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Miraak lies on the couch, quiet. One leg is folded, the other stretched out, boots still on because he tells himself he is only resting — that he is not waiting for the soft-footed shuffle of Lilliandra finally conceding to fatigue, finally coming to drape herself over him like she owns the space his body takes up. He keeps a book open on his chest, pages unmoving, and his gaze fixes on the lines without absorbing them.
The Tower hums around him. A low, patient vibration in the stone and the ink-veins, the slow breath of shelves settling, the distant cough of a book shifting itself into a better mood. He has learned, over the millennia, to read that hum the way one reads the weather: a change in pressure, a subtle tilt in the air.
And threaded through it, always, is her.
Not a sound. Not even a presence, in the way mortals mean it. More like a constant distortion at the edge of his senses — a familiar pressure, an ozone tang of her magicka, the faint static of her mind working. It has become so constant that he only notices it when it changes.
He turns a page without seeing it.
The hum dips.
Not louder. Not softer. Wrong in a way that makes his spine tighten before his mind names it. The Tower does not creak; it does not startle. It simply… stutters, like a heart skipping a beat.
He lifts his head, and the book slides a fraction down his chest.
For a moment, he tells himself it is nothing. Lilliandra’s wards flare and gutter all the time — a side effect of her pretending caution is for other people. He has seen her burn through circles of chalk and goldleaf as if they are suggestions. He has watched her take apart a spell and rebuild it mid-cast because she did not like the aesthetic of the glyphwork.
But there is a particular kind of quiet that follows a mistake large enough to echo.
The ambient pressure of her — that constant edge-of-senses distortion — thins.
He realizes, with the sudden cold clarity of a knife sliding between ribs, that he cannot feel her.
Not ‘she is far away.’ Not ‘she is masking.’ Not even the maddening prickle of her trying to hide a thing from him and failing because he knows her too well.
Nothing.
His body is upright before the thought catches up. The book drops to the floor with a dull thump. His hand is already reaching, not for a weapon, but for the thread he always keeps lightly anchored to the wards he helped lay in this wing. A touch of his will, braided into stone. A tether.
It twitches under his fingers like a living thing in pain.
Somewhere, far above or far below — the Tower ignores conventional direction when it pleases — something ticks. A sound like a joint cracking. A ward failing.
He is moving before he decides to move.
The corridor unfurls for him — not out of kindness, but out of obedience. The Tower knows who its masters are. It shifts, arches widening, corners smoothing, floors lengthening by half an impossible step. Pages whisper along the walls as he passes, the sound rising like a gale caught in a library.
The first door he reaches is not her study. It should be. It’s the one she favours. The one full of stacked journals and half-finished diagrams and cups that have been used as beakers. The one that smells of ink, hot wax, and the sharp bite of her particular brand of genius.
The door is closed.
The Tower does not close doors on him.
His hand touches the archway and the stone is warm — fever-warm, as if something has bled heat into it. The ward-line carved into the lintel glows faintly, not with protective intent, but with the after-image of a surge: a light that has already burned and is now fading, leaving a ghost of itself behind.
He does not bother with keys. He does not knock. He shoves his will into the hinge and the Tower yields with a reluctant, almost resentful sigh.
The air inside hits him like a wave.
Not smoke. Not blood. Not the metallic tang of battle.
Ink.
Wet parchment. Brine. Ozone. The taste of lightning discharged into water. A note beneath it like rot — not death, exactly, but the wrongness that precedes it, the sweet-sour smell of something that should be alive and is in the process of deciding not to be.
The study is lit wrong.
The daylight globes she favours hover in their usual places, but the shadows are pooled in corners they do not belong. The edges of the room look slightly blurred, as if a painter has smudged the line between wall and air. A page flutters in slow motion mid-fall, caught on nothing, turning over and over as if gravity has forgotten what it is supposed to do.
And in the middle of it —
Lilliandra.
She’s on the floor.
Not collapsed neatly, not fainted in a dramatic sprawl. It’s an ugly fall: one shoulder against the desk leg, knees bent under her as if she tried to catch herself and missed. One hand is splayed on the chalk circle she drew — fingers still smeared with coppery dust — as though she reached for the nearest anchor and found it already slipping away.
