Considering this is meant to be a collection of short stories this is almost ridiculously long in comparison. It's also technically cheating a bit because this takes place a good while before Kawaakari Academy is even built. On top of that, this story is one of the weirdest here because it's abstract in a lot of places, not least because of my decision to barely use any names in the narration. Don't ask me why I did that, but I have to say I do like how it turned out.

Anyway, I should also say that this is one of the angstier stories in the collection by far. It also comes with potential trigger warnings, and as with the older stories in this collection where that applied, I'll put the specifics in the author's note at the bottom of the story for anyone who might want to have that information to hand.

He's never really thought about children before.

Of course, he has been around children. He, himself was once a child, though it is not a time he remembers with the rosy-hued fondness that is usually reserved for childhood memories. She herself was once a child, but she too does not have any fondness for that time. Indeed, he knows full well that she would rather not remember her childhood at all. They may as well have not ever been children before, so lacking in warmth those times had been. And though they have found the warmth in each other now, found everything in each other as they walk their way through life they have never thought themselves ones to have children. Why would they? It is not as if they really have the desire to do so. Not in this life, where they are warriors who answer to nobody but themselves and their missions.

So, he has never had any reason to think about children. He has been around them, plenty of times. He has seen them stare up at him and her wide-eyed with admiration, hiding behind their mothers' skirts or fathers' legs when they realise they've been noticed. He has held the babies of admiring parents as thanks for services rendered, disasters averted. It makes him feel good, admired. It cements the image of him and her as wild heroes and cements their glory. It does not make him someone who could be a parent himself. If he had ever thought about it before, really thought about it, then that was what he would have said. It is what she would have said too, he knows.

Yet, one spring morning, he wakes up to see that she is watching him thoughtfully. He senses a question in her, but she does not ask it aloud and neither does she let him read it from her mind. Rather she waits for him to sit up in their tent and face her fully before taking his hand and pressing it flat against her belly. For a moment, he doesn't understand and then he feels it. The quickening. Two tiny unfurling lives.

And suddenly, for the first time, they both have to think about children.

…

To her, the problem is not whether or not to keep the children. When she realised that her body had created these two lives, it was early enough that to unmake them would be a relatively quick and painless affair. When she realised, she already knew that she could not do such a thing. They both knew it. It might have been unexpected, but the joy of it, of knowing that they, together, have created new lives that already are the best of both of them means that it is not something that they regret. They might not have particularly wanted children but these ones, they do, almost more than anything.

So no, the problem was never whether to keep them or not. The problem is how.

They have nobody in their lives, really. There are people they encounter regularly, contacts in the Imperial family and across the various regions of the land whom they cooperate with in order to carry out the missions they acquire. They have the loyalty of many ordinary citizens, who are either too awestruck or too fearful to do otherwise. But they have nobody else, only each other. They will have others to love one day, for he has shown her the threads of fate but those bright lives so very, very far away. Now, they only have each other. Most of the time, that works perfectly well. Since meeting they've never needed another person, not really. They have become everything to each other, absolutely everything. They have each other's backs on turbulent battlefields, they comfort each other and heal each other's injuries. She makes him feel brave and he makes her feel safe. He is the only one who is not afraid of her and she is the only one who takes his unusually potent powers in her stride. When it is just each other, everything is perfect. They need no others. But now there are children, it is a different matter. It is no matter that they have barely started growing but they are children still. They need more than two wandering warrior parents.

Yet there is nobody else that they can tell, not really.

Yes, there are those bright lives that they have seen in their fate, who will be theirs forever one day. Amethyst, cobalt, emerald, leaf. Flame, amber, bronze, scarlet. Lemon yellow, pastel pink, and more besides. It is enough to be something more than comradeship, more than family. Everything, really. Yet they are so very, very far away. She would have asked him how far away, except he cannot tell her as she knows full well. He is no overseer, no Lesser God who has domain over aspects of fate. All he can do is see fate and show it to those with the appropriate power for sight, like her. It is possible that if those coloured threads were to meet theirs now that they'd be the family that their two children would need, but they won't be. There is no sense in relying on something impossible. But even if they had those other people to rely on, they would not be able to rely on them for this.

