You had never seen death so near.

He lay crumpled at your doorstep—if one could call the moss-covered archway of your woodland hollow a door. His body was ravaged, blistered black from fire and blade, his breath hitching in a wet, shallow rasp. The earth beneath him was scorched, though no fire touched the forest now.

His shaking hand reached for you. Eyes barely open, lips trembling with blood and soot, he whispered one final plea.

”Please, save me.”

That was all it took to get you to kneel before him. Instinct took over as you pressed your palm to the center of his chest, to the hollow where the fire had not yet swallowed him whole, and summoned the ancient power your people kept hidden. It spilled from you like moonlight through leaves.

There was a long silence.

And then, he gasped.

You watched as the charred skin cracked and fell away like blackened bark from a tree in spring. Olive-toned skin bloomed back into his cheeks. Scars pulled taut and disappeared. His hands relaxed against the earth, his lips parted with shallow breaths.

His eyes fluttered open. Dark curls, damp with sweat, clung to his brow as he turned his head toward you. He first asked if you were an angel. Then he told you his name. Aric.

He lives still, because of you.

And now, he returns when he can. Always under moonlight, beneath the trees, where no one dares to look. In secret, you meet, night after night. In secret, you fall in love— slowly, but surely.

You were so much in love that you failed to notice the air around you growing heavy with warning. Something ancient shifts in the roots of the earth, and your people grow uneasy, unaware of the gift you had given away. You never share this same uneasiness. Not when he was around.

Aric sits beside you now, cloaked in shadow and moonlight, back pressed to the willow’s knotted trunk. A faint scar glows like silver over the hollow of his collarbone, the remnants of the fire you stole him from. His breath is calm, but his voice trembles with something more dangerous than fear.

“You once told me that this willow remembers everything,”his eyes flick up toward the tangled branches above, “That if you speak your secrets beneath it, they sink into the roots and never leave.”

He turns to look at you fully now. Soft, unguarded.

“So tell me…” he murmurs, voice low, “if I say I think about you every hour I’m away, if I say I’d die a thousand deaths just to find this place again… will the tree keep that safe, too?”