Her eyes are open.
That’s what makes his stomach drop.
Open, but not seeing. Pupils fixed on a point somewhere past the ceiling, past the Tower, past the concept of present time. The whites have a thin webbing of red as if she has been staring too hard at something bright. A line of blood has dried at one nostril, dark against her pale skin. Her lips parted.
No breath moves them.
He’s on his knees beside her without remembering the space between.
His hand finds her throat. Pulse — faint, distant, like a signal heard through thick walls. Not steady. Not safe.
“Lilliandra.” The name comes out clipped, sharp. He tries it again, lower. “Lilli.”
Nothing.
He presses his palm to her sternum. Restoration answers him eagerly — it always does, eager to mend what is broken, eager to make flesh remember its proper shape. Golden light blooms under his fingers, and for a moment the room breathes with him. He feels her ribs lift. He feels the muscle of her heart respond, a stutter.
And then the light slides off her as if it cannot find purchase.
Her heart falters again. The pulse under his fingers thins. The warmth in her chest feels… shallow. Like a fire that is burning in a hearth with no chimney, starving itself on its own smoke.
“Damn you,” he hisses, and it’s not directed at the spell. It is directed at her. At her stubbornness. At her arrogance. At the way she will take a blade to her own throat if the result is ‘useful data.’
He forces more restoration into her, more insistence, more command.
Her skin warms. The blood in her veins remembers movement.
But it does not solve the wrongness.
Because what is wrong with her is not merely body.
His gaze jerks to the circle beneath her hand. To the scatter of notes on the desk above her, pages half pinned by weighted inkstones, lines of script in her tight, looping hand. There are runes there, sigils nested within sigils, clever redundancies, the kind of layered structure she builds when she is trying to cheat a rule she has decided she resents.
Copper dust is worked into the chalk, gleaming faintly like ground coins. There is a thin wire looped through the circle — copper again — tied to a rod set against the desk leg. The rod hums with residual power, acting as a crude anchor.
Redundancies. Failsafes. A system designed to catch something if it slips.
His chest goes tight.
She planned for this.
Not for dying, perhaps — she never likes to admit she is mortal — but for slipping. For displacement. For the soul’s alignment to go wrong. She built a net beneath her own feet, because she knows she likes to dance on edges.
And yet—
His eyes flick across the glyphs, fast, ruthless. He’s not reading for beauty. He’s reading for function. For the fulcrum. For the switch he can flip to make this stop.
A binding array. A tether line. A clause written in the margin in shorthand, as if she did not want to waste time explaining it to herself:
Co-anchor.
His hand stills on her chest.
Co-anchor. As in: two points of stability. Two living presences linked so one can pull the other back if the line snaps.
A sane mage would choose the easiest co-anchor available: the person already bound to her in every practical way that matters. The man who is currently kneeling beside her with his hand over her heart. The one whose soul and will have been close enough to hers for years that even Apocrypha recognizes the pattern of them.
But her circle has no hook for him.
No slot where his magic is meant to braid in. No placeholder for his name. No prepared channel.
She built the redundancy… and did not include him.
Above the easiest backup of simply bothering him, telling him, stand guard while I do something stupid, she decided she was above needing anyone at all.
The room tilts. Not physically — the Tower holds steady — but inside his head, something shifts from fear into cold, bright fury.
“Of course,” he mutters. “Of course, you did.”
Her pulse stutters again under his fingers, as if offended by the accusation. Her eyes remain fixed on nothing. The way her shadow lies at her side is wrong; it’s a shade too far from her body, more like a garment she’s half removed.
He inhales, forces himself to stop feeling and start solving.
Restoration will keep the flesh warm, the muscle moving, but it cannot drag a soul back if the soul is already halfway out the door.
And he does know soul magic and necromancy — not the way Lilliandra knows it, with her surgical curiosity and her willingness to treat bodies like tools, but enough. Dragon priests learn many things in service of their dragons. Some of them die and do not stay that way. Some achieve states of undeath that require a precise understanding of what binds spirit to bone.
He’s performed rites that make the line between “alive” and “not” thin enough to step over.
He hates that he knows these things.
He hates that he needs them now.
