Chapter 347 She Begged The Goddess

Tristan made it four steps past the chamber doors before his knees hit the stone.

A dark vein crawled up the side of his neck, the corruption rooting itself beneath his skin, branching at his jaw, forking towards his ear.

He fell to his side, flat on the floor as his body seized.

His eyes rolled. His hands clawed at the stone, and the magic that lived in his blood, the Fae power that had defined his lineage for a thousand years, fought. Green light erupted from his palms in jagged, uncontrolled bursts that scorched the walls and shattered a window fifteen feet away.

“Tristan!”

River sprinted around the corner, her eyes still red, her face still carrying the grief of being called something less than a daughter. The grief evaporated the instant she saw him on the floor.

“Oh gods.”

She dropped beside him. Her hands found his face, turned it toward her, and the sound she made when she saw the dark veins branching across his jaw was a sound that had no name in any language and belonged to every language at once.

“Tristan. Look at me. Open your eyes.”

His eyes opened. The green was fading. The irises were clouding, the color draining outward from the pupils as if the darkness crawling through his veins was reaching for the last bright thing left in him.

“River.” His voice was wrong. Thin. Scraped hollow. “Something is wrong.”

“I know. I see it. Stay with me.”

She screamed for the healers. The scream echoed through every corridor in the palace, and the quality of it, the particular frequency of a woman watching the man she loved die on a stone floor, brought six Fae healers running before the echo finished.

✦✦✦

TRISTAN’S QUARTERS

They gave him a day.

The healers worked through the afternoon and into the evening, their hands glowing with gold Fae magic that fought the dark veins the way a candle fights a storm: valiantly, visibly, and with diminishing returns. The corruption was deep. It had been building for weeks, and the blood magic accelerating it had threaded so thoroughly into Tristan’s soul that removing it without killing him was impossible.

Time sped up, and Gavriel Sterling watched a prince die at double speed.

Nosebleeds that started without warning and refused to stop. Blackouts that lasted seconds, then minutes, then longer. Moments where Tristan’s magic detonated sideways, scorching bedsheets, cracking the stone beneath his bed, filling the room with the smell of ozone and something darker, something rotting, the scent of Fae power being consumed from the inside.

River stayed. She held his hand through every seizure, every blackout, every moment where his body convulsed and his magic tried to tear through the walls. The healers told her to leave. She refused with a look that ended the conversation before it started.

Atlas stayed. The Fae King sat in the chair beside the window, his posture carrying the weight of a father watching his son die and understanding, with the strategic mind that had held a kingdom for thirty years, that the dying was political in a way that couldn’t be solved by holding a hand.

The head healer delivered the assessment.

“The fated tie between the prince and Vesper Willow has been tainted by his refusal to accept her. He has a day. Perhaps less.”

River’s hand tightened around Tristan’s. Her knuckles went white.

Atlas said nothing. The nothing was louder than anything the healer had said.

✦✦✦

TEMPLE OF THE MOON GODDESS

River went alone.

White stone, open to the sky, a crescent altar carved from a single piece of moonstone that glowed faint silver in the dark.

The priestess was there. She was always there. Old enough that her age was a rumor rather than a fact, her white robes catching the wind, her silver eyes reflecting the moonlight.

River knelt at the altar.

“Please.” Her voice cracked on the word. “Tristan is dying. Please. Tell me how to save him.”

The priestess was silent for a long time.

“The fated tie must be consummated.” The priestess’s voice carried the resonance of a vessel. “Release him, child. Let the tie to the Willow woman be recognized. His soul will heal. It is the only way the corruption will recede.”

The words sat on the altar between them and neither woman moved.

River pressed her forehead against the cold stone. Her tears fell on the moonstone, and the altar absorbed them the way altars absorb all offerings: silently, without acknowledgment, without promising anything in return.

✦✦✦

TRISTAN’S CHAMBERS

River entered with two elders and Atlas.

Tristan was conscious. Barely. The dark veins had spread from his neck to his collarbone, threading across his chest in a pattern that looked deliberate, designed, as if the corruption was building architecture inside him rather than destroying what was already there.

River took his hand.

“Tristan, I’m sorry. This is the only way to save you.”

His eyes opened. The green was nearly gone, replaced by a dull gray that had no business existing in the eyes of a prince who had been lit from the inside since the day he was born.

“No.”

“Please, Tristan. You have so much life left to live—”

“I heard you leave. I know where you went.” His hand tightened around hers with a strength that his body should have been incapable of producing. “I know what they told you, and the answer is no. I built this, River. I built it with my hands. Every day. On purpose. The way I told my father I would.”

“You are dying.”

“Then I die chosen. I die yours.” His jaw set with the particular stubbornness of a boy who had once declared a six-year-old’s birthday into existence and had never once in his life accepted that the world could override his decisions. “I would rather be dead and bonded to you than alive and bonded to a woman I was never given the chance to refuse.”

“Tristan, please—”

“I would find you every time, River. I said that on a wall when I was twelve years old, and I meant it then, and I mean it now, and I will mean it dead.” He pulled her hand to his chest. The dark veins pulsed beneath her fingers. “Do you feel that? That is my heart. It still beats for you. It will beat for you until the corruption takes the last of it, and when it stops, the last sound it makes will be your name.”

River broke.

She collapsed forward onto his chest and sobbed with a violence that shook the bed, her fingers fisting in his shirt, her tears soaking through the fabric.

The sound that came out of her was so raw and so broken that Gavriel Sterling, standing invisible in the corner of the room, had to look away.

He couldn’t.

He watched. Because this was his soul. This was the life that had made him. And the man dying in that bed was the man he had been, and the woman crying on his chest was the woman he had spent every life since trying to find again.

Tristan’s hand came up. His fingers slid into her white hair, the way they had on a midnight corridor when he finally kissed her, the way they had on every night since, and he held her against his chest and let her cry.