Page 49 of Pisces Rising

The others nodded, confirming that the two Zodiacs who’d received the most suspicion during the ordeal were the only reason they’d made it out alive.

But Pisces felt no such triumph, her brow furrowing with escalating worry and dread.

"But Aries..." She searched their somber faces. When none would meet her gaze, she finally asked the terrifying question. "What happened?"

Sag stepped forward reluctantly, shame and regret etched across his handsome features. "When you went into the black hole, Aries went senseless with grief. He fought harder than I’ve ever seen to break through Gemini’s veil. Sag shook his head at the memory. “By the time he got through, the void had closed, and the mirror realm was about to collapse. He refused to come with us through the fracture. He...he vowed not to abandon you to the void's fate, no matter what happened to him." Sag's voice grew thick. "We had no choice but to leave him behind. You know Aries, when he makes his mind up, he can’t be swayed.” Before Pisces could collapse to her knees, Sag caught her and held her against him. “We hoped he’d manage to get through somehow.”

An anguished cry tore from Pisces as those words sliced straight through her. Aries, her destined love, had knowingly doomed himself out of devotion to her. She had saved them all, but at the most devastating cost her soul could bear. Tears streamed unchecked down her face as the void of his loss threatened to swallow her whole. She pulled away from Sag and sank to the floor, keening a primal wail of utter despair that shook the fortress to its core. Around her, the others could only watch in stunned silence as Pisces' sorrow threatened to eclipse the lights of a thousand galaxies.

"I have to go back for him!" she cried out, her voice cracking with anguish. "I can't just leave Aries trapped in that hell!" She tried to push past the others, but they quickly formed a barricade to stop her. Leo and Taurus grabbed her arms gently but firmly.

"You can’t go back there, Pisces," Virgo stated solemnly. "The mirror realm is gone, collapsed in on itself. All fractures and passages have sealed."

"Then we'll find another way to get through!" Pisces cried desperately, struggling against their grips.

Sag shook his head sadly. "I've scoured my celestial maps tracking our constellation's stars. Aries'...Aries' light is simply gone from the cosmic fabric."

A heart-wrenching wail tore from Pisces' lips as she collapsed again, her legs giving out. The others could only watch, somber and powerless, as their friend dissolved into a vortex of crippling grief. “You have to let me go! I brought him back once. I can bring him back again.”

Sag collected her off the floor and hugged her. “He’s gone, Pisces. I’m sorry.”

Chapter

Forty

Over the following days, Pisces retreated into an impenetrable depression. She cloistered herself in her chamber at Star Castle, refusing to leave or speak to anyone. The emotional trauma of losing Aries, the one she had given up so much to save, proved too great a burden.

Cancer tried in vain to soothe Pisces with her nurturing energies, but she rebuffed all company and comfort. The other Zodiacs made pilgrimage after pilgrimage to her door, pleading for her to emerge, but only silence answered their calls. Slumped in the shadows, Pisces knew no one could possibly understand her anguish. The soul-shattering loss of her beloved Aries left an inescapable, spiraling void inside her that threatened to devour her sanity. All she could do was stare vacantly at the walls, utterly lost in a mirrored reality of her own lonely making.

"You cannot fathom this anguish..." Pisces' muffled voice eventually rasped out from the shadows, startling the tender Cancer. "Leave me alone."

Leo attempted to rouse her with booming tales of perseverance and warrior resolve. Sagittarius offered mystical insights, claiming his celestial maps showed Aries' light had simply been drawn into another plane beyond his sight. But Pisces' silence was the only response, a hollow void where her spirit once resounded. It didn’t matter that she’d recaptured the Cerulean Tear. She was dead anyway.

Aquarius appeared at the door on what felt like the millionth unanswered call. The water bearer's soothing tones filtered through the cracks as she spoke. "Pisces, I bore word from the gods themselves, whispers that may give you some peace..." From within the chambers, the faintest flicker of Pisces' curiosity stirred at Aquarius' words. The water bearer continued in her gentle cadence.

"They gave me a message: When two souls intertwine so cosmically, they weave their love into a single, luminous thread that transcends the cosmos.” Aquarius paused, sensing Pisces' despondency fracturing ever so slightly. “I don’t know what it means to you, but it seems the gods desire to intervene with destiny this time.”

After Aquarius departed, her words continued echoing through Pisces' consciousness like the breaking of a cosmic dawn. Gradually, she willed herself to rise from her pit of despair. Slipping outside under the tapestry of infinite stars, she reached inward to those limitless celestial depths that flowed through her being.

She lifted her haunted gaze toward the vast sparkling cosmos, remembering his vow. Her quivering lips parted as she sent out a cosmic call, reverberating across realities. “Find me, Aries. You vowed always to find your way back to me!” Falling to her knees, she let a sob echo through the darkness. “You promised, Aries.” Tears streaked down her pallid cheeks, glittering like stardust in the celestial light. Pisces raised her hand, releasing a shimmering blue tendril of her intimate power across the cosmos like a luminescent comet's tail. It cut through the blackness, a path glowing brilliantly for Aries to take should he still draw breath.

No sooner had the ethereal thread been cast, then a ripple of the purest power shuddered through the universe. Pisces gasped as she felt the wave's force deep in her cosmic bones. Out among the stars, a blazing solar flare erupted from a distant celestial body like a supernova. The fiery detonation rocked the foundations of everything around Star Castle.

Within the searing cosmic tsunami, Pisces felt the unmistakable resonance of Aries' spirit. Her eyes went wide, her senses straining to locate that blazing familiarity's source.

Pisces turned and raced back inside the castle's winding halls, abandoning all decorum. She moved with preternatural swiftness and purpose, following the cosmic trail of flickering embers only she could perceive. Deeper and deeper, she ran, eventually coming upon the main temple chamber cloaked in shifting shadows. Pisces skidded to a halt, feeling the weight of Aries' long-awaited presence bearing down on her like a lodestone. She whirled, searching the flickering darkness, holding her breath with a pounding heart. There. From the blackest recesses of the chamber, a muscular silhouette emerged, blazing like the heart of a star just barely banked. Aries' nostrils flared with each heaving breath, his body ridged and radiating with seductive, primordial power.

Pisces stood mesmerized as he stalked toward her, inexorably drawn by the gravitational forces that bound them together across space and time. No words were needed nor wanted in that eternal moment of reunion. As he reached her, she simply collapsed into his searing embrace. Their bodies crashed together, all passion and smoldering need hitting a critical flash point. Pisces opened herself to the drowned phoenix rising, allowing his rebirth to ignite her tides into an unstoppable cosmic tsunami.

An eternity seemed to pass before they finally drifted back to consciousness. Pisces stroked his perfect features in amazed wonder.

"How?" she breathed reverently. "How did you find your way from the shattered realm?"

Aries' voice smoldered like newborn stars coalescing from a cloud of interstellar dust. "I followed the glimmering trail of your soul-light, Starfish. I would pursue you across infinity until the last embers flared around us."

Pisces smiled and pulled him close once more, for once not caring how he had beaten the impossible cosmic odds. All that mattered was that they were reunited after the longest, cruelest separation. She was finally, utterly whole again.

Pisces squeezed Aries tightly, overwhelmed with joy at having him back. Feeling the intense heat radiating from his body made her heart swell. "I was in a deep, dark place without you," she murmured. "But having you here again sets my soul on fire."

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