DRAKENFELL — GAMMA QUARTERS

Gavriel Sterling opened his eyes and thought: what year is it, why does my mouth taste like death, and who drank my whiskey.

The ceiling was familiar. Stone. Dark. Drakenfell. His room. The fire was out. Two empty glasses sat on his nightstand, side by side, one clean and one carrying the residue of whiskey that had been poured and consumed by a person who was gone. A blanket was wrapped around him so tightly he looked vacuum-sealed, which was a design choice he did not recall making.

He was alive. That was new.

Last time he checked, he was dying. Dark magic killing him. Serena’s face swimming above him while his vision went dark. That was the last frame before the movie changed channels into something ten thousand years old and considerably more devastating.

He sat up. His body protested the sitting with the specific stiffness of muscles that had been horizontal for days and were being asked to perform vertical without adequate notice. His joints cracked. His spine popped in three places. His head felt like it had been used as a drum by a creature with enthusiasm and zero rhythm.

Nobody was in the room.

He looked left. Nobody. Right. Nobody. The chair beside his bed was empty, carrying the indentation of a person who had been sitting in it recently and repeatedly. A book was on the seat, face-down, open to a page that had been abandoned mid-read.

The Gamma of Drakenfell had woken up from a coma and nobody was here. No healer, no mage, no friend, no prince, no king.

He had been dying, and then he had been unconscious, and then he had been traveling through past lives, and the welcome committee for his return to consciousness was two empty whiskey glasses and a blanket that had been tucked with aggression.

“Cool,” he said to the room. “Great to be back.”

He stood. His legs held. Barely. The standing was a negotiation between his body’s desire to remain horizontal and his brain’s insistence that vertical was happening and the insistence was final.

He walked to the bathing chamber.

The water was hot. He stood under it and let it run over his body, his head bowed, his hands braced against the stone wall, and his mind went where his mind had been going since his eyes opened.

Tristan Aelindor.

The name sat in his chest like a coal. Still warm. Still glowing. Carrying the residual heat of a life he had lived and a love he had built, all compressed into a vision that had lasted days or hours or minutes, he couldn’t tell, and the telling didn’t matter because the living had been real regardless of the timeline.

He had been a prince. A Fae prince with green eyes and mud on his boots who had found a girl on a rock and decided, at ten years old, that she was his to keep. He had spent a lifetime keeping her.

Nobody would understand it. Nobody would believe it. The vision was so specific, so detailed, so thoroughly lived that describing it would require hours and the describing would sound insane, because the distance between “I had a dream” and “I lived an entire life as a Fae prince who died protecting a woman who is currently my best friend’s mate” was a distance that credibility could never cross.

He kept it to himself. Filed it. The filing was deep, structural, buried beneath the layers of personality and humor and deflection that Gavriel Sterling had been building since childhood, the layers that existed specifically for moments when the thing underneath was too large for the surface to hold.

But fuck, it explained everything.

The draw to Serena. From the second he set eyes on her in Drakenfell, something in his chest had oriented towards her the way a compass orients towards north. Instant. Involuntary.

Deeper than attraction, deeper than friendship, deeper than any word the common tongue had for the specific gravity that pulled a man towards a woman he had never met and could never explain.

He had loved her from the first second because his soul had loved her for thousands of years.

It explained the Scrolls of the First Accord, given to him to hold for Serena.

It explained the instinct to guard Serena that lived in his body like a second pulse. It was memory. His soul remembered carrying a girl through a servant’s entrance and declaring her a citizen. His soul remembered teaching her to climb a wall and catching her when she fell.

His soul remembered every goddamn thing, and the remembering was the engine that had driven every decision he had made since she walked into Drakenfell and his chest did the thing it had been doing since he was ten years old in a different body with a different name.

And the severing.

He turned his face into the water and let it run over his closed eyes.

The fated matebond with Guinevere. The bond he had shattered with the desperation of a man who understood, at a level his conscious mind couldn’t access, that fated ties given by the Moon Goddess were capable of killing the people attached to them.

He wondered how he was still alive, because that would have killed Tristan.

The answer had to be because he was a wolf in this life. Wolf matebond mechanics worked differently than Fae fated ties, similar in some ways, but different in others.

He also was dying last time he remembered. Something to do with dark magic and breaking his matebond. But also very similar to the symptoms Tristan had when he tried to deny his fated tie.

Had he just snapped out of that on his own?

Had the Moon Goddess given him a body where the breaking was possible?

He wasn’t sure.

The theological implications of being given a do-over by a deity who had fucked up the assignment in the first place were above his pay grade, and his pay grade was Gamma, and Gamma pay grade covered military operations and sarcastic commentary, not divine intent.

His wolf was quiet.

Rook had been silent since Gavriel woke up, carrying the specific stillness of an animal surfacing from a long sleep and taking stock of the room before committing to consciousness.

The vision was his. The knowledge was his. The grief and the gratitude and the bone-deep understanding of who he was and why he was here, all of it stayed in the part of his mind that not even his wolf could reach.

He turned the water off. Stepped out. Grabbed a towel.

His shoulder caught his eye in the mirror.

A bandage. White gauze, secured with tape, covering a spot that he did not remember injuring.