Page 116 of Synodic

“And when she made me kiss her, your life was at stake. I had to make her believe. So I thought of you, imagined tasting your lips, feeling your skin on mine, and when the time came, I would have imagined you beneath me as I fucked her with my soulless body. It’s sick and I hate myself for using my feelings for you in such a way, but if I couldn’t convince her, she would have never let you go.”

Outside a dark cloud lifted, mirroring the clearing of our shrouded souls, and the golden light of day slanted in through the canopied dome, illuminating the map of scars upon Rowen’s body. My eyes dropped, and where I expected to bristle at the gruesome defacement above his heart, I only beamed with pride and respect. Rowen had offered his body in every way imaginable and had never let it affect his integrity. He was good through and through. How had I ever doubted it?

I put my hand over his heart, “Rowen, you did what you had to do. We all did. Aliphoura would have eventually found me whether you loved me or not. She said it herself, she was in search of the Alcreon Light. Don’t ever hate yourself for anything, because I never could.” I held the stare of his emerald gaze, and I opened my mouth for the words I feared I would never get to say, the words Rowen needed to hear for his own redemption, and the words that would answer his long-suffered admission from the crypts.

And so I said to Rowen what I had always felt, always known, and would never forget, “Because I love you too.”

42

The sun set on the outside world, slowly dimming as the room’s luminorbs came to life. We hadn’t ventured out from Rowen’s dome once today. Lost in conversation, the sky continued its circumnavigation around us, the moon pulling the night back overhead on the wings of a silver chariot.

Stretching my legs, I walked around Rowen’s room, his sharp eyes following my every move.

I immediately stopped short.

Stacked one on top of the other were the journals I’d noticed my first night here. They had mysteriously gone missing when Rowen offered up his home to me, but now here they sat, a beige tower of rough-hewn bindings and warped pages begging to be leafed through.

“These were here my first night. You moved them,” I said, gesturing to the stack of worn books now plopped on his desk for anyone to see. “Scared I was going to take a peek?”

“Can you deny your curiosity wouldn’t have gotten the better of you?”

“I would never,” I said nonchalantly, knowing full well I had gone on a serious manhunt trying to find them. The glint in his eyes told me he expected as much, but I’d be damned if I was going to admit it.

“Go ahead, take a look. I brought them back for you.”

My heart stutter-stepped in my chest. What else could Rowen have kept from me, but was now willing to share? Beyond intrigued, I ran my finger up the rugged spines and selected the volume sitting highest atop the stack. I opened the worked cover, allowing it to naturally fall where the binding creased the deepest. And what I saw before me sucked all the breath from my lungs.

They weren’t journals at all, but sketchbooks.

I was looking at a charcoal drawing. Beautiful. Dark. And haunting.

Harsh depressed lines swirled elliptically, drawn overtop each other again and again in aggressive strokes. In the center of the thick black cloud was…was me. Glimpses of my body peeked through the gaps of spiraling darkness. From what I could see of my face, it was angled and defiant, vulnerable and afraid, but still standing strong. Resisting.

Is…is that what I look like?

To view myself through the eyes of another had me feeling raw, found, and utterly seen. Even though it was a drawing of me, it felt too intimate to look at. A moment so frozen it could shatter.

I flashed my eyes to him.

He was preternaturally still, waiting for me to react as if I were a too-wild creature that would dart at the slightest sign of being captured. But he already had me, held something deep within me I thought I had lost long ago.

“Rowen. This is…you are…remarkable,” I said, almost choking on the words full of emotion; another revelation of this enigmatic man brought to the surface. This explained why his fingers always looked covered in soot. His charcoal-smeared hands were not just the tools of a warrior, but of an artist.

I lightly traced the movements of the dark graphite, feeling the depth of each stroke. The emotion put into every line seeped through the pad of my finger and the rhythm of the shading vibrated in my pulse as if I were reliving the memory of him sketching it.

Inhaling the earthy scents of parchment and charcoal, I flipped through page after page of impressive renderings. Occasionally there were drawings of the Wyn village, its working people and sweeping landscapes, there were even some of a strange city with crowded buildings, pointed archways, and cobblestone streets, but the reoccurring theme throughout his sketches was me, covered in varying shades of darkness.

At first, they were small, angled snippets of my face and body, fighting the weaning effects of the drug that had been suppressing me for years. Gradually the black cloud faded, revealing an almost unrecognizable woman, wild with her free eyes and bare skin.

“If I had known I was being watched I might have opted to wear more clothing.”

“While I certainly didn’t mind it, it wasn’t what made me seek you out and draw you each night.” He stood from the bed and every muscle, large and intricate, shifted as he walked toward me, spellbinding me with yet another work of art—his body. Standing in front of me, he opened his palms. “These hands were responsible for so much horror, bloodshed, and death, that I wanted them to be responsible for something beautiful too, so I began drawing as a way to…cope. But when you appeared to me, you woke up a part of me I’d never known. However long you stayed was all that I truly existed. And if by some cruel twist of fate I never saw you again, at least I would have these to remind me of how I felt. That there was good, somewhere out there, and that she had come to me, if even for a little while.”

The sincere vulnerability on his face, so open and clear with no traces of his once concealing mask, broke me in a way that somehow put me back together again, the way I was always meant to be.

Overcome with emotion, I tore my eyes from his face and looked at the sketch on the final page.

Drawn so lightly and timidly, as if to press any harder would be to draw the ink from his own blood, was yet another picture of me. It was a close-up of my face, flickering in the light of the cave the night I saved Rowen’s life, the night he kissed me.

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