Sleep wouldn't come.
I lay on my back with the blankets twisted around my legs, the silver feather on the nightstand glowing like a shard of captured moonlight. Each pulse of its soft radiance threw wing-shaped shadows across the ceiling, shadows that swayed when I breathed too fast. Adrian's voice circled through the darkness in a low, unshakable whisper: Their love story for you is a cage.
I told myself—again and again—that he was only trying to manipulate me. Yet every time I repeated it, doubt pressed heavier than the night. The Concord had appeared without invitation. Elior had admitted, in that quiet way of his, that he served them. Was Adrian truly lying? Or had he simply peeled back a truth I wasn't ready to see?
The feather pulsed harder, a slow, patient heartbeat that seemed to ask, Whose choice is this, really?
I dragged a scarf over it, but the glow bled through the weave in thin silver lines, stubborn as memory. The hours stretched long and brittle. Outside, a train wailed across the river. Pipes ticked in the walls. I counted each sound like a rosary until the first smear of dawn painted the curtains a watery gold.
Across the city, on the roof of the darkened café, Elior felt the same dawn cut the horizon. He stood with shoulders squared against the wind, green light licking around his hands, faint as fox-fire. A warm golden tremor brushed his senses—Adrian's signature, unmistakable. It was like breathing a foreign climate: roses, smoke, freedom.
His fingers curled. Power flared, then dimmed as he forced it back. A Cupid's oath forbids intrusion on mortal freedom, even when a rival stalks the heart you long to protect.
The Concord's messenger had called me Child of the Feather, a title older than the rivers. That name bent rules forged before stars first burned. Elior felt the weight of it settle across his shoulders like new armor and old chains.
Pippin flickered into being beside him in a scatter of soft sparks, wings quivering against the early breeze.
"You let him that close?" the sprite demanded, voice sharp with disbelief.
"I felt it," Elior said quietly. "I couldn't stop it without breaking the vow."
Pippin settled on his shoulder, uncharacteristically solemn. "If she chooses him…"
"I know." The unfinished sentence hung between them like an unstruck bell.
Morning in my apartment arrived too bright, too ordinary. I brewed coffee, burned the first pot, and left the second untouched. My reflection in the kitchen window looked almost like someone else—eyes shadowed, hair tangled from a night of restless turning. A normal girl in a normal city, except for the silver glow seeping from beneath a scarf.
When the knock came just after sunrise, relief startled me so much I nearly dropped the empty cup.
I opened the door before he could speak. "You knew he came."
Elior's eyes—soft green, threaded with worry—met mine without flinching. "Yes."
"You stayed away."
"I had to. You deserve the right to meet every choice without my interference."
The honesty in his voice disarmed me more than any argument. His presence carried the scent of rain on pine, steady and grounding, yet a flicker of something wilder—envy, maybe—moved beneath it.
"Then come in," I said, stepping aside. "We need to talk."
The feather greeted him the moment he crossed the threshold, pulsing through the scarf like a heartbeat against the air. The rhythm quickened as though it recognized him.
"She's bonded," he murmured.
I caught the words and held them. "What does that mean for me?"
"It means the decision is already orbiting you," he said, gaze never leaving the faint light. "The Concord believes your heart will anchor the balance. Adrian believes it can unmake it. And I—" His breath caught, the sentence unraveling. Centuries of discipline failed him; the truth lived there, unspoken, that he wanted me to choose him even as he vowed not to sway me.
"I don't belong to anyone's plan," I said, voice steadier than the storm inside me. "Not theirs. Not his. Not yours."
The sentence cut through the room like a spark and a wound at once.
Elior didn't argue. He stepped closer, hands open, the quiet of him louder than any plea. "That's all I want," he said softly, "for the choice to stay yours."
The feather flared without warning, silver light spilling across the walls until every shadow fled. For a heartbeat the glow braided green and gold, as if two worlds stretched toward me at once. His face was luminous in it, every line etched with something I could not name. The air vibrated, charged with the weight of unseen watchers—Concord, ex-Cupid, destiny itself.
I felt the vast machinery of their war press around me, the tug of Adrian's freedom, the pull of Elior's vow, and a third current that belonged only to me.
The light ebbed slowly, leaving the faint scent of roses and rain. I drew a long, steady breath.
Whatever came next would not be simple. No safe path waited, no tidy ending shaped by distant powers.
But the decision—terrifying and unbound—would be mine, and mine alone.