Not when their two children are not any two children, but two daughters. Twin daughters.

They all know the stories about the misfortune twin daughters bring. They all know how to keep watch in those instances where a blood mother is found to be carrying two lives, staying vigilant for any signs that both the lives are female. If it is just one that's a girl, that can be accepted but two girls, together? Never. If they can spot it early, and un-make those lives before they are close to forming then they can do that. If they're spotted early, then it is an easily solved matter, an easily forgotten loss. But later, as they get closer to being born, it is a much more painful but just as necessary matter.

It is just as painful if the twin girls are not spotted before birth and therefore actually born. She knows this well. When she realises her twins are females, the memory of tiny wails piercing the sky is fresh in her mind from a favour done for a member of the Imperial Family the previous moon. She remembers how they had taken the children to a valley shrine not only to protect the blood mother's reputation but also to spare her from having to see. After all, as she now knew well, a baby was still a baby to a parent no matter what darkness they held. Still, at the time it had not sickened her to swing the blade. She had looked away, sure. She had buried them tenderly afterwards and whispered one more prayer than necessary to send their unformed souls to the Other Side. When the two of them had returned to the parents, she had offered a condolence despite the sideways look the priest had given her for doing so. But she had not had any regret over it; she hadn't been repulsed at the fact that she had slain an infant. It was, after all, what was necessary in order to preserve light and if there was anything the two of them truly answered to, it was that directive. Preserve the light, no matter what.

But now, now it is different.

She does not care what darkness will fall from letting them exist. She cannot let the same thing happen to her two little girls. And there is no way around it apart from keeping them secret. In that, they only have each other.

They use everything they can think of. They often use attention-deflection spells and charms of various kinds to aid them in moving through spaces undetected, but they employ these in greater force. Though it will be a long time before her body even vaguely begins to show the signs of their daughters' lives she adjusts her dresses to hide her shape, changes the type of armour she uses in the situations that call for it, sews more charms into the fabric to further deflect attention. She considers every action carefully, makes sure that nothing she does could be interpreted in such a way that would lead people to the truth. She does not even betray a glimmer of interest in motherhood.

Of course, the burden is not hers alone. Some of it is, in a way, for it is only her body who carries them and changes as they grow. But his and her hearts and minds share the load equally, and now he is even less inclined to leave her side. More inclined to take any threat to her seriously, perceived or otherwise. They both also withdraw a little from the world-they are wild things, after all, answering to nobody but each other. Those who know of them have come to understand this, and they know full well that being unreachable is something expected of them. He is taking the lead in looking for somewhere for the two of them to go when the time comes that they need somewhere safe and hidden away to settle, but in the meantime they wander more than they usually do. They fulfil their duties, naturally, but they do not stay in one place for nearly as long as they used to (not that this was very long in the first place). They do not give people the time to look at her and to wonder. He helps her to further cement their reputation, too, as a fierce and fearsome unit, as an untouchable pairing. To toe the line between admiration and terror so that they think twice before crossing them. Reputation is armour too, after all, and they'll both take any armour they can get for their slowly growing girls.

And so the days and the weeks and eventually the moons begin to pass. They continue on like this, and it is not easy, but it is worth it. It is worth it, and they put everything into it. They do not think about after, when their girls are finally born and she can hold them both to her. They just concentrate on continuing on to get to that point.

Because they will. They are sure of it.

…

Despite only concentrating on getting to that point, they cannot help but dream a little bit. Mostly, they wonder about what their girls will end up looking like. For him, it is both straightforward and non-specific: he wishes them to look as different to each other as possible. For them each to inherit different features from far-back generations of their blood families and to not even look like sisters. For her, however, it takes her some time before eventually one day she had decided:

"I want them to have your face. Your eyes, your smile, your charm. I want them to beguile, not taunt. It is easier to exist in the world with a face like yours, it will be easier for them to exist in this world if they are softer. But I want them to have my hair. My horns."

For some reason, he'd started laughing at this, which had made her pout and say:

"What? I like my hair."

