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The first time Stardust saw him, the faerie was crouched in a tangle of thorns, one palm outstretched to coax a spore from a trap. He moved like a shadow, neither soundless nor silent, but deliberate in a way that made noise seem irrelevant. Stardust had never seen anything like him.
He hovered on the edge of the clearing, torn between curiosity and awe. His own form shimmered faintly in the late evening light, soft bioluminescence leaking from the seams of his dough like ink in water. His feet didn’t quite press into the moss below. Spacefarers didn’t touch the ground unless they needed to.
He didn’t understand yet why he’d come to Earthbread, not fully. The other stars had noticed something—a glow, soft and flickering like a heartbeat, buried deep in the continent’s tangled woods. He’d expected a machine, maybe an echo of life long gone. Not this… this being. Not someone with wind-scattered hair the color of salt and pepper bark and a weapon trained at him like he was a threat. Not someone who looked up at him now, quietly unimpressed.
“Are you finished staring?” the faerie said, his voice low and flat as still water. “Or do you want something?”
Stardust tilted his head. “You are… beautiful.”
The faerie blinked once. “You’re not from here.”
“I am not from anywhere now.” Stardust moved into the clearing, careful to move slowly, non-threateningly. “I crashed.”
Mercurial rose to his full height—not much taller than Stardust himself, though he radiated a presence that made Stardust hesitate. “Then you should leave these woods. You don’t belong in them.”
“I have nowhere else to go.”
“That’s not my problem.”
Stardust paused, unsure if this was rejection or something else. The customs here, the emotions—they were strange to him. The stars communicated through resonance and pulse, through shared dreams and neural touch. Here, all he had were words. And he was still learning what they all meant.
“I will stay nearby,” he said simply. “You saved the small creature. That was kind. I like kind things.”
Mercurial gave him a look like he was weighing a stone and wondering if it could be thrown far enough to matter. Then, with no fanfare, he turned and floated away.
Stardust followed.
—
That night, Stardust sat by the edge of a cold spring, cupping glowing water in his long fingers, watching it drain through the lines of his palm. He was still glowing faintly, as he always did when confused or frightened. Nearby, in the crook of an old tree, the faerie sat perched like a carved figurehead, legs dangling as he watched the woods, silent.
He’d let Stardust stay. Said nothing about it. Simply didn’t stop him.
“You are not afraid of me,” Stardust said softly, after a long while.
Mercurial’s reply was a mere murmur. “I’ve met worse things than a glowstick from the stars.”
Stardust frowned. “I do not know what a glowstick is.”
Mercurial sighed and leaned his head back against the bark. His wings settled into a gentle flutter-stop-flutter motion, as if he could never stop moving. The moonlight caught the curve of his cheek and made him look almost made of stone. “Then you will need to learn. This land will not wait for you to understand it.”
Stardust tilted his head. “Will you help me?”
A pause.
Then, dry as dust, “Maybe.”
Stardust smiled up at him. “Very well.”
Mercurial didn’t return it. Not outright. But the corner of his mouth twitched, just once, like a leaf caught in a breeze he hadn’t meant to notice. He shifted on his perch, wings—thin, metallic, and etched with tiny rivulets of silver like river maps—tucked close against his back.
“Don’t be so show,” he muttered, sparing a glance down. “You’ll make yourself a target.”
Stardust blinked slowly, pupils narrowing. “Is ‘showy a threat?”
“‘Showy is an affliction,” Mercurial replied, hopping down from the crook of the tree. He landed with barely a sound. “On this plane, anyway. All the things that are considered cute tend to be killed, eaten, or made into pets.”
Stardust tilted his head. “Am I one of those things?”
Mercurial stared at him, an unreadable expression in the flickering half-light. “I haven’t decided yet.”
A shiver, not of fear, moved across Stardust’s skin. The creatures of this world were... layered. Earthbound things with fire in their blood. Their faces told stories that their mouths didn’t share.
“Then I’ll wait,” Stardust said, and sat cross-legged beside the spring.
They were quiet for a long while. Yeast spores flickered along the trees like distant static. Stardust traced symbols into the wet stone beside him, glowing faintly with the bioluminescence he hadn’t yet learned to shut off. A pattern—circular, nested—representing loneliness. Or longing. The two emotions blurred together in his tongue.
Mercurial glanced over at the glowing spiral.
“What does that mean?”
Stardust looked up. “There is no perfect word in your language. But… it is the ache of reaching out and finding no one.”
Mercurial’s brow furrowed just slightly. He didn’t reply immediately.
“I know that one,” he said at last, very quietly.
Stardust met his gaze. “Do you? I thought you didn’t get involved.”
“I don’t,” Mercurial said, sharper now, rising to his feet. His wings flared, just slightly, casting jagged shadows behind him. “And you’d do well to remember that.”
Stardust opened his mouth, then closed it. He bowed his head in a slow gesture of apology.
Mercurial sighed.
“Don’t do that either. Makes me feel like I kicked a turnip rabbit.”
“A turnip rabbit?” Stardust repeated, perking up slightly. “Is that a real creature?”
