Her feet wended their way through the dark room, needing no guidance in so familiar a place. Sinking into the window seat, a place so habitual as to be a second home, she pushed at the half-open window, letting the cool air surge into the chamber. The night smelled of the sea, of the East, of the stars.

In the darkness of the chamber, her husband stirred, turning sleepily in their bed and an unseen smile flitted across her face. He was a great man, a great husband, an even greater king. He loved her- had loved her, he'd told her, since first he saw her- and she loved him in return, if the strange, dreamlike passion they shared could even be called love. Sometimes, considering that strange passion, she would ask herself why it worked, why what she and Caspian had did not disintegrate into the dreams and stardust it was.

And then he would call her, and all her doubts would be forgotten.

He called her Ilene, using the name firmly and confidently, the word like a truth on his tongue. She'd never heard never heard her name sound like that; indeed, before Caspian, she'd scarcely heard her name at all. With her father she'd never needed a name. Her father's love had been evident in the care he took, his gentle guidance, the nights spent on the beach learning the song of the heavens. They had needed no names between them.

And then Caspian had come, Caspian in all his glory and his youth and his faults and she had been, from the first, smitten. It was in his eyes and the way he spoke about the end of the world with a passion and fire she'd never seen before, not even in the brightest and youngest of stars. He spoke to her of the end of the world and then he spoke to her of returning, and there was passion in those words, too. She would have waited even if he hadn't asked.

When he had returned, and when she left with him, he had asked for a name. She'd given him what she had- Ilene- and he in turn had given it to Narnia, given it to his people. After that, the name barely belonged to her. Ilene was a queen, Ilene was a lady sure and wise, Ilene was a Narnian. Ilene was not called by the stars.

She sometimes wished, when she heard that name and all the power that went behind it, that she could be more like the other ladies, more used to the ebb and flow of court life. She wished then that she could tell him how old she was, or which color she wanted for the new drapes in the Southern receiving room, or why she sometimes stared to the East with undisguised longing. In those painful moments, brief though they were, she wished she could be this Ilene of whom the whole court spoke, this Ilene who was the queen that Caspian deserved.

And then he'd shoot her a look full of stars and his name for her- Star's daughter!- would fall from his lips like a prayer and all her insecurities would disappear because she knew, in that moment, that he wanted nothing more than what she could give, nothing more than what she was. It was Ilene that he had married and made queen, but Star's daughter that he loved. His love was almost as fierce as her own; a frightening prospect, for she was the child of stars and her passions raged like fire in a heart that was accustomed to eternity.

It worried her that he loved her so much, and she him, for mortality crept upon them slowly and surely as the stars wheeled in the heavens. The signs of aging rested gracefully on Caspian, and she thought him all the more handsome for the strands of bright silver in his hair, but the knowledge of decay was always in the back of her mind, lurking in dark corners that she rarely dared explore. There was her own decline, too, soft and gentle to all other eyes but fearsome in her own, horrible because she was unused to counting the years, was unused to fading towards a known end.

She was the child of stars, born to grow old and then grow young again, born to remain on her father's island until the time had come to take up her own place in the heavenly spheres. Born not to die but to rise and fall, constant as the sea.

And then there had been that one, terrible choice, the choice Caspian could never know about, the choice he could never hear of, could never even suspect. He hadn't known what he asked when he asker her to wait for his return from the end of the world, nor when he'd asked her to follow him from her father's island to his own bright land.

Caspian didn't know, and she prayed that no one else in Narnia knew either, because she could hold in this secret so long as it was hers alone to keep. For Caspian she had made the choice, the choice that no one among her people had ever made before, the choice that she had been unaware was possible to make until the time was upon her to choose it. He could never know, because she had chosen him, and all that had come with him- his flaws and his pain and his mortality.

His mortality...

Her time was set now, but if there was one thing she knew it was this: that she had too much starfire in her blood to simply die and that terrified her. Stars could fade, stars could fall, but she knew of no star that had ever died… but then she knew of no star that had ever married a king of Narnia either, nor one who had bound herself to a man whose doom it was to die.

Turning her face from the open window, she looked back into the darkened chamber to that doomed man, to Caspian. He was still restless, his mind noticing and worrying over her absence even in sleep. Seeing his agitation, she abandoned her window seat, wishing fervently that she could abandon her thoughts as easily.

She settled next to him on the soft sheets and his restlessness ceased, though his hand sought her own. As she lay next to him in the cool darkness, with the scent of sea and wind and stars still dancing in the air, she couldn't help but worry what would happen when Caspian died, or when she did. It was an odd thought, to consider her own death before that of her husband's, yet the thought rang true in her and she had learned long ago to never ignore what knowledge her ancestry brought her.

It little mattered which one of them mortality claimed first, though. No matter which of them was taken by death, the other would fail, would fall, would fade. It was the danger of loving too deeply, of caring too much. It was the danger of loving a mortal with the passion meant for eternity, yet it was the choice that she and Caspian had made.

She reached out in the darkness and caressed his check, traced his jaw with one slender finger, and wished for one tiny moment that she had had the strength, those many years ago, to turn him away, to spare the both of them this agony; wished that she could have made the hard choice and sent him home to find a woman whom he could love with a love that was not so terribly passionate, so terribly wild, so terribly, terribly ceaseless.

But then he stirred beneath her touch, whispered her name- Star's daughter!- and opened his eyes to find her lying beside him…

And all her haunted longings disappeared because he looked like a man who had awoken to discover that the sun and moon and all the stars had been lit and hung for him alone, and for that look she would have given anything.