment.

Dorian cocks his head to one side. “I asked what favor you needed from Ashton. Are you all right?”

“Not really,” he answers with absolute honesty.

Whatever this is, Orym is already tired of it. He feels like he’s been running on adrenaline for weeks. The throbbing in his ribs feels fresh, but his body has the same bruised ache he gets when he’s been awake too long, taken a few too many hits. It’s making him feel sluggish, not just physically. He’s missing something, missing too many somethings; the answer staring him in the face but Orym just can’t see it.

Dorian’s hand lands on his shoulder, his cool fingertips stroking along the cyclonic patterns of his tattoo. A minor healing spell, Orym realizes belatedly. He’s so familiar with how Dorian’s magic feels, how it makes him feel, that it takes him longer to recognize this one has a different quality to it. It feels like the moment in the rain the night before. Warm and protective, seeing something clearly for the first time and knowing it's right.

Orym reaches for his hand, swallowing around a thick knot that’s formed in his throat. He wants this. He wants Dorian. It’s not just that he wants him to live, because he does. Orym wants the version of the future where he gets right whatever it is he’s doing wrong, and lives to explore what it would be like to keep on living with Dorian. More than that swooping sensation of falling. Love, the real thing, but especially all that comes after.

“You know you can tell me whatever it is,” Dorian says in a low voice that’s meant only for Orym. “I’ve got your back, no matter what. No questions asked.”

“That’s a lie,” Orym says, but he manages a real smile, thin as it may be. “You always have questions. Let me get you answers first, all right?”

“Fair enough.” Dorian strums his fingers over the strings of his lute, makes one last change to the pegs, and starts to play a song that Orym’s heard him play a few times when he’s absentmindedly staring off into the middle distance. Orym knows that look: it’s exactly the way he feels when he thinks of how things used to be for him in Zephrah.

“You’ve played that one a few times,” he says warmly, tucking away Dorian’s bashfully pleased smile to be examined and treasured later.

Knowing he’s in love with Dorian, actually in love with him and not teetering on the edge of something foolhardy and meaningless, feels like a precious revelation. A gift Orym never counted on, even if absolutely everyone had told him it would happen for him again one day.

“Lady of the Squall,” Dorian says lightly, his eyes twitching to the side of Orym’s face, as though he wants to look away and is forcing himself to keep the connection between them for something important.

Imogen adjusts her reading glasses, pulling her knees closer with a jaw-cracking yawn. “Isn’t it some sort of national anthem? Or something like that. I read about it in a book when I was a little girl.”

“Is it?” Dorian asks brightly. “I only know it as a ballad.”

Imogen yawns again, closing her book and rubbing one hand over her face. “I can’t remember. Your song is just so very beautiful, Dorian. You’ll have to tell us the story sometime.”

“Absolutely. Are you going to bed?”

Imogen unwinds her body from the chair and nods. “Wake me if we hear anything?”

Laudna objects to waking Imogen when they finally do, even as the rest of them work on their strategy. Orym takes advantage of the bustle of energy to take the empty chair next to Ashton.

“Conspicuous for an assassin,” Ashton tells him bluntly, offering a slip of folded paper between their fingers. “Expensive, too. Either Milo knew the right someone, or they’re not very fucking careful. Rates as requested, if you follow.”

Dread sits in Orym’s stomach like a ball of cold iron when he thinks about the rain, the very stuff that makes up the planes themselves parting in the dark. He wonders for the first time how Ashton fared against the mystery assassin during the loop he met it. Orym hadn't lived long enough to see, and he now feels gutting shame for failing to think of it before.

The paper has an address on it, scribbled in luminescent ink. When he holds it up to the light, the shapes of the letters seem to bend a little, but Orym pockets it with a grateful nod.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Owe me?” Ashton looks surprised, then swallows it back into their usual ambivalence. “Cover drinks tomorrow night when we’re done with that warehouse and we’ll call it even.”

If he lives that long. Orym claps him on the shoulder when he’s standing on his feet, looking once in Dorian’s direction.

They can’t go to that address together, even though what he wants is to ask Dorian to come. It would make him feel better to have someone watching his back, but he’s afraid. Mostly for Dorian, who has somehow attracted the attention of an assassin to the highest echelons of Jrusar. An assassin who hissed something in Primordial before killing him the first time, and knows something about Dorian that Orym doesn’t.

“One more question,” Orym hears himself ask before leaving the room, feeling like something is coming into focus, even if he can’t quite grasp it yet. “You speak Primordial, right?”

“Few words here and there. Mostly Terran. Picked up the rest, you know. Around.”

Where Orym once had perfect recall of every detail of that night, it’s fuzzier now. The memories mixing with the second version of that rainy night on the street. He has to think carefully before he pronounces the syllables as closely to those he heard trembling between the raindrops. Even in that imperfect form, it seems to resonate with the air around them after he’s done speaking it.

“That’s Auran,” Ashton offers, rubbing one hand over their mouth. “It’s – well, it’s not a great translation, but it means, like – I don’t know. Haughty. Lofty, maybe. Dorian would be able to tell you.”

The soaring one, Orym remembers, holding his tongue except to thank Ashton.

“Hey,” says Ashton one last time before he goes for the stairs, as if they know precisely what he’s going to do. “Don’t die.”

“I’m trying.” Then he slips out of the room without anyone looking twice at him.

At least, he supposes he’s unnoticed until there’s a soft knock on the door in the code he and the others developed when they were still together in Tal’Dorei. Dorian’s changed into a less formal outfit of his breeches and a loose shirt, his hair tied back at the nape of his neck in a loose tail. His skin glows in the firelight, roughly the same color as the few times Orym has seen him flush.

“You finish your favor with Ashton?”

“I asked for some information,” he explains, holding up the folded paper. “What did you think?”

At his abashed expression, it dawns on him that Dorian is jealous. It’s such an outlandish idea that Orym only stares at him for a few beats longer than is appropriate. Dorian might be insecure, but he’s – well, not the sort of person who ever should have reason to be jealous of someone else.

“I don’t know what I thought,” Dorian admits, visibly relaxing as he crosses toward the fire. “How are you feeling about tomorrow?”

“Like we don’t have anywhere as much information as we need. Like we’re about to get our asses kicked.”

“Not the first time, right?” Dorian cracks a smile over his shoulder, lifting one hand to play absently with his earring.

Orym’s feet feel rooted to the floor as he watches him, safe and at ease. He has no regrets about what it is he’s going to do tonight, about whatever it will cost to keep him safe. “Are you going to get angry at me if I ask you to be careful tomorrow?”

Dorian laughs, “Why would I?” Because of course he has no idea about being angry the last time, or maybe Orym hasn’t tripped over that part of him that thinks he can’t help anyone else. His eyes are dark, like shards of cobalt in the firelight as he watches Orym. “Will you promise to look out for yourself, too?”

The right thing to do might be to make a joke about how little Orym does. It might make things a little easier if he broke the tension. Instead, he unsticks himself from his place by the door and says, “I’m not going to lie to you and say I will.”

“Typical.” But Dorian doesn’t look angry or annoyed, merely indulgently entertained by Orym’s candor. His faith has never been tested in any meaningful way. Orym has never failed him before, not so far as Dorian knows.