He'd continued laughing, and she'd ended up laughing too and they had not just imagined what their girls would look like but also one day telling them about this little moment. For their girls will be world-changing creatures, not just for being twin sisters in a world that will fear them and hunt them down but also for the blood of their parents. They have already changed both their worlds, after all. But they will also be little girls, who deserve stories like this to help them understand that right from the beginning they were adored and that they always will be. So they do talk about the future, in little snatches like that but more importantly, they decide upon their girls' names.

They consider names that come from light itself, such as the names of rulers past and the potential rulers of the future, but that does not feel quite right. Neither of their girls are darkness, they know and believe this, but still it does not feel right. So they turn to the colours of light instead, to lotus pink and to pale sunny yellow and to pure white. And, above all, to silver and gold. Rather than a light sister and a dark, instead they will have a silver and a gold.

Eun and Aranka are the names they settle upon eventually, after having sifted through all languages and all their variations. Eun, and Aranka. Aranka, and Eun. Names that are said together and that stand as a unit the way their own names do. But names that stand up alone, too, though neither girl will be alone if they can help it.

They seal the promise of those names in the same valley where they killed a pair of twins the moon before Eun and Aranka's creation. The names light the air up goldsilver, silvergold. The vividness is an apology not just to the babies buried there, but to all that had come before the world over. But it is so much more than that. It is a wish, a hope.

A prayer.

…

It is a prayer that goes unanswered, of course.

He supposes he should have realised it sooner, really. On that goldsilver, silvergold night he had looked up at the sky and looked for their fates, feeling sure that now they had been named that their threads could begin their weaving but he had not seen any at all. He had seen his and hers, practically the same thread. He had been able to follow it right the way to the comrades he knows are in their future, though not right to the end. But he had not seen Eun there. He had not seen Aranka. But he had not been able to believe it, he was just convinced that perhaps these were two fates that could not be seen just yet, that because it was still a while before they were meant to be born that there was still time. A side of him knew this was foolish, the side that he has kept secret even from her for all this time. There was a side of him that perhaps already did realise but he ignored it. On that night he ignored it, concentrating only on watching the stars with her, making her smile, feeling their daughters' lives as they continued to grow. He ignored it on all the other nights, too, focusing only on moving forward and moving to safety as they had been all this time.

But then he cannot ignore it any longer.

It happens during what is supposed to be a normal day for them, dealing with raiders who are plundering a city and causing general trouble. The gang is large, and particularly vicious, and it seems like a particularly involved job. It doesn't worry him at first when they lose sight of each other, for he can reach out in his mind to check for her while they fight to get the situation under control and so he does that. So he continues to apprehend and hand over the raiders to the city gaolers, continues to rescue innocents and put out fires while he senses her doing the same in other sections. He senses her, and occasionally reminds her to be careful and smiles to himself when she scoffs at his worry. He does all that, until he doesn't.

He doesn't, because suddenly, he can no longer hear her.

And he calls and calls her name both in his mind and with his voice and he cannot find her. He ties up his duties with a carelessness unusual for him as he tears through the city and searches for her. Images begin to flood into his head, along with pure emotion. Distress, pain. Fear but not for herself, only the babies and oh, the pain. It is enough to make him double over as though it is his body experiencing it but he refuses to give into it. He just keeps going, trying only to convey that he is there and that he is coming, letting the images come in fast and thick until finally, finally he can glean clues from them.

He flies the rest of the way, to a house on the outskirts of a city, hidden in shadows with no lights on, a sight which makes him smile savagely as he concocts tales. If he spins this right, he can get them arrested as heretics and nobody will believe what they might say about him and her. He crashes in through an open window, prepared to put the fear of the Goddess into them but he sees her right there, skirts soaked in blood and skin soaked in tears and sweat as she kneels, trying to scoop up what remains of their twins from the wooden floor. When he sees that, he goes to her immediately and gathers her close, turning her head away from the carnage of incomplete lives. He closes his eyes and concentrates hard, calling right down to the power deep in the center of him. The secret side of him that he does not call on often-that of the Goddess dwelling within him. He calls to her and demands that Goddess make something happen and she does. Or he does, he supposes idly in the moment that they blink away in a flash of light.

But not before a fire springs up, swallowing the building with it.