“Not anymore.” Mercurial turned and began walking toward the tangle of brush that hid his watching place. Scout duty was rough, but required. “But if it were, I bet it’d glow and look at you the same way you’re looking at me now.”
“Like this?” Stardust said, and tried to look exactly as he had—gentle, hopeful, and just the faintest bit confused.
Mercurial didn’t turn around. But he called over his shoulder, “You can sleep by the roots tonight. Not too close. I don’t trust you.”
Stardust didn’t move. “Will you trust me later?”
There was no answer. Just the rustle of brush and wings.
But he stayed. And Stardust lay by the roots, careful not to press too deep, letting his light dim until he matched the stars overhead.
Above him, unseen but watching, Mercurial sat curled in a hollow, one eye still open.
He didn’t know why he was letting this strange, glowing creature linger. He didn’t like attachments.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling that, for the first time in a long while, something had found him. Something soft. Something curious.
And, worst of all, something that looked up to him.
The next time they met, it was because Mercurial nearly stabbed Stardust in the thigh.
He’d been patrolling—a late morning thick with dew, wings tucked beneath a loose grey cloak, glaive in hand. His quarry was a strange, bulbous tardigrade-beast that had wandered too close to the glade’s heart, disrupting the careful glamour that hid the beginnings of the Silver Kingdom. Mercurial had trailed it silently for over an hour, moving through fern and loam like a ripple through pondwater, every footstep calculated.
He’d just leapt forward to strike when a very luminous leg stepped into his path.
The tardigrade-beast gave a startled squeak and waddled away into the reeds. Mercurial’s glaive embedded itself into Stardust’s shin with a dull tink.
Stardust, ever serene, simply looked down.
Mercurial—still crouched, hand half-curled like a cat about to pounce—froze. His eyes narrowed.
“You,” he hissed.
“I appear to have interrupted something,” Stardust said apologetically, blinking in that slow, fluttery way of his. “Again.”
“What in the seven roots of the Silver Tree are you doing out here?” Mercurial snapped, yanking his glaive free with a quick motion. “Did I not say I don’t want company?”
Stardust frowned, thoughtful. “You said you don’t trust me. You didn’t say I couldn’t follow you.”
Mercurial stared at him, the sharp angle of his jaw tight, his white hair damp with sweat and mist. “That’s the same thing.”
Stardust tilted his head. “It’s not where I’m from.”
“Well, here it is.” Mercurial wiped the glaive on his cloak and sheathed it. “What do you want?”
Stardust hesitated, something shy blooming across his expression. “To understand.”
Mercurial gave him a hard look. “Understand what?”
“You,” Stardust said simply.
That gave Mercurial pause.
He didn’t like the way those words sat in the air between them—uncomplicated, earnest. There was no game to play when someone like Stardust looked at you that way. Just soft, devastating honesty.
“Why?”
Stardust smiled, gentle and glowing. “Because I’ve never seen a creature like you. You’re quiet and gleaming and sharp, like frost on a glaive. But you saved a gnome. And you let me sleep by the roots.”
Mercurial gritted his teeth. “That was pity.”
“I don’t mind.”
Mercurial turned away, wings flicking with agitation. “You. You are impossible.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
That almost made Mercurial laugh. Almost.
Instead, he crouched again and began tracing the tardigrade-beast’s retreat path. “If you’re going to follow me, make yourself useful. Be quiet. Do not step on the dough clumps. And if something starts hissing, don’t talk to it.”
Stardust brightened. Literally. His skin shimmered like crystals under the canopy.
“I can do that.”
They moved through the underbrush together—one a flicker of shadow and thorns, the other a soft lantern on two long legs.
Stardust trailed behind like a loyal moonbeam, not quite blending in, but not disrupting too much either. Every now and then, Mercurial glanced back. Once, he caught Stardust watching a spider’s web with open fascination.
And—damn it—he didn’t feel as irritated as he told himself he should.
“You are going to get eaten one of these days,” Mercurial muttered. “You look like a jellybean and smell like comet-light.”
Stardust beamed. “Do jellybeans taste good?”
“Wouldn’t know,” Mercurial said. “Things like me don’t eat things like that.”
“What do things like you eat?”
Mercurial stopped, turned, and looked him dead in the eye.
“Duty,” he said, tone dry. “And irritating visitors who don’t listen.”
Stardust blinked, uncertain.
Then he smiled again. “That’s not true.”
Mercurial sighed. “No. But you were quieter when you didn’t understand sarcasm.”
Stardust considered that. “Then maybe I’ll pretend not to understand more often.”
And again—against his better judgment—Mercurial felt his mouth twitch, the faintest shadow of a smile curling like ivy on cracked stone.
—
By mid-afternoon, they reached the edge of a clearing where the sun dappled the moss in gold, and the air smelled thick with wild mint and slow-blooming fluorescent jelly plants. The tardigrade-beast was gone—scuttled off to wherever overgrown, foul-tempered creatures went when they were scared—but Mercurial didn’t seem especially bothered by the loss of his quarry. He crouched in the shade of a twisted root, sharpening his glaive with the rhythmic scrape of stone on steel. Stardust, meanwhile, sat cross-legged a few paces away, watching spores dismantle a beetle carcass with the quiet reverence of someone witnessing a sacred rite.