Orym can’t quite bring himself to look away from the figure Dorian casts in shadow outlined in fire. Orym might know the character of this man, whatever it is that makes him who he is in truth, but he’s still an enigma. Dorian’s secrets are going to literally kill him. Both of them.

Then Dorian shifts his eyes back to the fire, wetting his lips, and Orym realizes that Dorian is nervous about something. About whatever it was that brought him to his room at the end of the day.

“I assumed you and Ashton were–” Dorian begins, saying everything but whatever it is he actually wants to. “And it made me realize that I might have been wrong about a few things.”

Orym comes to stand beside him at the fire. “What were you wrong about?”

“I thought you weren’t interested in… well, you’ve been doing the grieving widower thing for a while.”

It feels surreal when he asks, “Are we going to talk about this thing?”

“I didn’t think you wanted to.”

A few days ago, the first time Orym lived this night, he wouldn’t have wanted to. He’d wanted more time, to resolve all the things he doesn’t know about Dorian before letting himself fall, to give him the space for whatever it is he needs to feel comfortable. Whatever it is hovering between them has been there for a long time now, waiting for one or both of them to reach out and grab it whenever they were ready.

“I do, actually. I just don’t know what I want to say.” And he doesn’t know what it is Dorian wants, what he really wants, and it makes him hesitate before acting.

But only a moment. Dorian seems to understand what it is he meant, though, because when Orym pushes him back into the chair, he goes without argument. They both freeze in place for a moment when Orym climbs atop him: Orym’s knee pressed into Dorian’s thigh, Dorian’s slim fingers resting with light counter pressure on Orym’s hips to hold him in place.

Dorian’s mouth parts soundlessly, and Orym kisses him, palms pressed against the curve of his head near his ears. He feels Dorian’s answering groan in his chest and all the way up from his knees into his groin. Relief or lust floods him so abruptly that Orym feels lightheaded, and Dorian slips his tongue to him in the moment he shudders from it.

“Fuck,” Dorian laughs when Orym collapses his forehead against his shoulder to catch his breath. “You don’t need to say anything when you kiss like that.”

It’s immensely flattering to hear, of course. Orym leans back, the pads of his thumbs stroking the length of Dorian’s ears, watching his eyes flutter with pleasure. Dorian is a wonder: handsome and charming, determined and loyal. The very idea that he’s been waiting for Orym to give a sign of wanting him is laughable.

Dorian rests one hand on Orym’s cheek, his eyes softening in relief and–

–and a splinter of memory cuts between them: the fractured memories of Dorian’s shock as he held Orym’s face in just the same way as he is now, only that he was dying then. The frantic terror in his eyes while holding Orym when he died next.

Cold reality comes knocking its way back into the room, reminding Orym what it is he’s resolved to do. Orym feels his shoulders go stiff again, rising up toward his ears.

Dorian’s eyes search his and Orym recognizes the moment he realizes that something has gone wrong. “It’s all right if you need to take it slow,” he offers in a way that he probably thinks is magnanimous, but instead seems withdrawn and cold.

“That might be better,” he says, leaning back on Dorian’s knees, sliding to the floor and backing toward the door with a stab of regret. “We should get some rest.”

Dorian looks openly crestfallen as he says, “For whatever tomorrow brings.”

After he’s gone back to his room, Orym just stares at the fire for a long time. He turns over his memories of Dorian, from what little he remembers of their first meeting, the grindingly slow process of coming to trust one another without reservation, the ragged, broken-off ending looming ahead of them.

They yield no fresh insights, no guidance at all on the night ahead.

Orym pauses to listen to the steady sound of Dorian sleeping when he leaves. The fires in the house are low and the night chill feels harsh, sharper than usual against his skin, long after he finishes buckling his armor and closes the back door behind him.

The first thing he does is unfold the paper in the moonlight. The ink had been the first clue. The second had been Orym’s absolute certainty that his quarry isn’t the sort whose agents give away their address without certain precautions. When he holds it up again in the moonlight, Orym watches the letters on the page dissolve and reform. A true address. Or a place to start, at least.

The address is in a nicer section of the Lantern Spire, past the warehouses and taverns and into a quiet residential street, with stacked gardens built into the spire so that the cascading tendrils of vines and flowers cover over the stone. The enchantment on the street lamps is fresh, and the shadows have a paler quality that make it impossible for someone to spring out of them.

Compared to the night he’s facing at the end of the following day, it’s paradise.

It’s so nice that Orym checks the address in the light three times before he arrives outside a lush townhouse spanning half the square it faces. The address is correct, and perhaps it’s only that Orym has never thought about the living conditions of those who make their business doing the darker work of the elite. The dim glow of a few lanterns on the lower level suggest that the house servants are still awake, and Orym softens his footfalls when he enters the alleyway, searching for an inconspicuous entrance.

He scales the low wall and finds an unlocked window in the servants’ quarters, a small building set off to the side of the main house. The way between the two is unlit, but when he pulls the window closed behind him and peers in, it’s apparent that the two buildings are connected with a small, underground tunnel that leads to the cellars.

Once he’s inside the main house, Orym realizes that he doesn’t actually know how he plans to find the assassin in their home. His only advantage here is that he isn’t expected.

Orym’s just started searching the maze of corridors in the cellar when he hears footfalls on the stairs. He ducks into the space between two enormous racks of wine bottles when two figures pass with their heads ducked in conversation. Orym pulls in his breath, his eyes fixed on them for the first sign that they might spot him from his place in the shadows.

“–could get the workshop in proper shape if they weren’t so damnably paranoid about it. I’ve been working for the family since I was a boy and I know a thing or two about loyalty.”

“New job came in today,” says the other, rubbing her fingers over her eyes while yawning widely. “Noble sort from some demiplane with money and an attitude. Saw her into the study this afternoon. Anyway, no chance we’re getting the workshop finished until that’s managed. Better to just let it be what it is.”

“I know. I just mean, I’ve given everything to Kasyr. They get so irritable if the workshop isn’t clean, but don't trust us to–.”

Orym dares to push out his breath when they disappear down the corridor toward the other building, resting his head against the stone wall behind him. The workshop is his best bet, if not for finding Kasyr, then for getting something, anything that might keep him from failing a third time. It takes him a few minutes of careful searching, keeping to the shadows and listening carefully for more of the servants, but he finds a bolted stone door with an intricate, clockwork locking mechanism.

He spends a few agonizing minutes disarming the trap in the door, carefully sliding a pin through to hold back the trigger before slashing through the lock with his sword. The cloud of gas erupts about two feet higher than his head, giving Orym just enough time to push the door open, roll through, and slam it shut. The seal on the door glows red, but none of the gas passes through to the room itself.

“What an innovative way to avoid the gas.”

Orym whirls around with his sword held on guard between himself and the voice, getting his first look at the room around him. Whatever he’d imagined when he overheard the servants talking about a workshop, it wasn’t this. He feels a little like he’s standing in the nightmare version of a tailor’s work room. Lifeless, mannequin-like figures of varying sizes and configurations line the room, leaned against walls, laid out on a few tables in the center of the room with limbs askew.

Standing over one of those tables is a reed-thin half-elf with shorn hair and a pair of goggles pulled down over their face, an incomplete golden rune shimmering uncast in one hand and a long tool in the other.

“Are you Kasyr?”

