Erza stepped toward Yuuta.
Her footsteps were soft on the melting ice, careful, deliberate.
The port around her was a graveyard, bodies frozen in twisted shapes, blood staining the ice in patterns too horrible to name, containers scattered like children's toys.
But she did not look at any of it. Her eyes were fixed on the man who was sleeping against a stack of containers, his head tilted back, his face peaceful, his chest rising and falling with the gentle rhythm of someone who had finally been allowed to rest.
She knelt beside him.
Her hands, which had killed demons and shattered armies, were gentle as she slipped one arm beneath his shoulders and the other beneath his knees.
She lifted him, cradling him against her chest, holding him the way a princess holds her prince in the old stories, the ones she had never believed in, the ones she had mocked, the ones that now felt more real than anything she had ever experienced.
He was lighter than she expected.
