There exists a certain breed of people, Emmrich Volkarin has observed, who live in the excesses of their own making, and he has always known himself to be one of them. In all things, but especially in the amorous, his nature unfurls in grandiosity. He has often assured himself that this is a mark of distinction. They blush, all of them, do they not? Their eyes dart sideways, their mouths falter into embarrassed gratitude: Thank you, Emmrich, thank you, truly, you shouldn’t have gone to such trouble.
It makes no difference whether it is the routine bonds of years or the fleeting conspiracies of a night’s darkness; his approach is unvarying. Coffee will await them in the morning, placed just so, beside a carefully curated tray of toiletries reserved for such occasions. He will inquire, solicitous as ever: Do you have somewhere to be? Something you need? Someone you need? The questions perch delicately on the lip of a deeper one: Is it me you need? More of me, perhaps? A carriage, at least, if not my company?
It was Johanna, before she was finally exiled from the Watch, who delivered the line that needled its way into him.
"Four decades and counting, Volkarin, and still you rattle around alone. Ever wonder if it's because you drown people in your godsdamned devotion until they can’t find air to breathe? Pah.”
At first, he dismissed it with a smile slanted into a grimace, chalking it up to the jagged edge of her temper. Pah, he repeated with sardonic flourish, tossing the sound to the ceiling as if it were a paper ball aimed at a wastebasket. Pah, he said again later, softer, practicing the shape of her disdain in the privacy of his reflection.
He stands in the Lighthouse, his thoughts drifting back to that exchange from years ago. She knows nothing. Johanna, with her clipped words and sharpened angles, has no use for sentimentality, no patience for sweetness. And yet, she is content in her clean, unaffectionate way, while he—ah, he hovers just shy of it, circling its edges. Almost there. Soon, he promises himself, the elusive shape of it will solidify. Soon.
How else does one fasten themselves to others when born not merely from nothing, but from no one? A life without roots, without the parental gaze threading affection through the years, without the cushioning sprawl of family. You weave your own sentimentality from the tatters left behind, Emmrich tells himself. You make it elaborate, ornate, and irresistible. You do not ensnare—no, the word feels like a tooth snagging on cloth. He has no traps, no cages. He is not predatory but prodigal, spilling over with the weight of his own unstirred affection. A maximalist, yes.
What he wishes to show them, these transient silhouettes in the gallery of his life, is the sheer abundance of what he carries. Of what they lost by not choosing him. The unspent wealth of tenderness, the meticulous reservoirs he has cultivated for lack of recipients. It can all be theirs, whoever they are. Wouldn’t they understand their fortune, their rare chance to bask in the radiance of such unfettered devotion? Surely they would. Surely.
At thirty-five, his entanglement with the Orlesian art appraiser unraveled, not with drama but with a certain muted inevitability, as though it had been sketched lightly in chalk on a damp morning and then, suddenly, rained over, erased. He tells himself it could not have lasted; she collected men as she might collect unfinished canvases, drawn to their rough edges and faint promise. But once they hardened into something distinct, something complete, she set them aside, indifferent to the final form.
Emmrich, oh Emmrich, he hears her voice in his memory, though he wonders now if it was her voice at all or merely the soft inflection of her glance, the way her eyes curved away from him like hands withdrawing from a clasp. She had no fondness for gold; it was a color she found gaudy, oppressive, a vulgar punctuation on life's subtler compositions. Her fingers, long and bare, were her own; she had no need of his ring, no desire for the weight of it, least of all on that finger.
Years earlier, there was a boy, a student, like himself, with hair so very dark. They had bumped foreheads in the flickering veilfire, the absurd aftermath of Emmrich’s clumsy attempt to impress: a corpse laid open, its anatomy splayed for inspection, until a wayward wisp animated the flesh, sending them both lurching back, half-startled, half-laughing. It was a frantic affair, feverish and brief, as if passion itself had been distilled into those stolen weeks. He could have loved him endlessly, he thinks, could have folded himself into that golden rhythm forever. Even now, on certain nights, he fancies he can taste him, something like salt, something like cheap liquor.
The boy had left for Minrathous, his parting words wrapped in a promise to write. And he had, at first—letters arriving as steady and sure as a ticking clock, their edges faintly scented with ink and faraway rain. But the rhythm faltered; the clockwork slowed. The letters grew fewer, their voice dimmer, until one day the flow ceased entirely, leaving only silence and the faint echo of a promise gone pale with distance.
He loved Johanna too, he reflects, with a savage intensity that left the others pale by comparison, though Johanna, predictably, never returned it. Johanna loved her mind and the delicious friction of transgression. You can fuck me while I finish this paper, Volkarin, she had remarked once, without so much as a glance in his direction, her pen scratching insistently at the page.