"I am." Kasyr tips their head to one side curiously, peels away the goggles from their face. They don’t look exactly like they’re smiling, but they don’t look like they aren’t, either.

A swift inventory of the room tells Orym with some relief that the figures lying crumpled aren’t flesh and blood, but automatons built from intricate clockwork machinery. There are a few heaps of miscellaneous parts, some obviously set aside for damage, and others looking eerily alive in the flickering lamplight, standing straight-backed along the walls.

Orym looks back to Kasyr, searching the rich clothing beneath a work apron for a sign of the assassin he met in the rain, but Kasyr is too tall, too thin, and the watery quality of their voice isn’t anything like the tenor of the assassin. But the automaton lying out on the table before them is chillingly familiar.

The figure is black as shadow with filaments of residuum intricately woven in the same pattern as the dagger Orym caught the first night, took between his ribs the second. His fingers twitch toward the sudden twinge of pain, as if his body remembers how it felt when it slipped between his ribs.

Kasyr looks between the object of Orym’s gaze, and then back at him, and this time a triumphant smile blooms over their face. “I can see my creation is familiar to you, though it won’t have its first mission until tomorrow evening. It worked, didn’t it?”

“If you mean killing Dorian, then–”

“I don’t care about the prince,” interrupts Kasyr with a sharp motion of their hand. “He lives, he dies. Squabbles in the Silken Squall don’t concern me. Tell me how it happened. Tell me that it works.”

“Here I am,” says Orym, his head aching from how swiftly he’s trying to assemble his thoughts. An automaton enchanted to manipulate time and space and its creator in a workshop of clockwork assassins. The Silken Squall – a prince?

The soaring one. Orym hadn’t retained much from his lessons on elemental magic, setting aside that which he hadn’t needed, but he remembers that words in Primordial can carry power, like the runes on the mesa outside Emon. Old magics that refer to a lineage of things, like places or people. Or a title.

“You’re here now, yes.” Kasyr quickly sketches a new rune with their hand, pressing it into the automaton’s chest. “You shouldn’t have been able to attune to the knife. I don’t suppose you want to tell me how it happened?”

“I don’t know,” Orym tells them frankly, gripping his sword tighter. “But I’m not especially interested in dying a third time.”

“Three!” Kasyr looks up from the automaton with a delighted expression. “I do so wish that we had more time to explore this. Alas, I have a reputation to maintain and I am being paid quite a lot to ensure that the prince doesn’t interfere with – well, that’s none of your concern now. I can assure you, this will be the last time you will be inconvenienced.”

The filaments on the automaton flare with arcane energy the moment Kasyr begins chanting the incantation to animate it, and Orym doesn’t wait. He crosses the room and brings his sword up in an arc across their throat.

Kasyr blinks down at him in shock, tracing their fingertips through the blood soaking the heavy apron and silk shirt and dripping down onto the automaton. As they sink down to their knees, they grasp their throat to push out the last of the incantation in a weak burble. Then they slump against the table in a heap that reminds Orym forcefully of their creations.

The magical lamplight flickers weakly and then goes out, casting the room into complete, suffocating dark.

“Fuck,” Orym hisses, dredging into his pathetic magic for the flickering blue-gray flame in his palm. It bursts out of his glove just in time for him to see the clockwork assassin rise from the table with the gold dagger in hand.

He catches the first blow with his sword, and the flame in his hand shudders against the sudden movement, threatening darkness once again.

This is exactly the sort of scenario where Dorian’s magic would be helpful, he thinks helplessly, dodging too wide around another swipe of the dagger and barely catching himself on his back foot before he crashes into another automaton. He feels the whistling displacement of air above him a beat before something heavy he can’t see slams into the back of his head, sending him face first to the cold stone of the floor.

His vision blurs around a black dot in the center, but Orym pushes himself up to his knees, clinging to his sword like a lifeline. His druid fire is gone, and darkness warps and twists around him, though he can’t tell if it’s from the blow to his head or if it’s the automaton’s trick of distorting space around it.

As he tries to reorient himself, there’s the sudden, white hot prick of pain in his left shoulder as it materializes in front of him. The knife seems to phase in and out of reality, like a second and third stab, but it stays in his shoulder, and its positioning is enough to tell him where the automaton is standing. Orym drops to one knee, catching himself with his free hand and clumsily shoving his sword up and forward in a pale, desperate imitation of a stop thrust his swordmaster showed him once.

The filament on the automaton flares gold once more and he hears the clockwork mechanism click once before it collapses in front of him, its fading magic taking the room back to darkness.

The room is dark as pitch, the darkness so cloying that Orym can nearly see mirages of color and light creeping along the edges of his vision like spiders out of shadows. It’s silent but for his heart kicking wildly against his ribcage. He slowly realizes it's already too late for him again, but reaches for the hilt of the golden dagger and pulls it out with a choked cry.

The person hunting Dorian is still out there, and Orym has failed again.

Dying is a familiar feeling, somewhat reminiscent of the times he’s gone unconscious in battle, except that he knows there’s no help here. He’s alone in the dark, far from his friends, without hope of somehow escaping a sealed room into a mansion full of people who will soon discover Kasyr is dead by his hand.

Well, he can do something about exactly one of those things. Orym lifts his trembling hand and summons back his little flame, which springs up weaker than before, barely enough to hold back the shadows. It will have to be enough for the time he has left. With his other hand, Orym forms a fist around the hilt of the golden knife and holds it against his chest, staring at the flickering fire like it could guide him on to another chance. Just one more time.

“Next time will be different,” he breathes out into the dark like a promise to the universe. To himself. To Dorian. “Next time.”

Guttering like a candle in a whirlwind, the little light is the last thing to go before Orym.

Waking up is such a blessed relief that Orym feels tears welling at the corners of his eyes when he blinks them open again.

His whole body feels like a bruise, the lingering aches of the last loop clinging to him as he lies in his bed, feeling his way through the information he now has the same way he might feel his way through a dark room. Facing only his own thoughts and the days and night he has to unravel this, it’s a little easier to untangle the knots, identify the snags that he still hasn’t worked out.

Orym has known for a long time that Dorian is hardly a windblown traveling bard, but whenever he’d given it any thought, he had assumed that he was maybe a wealthy merchant’s son exploring the world on his own. Occasionally something darker, more desperate, but never nobility. Not royalty.

And, though Dorian came willingly, Orym has just been dragging him around the world on errands.

Now, someone in Jrusar knows who he is and – Orym tries to remember what Kasyr said, that the prince – Dorian, what in the hell? –was somehow connected to a squabble in the Silken Squall. That first night, Eshteross had said something to Dorian. A warning, Dorian told him on the way back, before things went wrong.

Rising out of bed is a far greater trial than usual, but Orym limps through the room, buckling his armor into place and grimacing through the echoes of unrealized pain. It’s possible to destroy the automaton, and it’s possible to keep stopping fresh assassins from coming for them, but it won’t remove the problem itself: that someone very specifically wants Dorian dead.

He emerges onto the street in time to see the beginning of a chain reaction: a wagon overflowing with flowers, its driver looking down at something in her hands instead of the road ahead of her, a dog darting into the street with its tail wagging enthusiastically at a horse. An unnatural wind gust flutters the flower merchant’s hair, drawing her attention back in time to shout for her donkey to stop short, unaffected by the horse rearing in panic across the street.