He slides his hand from her sternum to her abdomen, then to her throat again, grounding her body with touch while his other hand reaches into the chalk circle. The copper dust clings to his fingers. The circle hums faintly, unstable, like a string pulled too tight.
He tastes the structure of the spell for a heartbeat — the lingering residue of her attempt — and his chest aches.
She’s not trying to merely anchor herself to a point in space. She's testing to anchor herself to continuity. To make her soul remember ‘here’ even if reality wanted to unspool it.
An attempt to deny the universe the right to take her.
Ambitious.
Brilliant.
Reckless.
And now her soul is drifting in the gap between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere,’ and her body is an empty vessel struggling to keep itself warm.
“Fine,” he murmurs, and the word is not concession. It’s a threat. “If you will not come back by your own cleverness, I will haul you back.”
He presses two fingers to the chalk line and draws, not one of her elegant sigils, but a harsher mark — a tether, old and ugly. It does not care about aesthetics; it cares about function.
The air thickens. The ink in the veins of the wall pulses. The Tower notices.
He speaks a word under his breath — not a shout, not the Thu’um meant to break mountains, but a shaped syllable that bites the room into attention. The kind of utterance that makes spirits flinch. A hook cast into unseen water.
The space above Lilliandra’s body ripples.
For a split second he sees it: an echo of her, translucent and wrong. Her outline stands half a step to the left of where her body lies, as if she is misregistered in reality’s ledger. Her hair floats as though underwater. Her eyes in the echo are open too — but those eyes are looking somewhere else entirely.
It’s a horrifying thing, to see the woman he loves split like that. To see her as a mistake the universe has not corrected yet.
His hand clenches, and copper cuts into his palm.
“Do not,” he snarls, voice low. “Do not dare.”
He threads the tether in harder. It’s necromancy, yes, but not the raising of dead flesh. It’s the binding of a soul to what it already owns. A rope around a wrist that has slipped from a sleeve.
The echo flickers. For a moment it drifts, as if resisting — not maliciously, but with that stubborn inertia that is so utterly Lilliandra: the refusal to be moved by anything she does not choose.
Miraak leans closer, until his mouth is near her ear, near the warm skin that is still hers even if she is not fully in it.
He speaks her name again, but not the name everyone uses. Not the clipped ‘Lilli’ she pretends is casual. Not the full Altmeri line that sounds like ceremony. The name he has shaped for her in his own mouth.
“Dii Vokun,” he says. My shadow. It’s not a prayer. It’s not a plea. It is an ownership he rarely allows himself to voice, because it makes him vulnerable to admit that he has something to lose.
The echo shivers.
His thumb presses to the pulse point beneath her jaw, a steady insistence. His other hand holds the tether like a chain.
“Come back,” he repeats, softer now, less command and more… claim. “You have not finished irritating me.”
For the first time since he entered the room, something shifts in the air that is hers.
A tremor, like laughter caught behind teeth. A faint tightening in the muscle beneath his hand, as if her body recognizes the shape of that sentence and remembers that she does, in fact, still live here. The echo jerks, dragged by the tether and by the name, by the simple fact that there is someone on the other end who refuses to let go.
It snaps into alignment so suddenly that Miraak feels it in his own bones — a click, a lock falling into place.
Lilliandra’s body arches with a violent inhale, as though she has been drowning and has only just found the surface. Her eyes roll, then refocus — not fully, not safely, but present enough to be terrifying in a new way. Colour floods back into her lips in a slow, grudging wave. The ward-lines on the floor flare once and then gutter, spent.
The Tower’s hum steadies, shaken but intact.
Miraak stays crouched over her, hands still in place, as if the universe might try to steal her again the moment he loosens his grip.
For a long beat, he simply listens to her breathe. And in the quiet between those breaths, where his fear has nowhere to go, it curdles into something sharp and merciless.
Because she is back.
But she should never have been gone at all.
For a moment, she only lies there with her mouth open, pulling air like it is new information. The inhale is too sharp, too greedy; it catches at the top of her lungs as if she has forgotten how to do it without tearing herself.
Miraak keeps his hands on her anyway. One at her throat, fingers braced over the pulse point as though he can pin the rhythm in place through sheer insistence. The other on her sternum, palm flat, feeling the rise and fall he coaxed back into existence.
