Page 18 of Crown of Storm and Silence
Nesilhan—Elif—takes the opportunity to flee, running back toward the village with her hand pressed protectively to her belly. I watch her go, my world tilting on its axis.
"I'm going to kill you," I say to Banu, my voice deadly calm. "Whatever you've done to her, whatever spell?—"
"She doesn't remember me either," Banu interrupts softly, and the simple words stop me cold.
I stare at the fairy, processing this information. "What?"
"She lost her memories," Banu says, her voice heavy with sadness that seems to carry the weight of centuries. "When the bond was severed…it must have ripped away more than just the connection between you. Her mind, her very sense of self—it's all gone. She has no idea who she was, where she came from, or who loved her." Each word falls like a stone into still water, sending ripples of agony through my chest. "If we push too hard, if we tryto force her to remember…we’ll only make it worse. The trauma could shatter what little stability she's found."
Gone. Not hidden, not suppressed, not locked away behind walls of fear or pain. Gone. Every memory of our courtship, our wedding, our nights tangled together in desperate passion—erased as if they never existed. Every whispered confession of love, every promise we made in the darkness, every moment when she chose me despite my shadows—all of it lost to the void.
The truth is still not registering clearly; her voice is distant. My mind is not accepting it. She's not hiding from me. She's not choosing to forget out of spite or self-preservation. She literally has no memory that she was ever Nesilhan, that she once belonged to me, that she once chose to love darkness itself. The woman who once surrendered her very soul to mine through blood and magic doesn't even remember my name. I am less than a stranger to her—I am nothing. A blank space where love used to live.
My legs give out beneath me. I crash to my knees among the grass by the river's edge as a sound rips from my throat—raw, animalistic, the kind of keening wail that souls make when they're being torn apart. It starts as a whisper and builds to a roar that echoes off the water, off the hills, a lament for everything I've lost and can never reclaim. The sound of a man dying while still breathing, of love becoming grief, of hope transforming into ash on the wind.
The shadows explode outward from my skin in torrents of grief made manifest, pouring from me like blood from a severed artery. They spread across the ground, reaching for all, consuming what little light remains. The unnatural twilight I'd already created deepens into something far more malevolent, darkness layering upon darkness until even the shadows have shadows. This is what loss looks like when it takes physical form—hungry, desperate, all-consuming.
She doesn't know me.
I feel Banu's small presence beside me, and my shoulders tense instinctively. No one touches me. No one dares. But when her tiny hand settles on my shoulder with hesitant gentleness, I don't destroy her. Can't destroy her. Because she's mourning too, isn't she? My shadows writhe around her like living things seeking comfort they've never known, dark tendrils caressing her silver hair, her delicate hands, but they don't burn. They recognize her as one of the few souls who truly loved Nesilhan, one of the few who understands this particular agony.
For a moment—just a moment—I let myself lean into that touch. Let someone else carry a fragment of this unbearable weight. And it breaks something in me even deeper.
"I know," she whispers, her ancient voice thick with unshed tears. "I know it hurts."
Another sound rips from my chest—part sob, part scream, all devastation. Five months. Five months of searching every shadow, burning every village, destroying all I touched in service to the relentless hope that I might find her alive. And now that I have, now that she's here and whole and carrying my child, she's more lost to me than if she'd died in my arms. At least in death, she would have taken our love with her intact. At least in death, I could have mourned what we had instead of grieving what she can never remember we were.
The woman I love, who carries half my soul in the growing life within her, doesn't even know my name.
And she's not wrong to fear me. I am precisely the nightmare she should run from.
But she doesn't remember why.
Perhaps that's the cruelest mercy the universe has ever chosen to grant—that she won't remember what it cost to love me the first time. She has no recollection of the nights I held her while shadows danced across our skin, won't rememberchoosing me despite every instinct that screamed danger. She won't remember that once, impossibly, a creature of pure light looked into my darkness and decided it was worth saving. That knowledge died with her memories, and maybe that's for the best. Maybe forgetting me is the only way she can ever truly be free.
7
The Reckoning
Nesilhan
I runthrough the village streets like a woman fleeing the end of the world, my lungs burning with each ragged breath, my hand pressed protectively against my belly where new life grows in blissful ignorance of the chaos surrounding it. Behind me, the darkness spreads across the sky like spilled ink, devouring the afternoon sun with hungry tendrils that make the very air taste of death.
My world has tilted off its axis. Everything I thought I knew about myself—about Elif, the quiet healer who lives simply and asks for nothing more than peace, has shattered like glass against stone. The man at the river, with his dark eyes and voice like silk wrapped around steel, has torn through my carefully constructed existence with a single word.
Nesilhan.
The name reverberates through my skull like a bell tolling for the dead, each syllable awakening something that's been sleeping in the depths of my broken memory. Not quite remembrance, but recognition, the way a body might rememberthe shape of hands that once traced its curves, the way a heart might remember the rhythm of another beating against it in the darkness.
Hatun.Wife. The way he said it made something deep inside me cry out in anguish and longing, as if a part of my soul had been calling for him across an impossible distance and had finally, finally been heard. But the conscious part of me, the part that is Elif, recoiled in terror from the implications.
I am someone else. Someone I don't remember being. Someone who belonged to a creature of shadow and power whose very presence makes the darkness sing.
Tears stream down my face as I stumble through the cobblestone streets, past cottages whose warm windows mock me with their promise of simple, uncomplicated lives. Lives where women know their own names, where they don't wake from dreams of dark eyes and shadow-wrapped hands, where they don't carry children whose parentage is a mystery.
My cottage comes into view, its familiar walls and herb garden offering the illusion of sanctuary. But even as I reach for the door handle with shaking fingers, I know that whatever safety I've built here is about to crumble. He will follow. He will come for me, for the child I carry, for whatever claim he believes he has on the woman I used to be.
The door swings open before I can touch it, and my heart lurches with desperate hope and crushing disappointment in equal measure.
