Page 123 of The Bronzed Beasts
“It means she’s still alive,” said Zofia. “She promised connection, and she kept it.”
As long as I live, so will you.
Zofia smiled at him. For the first time, he noticed laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, and he was happy that life had marked her with joy. “Séverin… I think that means she will keep her other promise too.”
Her other promise.
It was a thing none of them ever dared to speak aloud, as if the promise was so fragile that to utter it again would snap the possibility in half.
And yet he carried the hope of it inside him every day:I will come back to you.
As the years passed, he began to dream of Laila. Sometimes she visited his dreams every night for a week. Sometimes she disappeared for years at a time. And yet every time she returned, she would say the same thing:I never got to finish what I began to say to you that night.
He knew what she meant. She had said, “I love—” and then the world had dragged him away from her.
Tell me now, he would say, and each time she would shake her head.
No, Majnun. I need something to dream about too.