Her heartbeat is still wrong. Not stopping — gods, not stopping — but uneven, a stuttered thing. He can feel the tremor in the muscle under his hand, the way her body is trying to remember the rules it nearly slipped free of.
“Stay,” he says, and it is a command delivered to her flesh rather than her mind. “Breathe.”
Her lashes flutter. The unfocused stare shifts, drifts, catches on his face like a hand trying to find the edge of a table in the dark.
“Miraak,” she croaks, as if surprised to discover him here.
It should not do anything to him. She says his name all the time — too casually, half the time, like she is trying to sand down the sharpness of it into something domestic. But right now, it lands with a weight he does not want to examine: confirmation that she is back inside herself enough to recognize him.
He leans closer, not in tenderness, but in scrutiny. His eyes flick over her pupils, the pallor of her skin, the dried blood at her nose. He should check for a concussion; he should check for internal bleeding; he should check— he should check everything because she is Lilliandra and ‘fine’ has never meant fine.
“You were out of alignment,” he says, voice low and flat. “Your soul slipped.”
She swallows. The motion makes the tendons in her throat shift under his fingers — alive. Real. “Mm,” she manages, and tries to smile. It’s a poor attempt; her mouth trembles. “Then I suppose… it worked.”
His jaw tightens.
It’s not the first time she has crawled back from the edge of something. He has watched her bleed for knowledge before. He has watched her grin through pain like it’s a private joke between her and the universe. He has loved her for it, in the same way one loves a knife for being sharp: with admiration and the constant awareness that it will cut.
He has never, until this moment, seen her half-absent — her body here and her presence elsewhere, like a garment half shrugged off.
He refuses to let her make that into a triumph.
“You almost died on the floor,” he says.
She makes a sound that might be a laugh if it weren’t clogged with exhaustion. “That’s melodramatic.”
“It’s accurate,” he stresses.
She shifts, the smallest attempt to sit up. His hand at her chest presses her back down with a firm, wordless refusal. He feels her test the pressure, then concede — not because she agrees, but because her body cannot win the argument.
Her eyes narrow slightly, focusing more. That’s always the next step for her: awareness returning like a blade drawn slowly from its sheath.
“What happened?” she asks, then, with the faint edge of irritation she cannot help even now. “I remember the surge. I remember—” Her gaze flicks toward the circle, the copper rod, to the desk. “—and then… static.”
Static. As if her near-unraveling was an inconvenience.
Miraak follows her gaze, and the sight of her work snaps something in him again: the chalk circle still humming faintly, the copper dust glittering, the pages covered in nested runes like a spiderweb of intent. The room still looks blurred at the edges, as if reality is reluctant to sit properly where she has tugged at it.
The thought arrives, sharp and clean: I should destroy it.
Not because he does not understand it. Not because he fears knowledge. But because she built this with her usual arrogance and called it contingency while leaving the most obvious safeguard out of the circle entirely. Because if this exists, she will try it again. She will refine it. She will ‘fix’ what went wrong.
And next time, the Tower might not stutter loud enough for him to hear.
His hand twitches.
He imagines wiping his palm through the chalk lines, smearing them into uselessness. Imagines snapping the copper rod and watching the spell structure collapse like a gutted thing. Imagines burning every page in her hand to ash.
She would hate him for it.
Which, he thinks with sudden, venomous clarity, would still be preferable to watching her die.
He doesn’t do it. Not yet.
He shifts his arm under her shoulders instead, careful despite himself. Her body is now warm — too warm, feverish with residual magic as it brightly snaps back into her — and awkward with her height; a tangle of long limbs too weighted to fight him.
“Up,” he says, and lifts before she can argue.
She gives a thin sound of protest as her spine leaves the floor, then clutches at his forearm with a reflexive grip that is more honest than any of her words. Her fingers are unsteady, nails faintly stained with copper dust and ink. He feels the tremor run through her hand into his skin.
“You—” she starts.
He cuts her off. “You are not remaining in this room.”
He carries her without ceremony. There is no bridal tenderness to it, no attempt to make it pretty. He hauls her like a prize he refuses to drop, her head lolling briefly against his shoulder until she gathers herself enough to keep it upright.