When they arrive at the place he suspected he would end up, something in him loosens. Nobody will find them up here, for there is nobody who can come up here, not even a Lesser God. He coaxes her to a river, sits them both down by it. He finds himself describing it to her, for her gaze is utterly sightless. Though agony is carved into her features she barely blinks or reacts and he has to listen closely to be sure that she is breathing at all. She allows him to clean her but only because she is not present enough to do it herself. She just slumps there, her mind clearly somewhere very far away, a shadow of the person she usually is. That glorious, beautiful person who may as well also be a part of him too, for how much she is to him. That fierce, fearsome being who shocks and inspires him but is somebody he's never, ever been afraid of. Never will be afraid of and yet now, here he is, afraid for her. He can barely process it yet, his own grief for their unmade daughters. So all he does is concentrate on trying to put her back together again.

But as he cleans the blood off her hands, he notices something clumped in it, something that feels soft under the stickiness and he takes extra care, piling up the clumps carefully and setting them aside while he finishes cleaning her. He helps her change clothes and then gets her to curl up in their tent and sleep before he takes the clumps to one of the streams and carefully begins to wash them off. It is a thankless task, the material so small and fragile he struggles to keep a hold of them but gradually the red whirls away and disappears in the water and leaves him with small, colourless threads. It takes him a moment to realise that they are hairs. Tiny little hairs.

After checking on her to make sure that she still sleeps, he takes the hairs to a shady corner and uses his magic to dry them out almost one at a time, using a containment barrier to prevent sudden breezes from taking any. Then he gathers them into two bundles, holding one in each hand, clasped tightly between his fingers as he considers them both. He cannot tell which hairs would have been Eun's, which ones Aranka's. Even when he holds the bundles against the sunlight, he cannot tell. He cannot even tell what colour their hair would have become had they had the chance to actually be born. All he can do is imagine and weep, and when his tears are done he goes back to watching over her.

…

For what feels like the longest time she feels like she is in a fog. Thick and grey and choking, robbing her of all her words apart from her daughters' names. Eun, Aranka. Aranka, Eun. Every movement is an effort, even moving her mouth. She can only just whisper their names over and over, but the sentiments that they stand in for would be so much more expansive if only she could fight through it. Yet, though everything around her feels thick and her belly feels unbearably hollow and empty, she knows she is not alone. She is only able to reach out to him once in the fog to ask, where are we and then to lash out and rasp why didn't you bring us here sooner when he gave her the answer. The venom of those words came back to sting her harder and she found herself retreating further into the fog but even so. Even so, he is there, steadfast. He feeds her and cleans her and sings to her, he strokes her hair and kisses her forehead and waits by her side until finally one day. He is the only reason that she has a fighting chance against the fog and therefore slowly, slowly, it clears away. Her sight returns, her limbs begin to feel normal. For the first time in a long time, she is able to sit up and she looks all the way around her at the way the sky completely surrounds them, stars swirling like glitter in water, at the softness of the clouds floating in reach (when she does reach out, her hands actually briefly make contact with something cottony before it dissipates and reforms elsewhere). She stares at the blue-blossom trees and the rivers and their tent, pitched some distance away from where she now sits.

And then she stares at the box lying beside her in the grass and she picks it up. She smells the magic coming off of it and she peers through the window inlaid in the wood, at the two locks of colourless hair tied with ribbon. It is a simple box, very few decorations and clearly handmade but still the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. His presence is all over it, bringing with it images of him sitting cross-legged on this very grass and hunching over it, carving and slotting the parts together.

"Ah, you are awake at last."

Awake feels a funny way to put it. She does not feel as if she slept at all but she manages a thin smile for him as he comes to sit down, firewood in one hand and the results of a hunt in another. But rather than light a fire he kneels in front of her and places his hands atop of hers, curled around the box.

"This is all I could do. I couldn't find you sooner. I wasn't able to think of this place sooner. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry that my body could not hold them long enough for us to get away, for them to be born."

She wants to cry, but she does not. She does not cry but they sit like that for a long while before he lets go and begins the preparations for their dinner. The first thing that she's actually been able to taste in a while, it is a novelty, as is being able to clear up afterwards. She is still weak what with the hollowness in her belly and the aching lower down, but she is glad to no longer be helpless. They do all this in silence and it is only afterwards she asks him for the details. That they try to puzzle out what it is that went wrong, that somebody figured it out and came after her for it. Did someone overhear them whispering their daughters' names? Were their spells not quite robust enough? They cannot quite pinpoint exactly how they failed, just that they did.

