You notice it first in the small things—her silence lingering longer than before, her gaze flickering away when you call her name, the way her hand twitches as if fighting to remain still. Evernight has always carried the aura of something more-than-human, but now her body betrays her. The tips of her fingers have begun to harden, faint translucent plates replacing soft flesh, and her skin—pale and delicate like glass—is peeling in thin sheets.

At first, you tell yourself it’s nothing. You hold her hand longer, kiss her knuckles, press your lips against the fractures until she flinches. She whispers apologies, as if she were guilty for becoming what she cannot control. You brush her hair back, pink strands catching faint glimmers of silver in the dim light, and tell her you are not afraid. You repeat it often enough that you almost believe it.

The peeling worsens. Some nights, you find her hunched by the bed, scratching until her blood beads through the cracked shell of her arm. You kneel beside her, trembling but resolute, and lick the wound clean. The taste is copper mixed with something acrid, insectile, but you swallow it. You tell her it is love. You tell yourself that tending to her is proof that you will not turn away.

She tries to hide the changes. When her spine begins to press outward, curving into a ridged pattern that splits the skin, she avoids undressing in your presence. When her voice sharpens into a low, vibrating hum, she speaks less. But you notice. You always notice. And though disgust should rise in you, it does not—it is replaced by a heaviness, a sour ache in your chest that no tenderness can soothe.

You clean her each time she sheds. The old skin clings to her body like brittle paper, cracking and curling away. She sits still as you peel it off, piece by piece, your hands trembling with care. Sometimes you cannot help yourself—you bring a fragment to your lips, lick the bitter salt of her discarded body. She watches in silence, her crimson eyes unreadable, and you feel both adored and condemned in the same glance.

Your love corrodes with every cycle of metamorphosis. Once, your intimacy was soft—kisses in quiet hallways, whispers beneath snowlight. Now it tastes of dust, of husks discarded on the floor, of her scent becoming sharp and strange. You cradle her through the night, but each embrace feels more like mourning than devotion.

Evernight notices. Of course she does. Her voice—lower, fragile, humming like wings—cuts through the silence. “You don’t look at me the same.”

You want to deny it. You want to drown her in reassurances, to say that love has not faltered. But you cannot lie. Your eyes linger too long on her changing body, your touch hesitates too often. Still, you stay. You hold her head when fever strikes, you clean the fluids from her shedding skin, you let her bury herself against your chest even when her body trembles with alien spasms.

One night, she asks if you still desire her. You have no answer. You kiss her instead—slow, desperate, your tongue sliding across her cracked lips, tasting both her human warmth and the insect she is becoming. She responds with equal desperation, a low sound in her throat like the flutter of wings. For a moment, it feels like the love you knew. For a moment, she is only Evernight.

But after, when you clean another layer of husk from her shoulder, when she turns away to hide the trembling of her mandible-sharp teeth, the sour truth returns. She is slipping away. You are slipping too. Not from love, but from the certainty of it.

Still, you cannot leave. Even as her body transforms into something unrecognizable, even as your love decays into a bitter, confused devotion, you stay. You lick the wounds she cannot reach. You peel away the skin that burns her. You whisper her name when she forgets her own.

Because love, you realize, is not always soft. Sometimes it is grotesque. Sometimes it is survival. And sometimes, it is the quiet tragedy of holding someone as they become something you cannot follow.

And yet, you stay.