As he moves, the Tower shifts around them. Shelves sigh. Pages hush. The corridor they step into feels cooler, cleaner, as if the Tower itself is relieved to let them leave that warped pocket of air behind.
Lilliandra blinks against his collarbone, eyes half-lidded. “You’re… overreacting.”
His grip tightens almost imperceptibly. “I had to tether you like a spirit refusing its grave,” he says, each word measured. “That is not something one overreacts to.”
“Miraak,” she murmurs again, and there is something in the way she says it — softened by exhaustion, edged by familiarity. She tries to pull her head back to look at him properly, as if she can negotiate him down with eye contact. “It was controlled.”
He stops walking.
Not abruptly — he does not jostle her — but he stills so completely that the Tower’s hum seems to pause in recognition of it. His eyes meet hers. “Controlled,” he repeats, and his voice is calm in a way that has always been more dangerous than shouting.
Her mouth opens. Closes. She seems to consider, just for a breath, the obvious lie. Then she takes the other route: truth reframed into something she can stomach. “I built redundancies,” she says, and gestures faintly back toward the study with a weak tip of her head. “Failsafes. Copper anchoring. Stabilizing loops. If the alignment slipped, it was meant to— to snap back. I just…” Her brow furrows, annoyed at her own body’s weakness. “I misjudged the strain tolerance on the final pull.”
Final pull. As if it is a measurement error.
“And you did not tell me,” he says.
A beat of silence.
Her gaze skitters away for a fraction of a second. It’s the closest thing to guilt he will get from her without a knife pressed to the right artery. “I didn’t want—” she begins, then exhales sharply. “You were resting. You’ve been… tense lately. I thought it would be faster if I just—”
If I just handle it.
If I just do it alone.
If I just risk my life quietly so it doesn’t inconvenience you.
The words don’t leave her mouth, but he hears them anyway, because he has spent fifty, sixty years learning the shape of her evasions. Learning the way she believes needing someone is weakness, even when she has already built a life around him.
His throat tightens, anger rising like bile. He swallows it down.
He starts walking again.
He carries her into the larger sitting room — the one with the couch he was pretending not to wait on, the one she likes to sprawl across when she’s stolen his warmth. He lowers her onto it with more care than he means to show, then immediately adjusts her posture, forcing her to lie back. His palm presses briefly to her forehead, then her throat again, checking pulse. His restoration magic brushes her skin like a cold cloth, assessing.
Her eyes flutter closed for a second. When they open, they are sharper.
“I will fix it,” she says, stubborn even now. “Whatever slipped, I can—”
“No,” he says, the single syllable cutting clean through her. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to.
She blinks at him, offended on principle. “No?”
“No,” he repeats. Then, because she will claw at any ambiguity: “You will not touch that circle again tonight. You will not stand. You will not return to that room until I have read every line of what you attempted and decided what you are allowed to try next.” The last part is deliberate. He watches her react to it — outrage flaring, pride bristling — and pushes anyway, because his fear has nowhere else to go but into control.
She stares at him, breathing steadier now, and the corner of her mouth twitches as if she is deciding whether to bite. “Since when do you decide what I’m allowed to do?” she asks, voice thin.
Since you nearly left me with a corpse that still had your face, he thinks.
He does not say that. Not yet.
Instead, he turns his head toward the corridor that leads back to her study, and his fingers curl once, slow and tight, as if around an invisible throat. The urge to go back and destroy the work pulses through him again.
He forces his hand to unclench. “You will sleep,” he says, and the words come out colder than he intends. “And then you will explain to me — slowly, clearly, like I am a student you do not trust — what you thought you were doing, and why you believed a copper rod was a better anchor than having me in the room.”
Her eyes widen a fraction at that last phrasing.
There it is: the true accusation. Not the spell. Not the mistake.
The choice.
Lilliandra goes very still, as if she has just realized that what he is angry about is not her arrogance in the abstract, but the specific kind that erases him from her contingency plans.
She opens her mouth. Whatever defense she was going to make falters.
And in the space where her usual flippancy should be, Miraak hears only her breathing — real, present, stubbornly alive — and thinks, with a violence that surprises even him, that he is not going to allow her to make him watch her come that close again.
