The silence in Tír na nÓg pressed inward, not just quiet—but vacant. A silence with weight. With grief. With shape. It filled the corners of halls once bright with story, dulled the stained-glass winds that used to whisper joy. Even the light here dimmed, as if the realm itself mourned him. Mourned us.
I could not bear them. Not Eirikr, not my sisters, not even the youngest who still believed love only ever healed. They looked at me like I was broken, but I was not broken. I was gone.
I didn’t choose a room, a retreat, a mountaintop. I became absence itself. A wind that never settled. A shadow without a candle. I walked past waterfalls and moon gardens and remembered none of it. My aura—which once pulsed with color and music—faded to a tremble of gray. Even the starlight would not touch me.
When they tried to speak, I could hear the care in their voices and it scalded me. I didn't want comfort. I didn’t want to be known.
How do you tell immortals what it means to lose something that must die? To hold a life in your arms knowing it will burn itself out while you remain?
You don’t.
You bury it inside you, like a grave no one is allowed to visit.
Eirikr found me. He didn’t say my name—wise of him. He sat beside me and told a story about a battle we fought against a god now forgotten, and I nodded, as if I remembered. As if I cared. I looked through him. I was still holding Henry’s face in my hands. Still brushing dirt from his shirt. Still whispering promises I never spoke aloud.
The others circled like stars, patient, orbiting, unsure how close they could come without being pulled in and devoured. I didn’t blame them. I had become something dangerous. Something grieving so loudly it could shatter.
They called me “too fragile for this.” As if fragility was a flaw. As if loving something doomed was weakness.
But it wasn’t weakness that undid me.
It was Henry. It was his stupid laugh and his stupid pancakes and his awful music and his beautiful hands. It was the way he reached for me in the dark. The way he believed in a house with windows and porches and me in it.
It was the way he made me believe too.
I used to think I could love and let go. That was the rule. That was the contract. Watch. Touch. But never keep. Never want.
And then he looked at me like I belonged, and I did.
I didn’t just lose a boy. I didn’t just lose a lover.
I lost the part of me that believed in staying.
I lie awake while my siblings sleep, eyes wide in the perfect dark, and I think of his last breath. Of how it must’ve felt. Did he look for me? Did he call my name? Did he think I abandoned him?
I’d trade eternity to have been there.
I’d trade the stars to hold his hand one more second.
I walked to the Well today. The Infinite. The place where we are born, and sometimes—if we dare—undone.
I stood on the edge. The water didn’t ripple. I said nothing. I did not jump.
Because I heard him. Just for a second. His laugh. Carried on wind that doesn’t belong to any world.
And I knew:
If I go now, he dies in me. For real. Forever.
So I won’t go. Not yet.
He gave me something I cannot return.
And I will carry it, even if it breaks me.
Even if I have to live forever with a heart that no longer fits in my chest.
He was worth it.
Gods help me, he was worth it.
And yet…
There is a part of me that believes this was my doing. That the Chaos felt me tip too close to truth. That it saw me reach for the forbidden and whispered, If you speak it, he dies. And I didn’t speak it, but I thought it. I wanted to. And maybe that was enough. Maybe that was all it needed.
Maybe Henry was my punishment.
Maybe love was never mine to keep. Maybe the price of touching something so mortal, so beautiful, is knowing your fingerprints are what marked it for ruin.
If I had stayed silent in my soul—not just in voice—if I had never imagined the words, never dared to wonder what it would be like to tell him who I am… would he still be alive?
I will never know. That is the blade I carry now.
A slow, eternal punishment:
To love something so much you unravel the fabric of your own restraint.
And then to live, knowing that perhaps—perhaps—you brought the end.
Maybe I should have joined him.
Maybe I still should.
I stood at the edge of the Infinite and I didn’t jump—but only because I thought maybe I deserved worse. Maybe oblivion is too clean. Too soft. Maybe what I deserve is this—to stay. To walk through eternity with the sound of his voice haunting every quiet hour.
I’m not good enough for this. For the gift he gave me. For the love I held like something fragile, even as I let it fall. I wanted to protect him, and instead I doomed him.
I failed. And no one will say it to my face because I shine too bright and wear the title of god. But inside? I’m just a coward who got someone good and soft and real killed.
I keep thinking about that moment I almost told him. How the words bloomed in my throat. How I wanted to reach out and pull him fully into my world. How close I came.
And the Chaos knew. It always knows. It punished him to teach me.
And now all I have is the echo of his laugh, the warmth of a hand I will never feel again, and a silence so vast it feels like it might collapse the sky.
I do not know how to keep living like this.
But I do.
Because I must. But why?