He weeps, and she laments, both in that moment and in the days and the weeks after. That time pulls by in a lazy, melancholy gaze as she gradually regains her strength. They idle their days away, exploring the place that he calls the Floating Gardens, looking down at the world from above and marvelling at it. They try and find comfort in each other, and find that and moments of pleasure too. The grief they hold in them is so strong that it could have broken them apart but they both vow over and over that it will not, that even if their worlds will never be goldsilver, silvergold ever again that they will always have each other. Gradually, the time comes for them to return to the world and they do just that.

For the most part, they carry on as they always have. After returning to the scene of their loss just to be sure that those who killed their daughters really did burn down with the house (they did), they move on to new missions, new adventures. But they pour more into it. Just as they did back when they thought to cement their reputations to protect their daughters, so they cement their reputation as a unit. Untouchable, unknowable, inseparable. They make it so that most of the world will not remember that once they had separate lives, and that for those who do they stop and blink and wonder at it, and decide that it is foolishness that once they worked separately. They make it so that when the world thinks of one of them, they always think of the other, that their names are uttered in tandem. Him and her. Her and him. If they were everything to each other before, they are so much more than that now. They still look to those bright threads in their future but they continue to only need each other.

The world is becoming a more dangerous place, as new knowledge about the Forgotten Goddess emerges and heretics become an ongoing problem. It makes their own lives more turbulent, things more dangerous. They face more difficulties and ordeals, though nothing is as painful as the loss of their daughters, something which they keep secret at all costs. Still, in so many ways despite the increased intensity and the winds of change heralding something dramatic on the horizon they really do carry on as they had before Eun and Aranka were even ideas. This includes quests for Lesser Gods, long arduous journeys that often intersect with other missions, other interests. It is one such mission that ends up providing them with a strange gift, some years after they have lost their children.

In this one, she had let him lead the way, for though the Lesser Gods in question were the one who'd contributed to her upbringing it was he who always had an instinct for anything to do with Akari. He, after all, had been the one to think of taking her to the Floating Gardens to heal, who had regretted that he'd not thought of that place as a safe haven for their daughters. It had been an easy enough undertaking, and they were soon on their way back with bagfuls of old and precious artefacts. As they'd made their way back up to the Central Mountains to the cavern where the Lesser God waited, she'd firmly tucked the thought away, constructed as many shields around it as possible. She knew they would notice, but to hell with that, she thinks. She did not want them to know anything of Eun and Aranka, not one little thing.

They won't, he says in her mind, having sensed the hard work going on in her mind as they climbed. I promise.

I know.

Then, they were there and they each had to make good on that promise. So they wait to be admitted into the cavern. It does not take long, and as soon as they are within it they bow respectfully and lay each artefact down. They then step back as the Lesser God, a goddess whose name meant bringer of death came forward. As The Lesser God inspected each one they waited, breath bated. The moment stretches before they then swirled a silver-blue cloud around each one, making them disappear.

"My husband," they say in a dark-honey voice, referring to the Lesser God who governed the dead who were not yet on the Other Side. "Will be grateful. His duties will be so much more effective now these gifts have been rightfully returned. Akari would not have wanted them out in the world for any old hands to touch, would she now?"

A meaningful look is given to him, and he stiffens very slightly before nodding. The Lesser God nods back.

"Of course, most who would have tried would surely have only hastened the end of their mortality, wouldn't they? But you are not most. And speaking of which, there are some who you had to send to their end in order to return what was ours, no?"

"Yes."

It was not a question that needed to be asked, and she knew that the Lesser God was getting at something. She waited it out, and sure enough after a moment of gazing at them (almost right through them both), the Lesser God smiled. They raised their hand in the air and then closed her eyes. It was clear that the Lesser God was communicating with someone. After a few moments, bright light of a colour that could not be described appeared around their raised hand, gathering and tangling like thread before aiming it right at the two of them.