“Understand? You will sleep,” Miraak says again, and there is steel under it now. “And tomorrow you explain.”
Lilliandra’s gaze fixes on him with that particular, tired sharpness she gets when pain has sanded down her patience. She’s too weak to sit up, too stubborn to yield. Her fingers flex against the couch cushion as if testing whether her body will obey a command to rise anyway. “You’re acting,” she says, and her voice is hoarse, “as if I did it to spite you.”
Miraak laughs once; it’s not amusement. It’s a clipped sound that means you still don’t understand what you’ve done. “No,” he replies. “I am acting as if you did it because you always believe you are the only reliable factor in the equation.”
Her mouth flattens. “I built redundancies.”
“I saw your redundancies.” He keeps his tone even with effort that makes his jaw ache. “Copper in chalk. A stabilizing loop. A co-anchor clause with no co-anchor. A net beneath your feet that assumes you can fall and be caught without anyone watching.”
“You don’t know that,” she snaps, and then immediately winces, as if the snap costs her. She drags in a breath, softer, trying to regain control of herself and the conversation. “You don’t know what the co-anchor clause was meant to be.”
Miraak holds her gaze.
The Tower hums around them, the whisper of pages low and attentive. He has always hated that it listens like a court. He hates it more now, because some part of him wants witnesses.
“Tell me.”
Lilliandra’s eyes flick, involuntarily, toward the corridor. Toward her study. Toward the half-broken circle still humming wrong. Toward the notes that will be calling to her the moment she is strong enough to stand. “It was meant to be…” she begins, and the pause that follows is not because she doesn’t know.
It’s because she does.
She has an answer ready. A perfectly reasonable answer. A clean answer.
And he sees, in that fraction of hesitation, the ugly truth: the co-anchor was never meant to be him. Not because she doesn’t trust him with her magic — she trusts him with too much, sometimes, in ways that still surprise him — but because she does not trust herself to need him. Not in the moment that matters.
She would rather build copper into chalk than admit she requires a living hand on her throat to stay tethered to the world.
Miraak’s fingers curl at his sides. “Say it,” he prompts, and his voice is very quiet now.
Lilliandra’s chin lifts a fraction. Defiance by reflex. “It was meant to be the Tower,” she says. “The Tower is stable. It’s—” She swallows. “It’s always here. It can hold a tether better than—”
“Than a person?” he finishes for her.
Her eyes narrow. “Than a person who might be asleep.”
The moment the words leave her mouth, she looks as if she regrets them. Not because they’re untrue — Lilliandra does not regret truth — but because she hears the implication the way he hears it.
You are optional. The Tower is not.
Miraak feels something in him go cold and bright.
His hand flexes at his side. For a moment the urge is violent and simple — go back, smear the circle, break the copper, erase the cleverness that almost got her killed. He doesn’t move to it.
He steps closer instead, until the edge of his shadow falls over her face. “Do you know,” he begins slowly, “what I saw when I entered that room?”
Lilliandra blinks, thrown off balance by the question. “A spell failure,” she replies as if it’s the only possible answer.
“No.”
He can still see it when he shuts his eyes: her body slack on the floor, her gaze empty, the echo of her standing half a step out of alignment like discarded skin.
“I saw you,” he says, each word bitten into shape, “half gone.”
Her throat works as she swallows again. She looks away for a fraction of a second, as if she can file the memory into a drawer and lock it. As if refusing to look at him will keep him from naming it. “I came back,” she says, too briskly.
“Because I pulled you back.”
Her eyes snap back to his. Irritation flares — a spark she clings to because it’s safer than the alternative. “And I’m grateful,” she says. “Truly. But don’t dramatize it into—”
“Do not,” Miraak cuts in, and the command lands like a blade flat against the throat. “Do not attempt to soothe this with your cleverness.”
Silence.
Lilliandra’s nostrils flare. Her fingers curl, then relax. She is not afraid of him, not truly. But she is wary of this: the rare moment when his composure fractures enough to show the sharp edges underneath.