There’s no crash, no ruined flowers scattered over the uneven stones.

Orym holds a moment outside the door with his breath burning in his lungs, one hand extended from summoning the wind. The flower merchant continues murmuring encouraging words to her donkey and never once looks back to see him watching.

The walk to Eshteross’ manor seems far shorter in the idyllic morning weather, although Orym sucks in a sharp breath when he passes the spot where Dorian died the first night – where he died another – wondering if he’s always going to think of that when he does.

To her credit, Evelyn doesn’t look particularly surprised to see him alone at the door. She and Eshteross tend to wake early in the morning and retire before it gets too late, and she escorts him to the library with brusquely efficient movements.

“He’s in an unusual mood,” she warns him just before they reach the door. “I think he’s reading his correspondence.”

Eshteross himself is up and pacing in front of his fireplace, his cane resting in the crook between the seat of his chair and the arm. He has a slight limp not unlike Orym’s, like he’s suffering stiffness from old wounds that haunt him. It’s several seconds before Orym recognizes his low growl not as pain, but as a gravelly sort of humming, and another few notes to recognize the tune.

“Lady of the Squall,” Orym chances aloud, matching Eshteross’ dirge to the whimsical, airy notes from Dorian’s rendition.

The humming ends and Eshteross peers down over his shoulder at Orym with a thoughtful narrowing of his eyes. “You know the song.”

“I don’t, actually. I’ve only heard it.”

“From our charming genasi acquaintance.” It isn’t a question, and Eshteross doesn’t mean him to answer it as one. Instead, he takes a deep, rattling inhale, and sits down in his chair.

“There’s someone in the city who wants him dead,” Orym says flatly, trusting in this old man because of his intuition and desperation. He’s not often wrong about people, not their true selves, and he doesn’t want to find out he’s wrong now.

Orym isn’t used to catching Eshteross entirely off guard, but his sharp inhale signals that he’s surprised him. “But you don’t know whom?”

“I know the name of the one they’ve engaged to kill him. Do you know Kasyr?”

Eshteross’ affirming noise is a quiet groan, like he’s putting something together. “I do. They bear the weight of generations of their family’s traditional work, but they have innovated on that art.”

Orym frowns, thinking of all the other automatons in Kasyr’s workshop, but he keeps his silence, allowing Eshteross to mull over the new information. Chasing Kasyr doesn't seem like the right move when his time is as short as it is, and he wonders if Eshteross will arrive at the same conclusion.

“It matters not,” he sighs heavily at last, scratching the stubble around his fangs. “Kasyr has the patronage of several well-connected families in the city, and your foe is the one who commissioned their services.”

“I need your help to find that person.”

Orym doesn’t know what else to do. Eshteross is the only person Orym knows in Jrusar who might be able to do anything at all.

Rather more importantly, he isn’t sure he’ll manage another loop. He's begun to feel like doing so causes damage he can’t see. The weariness he begins each loop with is edging toward a much more dangerous type of damage, beyond mere physical wounds. The suffocating darkness of the last loop has stayed with him, will stay with him for a long time. Eventually, Orym is going to break.

“There was a coup,” Eshteross pronounces carefully, gesturing to a roll of parchment on the table beside his chair. “The elder prince and his parents survived.” There’s the hint of power in the word, the faintest accent on the way Eshteross pronounces Dorian’s brother’s title that’s reminiscent of the Primordial word for it.

“Then why try to assassinate Dorian?”

He’s still trying to work his mind around the notion that Dorian is the prince of some elemental demiplane at all. He still has no idea why he’s here, how he went from being a prince somewhere else to meeting Orym in a tavern in Emon. Dorian has never offered him a scrap of information that would help him understand this danger he’s in.

“I presume our foe does not know that the coup was unsuccessful.”

Orym takes the paper from the table and Eshteross doesn’t move to stop him. There’s no ink on the page at all, simply a faint aura of arcane energy. Snapping the page back into its roll, he suppresses the urge to crush it in his fist. “When did this happen?”

“Last night.” Eshteross smiles for the first time with a grim sort of humor, clearly not finding this amusing at all. “You may imagine how surprised I am to find you here with news of this plot I’ve only just found out about this morning through expedited connections. Evelyn has not yet had the opportunity to uncover information about the individual responsible for hiring an assassin.”

“We don’t have time for that,” Orym interrupts, impatient with Eshteross’ measured calm. He knew – he’d known that Dorian was in danger, and he’d waited at least a day and a half to tell him all those other times. It matters, of course, that he was also monitoring for threats, but he missed something. He made a mistake, and–

–and so did Orym. For a moment, Orym locks fierce eyes with Esheross, fury and guilt bubbling in his chest, and realizes that on this they are in alignment.

“I see,” says Eshteross slowly. “What is the nature of Kasyr’s assassin?”

Orym looks away, his mouth flattening. “Forgive me, I’m not proficient enough in magic to describe it well. Some sort of time distortion. Runic magic.”

“And how many times have you encountered their creation?”

Every time he thinks he understands just how much this man knows, how far he can reach into the city, he’s surprised again. Understanding Eshteross is like looking at a mountain shrouded in mist and knowing that he’s missing the peaks and form of its entirety. Eshteross regards him steadily, waiting for his answer.

“Three. Each was–” Orym’s breath catches in his chest, remembering the precise way dying had felt. “Fatal,” he adds in a hoarse voice unlike his own.

“And that will happen when?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Very little time, indeed,” Eshteross sighs and calls for Evelyn.

She appears in the doorway as if she was waiting outside like a sentinel – a revelation about her role in Eshteross’ household that Orym intends to examine further – and looks between Orym’s hand around the parchment and Eshteross’ face before straightening her back.

“You have less time than I initially believed,” he instructs cryptically, looking to Orym’s face as he speaks. “Pay a visit to our friend Kasyr. Offer them double the usual fee – well, you know what to do. After that–”

“I think I’d like to deal with the other myself,” says Orym quietly, reconciling himself to Eshteross contracting the sort of work the bright-eyed Kasyr is known for. Another rock in the mountain coming into focus.

“As you wish.” Eshteross bows his head gracefully in his direction, an inscrutable expression on his face as Orym prepares to leave.

“One last thing,” Orym says with his hand on the door knob. “How long have you known about Dorian?”

He watches carefully as Eshteross decides how much to tell him, sees the moment he makes the decision and knows it will be no comfort.

“Since the beginning,” he answers mildly. “But I wouldn’t take it personally that you didn’t know how apparent it was. I have traveled far more than you, Ashari, and his motives were good.”

Orym was right: Eshteross’ secrets are no comfort to him as he’s walking back the way he came, past the place where he's died twice already. Will die again if he can’t get this right.

Dorian is waiting for him outside the modest townhouse, leaning against the entryway with his arms folded and his head down. “Imogen had another dream,” he says when Orym is close enough that no one but he will hear. “Fearne, too. Laudna’s beside herself – where have you been?”

At some point, Orym had become so used to the predictable nature of these days, knowing precisely what was coming to him next and trying to evade it, that he doesn’t know how to respond to something he didn’t know about.

“I went to talk to Eshteross,” says Orym slowly, beckoning Dorian inside with him. “What happened with Imogen?”

