Chapter Text
What a fool he’d been, Eris thought, to have ever believed that time would dull the burn of Nesta Archeron. He had never planned for forever. He had certainly never planned for a hundred years with anyone, least of all with the formidable creature before him.
Yet at dawn, as the river fog caught golden in the window, it was her he woke beside that morning, her who remained after the embers of every plan and every vengeance had cooled. He could not remember when she had first begun to fit, but now he could not imagine a world where she did not.
Sat across from his beautiful wife in their private hunting lodge, having enjoyed a simple dinner just the two of them, Eris hoped he would never have to.
He reached for the bottle, poured them each another glass—a velvet dark Autumn vintage, the good stuff. “To a hundred years,” he said, raising his glass.
Nesta clinked hers against his. “And not one minute more.”
"I can start the divorce paperwork after dessert, if you'd like,” he offered.
She finally laughed, brittle and bright. “You’d die of boredom within a week.”
He swallowed his smile. “Probably.”
Eris reached for the envelope in his breast pocket. The letter inside was thick, the paper expensive, the script precise. He’d spent weeks writing it, erasing and rewriting with all the methodical care he typically only reserved for statecraft. But this little tradition of theirs had started long before their wedding ceremony, the moment he decided to pick up a quill and write to her after his beloved wife-to-be dressed down his late father in a manner most spectacular and befitting of the now Lady of Autumn.
Eyes never leaving her face, he pulled the letter out, keeping his hand on the paper as she reached for it. Not to stop her—never that. To anchor himself, lest he betray some tremor of anticipation.
Nesta eyed it, suspicious. “We said no gifts.”
“We said no ostentatious gifts.” He raised a brow and watched her. “Open it.”
Nesta offered no smile. Only the narrowing, appraising look that he had come to know so well. Nesta broke the wax seal with her thumbnail and began reading. Eris watched her, barely breathing, as if reading his own fate on her sharp features.
My darling wife, my Nesta,
I considered burning this letter after I finished it—easier to keep certain things in the realm of thinking, not saying. But you have always seen through my cowardice, so here it is: a confession, or perhaps a record, for when we are too old to remember how things began.
When we first began our courtship, I thought I would grant you a ring and a crown but never touch your heart. I thought I would rule with you beside me, and that would be enough. I was wrong.
I did not want to love you at first. Not because you were unworthy, but because you were so obviously beyond me. I did not want to be the kind of male who needed another. I did not want you to see me, and I did not want to see myself as you did. But you made it impossible, from the first.
I have known many things in my long and odious existence: I have known the taste of fear, the sting of humiliation, the sharpness of betrayal. I have known the chill of loneliness more intimately than I have ever known warmth, despite the fire that runs in my blood. Before you, I would have told you that I was not made for anything but that chill.
But you. You are a force of nature, Nesta, and I have learned to crave your storms.
This brings me, inexpertly, to my point.
A hundred years ago, I would have wagered my own soul against the possibility of happiness, and I would have lost. Because I am happy. I have you, and I have never wanted for more than that. Every day you wake up beside me, every time you laugh at my expense, every time you correct me—these are riches beyond the dreams of my boyhood.
You have never been anything but honest with me. You have never lied to me about who you are or what you want. When you rage, you rage openly. When you love, you love as though it is a violence, a thing to carve into bone.
If you are a witch, then I am content to be enchanted. If you are a curse, then I am pleased to be damned. If I am less monstrous than my father, it is you who made me so.
If I am anything, it is because I am yours.
A century with you is not enough. I want another hundred, a thousand, and another after that. I do not know what waits for us in the next one. I do not care, so long as you are with me to meet it.
Yours forevermore,
Eris
He was prepared for a scoff. A roll of the eyes. The savage, inevitable retort that would dissect his sentiment into ribbons and then set the remains alight. But Nesta sat utterly still, shoulders knotted, gaze fixed on the loops and slants of his handwriting. Her mouth held a sharp line, but her pulse leapt in her throat, betraying her, as it always did.
At last, Nesta folded the letter carefully, and set it beside her glass. There was a long moment in which she only looked at her hands—hands that had felled kings, made powerful weapons, and sometimes trembled as he held them.
In the quiet, Eris found his own hands trembling very slightly on the table. He felt raw and exposed. Even after all this time, the female in front of him still had the power to unmake him.
Nesta inhaled, steadying herself. She was aware, with devastating clarity, of Eris watching her. Waiting for her to detonate or, worse, betray herself entirely.
Instead, she reached under her chair, slow and steady, and drew out a thick envelope of her own, placing it in the middle of the table like a wager.
“Don’t get sentimental,” she said, but her voice was not as sharp as she wanted. “You know I can’t stand it.”
He grinned. “I believe you agreed to love me as I am.”
She made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, as Eris took the letter. He broke the seal with careful hands and she let herself look at him, gathering every twitch of his jaw, every tremor in his long, elegant fingers. He read quickly, head bowed, firelight licking at the line of his pale throat.
My beloved Eris,
Firstly, it is important to me that you know I am not writing this out of obligation or tradition (though I suppose we are fond of traditions, aren’t we), but because the thought of not telling you these things, of not setting them somewhere you could see them, is unbearable.
When you met me, I was the furthest thing from a romantic. I had spent most of my life building walls high enough to make an enemy of every hand that tried to reach for me.
And still, you reached. You reached, and reached, and reached, as if you were born to scale whatever fortress I built. You pried me open with a patience that I mistook for arrogance, with a gentleness I did not believe existed in you, and if it did, it was a weapon, not a kindness. You made me feel seen, and it terrified me more than any monster or warlord or ancient god. For the first time in my life, I wanted to be known. I wanted to be understood. I wanted you to look at all the ugliness inside me and not turn away.
Somehow, impossibly, you did not. You see me, all the way through. You saw the ruins and decided to build a life inside them anyway.
I do not know if I deserve it. I do not know if I deserve you. But I know that I want you, and I want you to know that you are the only person who has ever made me want to stay. To build, to try, to hope that something as fragile as happiness could survive in a world as cruel as ours.
I know I am not easy to love. I am perhaps not even easy to tolerate. I have been told, all my life, that I am too much—too cold, too sharp, too bitter. You, on the other hand, have never once asked me to be less. If anything, you have dared me to be more. To want more. To take more.
You infuriate me, Eris Vanserra. Every day, you find new creative ways to do so. But you are also the reason I am alive, and the reason I am whole, and the reason that I can close my eyes at night and believe in the possibility of waking up to a better tomorrow.
A hundred years ago, I did not know what that looked like. Now, I know I am and ever shall be yours.
All my love,
Nesta
P.S. If you ruin this moment by laughing, I will kill you in your sleep.
He didn’t look up immediately. She waited, chin propped on her knuckles, watching the emotions play out behind his mask: the crumbling, the rebuilding, the laugh he would not allow to escape. For a moment, she thought he might say nothing at all.
Instead, Eris reached across the table, covering her hand with his own. His skin was hot, as always. His thumb traced the lines of her knuckles, each up-and-down motion a silent vow.
There was nothing left to say, but that had always been the point of them. They were born for crackling fires and silence and the kind of understanding that did not require explanation.
In the silence, Nesta raised her glass. “To forever,” she said.
He smiled, teeth glinting in the low firelight. “And not one minute more.”