Miraak leans in, close enough that she can feel the heat of him, close enough that the Tower’s whisper thins as if the realm itself is listening. He watches her carefully, and sees the exhaustion dragging at her bones, the residual tremor in her hands, the faint sheen of sweat at her brow. She looks wrecked. She looks alive. Those two facts should not be so tightly linked.
“You nearly died alone,” he says. “On the floor. In a circle you drew. With copper dust and ink and a plan that did not include telling me.”
Her lips part as if to respond. He doesn’t let her.
“You nearly died. You speak as if the relevant error is that you misjudged your strain tolerance,” he continues, and now there’s something in his voice that wasn’t there a moment ago — strain, a crack just beneath the surface. “As if you can correct the number and attempt again tomorrow.”
“Miraak—”
“I was on the couch,” he says, and the confession tastes bitter. “Pretending I was not waiting for you. As if I had any right to be complacent. As if you wouldn’t, given the opportunity, try to pry open the bones of reality with your bare hands.”
She makes a small, involuntary sound — not laughter, not quite — because yes, of course she would. It’s half insult, half affection. “You’re—” He sees her reach for that familiar script: banter, dismissal, a sly smile to defuse the tension. He sees her preparing to say something like I’m fine, I’m here, you’re being dramatic.
And something in him refuses it.
He does not shout. He does not pace. He does not slam his fist into a wall. That would be easy. That would be theater. His fear would like theater; it would like somewhere to spill.
Instead, he reaches for her.
Not gently.
His hand comes up and closes around her jaw, thumb pressing at the hinge, fingers curving along the line of her cheek with a firmness that makes her stop talking mid-word. It’s not pain. It’s not careful. It’s claiming — the kind of touch that says look at me, stay here, stay in your body, stay where I can keep you.
Her breath catches.
Her eyes flare wide, then narrow — anger sparked, then swallowed as she recognizes what this really is. The tremor in her gaze. The whitened knuckles of restraint in his own hand.
“No,” he says again, lower. “Listen to me.” The words land like a trap snapping shut.
Lilli’s throat works under his thumb as she swallows. She does not pull away. Her hand comes up slowly — unsteady, still weak — and wraps around his wrist, not to remove it, but to hold it there. An acknowledgment, more intimate than consent spoken out loud.
Miraak’s eyes flick down at that hand, then back to her face. His grip tightens a fraction, as if he can anchor her to the world through bone and breath. Gaze pins her. “You are not allowed to die before me,” he says.
The sentence is quiet. It’s not theatrical. It’s worse than that — raw, factual, final.
Lilliandra blinks slow. For a heartbeat she looks confused, like she’s been presented with a rule that doesn’t exist in her private cosmology.
Miraak continues anyway, because once the words begin, he cannot stop them without choking.
“Do you understand?” he asks, voice low and steady only because he is forcing it to be. “You will not burn yourself out alone in a circle of chalk and arrogance. You will not quietly slip out of your body while I’m three corridors away.”
Her pupils widen slightly. Her mouth opens, then closes. She’s listening now in a way she doesn’t always allow. She’s gone very still, as if the strength she has left is being spent on attention.
“If death comes for you,” Miraak says, “it will have to come through me first.”
The possessiveness in it tastes like something ancient. He hates that it’s there.
He hates more that it is honest.
“If you insist on risking yourself,” he continues, and his thumb shifts, pressing under her cheekbone like a warning, “then you are bound to me, Lilliandra. You do not get to step off the edge alone. Not when I have already—” His breath catches, the fracture showing for a heartbeat. “—not when I have already lost too many things to time and realms and gods that think they are entitled to what is mine.”
He does not say I care for you. He does not say I love you. Those words are too soft to carry the weight of what he means.
So, he gives her the weight instead.
“I will drag you back,” he says, voice turned dangerous with restraint. “From whatever grave or realm you think you can escape to.”
The Tower is silent. Not quiet — silent. Even the pages seem to hold their breath.
Lilliandra stares at him, eyes wide in a way that is almost startled. It’s rare to see her caught like this: stripped of her ready calculations, her sarcasm temporarily shelved because something has cut deeper than she expected.
He can see her mind moving behind her gaze, assembling the shape of what he just said and testing its edges like a blade.
Then her shoulders loosen by a fraction, and she exhales like something in her chest has been squeezed, and then a slow, wicked expression of satisfaction blooms.
