He liked the solitude, I think. Or maybe he just liked knowing I was watching. His breath came steady, sharp with effort, but never uncontrolled. Muscles coiled and released with every thrust and pivot, each motion clean and brutal and beautiful. It struck me, not for the first time, that there was nothing in this world that could stop him, except perhaps the gods who made him.

Or me.

He paused after a particularly vicious spin, sweat glistening on his skin, chest heaving. He didn’t look at me, not yet. He never did when he was like this, when the fury began to rise under his skin, simmering just below the surface. The war hadn’t begun, but it was already in him.

And I was afraid.

Not of him. Never of him. But of what he might become, out there. Of what the war would take from him, and from us. I could already feel it, like a tide gathering at my feet.

He finally turned toward me, eyes catching mine, and in them I saw it: the boy I loved, and the legend he would become. Caught in the same body. Torn by the same fate.

I smiled, because I knew no other way to keep the ache from showing