Chapter 1628
He followed her gaze.
Beyond the canopy of vines and petals, a glow pulsed in the trees. Not golden. Pale green. Soft and flickering like fireflies. It formed a spiral on the forest floor - growing outward, slow and endless.
"It’s copying us?" he asked.
"No. It’s echoing us," Rose said. "We gave the island our bodies. Our hearts. It’s giving us permanence."
He watched the spiral pulse again, more clearly now - each loop a new circle, forming wide enough to house another platform. Another nest. Another sacred place.
"We’ll never be alone," he murmured.
"We never were," she replied.
Then she turned and crawled into his lap, straddling him, wrapping her arms around his neck. "But this... this part... will always be ours."
He cupped her cheek. "You were the first to know."
"I was the first to fall," she said. "And I’d do it again."
She kissed him, long and slow, and he melted into her, into the night, into the pulse of the spiral forming around them.