“…Okay,” she breathes, voice faint and wrecked. “Weird way to propose, but yes.”
Miraak goes perfectly still. The Tower’s whisper returns all at once, like pages exhaling, like the realm itself remembering that sound exists.
His eyes narrow by instinct, as if she’s tried to cheat in a game. “That is not—” he begins.
Lilli’s lashes flutter. She looks very, very pleased with herself despite the exhaustion dragging at her bones. Her fingers remain curled around his wrist, holding him as if she’s afraid he’ll vanish if she lets go. The corner of her mouth tugs upward, slow and satisfied, as if she has found a loophole in his rage and intends to live in it.
“You said… bound.”
“I said it as a restriction.”
“That’s still… commitment,” she murmurs, as if explaining a simple theorem. “Lifetime clause. Afterlife clause. ‘I will drag you back’ clause.” Her smile widens, slow and satisfied. “Most people don’t threaten necromantic retrieval unless they’re serious.”
He should correct her. He should take the words back, reshape them, make them into something less revealing.
He finds, unexpectedly, that he cannot.
Because the truth is: he is serious.
Miraak exhales sharply and looks away like it will help. When he looks back at her, his voice is low, dangerous with restraint — and his hand is still on her face, still holding her like she’s real and he refuses to let the universe misplace her again. “Trust you,” he begins, “to interpret a prohibition against your death as romance.”
Lilliandra’s eyes gleam. She looks, for a heartbeat, younger than she ever allows herself to look — softened by the near-miss, lit from within by the simple fact that he has just admitted something he hates admitting. “Was it not?” she asks.
Miraak frowns.
He could deny it. He could be cruel. He could let go of her face, step back, put the mask on as neatly as he fastens armour — pretend he is still the man who does not attach, who does not need.
Instead, his hand stays where it is, firm on her jaw, thumb still braced beneath her cheekbone as if he’s afraid she’ll slip out of herself again if he loosens his grip.
For a heartbeat he only looks at her — at the dried blood at her nose, the faint tremor still living in her limbs, the way her mouth keeps trying to shape jokes around something that almost broke her. Around something that almost broke him.
Then he moves.
Not away.
Down.
He crouches beside the couch, bringing himself level with her rather than towering, a rare concession of posture that feels like yielding and claiming at once. His other hand slides behind her neck, fingers threading into her hair at the nape — not gentle, not careful, but sure. Anchoring.
He pulls.
Abrupt, uncompromising, with the same instinct that made him carve a tether into her chalk circle: come here. stay. stay where I can keep you.
She makes a small sound as her body shifts, breath catching — half surprise, half pain — and then she goes pliant with a familiarity that hurts. Cheek to his shoulder. Nose pressed to the line of his collar. Her hand comes up, slow and unsteady, and grips his sleeve as if her body has decided this is safer than pride.
Miraak’s arm tightens around her without permission from either of them.
He doesn’t often initiate touch like this. He endures it. Allows it. Pretends it’s inconsequential when she curls into him. But this— this is him reaching first, pulling her in like a man who has stopped bargaining with fear.
“Do not,” he says into her hair, quieter now, the edge still there but dulled by something raw, “do that again.”
Lilli hums faintly, the sound half agreement, half mischief on autopilot. “You can’t say all that and then start issuing more orders,” she murmurs, voice muffled against him.
Ordinarily, she would push. She would needle until he snapped again, until his restraint turned into a sharper kind of control — because it’s easier to live in that friction than in softness.
But she has felt his hand on her face. She has seen the fracture in him when he said half gone. So, she doesn’t push this time.
Her fingers flex once against his sleeve and then settle, loosening a fraction, as if she’s letting the joke be what it is: a thread thrown over a depth she doesn’t want to stare into too long. A way to reassure him she’s still herself, still here, still irritating.
Miraak closes his eyes for a beat. The Tower’s hum steadies around them, a low, satisfied resonance, as if the realm itself approves of this correction — this living weight returned to him.
“Watch me,” he replies, dry by habit.
But his grip at the back of her neck remains steady. Not a threat. Not a punishment.
An anchor.
A promise.
A claim he will not pretend is anything else.