Once upon a time, Lyo had asked her if she was planning to fall in love with any more princes. She answered no, and kept her promise in every technical sense of the word until his death.

The problem was, she had never fallen out of love either.

There was a black pearl on the mantle, and Lyo knew just what it meant. He knew, even when Peri sat content and pregnant at the fire, her gaze only straying out the window to the sea when the wind rattled the windows. He knew when his first child burst screaming into the world, when he lay in bed at night with Peri a constant warmth at his side.

Nevertheless, he died happy in the arms of his wife, who loved him with a irreparably divided heart; he slipped from the world with nothing but a sigh, neither enraptured nor afraid.

When his bones were sent back to ashes, scattered through the woods and over the beach, Peri sat in front of the mantle and stared, the sea out her window quiet. She contemplated the pearl for a time, and in the same moment considered herself.

Age had been kind to her. Her eyes were still the clear blue of periwinkles, of the sky reflected in the water, and her hair had gone bone-white, still tangled about her head in a frosty cloud. Her joints did creak, and her hands were rough with work, but she had the same charm about her; what she had gained was mostly wisdom, not wrinkles.
The pearl was like Kir's eyes: tumultous. Blue and black and green and the burgundy of a sunset at sea, all in one silvery-dark sphere, a world within a world.

Come out of the sea
And into my heart
My dark, my shining love
Promise we will never part
My dark, my singing love

And he came. The sea foamed up to her door, and her prince's fishbelly-pale skin emerged; his hair a dark wave, his eyes fathomless. He took her hand, and she followed, the black pearl against her breast, the years falling from her as she became foam and seawater, never to return to the house by the sea.