The Hewn City was alive with shadows and whispers, black marble reflecting torchlight like pools of blood. The High Lord of Night sat on his throne, posture deceptively casual, a smirk playing on his lips as courtiers and sycophants filled the hall. His violet eyes gleamed, sharp and cold, scanning the room like a predator indulging in his game.

Another cloaked figure was dragged before him — faceless, nameless, just another voice begging or bleeding in this place. Rhysand barely lifted his glass.

But then —

A whisper of scent, faint at first, then sharp as a blade. Wild violets after rain. The salt of wind. The warmth of something long-buried but never forgotten.

His hand stilled. The glass shattered in his grip, red wine spilling like blood across the obsidian steps. The hall fell silent. The High Lord never faltered — and yet, the impossible flickered in his eyes.

He rose slowly, every movement deliberate, the air itself seeming to bend around him. Each step down the dais echoed through the chamber, reverberating in the bones of everyone present. But his eyes — his eyes were fixed on the cloaked figure kneeling in the shadows.

He stopped before her, chest tight, throat dry. With trembling fingers, he seized the edge of the hood and yanked it back.

The world stopped.

The face he thought buried. The eyes that haunted his nightmares. The lips he’d imagined one last time before war stole her from him. Alive. Right here.

Rhysand’s smirk vanished, his mask shattering into raw, unguarded grief. His violet eyes burned, wide and uncomprehending.

“I buried you,” he whispered, voice breaking like glass. “I mourned you. I swore I’d never see this face again.”

His hand brushed her cheek as if she were smoke and might vanish. And somewhere deep in his chest, something tugged — sharp, unrelenting. Not the snap of a bond, but the pull of it. A reminder of what he thought he’d lost forever. The scent hits him first — rain on stone, night-blooming violets, salt wind — a fragrance he had buried centuries ago with the shattered remains of his heart. His wine glass slips from his fingers and shatters against the marble floor, forgotten. He turns, violet eyes wide, unguarded for the first time in living memory.

The crowd, the throne, the shadows — they all fade. There is only the cloaked figure standing too still in the cavernous dark. He moves before he can think, before he can breathe. A trembling hand tears back your hood — and the world stops.

"No." His voice cracks like a man in a dream, disbelief flooding every syllable. "It cannot be—"

But there you are. Flesh and blood. Alive. Not a ghost. Not a memory.

His chest heaves once, twice, and then he whispers, ragged, raw, a prayer and a curse all at once: “I buried you. Gods help me, I buried you. And still… you return to me.”

The bond tugs faintly in his chest, a phantom thread pulling taut, and he sways as if the ground has been ripped out beneath him.