He remembers the evening with an ache sharpened by detail: the roses, their petals faintly bruised as if blushing at his ineptitude; the wine, swirling darkly in glasses he had scrubbed to a nervous shine; the small box of Orlesian caramels, her favorite, held out with the tentative pride of a schoolboy offering his first essay to an indifferent master.
He was no one of consequence then, no lauded scholar or dazzling wit, just a young man scraping together gestures from borrowed elegance. And yet, he had tried—oh, how he had tried—pouring his entire being into that fragile theater of romance, as though effort alone might compel the world to forego its indifference.
The years folded and refolded themselves, their seams disappearing until time became a single, unbroken surface. His voice grew sleek, his purse heavier, his tailoring sharper. He became a presence, one that others noticed. Students watched him with eyes that lingered a beat too long; the occasional noble leaned in, fascinated by his murmurs over the dead, or else drawn by the possibility of extracting something—knowledge, power, perhaps only amusement.
Take Professor Volkarin’s class, the students murmured, their voices hushed, their smiles sly. He’s quite something to look at, isn’t he?
You are a connoisseur, are you not? the aristocrats would murmur, their words oiled with flattery, their smiles faintly predatory, the question ever a jeweled trap.
Why complicate things? colleagues would say with an air of weary sophistication, their proposals veiled in the thin gauze of propriety. A little diversion never hurt anyone.
Sometimes he allowed himself to be drawn in, sometimes not. These entanglements stretched in strange patterns—weeks collapsing into years, years vanishing into the quiet close of nothing. On certain occasions, he felt the weight of the moment tipping toward something lasting. His lips would part, shaping the beginnings of a plea: stay longer, stay forever. But before the words could leave him, they would pull away, the decision already made, their departure as effortless and inevitable as a candle guttering out in a draft.
At fifty, the lashes ceased to flutter. The students' lingering glances turned polite, their gazes moving past him as if he were part of the room's architecture. The brief romances grew briefer still, coming apart before they could be knotted into anything of substance. No one explained; no one ever said why. But he understood. It was the five, that inevitable syllable that had slipped into his age, heavy and uncompromising, like a note of finality struck too soon.
Once a man stepped into his fifth decade, what could he offer? A handful of years, perhaps, before the decline—before he became a relic of himself. His hair, silver since his youth, could not have been the culprit; its pale sheen had always been mistaken for distinction. No, it was the five, the fatal number, that had crept into his chronology and settled there like an uninvited guest.
Let’s stay together, let’s marry, let’s have children, let’s take them to my parents’ graves someday—this was the whispered litany he carried, a fragile incantation he longed to speak aloud. Sometimes, the words escaped him, offered tentatively to the ears of a lover. Other times, they remained locked within, the moment never ripening enough to bear their weight. With some, he dared to dream aloud; with others, the silence grew louder than the words could ever hope to be.
At fifty-two, improbably, he finds himself among this mismatched, maddening, and strangely endearing group intent on bringing low the gods of old. He rolls his eyes so often that he’s begun to wonder if one day they might stick, leaving him a statue of perpetual disdain. Neve cuts through his facades effortlessly, coaxing from him scraps of childhood he’d long since buried. With Lucanis, every conversation is a duel, the man’s pointed questions prodding at the fragile edges of his carefully constructed dreams of lichdom—questions that dredge up doubt, irritating as a grain of sand lodged beneath the skin.
Taash grates on him in ways he cannot fully articulate. The endless talk of dragons is a torment he would gladly forego, and yet it is Taash who catches him when an Antaam reaver’s blow leaves him seeing constellations. In Davrin, he glimpses something familiar, an echo of his love for Manfred, and in that recognition, he feels the strange solace of being known.
Harding is a different matter altogether, her culinary atrocities sparking in him an inexplicable desire to craft a sandwich of such undeniable perfection that it would silence her objections. He imagines her chewing begrudgingly, a reluctant admission forming at the corners of her mouth: yes, cheese on toast is a sandwich.
And then there is Bellara. Bellara, who speaks in a ceaseless cascade of words, her chatter so relentless it should unnerve him. But it doesn’t. He listens and finds himself oddly soothed, her voice filling the spaces he hadn’t realized were empty.
Rook—yes, Rook. He loves her, loves her with a rawness that feels almost indecent, as though his affection itself were an intrusion. Rook, younger by an expanse of years that feels cruelly conspicuous. Rook, who should belong to someone whose hair has not yet been kissed by silver, whose steps have not yet grown measured by the weight of decades. Rook, whose every second sentence is punctuated with fuck or shit or a biting go kill yourself.
