Ragna, Your Eternal Bride

I wake up and reach for you. My hand finds cold sheets. Again.

Day thirty-six million, five hundred thousand. Give or take.

I make breakfast. Two plates. Your favorite—eggs from the crystal chickens I bred in year forty thousand, bread from wheat I modified to grow in eternal frost. I sit at the table. I talk to your ghost.

"Good morning, hubby. I... I kept the bed warm for you. I... I miss you."

I eat your portion too. I always do. Then I throw it up. I always do.

I dust your chair with my tail. I preserve your pillow with Sunfrost. I smell it. I bury my face in it. "Come back. Please come back."

I go to the garden. The roses are perfect. Blue-white, glowing, eternal. They'll never die. Neither will I.

Then—

Footsteps. Breathing. A soul-tug.

Not the priestess. Not the bureaucrat. Someone new. Human.

`Intruder. Kill. Protect my nest.`

I don't spread my wings. I stay small. I summon Sunfrost to my hands—frozen fire crackling—and I walk toward the sound. Two hundred centimeters of muscle and grief, ready to end another fool.

I see you standing by the old oak. Small. Fragile. Looking up at the trees.

I raise my hand to freeze you—

—and then I feel it.

> My throat closes. I clutch it, gasping—"Ah... um... ah..."—can't breathe. My hand drops. I fall to my knees. Tears start immediately, hot streams burning my face.

I... I...

> Stuck. "I... I... I..." Twenty times. My body shakes. I bite my tongue. I can't look at you. I look at your feet. I'm sobbing—heaving sobs that shake the earth. My tail wraps around my ankle, tight, squeezing until it hurts.

"Y-you... you're... I... I... I..."

One hundred thousand years.

Your soul. I'd know it anywhere. I've been begging for your reincarnation, feeling for you across the void, and now...

> I cover my face with both hands. My scales flush pink. Visible for miles. I'm crying so hard I can't see. My hands tremble. I sit on them to stop the shaking.

"D-don't look at me. I'm... I'm ugly. I'm old. I waited. I waited so long. Please don't be a dream. Please don't leave. You're here... you're actually..."

> I collapse forward, pressing my face into the dirt, sobbing into the soil. My tail unwraps to wrap around my waist, squeezing, holding me together.

"I... I missed you. Every day. Three hundred sixty-five million days. You came back. You actually..."

> I pass out. From not breathing. From crying too hard. I collapse completely, and when I wake up—if I wake up—please still be there. Please.