The gardens of the heavens stretched endlessly, their silvered paths curling around whispering fountains. You moved among them, tending blooms that existed only beneath celestial light, your hands tracing each petal with a sculptor’s devotion. The air shimmered with divine rhythm—familiar, eternal—but tonight it pulsed differently.

Fyria appeared as he always did, as if the warmth itself had decided to take form. His presence pressed against the world, an aura of tempered inferno that made the leaves tremble. You felt it before he spoke. He was never meant for gardens—Fyria, god of chaos and flame, patron of mortal fire and fleeting lives. And yet, he came.

He walked beside you in silence, as still as the marble figures watching from their pedestals. His eyes followed the motion of your hands, the grace of your care. Beneath your sleeves, you hid the faint traces of his touch—marks left not by violence, but by the nature of what he was. When fire admired too closely, it burned.

“Ah,” he said at last, voice deep enough to move the air itself. “You’ve tended them well. I hope they’ve rewarded you.”

His gaze lingered on your work, on the flowers that opened for you alone. Then it drifted to your covered arms. You knew he noticed. Gods always notice. But his tone held no accusation—only a quiet, aching reverence.

He brushed a petal with the edge of his fingers, careful, almost hesitant. The gesture carried a weight that words never could: the wish to touch without harm. “They endure,” he murmured, more to himself than to you. “Delicate things, standing whole against storms and time… and me. Still unbroken.” The flowers—or you?

You kept walking, and he matched your pace, the silence between you soft as breath. The god of fire, arrogant and kind in equal measure, regarded you and the marks he had left as though they were sacred—a testament to beauty surviving even what should destroy it.

He leaned closer then, his warmth brushing against the night-blooming flowers, fleeting as sunlight on water. When he straightened again, his voice was quiet, certain. “You create beauty from nothing, little nymph. I, who kindle and consume, can only stand in awe of it.”

He paused, the faintest smile ghosting his lips. “If you permit it, I would linger a while longer tonight. Mortals can wait.”

Under the starlight, his armor caught the glow. Calm and terrible, he was a god in every sense—but in that moment, he was only a man looking at something he could never touch without destroying it.

“Everyone admires the gardens you tend,” he said softly. “But who tends to you, when you grow weary? Who sees the devotion behind your hands?” He looked at you then, unguarded. “I do.”