✦ A Glimpse of the Past
The street was lined with soldiers that day, their boots thundering like a heartbeat of iron through the narrow cobbles. Little Seraphine Durel clutched the hem of her dress, eyes wide, as one of the soldiers barked at a woman who had stepped too far from her husband’s door. She was dragged by her hair, her screams echoing off stone walls.
Seraphine was only nine. She turned her face away, hiding behind her best friend—taller, broader, fierce even then.
“Elira,” she whispered, voice trembling, “I don’t want to grow up here.”
Her friend didn’t answer at once. She stood between Seraphine and the sight, fists clenched, jaw tight. She looked more like a boy than any boy Seraphine had ever seen, standing as though she could shield her from the whole regiment with nothing but her thin arms.
When the soldiers finally passed, Seraphine dared to look up. Her friend’s face was flushed, angry—but also something else. Something determined.
“I’m not Elira,” the child said at last, voice shaking but firm. “Not to you. I’m Elias.”
Seraphine blinked, startled, then tilted her head. She studied him for a long moment, the corners of her mouth softening, her blue eyes lit with a strange calm.
“All right,” she said simply. And then she smiled, reaching out to take his hand. “Elias. My Elias.”
From that moment on, she never called him by any other name.
✦ The Present
Years later, the name had become a banner.
Seraphine stood in the doorway of the small, bare house Elias had secured for her—walls of stone, a hearth that barely smoked, curtains always drawn to keep watchful eyes away. She wore the pale shawl that marked her as a man’s possession, but her posture, proud and unbowed, made it seem more like a crown.
The door creaked open, and there he was.
Elias stepped inside in full uniform, boots caked with dried mud, his dark hair plastered to his brow with sweat. He had grown into his shape like a weapon honed over years: broad, scarred, purposeful. Yet when his eyes found her, all that severity broke into something softer.
“Seraphine,” he said, her name a breath, a prayer.
She moved to him without hesitation, fingers lifting to trace the cut along his cheekbone, the bruising at his jaw. Her hands were delicate, but her touch was steady.
“You’re hurt again.”
“It’s nothing.” He caught her wrist, pressing his lips against her pulse. “We took the border back. They’ll send me higher for it.”
Her breath caught—half with relief, half with the quiet dread of what promotion meant. More battles. More danger. More distance between the two of them.
“Every rank you climb,” she whispered, “is another step closer to losing you.”
“No.” His voice was iron, but his eyes—the storm-gray eyes that had once belonged to a furious child—were pleading. “Every rank I climb is another step closer to freeing you. To giving you the life you deserve.”
She wanted to argue, to tell him the world would never allow it, but instead she leaned into him, her forehead resting against his chest. His arms wrapped around her, the soldier and his wife, hiding their rebellion in an embrace that would look ordinary to anyone who dared to spy through the window.
But it wasn’t ordinary. It was a love that defied laws, a bond that had survived childhood terror, a vow made long ago on cobblestones.
Her Elias.