The rain did not let up while she spoke, despite the golden luminescence of her. It traced the sharp line of Noah’s jaw and gathered in the hollow of his throat, slid down broad shoulders that had learned to carry too much and call it strength. The shrine loomed nearer, long-left offerings bright against dark stone, fruit split and dripping despite the rain. Frey’s presence lingered in the air. ”When he aged up, Frey made Marcus a hybrid. It was about a year ago.” He said as he walked beside her, a steady presence against the slick riot of Torchline’s stone, glacier eyes fixed ahead though he felt every tremor in her through the bond. He didn’t take offense to Hotaru’s absence from his children. He felt confident in her love for them — confident that, if necessary, she would move the same mountains as she would for her own children. He knew, too, that demigodhood asked different things from you than other things in life did, and that alongside that she had moved to King’s End to try and start something new and beautiful for herself. Noah had respected that, though part of him regretted letting her go with such open hands.
“I know that place.” He assured her, voice shaped by rain and restraint. “Where you don’t know what you’re allowed to feel. Where it seems safer to feel nothing at all than risk burning everything down again.” He had done that once. He had watched it happen. Knew Hotaru had done it too, literally, once (at least). Steam curled upward from the sea in ghostly spirals, mingling with the drizzle until horizon and water blurred into something indistinct. “You are entitled to whatever rises in you,” he continued, “whether its anger. Grief. Even hope.” He let his glacier gaze sweep towards her, analyzing for her outward expressions that might give him further insight to her deep feelings of it all.
“When I came back after being dead on the tundra when the dragon killed Cordelia, and at first when Vi discharged me, I thought everything that had defined me was gone. Hunter. Husband. Demigod.” His jaw tightened, a fickle feathering of it. “I thought if those things were stripped away, there would be nothing left underneath.” The bond carried the truth of it, raw and unpolished. “But there was — is.” He slowed slightly so she would not have to match his longer stride so precisely, an unconscious accommodation. “You are not purposeless without him. Your only purpose is not with him, or for him. You are not only what someone else draws from you.” His eyes lifted toward the shrine, rain caught in pale lashes. “You are a mother. A demigod. A woman who has died and returned and still stands.” Times over again, not just this. Hotaru was a phoenix, remade in flame and glory and gore and grief and power.
He paused, feet stopping completely on the colorful stones pattered with rain. ”Do you want to wait for him?”
