Flame and Sparrow (Flame and Sparrow Duology Book 1)

by S.M. Gaither

“Sometimes admitting we’re lost is the first step to finding the way, isn’t it?”

“I feel…” he replied, slowly, “as though someone should have taught you not to play with fire.”

A monster, but a monster who had gifted me the sun. Who had offered me healing in every way he could after my trials…and then let me go when he saw no other way to aid in that healing. He was still the villain. I couldn’t forget that. It was just… In my head, I’d written our story much differently.

I don’t need you to burn the world down for me—if I wanted that done, I could do it myself.”

We sat silently in the wreckage of the day, like two equally lost souls, staring into the fire together.

His words had plucked a long-buried truth from the dark and guarded places of my heart, and since I didn’t know what else to say, I quietly admitted this truth to him: “I don’t know how to put them away.”

“Sometimes we hold on to painful things, I think, because letting them go feels like letting go of the person who gave them to us.”

“And because sometimes it’s all we have left of that person.”

I felt like I was standing on a shoreline waiting for a tidal wave to crash over me; I could rebuild what it destroyed, but I’d never fully recover from the things I wanted to do with him in this glittering forest.

“So perhaps I’ll just stand among the ashes with you,” he said, “and admire your work.”

A god, asking permission. And now he was kneeling before me, no longer simply asking, but seemingly prepared to beg, to worship—if

“I fell asleep with you in my arms, woke up the same way, and now everything else feels unbalanced in comparison. You’ve ruined me, I’m afraid, and it’s obvious to anyone paying attention—Valas

Everything around us feels like it’s moving toward chaos, and I should be focused on keeping order and solving problems, but for some reason all I can think about most of the time is you.

eyes on me, Wildfire.”

“I felt you, even among this chaos. Something in my blood, in my bones, calling for my attention in spite of it all.

We have a story in my old kingdom, that when the one you’re meant to be with enters the world, they steal a part of your soul with their first breath. “And you exist, missing that part, until they find you and breathe it back into you. Miran-achth refers to the breath—the part that is missing.