Rook, who comes from Rivain but not truly, her roots stretching from an alienage, a world far from his own. She can read, but poorly, and dismisses it whenever possible. She once made it clear that books belonged to the lives of others, those who grew up with scholars.
Yet, beneath her defiance, there are moments of vulnerability. Once, she brings him a Venatori missive, the text dense and convoluted, and quietly asks him to read it for her. Her usual boldness has been tempered by something smaller, almost shy; a reluctance to expose what she lacks but a willingness to trust him with it.
Rook, so utterly unlike anyone he has ever loved, so far from the world of symposiums and necromantic subtleties where he has always thought his affections must dwell. The languages of hypotheses and sciences are foreign to her. But she teaches him other things instead: the delicate art of unlocking what refuses to yield, the precise tension of a pick against the hidden tumblers, the silence required to hear a mechanism surrender.
Impossibly, unstoppably, he loves her—a love without reason, as if reason had never existed at all.
Sometimes the tears threaten, and sometimes they come. Not in torrents or grandiose sobs, but as a quiet dampening of his eyes, just enough to blur his vision as he presses his hands against his face in the solitude of night. He is happy—fantastically, achingly happy—because he loves her with a fervor that feels miraculous, and, impossibly, she loves him too. But the clock is cruel. There is no time. There will never be enough time.
He will die before her—this much he knows—if he chooses to die at all. And when he is gone, she will mourn him, briefly but with a scorching intensity, before moving forward, as the living must. She will find another, someone new to hold, to share her days and her nights. It coils in him, sick and green, this jealousy so sharp it feels like a betrayal of his love for her. He wants her happiness, he tells himself—her boundless, effortless happiness—even if it must come without him.
And yet, the thought of her in another’s arms, her life spilling into someone else’s—after all these years of waiting, of searching for someone who might stay—it is a wound he cannot quite close. But still, she must be happy. She must.
Pah, Johanna once said. Yes. Pah.
Rook, who calls him pretty with a disarming frankness, who tilts her head and declares he is too tall, then adds, almost as an afterthought, that she likes his eyes, his hair, his hands. Rook, who raises a defiant middle finger to a merchant scheming to cheat him. Rook, who leads him to Rivain—hers but not hers, a place of half-belonging—and asks, with a sudden softness, if he would like to taste the sea salt in the air with her.
Rook, Rook, Rook, who calls him her first even as he rasps assurances that he can wait, that he is content to wait. Rook, who bleeds and winces, who admits, without pretense, that it is not nice—not yet—but insists that it will be, if only he’ll press on, again and again, until the awkwardness burns away and something else remains. And then, in time, it does. The lessons, stumbling as they are, yield their strange harvest.
"Fuck me," she says, sliding onto his lap, the words abrupt and unadorned.
He frowns, as he always does. Not with anger but with a pained, almost mournful reproach, murmuring, "Must you be so crass, my darling?" And then, as if to erase the jaggedness of her demand, he makes love to her instead.
He loves her with a sincerity so overwhelming it spills into the small rituals of their mornings, saturating every moment. He murmurs it into the curve of her shoulder, stirs it into the coffee he sets gently by her bedside, whispers it to her in the gray light before dawn when she is too drowsy to do more than hum faintly in response, a muffled acknowledgment that feels like the echo of a dream.
I love you, I love you, I love you, the words repeat themselves in his mind, circling endlessly. He imagines writing them out for her, not once but a hundred times, in the looping grace of Nevarran cursive, and then teaching her to read the script with infinite patience, her fingers tracing the lines as he watches.
One morning, he brings her a bundle of new clothes, tea fragrant and warm, and fresh bandages to replace the ones that had grown stiff with her blood during the night.
She looks at him and says, “You don’t need to do anything for me, Emmrich.”
“It is a want, not a must,” he replies softly, and presses a kiss to her cheek.
“Oh, thank you,” she says after a pause. “I love you.”
What he truly wants to say he cannot properly construct: please, please, please, don’t go back to the dragon’s hoard. He would bury her in gold himself, pile it at her feet until there was no need for her to seek out treasure elsewhere. Please, please, please, he thinks, come back to Nevarra with me. Let me love you there, in my house, in my world, away from dragons, from gods, from locks waiting to be broken.
Look, look—won’t she see it, won’t she understand? All that he has, all that he is, lies waiting for her to take. The treasure hunter could rest, abandon her searching, if only she would choose him. Not now, of course, not now when her choice is already him, but later, when the gods lie still and her freedom stretches unbound before her.
His accounts, his wealth, every piece of his carefully constructed world—she could claim it all, strip it to its bones, and still he would find more for her. Let her be greedy, insatiable; let her empty him entirely. He would gather, he would build, he would conjure whatever she desired, anything to keep her near, anything to make her stay.
Yes, yes—he could love her forever.