Instinctively, they draw closer to each other, but when they attempt to cast a spell of their own, they find themselves frozen. Panicked, their eyes meet each other when the Lesser God laughs.

"You cannot move, do not worry though. For this is your reward, don't you know?"

"Our…reward?" she asks.

But the light starts to fade, and as she blinks her way out of it and lets it settle against her skin as she regains her motion, she realises she thinks she knows. Even before the Lesser God says it, she thinks she knows. Yet it does not lessen the shock when the answer is spoken:

"Their lifetimes, added to yours."

"We are immortal now?" she asks, slowly.

The Lesser God tips back their head and laughs:

"Do not be so silly, not yet. But hopefully, this will give you enough time to lose your mortality, I hope. After all, you have such an interesting thread of fate, don't you? It would be a shame if it was cut short before you had the chance to really weave it."

She looks at him, and he looks at her. He reaches out to grab her hand. The Lesser God looks between them.

"I trust you will be pleased. With such time on your hands, you will surely become great. You will have glory that is almost on our levels-"

Glory, she wants to scoff, do you really think that is the only thing we care about? If I could have looked after Eun and Aranka long enough for them to be born, we would gladly have lived out an ordinary amount of mortal days. The thought stays locked behind shields and other spells, safe in the corner of her mind but it burns and slams at the walls of hit nonetheless, it rages. The Lesser God fixes their eyes on them and pauses. Then, they look to her in particular and say:

"Perhaps, in some ways, it will make up for all in your life that you could not gain with your powers already."

The look is another of the type that stretches out for moments, one that turns her cold. That she forces to make her seem cold, because even worse than the possibility of this Lesser God knowing is them knowing that this realisation is one that upsets them.

But before she can consider it properly, they are being sent out. She lets go of his hand to be able to navigate her way back down the mountain better, but grabs it again the moment she reaches the ground again. To her surprise, he tugs away, only to then gather her in a tight embrace.

"Cry, if you need to."

"I do not cry."

"I know. But nonetheless."

"I do not cry."

But nonetheless, she buries her face in his chest for a moment before shifting around so that she leans against him, looking up at the sky. Night has fallen, and the stars are out. Here on the Central Mountains, so too are the threads of fate, made clear by the specific make-up of the magic of the deities populating this place, of the plants and potions brewed here. All the threads are bright but it is theirs that shines the brightest, of course. So very, very bright, especially at the end when they run side-by-side with so many other colours.

Yet, even with the added weight of extra years of life, those colours seem so very, very distant.

…

Time continues to go by, and he suspects that the Lesser God had lied to them when they had said that the lives added to theirs would not yet make them immortal, for as decades go by they do not age one whit. They do not age, but the world seems to do so rapidly, the throne continually changing as more and more people preach of the Forgotten Goddess and conflicts break out each and every day. The two of them make a particular point of carefully forging allegiances with the Imperial family even as it fractures and splinters, while at the same time making it clear they work only for themselves and for the light.

He also makes a point of spreading rumours, whispering that twin girls do not need killing, only separating. On the few other occasions when they are called to a birth he spreads those whispers and instead of taking the twins to a valley or a high mountain to slay them the two of them will leave them on doorsteps of orphanages, of households who they hear longing for a child. It is he who takes the lead in this, though she too spreads whispers and erases memories of those too staunchly traditional to consent to giving those little children a chance at life. With so many stories of discord and strife emerging across the land, this shift goes slowly, unremarked-upon for the most part. It makes little impact, and as she often says it does not change anything for their beloved Eun, their precious Aranka. Nonetheless, he in particular persists in it and takes satisfaction when the ideas take on roots of their own and he can step back and let the rumours grow alone.

Sometimes, in between all this, they return to the floating gardens for a semblance of peace. One time, he spends an age making silver and gold crowns twined with rosebuds and blossoms and engraved with runes and they wear them together to further seal their bond, but all the other times they go up their simply to carve out snatches of time to just be. Outside of that however their days are strife and conflict and ever more dizzying feats and horrors. So it is inevitable when one day while making arrests at a heretic shrine that an Imperial messenger finds them with a summons from the current emperor and empress. The two of them have been ordered to go and have an audience with them with some urgency, in regards to the heresy. The two of them happen to know both the emperor and the empress, having undertaken missions for them before, although this will be the first time they do so for them as rulers. Feeling war brewing on the horizon, they naturally agree and after clearing out and ritually purifying the heretic shrine, they set off.

