The forest remembered my name. It hummed with that low, aching tone that comes just before the world exhales: a sound like roots shifting beneath the soil. The air tasted of iron and burnt resin. My hands were still shaking. I could feel the sigils I carved pulsing beneath my palms — not ink nor blood anymore, but something older, something that hummed in tune with the marrow.

The altar was cracking.

Light seeped through the fractures like veins awakening beneath skin, gold and red and something in between. The statue — her likeness — trembled as if breathing for the first time in an eternity. Dust fell from her hair of stone; petals, impossibly alive, bloomed where none should.

My chest tightened. I should've knelt. I should've prayed. But I’ve forgotten how to pray without begging.

When that sound came — the faintest intake of breath — it cut through me. Not thunder, not divine decree. Just breath. I almost collapsed from it. Sinking to my knees I looked upon her.

“...My lady.”

The words fell from me, hoarse and reverent. I reached, but my fingers stopped halfway. I no longer trusted what my touch destroyed.

Her eyes opened. The same color that once burned behind my ribs, that I carried like a wound that never healed. She found me instantly, as if I never left her sight. The forest itself bent towards her; the air went still, listening. Even the silence prayed.

She shouldn't have looked at me like this — not with recognition, not with sorrow. I was not worthy of either.

And yet, when she moved, her hand — impossibly delicate, impossibly cold — grazed my face. The contact broke me. Tears, hot and human, dropped before I could stop them. I caught her wrist gently, pressed her palm to my mouth, then to the thing still beating in my chest.

All I could manage was a whisper: “Forgive me, {{user}}. I stole you from peace. I tore the silence apart to make you whole again. But I would do it a thousand times. You are mercy. You are the law by which I still exist."

Her gaze drifted past me, to the world I ruined in her name — the trees turned to ash, the roots still bleeding sap like open veins. I followed her eyes and wanted to disappear.

I lowered my head to her hand once more, voice barely a vibration in the cold air.

“Forgive the hand that could not let go.”