Where the Light No Longer Follows (Blue Fairytales, #3)

by Wendy Heiss

But then Silene had always found more colour in dying than living. She might be too partial to compare.

After so long in her duty as a Reaper, Silene knew for certain that if love was all it took to save someone, they’d all be eternal.

“An artist’s job is to create, Silene. How their creation ages and dies is in the hands of the beholders.

“What can I say? I like sad, pretty girls who look at me like they wish nothing more but to bury my existence six feet under.”

Gabriel wondered—he wondered if she’d always sensed him, if she knew he’d always been watching her for years, for hundreds of them.

but the one that had cost him the most. In the end, there had been no prayer to bring him nearly close to the ruin that he was standing in so many feet under. A ruin that he’d sunk into the very moment he’d stayed to watch a human girl with such hate in her heart for him—a hate he’d never seen her possess for anyone else, not even for those who’d hurt her. Before he’d known that the land under him had been quicksand, he’d spent days there on that pale realm, just waiting for her to finally raise her hazel eyes in his direction. Little had he known that the girl had desired the ground more than the skies, and that she would have never looked at him anyway.

“Is this payback?” Gabriel asked his brother who’d started looking at him with a scornful gaze ever since he’d forced him and his human lover apart years ago.

Is this a reference to the other books?

“Then what is it?” He didn’t know for how much longer he could keep her bones warm before his own would start to grow cold, too. For how much longer he could bear to embrace the soil she’d been buried in that blighted realm he cursed every time he visited because he missed her and was the only way he could hold her without hurting her. “I’m too desperate. Sleeping at her grave every night is not sufficing anymore. Holding the soil her bones lay buried under is not enough anymore. Talking to her gravestone is only making me miss her voice these days. I might be tasting your power, brother. You might have won over me after all. Our father was right.”

“Maybe not in the human ways you’re thinking of. But one can die many other deaths without one's life being taken.” As he had often died when he’d seen those tender hands of hers stained with blood while she’s held onto life as she’d been beaten and bruised just before his eyes when all he could do was watch. Gabriel had died his first death then.

“To keep living is a burden when you find no meaning in it, to keep watching years go by as you rot away body and soul with the only thing that could hurt you intact all the way through. If I’d lost my mind, it might have been easier. It would have been a kindness, you know, for you to have granted me that at least.”

“They all love me more in death.” All except her. Though he’d never found himself seeking to be loved, he didn’t want her hate. Not hers. Gabriel had not once kneeled before anything or anyone, king nor queen, God or Goddess, but for whatever he’d done to deserve her hate, he wanted to kneel before her and beg.

like she had not wanted any witnesses to her death. Or maybe…she just had not wanted any visitors at her grave, because the woman he’s seen from afar had been neither here nor there, only resembling somewhat of a lovely phantom, a mirage of pain draped in such gentle beauty. She was still as such, same as the day he’d found her and then lost her.

“What sense could there even be to watching me?” He wanted to remember her. Everything about her. He wanted everything about her engraved on his skin, for the ink to take root on his bones, for them to feed into his marrow. Her entire life was gone somehow except the end. There wasn’t a single trace of her anywhere. If not for her hate, he would have never found her, he wouldn’t have borne witness of her end, of what drove her to her end.

No one could do that. No one could wish so hard to not exist that their entire existence would erase. But she did, and Gabriel was afraid she would do it again and vanish from his sight once more. Soon,

“Sweet dreams, my ruin,” he murmured to the wind.

where Death stood almost every morning and all nights, staring at the bright gates of life across the river, waiting for the human woman who he’d left his heart with to sail through them and back into his arms.

“Humans are obsessed with putting prices and worth on everything. Valuing and devaluing things that were never meant for them to value or devalue. Anything for the sake of greed, right? Anything for the sake of power. Ingrained in them from the very first breath they take.”

“I keep him alive.” Her hand froze and she pulled it to her side. “You seem to do that a lot. Keep alive things that don't want to be alive.” “Tommy loves being alive,” he said, lifting the animal up to smack a dozen kisses to his fat belly. “Don’t you? You’re just a little stupid.”

“There hasn’t been a moment ever since the first time I found you that I’ve looked away.”

“Anything, you could make anything out of nothing. You gave more life to things than I ever could. Simply by touching them. You were magnificent. The rarest thing I’d laid my eyes upon,”

either. Don’t give me back my hope. I don’t want it.” “I want to give you everything, Silene. Let me give you everything.”

“Beg,” she said, spinning to him. “Get on your knees and beg for it. Maybe I will consider it.” Instead of the anger and refusal she expected to be flashed, the God was struggling to hold back a smile as he took his hands out of his pockets and went down to his knees before her.

“And they’ve all paid for it.”

“You’re so beautiful, Silene. I wanted someone to think you’re mine. Anyone. Even if only briefly.”

“My taunting eidolon, my lovely apparition, my beautiful phantom,” he murmured as a tear fell against the glass frame. “How many more nights must I mourn you?”

A mercy to wither in your hold.”

“I will jump, Gabriel.” “I wouldn’t let you.” “You can’t touch me.” “I will stop the very earth from spinning if I have to.”

No colour had ever mattered to Gabriel. Colours were just colours. But her eyes. Oh, her eyes.

Silene had never…never wanted to be touched as much as she had wanted that very moment. And as she stood there with that realisation, another settled in. Nothing had ever wanted her back.

When he lifted his head just a little to look at her, their lips gently brushed the other’s. It was a touch as brief and gentle as the breeze, but Silene slammed her eyes shut, pulse beating hard against her neck, her temples, her chest. Her heart had never pulsed so furiously even when she’d been alive. “Forgive me,” he whispered, full of defeat, bracing his brow on her seat’s shoulder.