…

That night, they stay in palace rooms, so that they can have their audience with the emperor and empress in the morning. It is one of the occasions they are given separate rooms, but he does not fuss. Rather, he prepares himself as if he is going to bed and instead gazes out of the window. It is not the scenery that interests him though, all sculpted bushes and high fences that (for now) keep the unrest at bay. Rather, it is the sky, that clear glittering expanse. Standing here on his own, it is not so special.

What it is, though, is a sky good for viewing fates.

But that will not be special on his own, either.

So he picks up his cloak and wraps it around his shoulders and then leaves his room. Hers is just across from him, and rather than knock he simply pauses and tilts his head to the door. After a moment, he pushes it open and steps into the room, closing the door behind him.

She is also looking through the window, having drawn up a chair to do so more comfortably. Or at least she is until he comes in. Then, she turns to look at him. The box with their daughters' hairs is in her hands, glowing bright enough that it is the reason she has not lit any other lamps in the room. It is not quite goldsilver, silvergold and he knows it never will be. So he does not say anything initially and instead crosses the room and opens the window to better see their fates.

When he has swept his hand across the sky, he rests his hands atop the windowsill briefly, then sticks them in his pockets while waiting for the threads to appear. So many threads of different colours, all glittering, but none of interest to him. All those fates being woven by hands unseen, everywhere. Then, gradually, the gold of their own thread becomes clearer, shining brighter than all the rest. He wonders which hands are weaving those threads, so tightly intertwined for so very long they may as well have always been one. In this stretch of sky, he cannot even look far enough to find the points at which they were once two separate threads. That is how it should be. He does not want to see it.

"Aranka and Eun were never there." He murmurs.

He turns away from the threads for a moment to meet her eyes. He bends slightly and reaches out to wipe away the tears that he sees there but there is no need, for they do not fall. They never fall. He touches her face anyway, and after putting the box in her lap she covers his hand with one of hers for a moment before using her other to point out of the window.

"I know. But look who is there."

He frowns at her, she smirks. A beat passes, then another before his gaze returns to the sky and to their fate. He follows the line of their intertwined thread but not to the obscured beginning but in the other direction this time. At first, he cannot see what she is talking about and then suddenly he does and he wonders how it is he didn't.

Amethyst, cobalt, emerald, leaf. Flame, amber, bronze, scarlet. Lemon yellow, pastel pink, and more besides. They do not intertwine with them, not even slightly but they run close together, side by side and they do so for so long that the end, too, is something that disappears beyond his sight.

Them.

It is them. The other people that have always been a part of his fate, just as much as she has. The ones who have been a part of her fate as much as he has. He still knows that even if he was to reach out again to touch, to call upon those of his powers that come from the goddess that he would still not be able to see their faces, to learn anything else about them. Not just yet. But even so…

"They're closer now." He says, understanding.

"They are, aren't they?" she comments. "Whatever it is that we will be tasked with tomorrow, that's the how of it, isn't it?"

"I can only assume so."

"I try to not wonder, it's pointless really but…despite the ways of this world, if we had them all now do you think they would have loved our daughters?"

"Yes."

As soon as he says this, he taps his hand against the windowsill and then looks at her.

"Do you want to? Tell them, I mean?"

She considers and then shakes her head.

"I don't know. Even if they will be there forever, they weren't there to remember a time that we were waiting for Eun and Aranka to be born. They weren't there picking the pieces up afterwards."

"That's hardly their fault."

"Yes, but…well, if we had our daughters, would they even be…"

She gestures to the colours. Despite them being so high above they seem to dance across her hand and she closes it into a fist as if she is clasping them, seeming surprised when that doesn't work. For a moment she looks just like she did back then when she was overcoming the worst of the pain and still barely able to sit up. The moment passes quickly however, and though she does not gather her coldness about her she is resolute again.

"We were never meant to have Aranka. Never meant to have Eun. But these people, whoever they are…what if they feel like second best even though they are the ones we're meant to have?"