“She said something happened to you last night,” Dorian presses, holding open the door to the stairs for him to ascend. “She and Fearne both said they saw something happen to you in their dreams, and then you were gone when they went to check. Why didn’t you knock on someone’s door before you left? Leave a note?”

He stops a few steps up from Dorian, looks back at him at eye level with his eyebrows up. “You were worried about me.”

“Orym, I’m always worried about you.”

Who does it for you, Orym?

“I’m sorry.” Orym grasps his shoulder in one hand and swallows back the tidal wave impulse to rest his forehead against Dorian’s shoulder. To simply rest for a while, but not just yet.

“Fine.” Dorian’s throat bobs a few times, obviously swallowing the rest of the lashing he’d prepared for Orym. “Yes. You just – you frightened all of us.”

“I’m here now, and you can see that I’m safe and whole.” He doesn’t add that this is only a temporary state, and not one likely to last.

“It’s impossible to be angry at you,” Dorian complains with the flash of a good natured smile. It nonetheless looks a little worn at the edges in a way that makes Orym’s heart flip.

He hadn’t noticed if the others were wearing down from the repeated loops the way he has. It hadn’t occurred to him that it was possible, that he might always have been limited in how many times he could do this, simply by how quickly they might all wear down. That his isn't the only lingering trauma, even if none of the others know why they feel the way they do.

“I need to talk to you,” says Orym, gesturing up the stairs with his head and seeing Dorian’s brow darken. “Tell the others I’m back and meet me in my room alone.”

His expression is unchanged, expressively and obviously worried, when Orym bolts the door behind him a few moments later. Whatever he told the others, it didn’t satisfy any of them, either.

“Can you cast something for a little privacy?” He can hear how the words come out as he says them, but Orym looks up to the ceiling before finishing: “It’s about your family.”

Dorian’s mouth opens and he blanches, his face turning an ashen gray in the exact inverse of his blushes. Then he mutters the invocation for the spell like a command, and the edges of the room shimmer with rapidly dissipating magic.

Something in his demeanor has changed dramatically from the moment he came in, as though Dorian has slipped behind a mask that only looks like a waxy copy of the real thing. His eyes are colder, his mouth set in an unhappy line, one hand settled on his belt in a parody of easiness. Beneath that, Orym can see the slight tremble in his fingertips, the nervous energy emanating from him, signs of the Dorian he knows roiling beneath the surface of this person he doesn’t.

He’s frightened.

Orym remembers Dorian once saying that he’d grown up lonely, and here is the result. All this time Orym thought Dorian had always been papering over his secrets with charming wit, that he’d one day feel comfortable enough to come clean and relax into his real self. Now he knows it was the other way around: the Dorian he knows is real, and this other version of him was the lie until he could become Dorian.

“Someone tried to kill your family last night.” Orym watches Dorian’s eyes widen with – with fear, and something more complicated than that. He hastens to add, “They failed, but they knew you were here in Jrusar, and they sent someone to–”

“To tie off a loose end,” Dorian finishes in a furious voice, turning away from Orym with his face in his hands. After a moment where he doesn't breathe, doesn't move at all, he asks, “They’re okay? My brother–”

“Is alive,” offers Orym in what he hopes is a comforting voice. “That’s all I know. I think they came to make sure you didn’t interfere.”

“They were right. I would have,” Dorian tells him, his voice gone quiet and resolute when he lifts his face and searches Orym’s. “I love my brother, and – and he is the only thing standing between me and something I never want to have to do.”

Orym looks back at him, patiently considering everything he knows about Dorian against everything he's learning now. “I don’t think anyone would accuse you of secretly hoping your brother dies so you can inherit.”

“How do you know this? What did talking to Eshteross – oh, of course.” Dorian looks relieved, then regretful, but Orym thinks that his mannerisms look a little more like himself again. Less restrained.

“I suppose we should have assumed his background investigations were going to be fruitful,” Orym suggests, wondering what notes Eshteross has on him. How one might summarize the complete collapse of another person’s life in a simple notation.

“Are you planning to tell the others?” Dorian sounds brave, but his voice cracks a little at the end, all his fears broken open for Orym to see.

It’s a desperate question, the sort someone asks when they’re afraid of losing everything. Orym has wondered what reasons Dorian might have for lying as much as he does for as long as he’s known him, and now they’re blindingly obvious to him. Not only obvious, but rational. Orym couldn't say what he wouldn’t do to try and keep these friends he’s made. He's already died for Dorian, what else might he do to keep Fearne, or Ashton, or any of the others safe?

Orym crosses the room in a few strides, grabs Dorian by the front of his tunic and pulls him down toward him. It’s awkward, because Dorian is stronger than he is, but he goes anyway, landing on one knee. Dorian immediately pulls Orym against his chest with both arms, his face pressed into his shoulder, pushing ragged breaths into his neck.

“I thought I’d leave that to you to decide,” he says at last, holding him up with both arms and resting his cheek on the top of Dorian’s head. “It wouldn't be my place.”

Dorian sags into him with apparent relief. His expression is tentatively hopeful, and far closer to the Dorian that Orym knows. “What are we going to do?”

Orym likes that. He doesn’t want to do this alone anymore. Doing this with someone, with Dorian, is more than a comfort. He thinks of the night before in the darkness and holds in a shudder.

“I was planning to find the person who came to kill you,” says Orym next to his ear. “And then I planned to make sure they don’t have the chance.”

The intensity of that feeling, the sense that he would do anything, has already done things he wouldn’t have before, sits like a weight on his chest. It doesn’t feel right, but Orym isn’t sure he cares, shoving back at his own rational self-talk that reminds him that he isn’t vengeful.

Sitting back on his heels, Dorian scrubs the heel of his hand over his face again. He doesn’t look like that cold person anymore. He doesn’t look like a prince at all. He just looks like Dorian. Maybe that was always the point.

“I hate that you’ve gotten caught in the middle of this. I hate that this is the way you had to find out about – about me. Why aren’t you angry about that?”

“I can ask questions later. For now I’ll just ask: aside from telling me you were only a gifted lutist, something your swordsmanship made me suspect was a lie – aside from that, did you ever lie to me about anything that mattered, Dorian?”

Dorian blinks back at him a few times at the sound of his name – the name he chose for himself – then looks back down at his hands. He plainly wants to argue every deceptive moment he’s tortured himself for over the past year, but when he looks back to Orym with a stunned expression, he closes his mouth.

“Okay,” Dorian says hoarsely. “Let's get started.”

Rather than the discreet message they received before with instructions on the next job, a small bird lands just inside Orym’s window as the sun disappears that evening. It sings a few notes from Lady of the Squall – a flair for detail that Orym appreciates in Evelyn’s work – and drops a tightly-rolled bit of paper into his hand before swooping back into glowing twilight.

The note is written in Evelyn’s steady, looping script, and Orym reads it twice before closing it up into his hand and heading to Dorian’s room.

Dorian answers the door dressed as he had been the night he came to Orym’s room to ask jealously what he’d needed from Ashton. His hair is loosely braided, the first few buttons of his shirt undone and only half-tucked into his breeches. The sight stops Orym short just inside the door, remembering and wanting.

But Dorian doesn’t seem to notice as he goes about casting his silencing spell without prompting this time, muttering the incantation under his breath as he locks the door behind Orym. “You heard from Eshteross, then?”

