POV: Aphrodite
She grieves Alric. And doesn't understand why it hurts.
The battle's aftermath has the specific quality of all battle aftermaths — the sudden quiet where the noise was, the assessment of what the quiet reveals, the specific inventory of what remained through the fight and what didn't.
I sit alone in the hour between the assessment's completion and the next phase of the planning.
Alric.
The King without the crown scars, with the honest voice and the partners handshake and the chains that broke and the smile at the end of it. The cursed wolf king who was a Direwolf ally by choice before the betrayal and a warden by compulsion after and who held the collapse geometry with his body and tore the curse into himself and let the gates close.
I never accepted the bond.