"That's…"

"You love them already, don't you? We haven't yet met them but you already love them, just as we loved our daughters."

He nods simply. It is not a sentiment that needs voicing. It is already too potent. He yearns for them, these people he has not met yet, with the yearning of two people. There is, however, something else he needs to voice:

"It's still separate, though. And look, they're with us right until the end. I do not think that it would hurt them to hear of the loves we had with our girls, the dreams we had when we thought they'd at least live to take a single breath in this world. Don't you want to hear it, one day?"

"Hear what?" she frowns at him.

"Their names in someone else's mouth."

She blinks at him, and lowers her eyes. He kneels down by the chair so that he can take the box from her lap. He remembers every moment spent carving it and more than that, he remembers each tiny moment spent getting the contents of the box, frailer than dandelion seeds. It is not fair that this is all that's left of their little girls, that and the pain. Not even a few stitches of fate. And with all their murderers now rightfully dead there is nobody left to remember them, not even in rumours.

He wants someone else to remember them.

But then he imagines himself sitting in front of those people. He imagines them in a room like the one the two of them are in now, some in chairs and some on the floor, and even a few on the bed while the two of them stand by the window. And despite how much he wants their daughters' memories to live on in a way they themselves did not he is seized with panic at the thought. His insides curdle, burning with the same white-hot guilt and helplessness he had that awful day when he'd finally found her, hollow-eyed and blood-soaked. He, who wields words better of the two of them, cannot imagine the words he would use for this.

Yet…

Yet, he wants to just hold them close, too. To shelter and protect the memory of them the way neither of them could do for them, as actual people in the making. To do what they were supposed to do properly the first time around-keep them secret. Not utter a word to anyone else apart from each other. How can he have them both remembered and protected? How?

"Shhh, it's alright, it's alright."

She should not be comforting him. After all this time, he still thinks this. She should not be comforting him and yet he takes that comfort anyway. Rests his head in her lap and lets her stroke his hair for a short time before he sighs and straightens, points at the threads again.

"Let's meet them first, then."

She leans her head against his shoulders and says:

"Yes, lets."

There is nothing else that can be, or even needs to be, said after this. Instead, they remain there by the window, watching the stars and the threads of fate for the rest of the night.

…

Morning comes. The emperor sees them alone, for the empress has gone to intervene with another conflict. The two of them can hear the sounds of it raging from outside even as the emperor gives them their decree: to either avert war or, if it breaks out inevitably to then help to win it. They will be given resources to gather their own team to fight against the darkness that is rising. When they hear this in particular, they both look at each other, knowing that this is it. This is how they will be able to finally meet those bright lives and though the colour of that glow is not goldsilver, silvergold nonetheless it strengthens their resolve.

They listen to the rest of the emperor's orders and take that newfound resolve with them as they leave. That resolve is well-needed for as they do leave, a whirlwind of rage slams right into the heart of the palace, plunging them both into their first battle. It is not a difficult battle for them, the intruders are either swiftly dispatched or bundled away to the dungeons and the mess is minimal. They walk away without injury because of that resolve, into the bright daylight, carrying instructions and new weapons and a newfound purpose. All who see them know what it is they have been asked to do and assume that the fire in their eyes and footsteps is their commitment to that purpose, that their resolve is for that, all wrapped up in honour and adventure and imperial decree. That they walk only towards glory and victory, but they'd be wrong, those people.

They are wrong.

For it is not those things that the two of them walk to, but to them. The people whose vivid, shimmering threads they watched all night. The people they might actually have the chance to love properly. The people with whom they will actually build a life with this time. The ones who will be with them right until them. Oh, they know their duty, could not forget it with the skirmish that met them as they began their journey. They'll relish the knowledge that they are leading the efforts to rid the land of all the evil that plagues it, the fact that it is they that have the power to rise up and meet the challenge. They'll take the glory that comes with victory, just as they've always done. They'll take it all. But nonetheless, that is not what they are walking towards, working towards. It will never be. No, it will be for them.

Always, always for them.

They can't wait to meet them.

Trigger warnings are for: child loss, violence against children (both born and unborn), general graphic violence