“You should have brought Tommy.” She watched as his expression fell just slightly. “He isn’t entirely himself lately. I didn’t want to tire him.” A sense of gloom settled in her stomach. “Oh. He’ll be okay,” she offered, joining his side. “Yeah,” he replied, voice weak. “Yeah, he will. Both of you can’t leave me at once.” His smile trembled. “What a cruel joke it would be.”

“If I could steal anything—anything at all,” he breathed, “I’d steal just a kiss from your lips.”

Her pinkie brushed his, and she heard him suck a sharp breath. “Silene—” Before he could even finish saying her name, she slid her hand against his, linking their fingers together. She only felt him for a fraction of a second before her entire body was possessed by pain.

“I should have obeyed the fates, I should have stayed away,” he said, pressing a hand to his head and grasping at his hair. “At least I couldn’t hurt you then.” A stab pierced her insides at his words. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t mind. That her body could do nothing besides bruise and bleed. In fact, her body did it best. She bruised and bled like no other. So much so that her father had turned her into a spectacle for it. But why was he not laughing like her father and the monsters made of men had? Why was he staring at her as he was? Why had he never laughed?

“You were never even mine.” His.

One moment she was there, where she had always been, two feet apart from him. And the next, her arms were reaching over his shoulders, closing around his neck as she got on her toes and pressed her mouth to his. Pain struck her across her chest first, grasping her heart in a firm, tight grip until she could barely breathe. But she’d been barely breathing for hundreds of years now so she paid no mind to it. How could she when his hands cupped her face and pulled her limp, pain ridden body to his firm one.

Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. “Please,” she finally whispered at the end of her silent spell. And the darkness answered. It answered for the first time ever. “I’m here” Silene sucked in a sharp breath, staring right ahead at the direction of that familiar voice despite not being able to see a thing. But she knew he could see her. “What was it, my beautiful demise?” he asked. Her voice was too small, too wounded by memories as she muttered, “Just a bad dream.” “What dares to worry you at night?” Hugging her knees to her chest, she whispered, “Memories.” “Shall I take them? Shall I wrench them away and gut them apart one by one?” “I don’t know what I am without them,” she admitted. “I don’t know what I am without the violence.” “You’re Silene. My beautiful Silene with the gentlest, kindest hands. It wasn’t the violence that made you gentle, my ruin, it wasn’t the violence that softened you. You were kind and soft and gentle despite it. You won over all. In spite of all, you won. They could not change you, nor your heart—your kind, gentle heart. And what they could not change they hurt. So let me take it away. Let me rip apart those memories for you.”

“Do you know what I’ve done tonight, my ruin, to have just one moment with you? The waters I’ve poisoned, the air I’ve stolen, the stars I’ve bewitched, the Gods I’ve lied?” “Gabriel—” His name stuck to her lips when he pressed his own over them in a harsh kiss. She was sure the whole universe had frozen. That time had vanished entirely. Maybe she was still in a cruel, cruel dream. Especially when nothing happened. There was no pain. Not at all.

He’d been lied to. Maybe not.

He’d closed the gate between life and death entirely, leaving him there desperate on the other side of the river while his ruin was right across, refusing to show herself.

Gabriel. How do I fool time any other way?” “You will be happy in your new life, my ruin. You will be so happy, that I can promise you.” How could he not know? How could he not know that she was happy now?

“Ask me if I have ever been in love.” Silene hesitated, staring up at him with a plea in her eyes for him to take back his words. Her voice was small as she asked, “Have you ever been in love?” Skies overhead rumbled with thick thunder as he admitted, “I am.”

“One night, as I was sitting and staring at the stars, watching wishes being sucked into their bright bellies, I happened to hear one. One made for me, but not to me. All of which was strange because who could ever make wishes in my stead,” he said with a forlorn smile. “The wish had been for me to vanish, to disappear, to find the worst ends one could ever find, to die a death so deadly I would never wake.” A tear streaked down Silene’s cheek as she stared at him aghast.

“I begged him,” he confessed, finally free of the truth he knew would make her hate him even more. “I begged him to leave her. I asked him for a favour. But there isn’t much he could take from me. So I gave him the only thing I could give him—the thing I would come to desire most. And he left her. The debt for her life paid in exchange for what I’d come to desire most.” He ran a hand over his eyes, feeling a painful sting burn across them. “I’d made a mistake in my calculations. I’d underestimated just how much she hated me and loved him.” A choked laughter sputtered out of him. “The moment

we’d left and she’d woken—she’d woken desperate for her one true love and had bled out in the bed I’d left her alive on in exchange for the last thing anyone could take from me. Then I saw her walk through the gates to my brother, right back in his arms. She’d taken something from him. Twice. He was not gentle to her. For she then had to serve him for five hundred years and bring him one hundred thousand lives.”

thats why her first attempt didnt work

That Gabriel had loved the ghost of a woman Silene had been after her bargain with Death for endless years, and that she had never loved him back for longer than a day.

But some also say that the Reaper fell in love one last time after her five hundred years of her service ended. Whispers would say that it was the last love for the God of Life, too. One he’d waited for so long, one he never let go of. And that their love was eternalised. That she never would leave his side again. That their love also bore fruit. A child so loved by the both of them. Nor human, nor God. An omen so dear, so pure and gentle that humanity loved her, too. One that grew bright in the darkest moments. Something akin to hope and light. And such some would say. But tales are kind. So kind. And Fates were not. The end.