“Evelyn, actually.” Orym holds up the paper, remembering the purpose of his visit. “I think her role is a little more loosely defined than his caretaker.”

“That’s often the case,” Dorian says lightly, taking the paper from him. “This is written in…?”

“Halfling. I thought you spoke – how many languages?”

“Seven.” At Orym’s incredulous stare, Dorian shrugs one shoulder. “I’m terrible at most of them. Halfling wasn't considered diplomatically crucial.”

“It’s directions to a house in the city.” Orym reads through it one more time. “It also says that they were able to buy out Kasyr’s contract to–”

“Kill me?”

“It says remove, actually.”

Dorian spares one look out the window of his room, a grim turn to his mouth, then begins pacing again with his arms folded over his middle and his eyes on the floor ahead of him. It's precisely the same way Orym feels, the disquieting sense that something is completely wrong simmering beneath his thinning cover of self-control.

It’s astonishing how much of him makes sense to Orym now, watching him move through the world with a practiced composure, except when he’s out of his element. Orym remembers that he’s only just found out his brother and parents were nearly killed, that someone intends the same for him, and grabs his hand when he passes by him again.

“They’re safe, Dorian. And I’ll do whatever I need to make sure you are, too.”

“It’s not them I was thinking about, actually. They’re – it’s actually a little hard for me to imagine they would ever be in any real danger.” He watches as Dorian looks between their hands and his face, his pulse fast at the base of his throat before he settles on Orym’s face with a clear-eyed stare. “I was thinking about you. Did you want to deal with this tonight?”

Orym’s usual way of things is to confront a threat directly without delay, but all he can think is that it hasn’t worked for him yet. Failure after failure, and now all Orym wants is to have one last night of peace before whatever comes next.

Death has been familiar to him for years, but Orym has tried to peaceably coexist with it without fear. And he is afraid. Maybe not of dying, exactly, because he now knows what that feels like with excruciating familiarity. He’s afraid of not living, of never getting out of this recursive hell to see what may come after.

It feels shameful. It feels like something’s broken, the kind of thing like when his husband died, or when he left home. The shattered things that have permanence, that reshape the directional flow of his life and never come back together.

“No,” is all he says, looking at the floor. “Not particularly.”

He feels Dorian’s eyes on him. “I don’t either.”

“I’m afraid for you,” Orym explains quietly, feeling painfully exposed as he says aloud the one thing pushing him through since that first, awful night. “I don’t want you to die. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Dorian, I–”

“Nothing’s happened yet.” Dorian’s perplexed voice is far further than the ringing in Orym’s ears, but even from this distance it turns horrified. “Orym.”

Hot tears splash the floor beside his boots and Orym stares at them, uncomprehending. It’s wrong, somehow. It seems more likely that the coming rain has broken through time and space and is the cause of the puddle of moisture in front of him. His vision blurs along the waterline of his eyes, and his chest burns with all the things he’s told himself he can’t, won’t, would never let out.

But here they are.

Breathing takes effort he can’t expend, and so his desperate suck for air comes between the silent heaving of his chest that he can’t pull back under his control. He tries to remember when he cried last, if he can remember crying in front of anyone aside from his mother and husband at all.

Orym yanks his hand free from Dorian’s, swipes his palms across his burning cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out, hating the way it makes his throat ache when he does. “I’m so sorry.”

He's sorry because he’ll never be able to explain what the last week of his life has been for him and only him. Because he will be haunted for all his days by these failures, by the ghosts of could-have-been and if only. Because he’s wasted so much time, and now there may be no time at all for them to find out what they might have been.

“Orym, I’m fine,” Dorian insists, but he sounds a little panicked, like Orym’s breakdown is the harbinger of doom he didn’t even know to look for.

Once again, it feels like they’re both holding each other at the edge of an abyss, but rather than teetering one way and the other, waiting to see what the other might choose, Orym doesn’t wait to see what might happen now.

He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees sparks of light against the darkness of his vision and his breathing slows again. Bravery is something that comes easily to Orym, but this is more frightening than any fight he's been in.

“I love you. I wanted loving you to feel certain and secure, but it’s fear and darkness and hope where there’s space between. I don’t like feeling afraid, and I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or if there will be anything after that. I just know that I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

Dorian allows only a heartbeat of silence after he finishes before reaching for Orym. “Then let’s not be alone tonight,” he says, leading him to the bed.

He kneels in front of Orym and begins carefully unbuckling his armor, removing his boots, and setting them to the side in just the way Orym prefers. When he’s finished, and Orym is standing in his bare feet without a shirt, Dorian holds him steady with his hands on his arms.

"I have a few things I should say, too," he says at last, sliding his palms along the curve of Orym’s shoulders to cradle his face. It’s so intensely vulnerable – eye to eye, secrets wrenched out – that Orym feels his eyes welling up again just knowing what’s happening. How hard-won this moment is. How fleeting.

“I have constructed elaborate fantasies about what this moment would be like for months,” Dorian tells him slowly, with the faintest hint of a blush along the pointed tips of his ears. “I wanted – I wanted it to be romantic. I wanted you to feel sure about me. I wanted the air to be clear between us when I did. But instead – I love you. I don't mind if it's messy, as long as it's you.”

“You asked me why I wasn’t angry when I found out.” Orym presses his face down into Dorian’s palms, feeling as though Dorian is holding his whole body upright. “I’m not angry because it doesn't matter. I already know everything I need to know about who you are, and that’s all I want.”

The last thing he sees before Dorian lowers his face to Orym’s is his sky-bright eyes softening.

It’s an entirely different kiss than the last, the only other kiss Orym has had with Dorian. Rather than unresolved tension, it feels grounded and real. Orym sighs between his lips, feeling another wave of tightness in his chest. Rather than the sensation of despair, it’s desperate hope.

He explores the plush swell of Dorian’s lower lip, alternating between a swipe of his tongue along the seam of his mouth and biting at the corner until Dorian chases him down again.

What remains of their clothes goes next, but the shock of bare skin touching hardly feels like a revelation, just the natural result of what they've built together. Even so, it’s as much a stark reminder that they’re alive as Orym climbing over Dorian’s chest so their breath mingles, listening for his heartbeat.

After, when the heat from their bodies dissipates into the night air, Orym folds Dorian’s hands around his own and coils up against his chest so he can watch the rise and fall of it as he falls asleep. The rhythm of it steadies, although Dorian doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.

Neither of them speak a word. Nothing seems like it would fit the moment, and Orym wants to believe that they’re saving things for the future. Something to look forward to.

Let me keep this, he begs into the unforgiving dark before he sleeps. Let this be the one to stay.

Orym wakes into the liminal time between midnight and morning feeling heavy with the relief of dreamless, restful sleep. He doesn’t remember where he is at first, when he is, trying to reconstruct a timeline that means something to him from splinters.

When he finally opens his sleep-crusted eyes and pushes up from his belly, he finds Dorian is sitting upright against the pillows with his hands in Orym’s hair.

Orym collapses face-first back into his lap. He’s in Dorian’s room. Dorian’s bed.

“What time is it?” he asks, circling his arms back to their place around Dorian’s waist.

“It’s still early.” Dorian’s fingernails scrape gently down his nape and an answering shiver crackles up Orym’s spine. “We don’t need to go yet.”

