Okay, Helian. Take a deep breath. In, and out. Slowly.

  “Frost, what do you mean it’s your fault? I already told you I’m not going to leave. You don’t need to worry.”

  “They wrote it, so it’s all my fault. That’s why I knew what was going to happen even though I shouldn’t have known, and they must have wanted to punish you for rejecting them, or torment you for fun, or trick you into-”

  I took her hands firmly in mine and squeezed. I knew the answer to the question I was going to ask, but the important thing was to slow her down. “That’s not your fault, Frost. Why would it be your fault? And in the first place, like I said, you’ve misunderstood something.”

  She silently buried her face in my shoulder, so I continued. “This wasn’t their idea. They wrote it, yes… but it was my idea. Almost all of it. So, it’s not your fault, okay?”

  It’s my fault. Everything that happened to her was my fault. I could stomach the fact that I had done all of this to myself, even if it made me sick to think about the people that had gotten hurt to push the plot along. But she wasn’t even supposed to be involved, so why did she have to get hurt?

  “I don’t understand. Why would you do this to yourself? Did you do something you had to atone for? What could you have done that was so bad?”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s not it. It was all just… words. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. It was just a story, so no one would get hurt. I was certain nobody would get hurt. I was certain that words couldn’t hurt anyone.”

  Even if I couldn’t have known that the novel would be so important, I probably should have realized. Of course words could hurt people. Every word my parents said had been a knife that dug deep into my chest and twisted.

  “So Arsen and Mother and the duchess were all like that because you wanted them to be?”

  “… yes. It was appealing. I thought it was interesting.”

  “Everyone being like XXXXXXX was your idea… that’s why I’m like XXXXXXX, isn’t it? That was what you wanted.”

  That’s not- “No, no, hold on! They’re villains, Frost! Well, not your mother, but you understand, right? They’re the monsters, the obstacles for the heroine to overcome, the things that stand in the way of a happy ending! They-”

  How had the author felt when they realized all the villains were just like them? I had asked for a rebuke of their whole being. I’d made an inventory of every way they wronged me without even realizing what I was doing. It must have hurt so much.

  Fuck. “And in the first place, you and XXXXXXX are different. I don’t care what the dragon told you, I don’t care what you remember. I don’t care what you think you know. You’re different, okay? You’ve always been you, and you’ll always be you.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I had been hurting her all this time. “I was wrong to say you were no one, little bird. I still thought all this would vanish one day, like mist… I thought none of it mattered, and I was just having some fun, and once I left, you’d live a normal life like any other background character. I shouldn’t have thought that way. I was wrong.”

  She nodded and spoke quietly. “How are we different?”

  I slowly guided her down onto the mattress alongside me and stared her in the face. She looked away.

  I pulled her close and whispered in her ear. “I’ve only ever wanted to do this with you.”

  As I caressed her gently, she whimpered, and her muscles tensed around me.

  ------

  When I rose the next morning, Frost was already awake, staring at the rising sun.

  “What’s wrong, Frost?”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We go back to the estate, and we go on with our lives. It sounded like Rosa was in trouble, so maybe we can help her.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Helian. You’re not safe, since I’m not me.”

  “I already told you-”

  “It means a lot that you trust me, but that doesn’t change things. You trusted me before, and it all went wrong. It could all go wrong again.”

  “We’ll fix it somehow, okay? We’re going to stay together and sort everything out.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know what to do. But I promised, so I’ll believe you.”

  Had she promised me something last night? I couldn’t remember. But if the promise would keep us together, I suppose it couldn’t be anything bad. “Alright. I’ll make a promise to you too, okay? No matter what, I’m never going to abandon you. You can trust me, and I’ll trust you, alright? Even if you make a mistake, I’ll bring you back. And if I make a mistake, you can come rescue me again, okay?”

  Frost nodded. “Okay. That sounds good. Thank you, Helian.”

  She turned to me and hugged me tightly. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Frost. You know that, right? I’ve never stopped loving you, not even for a second.”

  “Not even when we broke up?”

  “That was the worst day of my entire life. I wanted to stay so badly.”

  “I wanted you to stay, too. I should have asked you to stay. I’m sorry that I never asked you to stay. I only understood how important that was once the dragon explained it to me.”

  The dragon again. I still couldn’t understand its motive for getting involved in all of this. Dragons were supposed to be ancient, wise beings, with little interest in human struggles. After all, we were so far beneath them that we could be considered insects. And from what I’d been told, they held a role of vast importance in regulating nature so that this world wouldn’t fall apart.

  Why would a creature like that care about Frost? I could barely understand why it cared about me, but why her? It had given her a gift in exchange for a mere promise – any promise a human could make meant nothing on the grand scale of things. Once she and I passed from this world, the promise would cease to matter.

  “It’s okay. There were many things we should have told each other. We learned our lesson, right? We don’t need to keep secrets anymore, so you can tell me anything.”

  She grimaced. “I should probably tell you what happened to Rosa… For starters, you must keep this a secret. If you tell anyone, you could be executed.”

  Rosa needed to realize that people took her jokes seriously. I had grown tired of this one. “I understand, I’ll keep it a secret.”

  “Rosa’s the princess, Helian. The one that’s still alive – her elder brother tried to kill all his siblings and her elder sister did die but Rosa’s still alive, even though everyone thinks she’s dead. And now she’s planning a coup, and I told her it was probably a good idea since we thought her brother had put you to sleep and I guess that was a mistake and I shouldn’t have encouraged her to do it. I know how much she loves to talk about uprisings and it kind of sounded like a good idea but I should have told her not to. I think she’s in danger now.”

  “Frost… you really need to stop causing trouble when I’m not around.”