Seris:
The stars still falling were wild and unafraid, just like Ariane.
A sharp, aching fear ran through me… she was gone.
I stood there, hand half-outstretched, as if the ghost of her touch still lingered on my skin. The air where she’d been shimmered faintly, the only sign she had ever been beside me.
One smile.
One truth.
One touch.
Then nothing, and yet it was everything.
My little eternity had left me; the silence in her absence screamed so loudly I could have toppled from the balcony with the vertigo of it.
I turned with a slowness that felt unnatural—like the world had shifted into some viscous state, each step a labor through thick, invisible mire.
The hall into the dining room still pulsed with blue firelight, but it felt dimmer now, somehow colder without her presen