“Oh,” he says, wanting only to stay here as long as he can. “That’s good.”

It’s quiet for only another moment before he hears Dorian ask: “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Orym rolls onto his back so he can see Dorian’s face. Dimly lit by the glowing embers of the fire, his eyes barely seem blue at all.

When Orym doesn’t answer immediately, the corners of Dorian’s mouth drops a little, but he keeps going with his hands: dragging his fingertips in circles against his scalp, pausing only now and then to graze the shell of his ear with his thumbs.

“I’ve never seen you break,” Dorian continues. “Not when you found Bell’s body. Not when Opal put on the crown. Not even when you were in Zephrah again. I thought maybe we could talk about why this – is it because of what happened to your husband?”

It’s reminiscent of that second loop, when Dorian thought Orym was overly worried because of his late husband. And it is that, a little bit. The vestigial aching of grief that never entirely passes on. Orym is still afraid of losing another person he loves, but he hasn't made Dorian any safer by leaving him in the dark up until now. His reasons for keeping silent feel thin and insufficient now. There’s no one who should know what’s happened more than Dorian.

“Not entirely,” Orym answers in a sleep-thick voice, realizing how poorly he’s slept during the loops. He feels like he’s been awake for a week, constantly on watch and terrified. In a way, he has.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. The first time, the assassin succeeded–” He can’t bring himself to finish that sentence. “I don’t know what happened the second and third time. I didn’t live long enough to see.”

Dorian inhales sharply above him, his hands freezing in place when he says, “I think I need you to explain what you mean when you say this isn’t the first time.”

“I don’t understand the magic well enough to explain. That magic was how they caught us the first time, and that – their weapon made it so I looped back to yesterday morning. I kept trying to–”

“Three times?” Dorian’s voice rises loud enough that it rings across the room, his face turning toward the ceiling to cover his expression while he tries recomposing himself.

“Not this part. This is new.” Orym turns his face into Dorian’s bare thigh, inhaling that familiar, petrichor scent he’s loved for so long. “I went to Eshteross this time. I knew the name of the assassin, he knew about your family, and here we are.”

“I didn’t think you tricked me into bed with you, Orym. I’d have gone with you willingly every time, I am completely sure.” His hands are shaking a little when he resumes his gentle stroking, this time down his bicep. “I meant – you died three times?”

Each death flashes behind his eyelids in a blink and Orym feels that dreadful tightness in his chest once more.

“Yes.”

“And you don’t have the weapon that caused the – you called them loops?”

“I imagine it’s in Kasyr’s workshop right now. I thought – well, like I told you: I planned not to let them have the chance to kill you again.” Orym presses a single, warm kiss to the inside of Dorian’s knee and pushes himself up.

Even as he says the words, he realizes what it is about them that feels wrong: this is the sort of terrifying brutality Orym hadn’t known he possessed. Dorian’s expression is stricken when he reaches out and crushes Orym against his chest with his face pressed into his hair.

“We’re not going to do that,” Dorian says quietly. “And neither of us are dying this time. I promise you that.”

They dress in silence a few hours later, when night finally begins turning over to gray dawn. Orym feels bruised and still sensitive from the ordeal of the past few loops. Now that he’s not doing this alone, though, the pain feels less raw, more like the sensation of a bone being set. Sore and aching. Not whole, but healing.

Evelyn’s directions bring them to a secluded neighborhood so high up on the spire that the thick clouds presaging the coming storm feel near enough to touch. Each house has a gated courtyard the size of a large park, sprawling gardens with a maze of bushes, cascading waterfalls splashing over rocky pools, and a winding path to the entrance. At the end of the street, overlooking the city below, is an enormous house with a quartz facade that fades like a ghost into the gloom of the morning. In the sun, it’s likely luminous, ethereal, and unmistakable.

“Typical,” Dorian grunts, eyeing the dew collecting along the tips of his hair as they stare over at it. “My people aren’t subtle.”

“No,” Orym agrees, looking over at Dorian himself and exchanging his fond smile for Dorian’s self-aware one. “This is…?”

“Probably one of the houses for our… oh, a diplomat, I suppose. I can’t imagine my parents ever coming to Jrusar.” He beckons Orym around to one of the side gates hidden in the foggy gloom and tests the lock with his hand, frowning at the cold iron when it doesn’t give.

“I’ve got it.” Orym waits for Dorian to stand aside, taking a moment to scan the area for another person before drawing his sword and cutting through the lock with a swift slash.

“Doesn’t get old,” Dorian mutters as they slip through, closing his fist around the ruined lock to mend it.

Orym stands back to back with him while he works, scanning the courtyard with his sword out. The clouds will help obscure their work, but he feels even more guarded than usual. The idea that there’s no space for mistakes is a grim one, but there's now hope, growing to fill the uncertainty for their future.

“Any last minute advice on what we should expect?” he asks, watching over his shoulder as Dorian finishes with the lock.

“Haughty, superior wind elementals with an enormous stick–”

“I wouldn’t finish that, were I you.”

The voice behind him makes Orym curse, tightening his grip on his sword and wheeling back around to face a tall genasi woman with cloud-gray skin and abundant white hair flowing around her face, as if she’s standing in a breeze he can't feel. Her slim fingers close around the sigil hanging from her neck, and flicker with magic the color and intensity of a midday sun.

“I’d hoped to keep my hands clean of this, but I can make it look like an accident,” she says, her head turning very slightly to one side as Dorian stands with a dark frown. The woman isn’t a stranger to him, judging by the furious twitch at the corners of his mouth.

“I want to be surprised that it’s you,” says Dorian in a voice somewhere between the one Orym knows and that strange, cold one.

“I assumed you would be harder to find, Bronte,” she goes on, and it sounds like a breathy gale whipping against Orym’s face. The woman’s sharp, gray eyes scrape over Orym and, apparently finding him wanting, she gives a disdainful sniff. “Or that you would have enough sense to hide when you heard what was happening. You couldn’t resist, could you?”

“Orym,” says Dorian in his cold, bored voice, his hand reaching around for his scimitar. “I’d like you to meet my cousin, Caecia. My father’s sister’s daughter, here to eliminate a small obstacle and maintain some amount of plausible innocence.”

“How dare you.” Caecia covers astonishment with shocked fury, lightning rippling between her fingertips and striking the ground beside her.

Dorian covers a smile with one hand, looking down to Orym. “She’s offended I broke protocol and presented her to you,” he says, his eyes falling back on her. “Since I’m not sure murder is necessarily offensive to her. I’m disappointed, Caecia.”

“Disappointed?” Caecia regains her composure, the sigil in her hand glowing again. “I wonder how my aunt and uncle felt when they died, knowing you were off gallivanting around this mundane place, selling songs and running errands.”

Whatever Dorian thinks is lost as he keeps his face impassive and lifts his chin. “You’ll have to ask them what they think when you see them again.”

The scimitar comes free of its hidden scabbard and a bolt of arcane lightning from Caecia’s fingertips arcs in their direction, but not before Dorian drops his hand on Orym’s shoulder, releasing a spell of his own with the familiar sense of temporary imperviousness that comes with it. He doesn’t say anything, but – well, it doesn’t really seem to matter between them.

