When he had first come through the gates—when he had first breached the shores of Beqanna once more—he had felt that strange clarity burst in his chest. He had felt the joy of it—the unmistakable way that it had radiated from his very core. To be alive again! To find a home with Agetta once more.
To, through some miracle, raise children with her.
It was almost too much to bear. Too much to ask for and impossible to show the full depth of his gratitude. He had felt something like shame when he had woken up to the heavy weight in his chest. When the joy began to feel stained with something else. At first, he chalked it up to some kind of remnant of death. As though the bleakness of it had somehow followed him into life. Had someone found him.
But it had not gone away.
And he had not been able to claw his way back to the simple, clear-eyed joy of his first days. That is not to say that he does not feel joy. He does. (He does!) He wakes next to Agetta and presses his face into the brilliance of her white hair. He watches Beyza and Caledonia grow with each day. But he cannot shake the otherness that follows him. The doubt that creeps without root into the back of his mind.
It is that dread that brings him here today. That has him walking, eagle wings folded over the width of his back, through the meadow as he did countless times in the years of his first life.
Which is, of course, when he sees her.
Something like shock races through his system. Followed by joy, and guilt, and a million other emotions that he cannot name. It paralyzes him for a second before he walks toward her as if almost in a daze.
“Anonya?”
The name comes to him so easily, as if he had said it but yesterday.
“Is that really you?”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to