Orym drops to the stone pavers of the garden, rolling close to the ground to avoid the blast. He misses most of it, but hears Dorian’s muffled grunt as it hits him, sending him to one knee. The panicked stab of fear hits Orym in the chest, remembering the knife and the blood, the limp weight of Dorian’s whole body in his arms.

It’s not the same, he reminds himself firmly, shaking off the fear grappling him for control. It’s not the same, because everything about this is different than before.

Rolling through and up to his feet, Orym is aware of Dorian flanking the other side of her, sword drawn and held down as he mutters an incantation. Orym pulls his shield in front of himself, tucking his sword arm close to his chest as he prepares, then springs in the air, unwinding the strike like a windmill.

Caecia looks between them and chooses, turns toward Dorian, and fires her spell point blank into his chest. Orym drops from the air, slashing from one shoulder to the other, twisting his body with the last of his momentum to smash his shield down on her.

Orym wants it to feel satisfying to watch her crumple to the ground, to pull the sigil from her neck and send it flying over the garden wall to the street below. After everything that’s happened, it should feel monumental. Like he’s accomplished something important and final, but it doesn’t. He can only keep thinking of Dorian’s resolute voice earlier that morning, assuring him that neither of them were going to die today.

His sword and shield go to the ground beside Dorian while Orym hauls him over onto his back, hands flying across his chest plate. It’s several seconds before he realizes that Dorian is breathing and that he’s only been stunned. It's longer still before his eyes blink open and follow Orym’s hands as he administers basic field medicine. Dorian looks meaningfully toward Caecia, unable to speak.

Orym thrusts one hand behind him, encouraging vines to sprout from the ground, curling around her wrists and ankles and tightening.

Although Dorian looks stiff and sore when he sits up, he drags himself to his cousin's prone form and adjusts her hair with that complicated, fearful, sad expression again. His fingertips glow with a minor healing spell, the blue-white glow illuminating both of them. For a moment, Orym can even see the resemblance between the two in the ridge of their noses, the spray of thick lashes that frame their eyes.

In his fear, Orym felt a desperate longing for vengeance. What he’d wanted was to find and kill anyone who wanted to harm Dorian, to end the seemingly endless cycle of torture he’s been living. Watching Dorian healing his cousin, what remains of that impulse drains away, only leaving him weary and sad. He knows something of himself he hadn't before from that desire, from the profound longing to live. Orym isn't yet sure what to make of it.

So, he asks Dorian, “What do you want to do with her?”

“If her mother failed to kill my parents and my brother, then the kind thing would be to kill her now,” Dorian answers with a grimace, but he doesn’t look away from Caecia's face. As she begins to stir from unconsciousness, Dorian’s hands glow again and she goes still as magical sleep grips her.

“You don’t want to.”

“No,” Dorian agrees, finally lifting his eyes to Orym’s. “Her father was grasping and power-hungry, and he resented my brother and I ruining his chance to have it. Caecia spent our childhood making it clear she thought she was a better heir than I would ever be, and she was right.”

He waits another moment, then sighs as he stands up, pushing to his knees and then straightening with a grimace of pain. “But there aren’t that many people who understand what it was like for me back home. If I send her back, her death will be a spectacle.”

“And if you let her go?”

“She’ll be exiled, at best. It’s more likely she’ll be hunted down on principle.” Dorian scrubs his hands over his whole face. “This is why I was never going to be a good heir for my brother. There are no good answers for her, and I can't choose which terrible one is right.”

No, Orym thinks. Some things don't have tidy, simple answers. This was never going to end with a clean solution: Dorian's hunter cleanly eliminated, the forces that want him dead utterly defeated, the end of repeated days and a return to the life he had. Not when what he's most wanted most was to finally move on from the things holding him in the past.

Orym managed that much, and something more besides. It's more than enough.

“We don't have to choose for her,” he says, unwinding the vines from Caecia's limbs, helping Dorian lift her into his arms. “But we can give her the same chance the rest of us get.”

If Eshteross dislikes that they’ve brought an angry, powerful elemental wizard to his manor, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he calls for Evelyn to bring tea and a chain enchanted to suppress her magic. It takes the better part of the day to work out a safe house for Caecia among Eshteross’ enormous network of contacts, while Evelyn tends wounds and refreshes the binding spells.

“It’s a shame,” Eshteross says at the end of the day, after talking with Caecia in another room for the better part of an hour. Orym pointedly stayed away, although from his place at Dorian’s side, he sees that he, at least, is possessed by an urgent desire to go to her, to own some amount of responsibility for his cousin and her fate.

Eshteross groans, long and pained, as he sinks into his chair with his cane across his knees. “She’s quite brilliant, beneath that ridiculous, auran arrogance.”

Dorian suppresses a nervous laugh under a cough, holding out a hand to excuse himself. “Yes,” he agrees quickly. “She always was.”

“I understand you may have some reservations about this, Ashari.” His eyes land on Orym. “But, assuming all goes well following her rehabilitation, I would like to reintroduce her to Kasyr under different circumstances than their initial meeting. I had the impression Kasyr quite liked her.”

Orym is surprised how level he manages to keep his stare as his stomach lurches with visceral dislike. These two killed him, killed Dorian, the sort of danger they present could–

Much as he had with Orym and the others, Eshteross has his habit of cultivating promising adventurers and directing them toward his purposes. If he thinks Kasyr and Caecia will serve in some capacity or another, Orym won’t object on the basis of what they’ve done in a life that never came to pass.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Dorian sits up straighter in his chair, staring directly at Orym.

“It’s fine,” Orym answers, looking back with something soft uncurling in his chest. Remembering where he is, he bows his head and adds to Eshteross, “If you think you can keep their combined aspirations from pulling apart the world, then I defer to your judgment.”

Eshteross’ answer is a low, rumbling groan, a little like grudging agreement.

Outside, he can hear thunder rumbling in the horizon and rain beginning to fall. It doesn’t feel anything so ominous as it had that first night. His dread has been replaced with something else. Anticipation, or something like it. The future is waiting ahead for him, whatever it might be.

“We’ll take our leave before the rain gets too bad,” says Orym and finds Dorian already on his feet.

Evelyn waits by the door with an umbrella and hot food packed for them and gives a polite bow when they step out into the steady rain.

It feels familiar, this part. Absent the certainty of death ahead of them, it’s even a pleasant walk for the two of them. The sound of rainwater against the rooftops, gurgling along in rivulets on either side of the street, even the steady drum of raindrops on the hide umbrella are comfortably companionable. Orym hasn't lived this evening before, not like this. Not yet.

"Will you go back?" he asks, thinking of Dorian's distress over Caecia's fate.

Humming thoughtfully, Dorian holds the umbrella so it covers Orym better. “I suppose I'll have to. The only one who could persuade my parents to let Caecia live is my brother, and I'm the only one who could persuade him once he finds out what she's done."

In the middle distance, their ivy-covered house comes into focus. The rain keeps falling, cut with the occasional growl of thunder. They're only a heartbeat from the place Kasyr's assassin came through the first night. Orym looks on to the lights of the house when he asks, "Are you coming back?"

"I don't plan to be there very long, but–" Dorian stops short, waits for Orym to look back before he holds out one hand. "I hoped you would come with me, actually."

“Yes,” he answers, taking Dorian's hand in his and leading him through the night and on home. “Always.”