Mercurial’s eyes flicked toward him.
“You really don’t have anything better to do?” he asked, not bothering to hide the irritation in his tone.
Stardust looked up. “What’s better than this?”
“This?” Mercurial gestured vaguely to the woods, to the tangled brush and biting creatures, to the mercury pooling under his collar. “You’re surrounded by filth and rot and things that will eat your insides out if you make the wrong noise.”
Stardust smiled faintly. “Yes. It’s peaceful.”
Mercurial stared. “Are you defective?”
Stardust pondered that, unbothered. “Maybe. But I think I’m just… not like you.”
“No argument there.”
Stardust leaned back, bracing his arms behind him. The moss glowed faintly where his skin touched it, like the ground itself was reacting to his presence. “Where I’m from, we didn’t have forests. Or critters. Or water that moves.”
Mercurial narrowed his eyes. “So what? You come here to roll around in the dirt and pretend it means something?”
Stardust didn’t answer at first. His eyes, bright blue and strangely warm in their softness, traced the canopy above.
“I think,” he said slowly, “I came here to feel something real. And then I found you.”
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was heavy, thick with the weight of a truth Mercurial didn’t want to acknowledge. He looked down at his glaive, saw his reflection warped in the silver, then sheathed it with a snap.
“You’re romanticizing me,” he muttered. “Dangerous habit.”
Stardust tilted his head. “Is it?”
Mercurial stood, brushing dirt from his knees. “People like you come looking for wild things to fix your loneliness. You think if you love us enough, we’ll fill that void you’re dragging around behind you.”
Stardust’s glow dimmed, just a little.
“And we don’t?” he asked, quietly.
Mercurial paused. His wings rustled behind him like dry leaves in a gust. “No,” he said. “We make it worse. Because we know how to live with that emptiness. We built homes in it.”
He started walking again, past the clearing and into thicker underbrush.
Stardust rose to follow.
This time, Mercurial didn’t stop him.
—
By evening, they found themselves at the edge of a small, glass-still pond. Dragonflies skimmed its surface, and the first stars had begun to prick through the sky, faint and blinking. Mercurial crouched near the water’s edge, refilling a skinbag with clean springwater. Stardust stood beside him, knees bent, watching his own reflection shimmer.
“Back home,” Stardust murmured, “we didn’t have lights like this. We had stars, but they didn’t twinkle.”
Mercurial looked up. “You’re telling me you came from the stars and never saw them?”
Stardust nodded. “I was born in transit. Between galaxies. Between moons. I’ve only ever heard of planets with skies.”
Mercurial stared for a beat, then returned to his task.
“You’re worse off than I thought.”
“I like it here,” Stardust added, gazing upward. “Even the rot. It smells like change. Like things that don’t want to stay dead.”
Mercurial scoffed. “You’re getting poetic again. I might vomit.”
“I’d catch it if you did.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You let me follow you.”
Mercurial muttered a curse in a language Stardust hadn’t catalogued yet, then handed him the water-skin. Their fingers brushed. Stardust blinked down at the contact, and Mercurial snatched his hand back before the moment could linger.
“I don’t like you,” he warned.
Stardust’s voice was soft. “You don’t need to.”
Mercurial glanced at him sidelong, one wing twitching.
“You’re a fool,” he said.
“And you’re lonely,” Stardust replied, without malice.
Mercurial stiffened. The air hung quiet for several heartbeats. Then he turned and walked away from the pond, not bothering to tell Stardust to stay put.
Stardust followed, silent this time. Careful.
It rained the third time they met.
Not a gentle forest drizzle, but a sky-splitting downpour that turned the moss to soup and made even the oldest trees groan beneath the weight of water. Thunder growled from the eastern ridge, low and long, like some ancient god had turned over in his sleep. Most of the forest hunkered down—spores sheltering in hollows, beetles burrowing deeper, leaves curling tight.
Mercurial did not seek shelter.
He stood waist-deep in a creek, eyes closed, the rain streaming down his face and shoulders. The water was cold enough to bite, but he didn’t flinch. His hair clung to his brow in soaked white and black strands, plastered to his cheek like silken threads. His wings, too fragile to fly in this weather, hung slick and still against his back, nearly transparent.
He heard Stardust before he saw him—a soft, shivering hum echoing between the trees. Stardust didn’t walk so much as glide over the mud, awkward but determined, his light flickering dim under the storm. He had a ragged leaf stretched over his head like an umbrella, and it was doing a poor job of keeping him dry.
Mercurial didn’t open his eyes.
“You’re going to short out if you keep following me in storms,” he said flatly.
Stardust stopped at the bank, water lapping at his toes. He looked miserable. Drenched. But somehow—still faintly glowing.
“I was worried.”
Mercurial opened one eye, just barely. “About what?”
“You weren’t where you usually are. The tree hollow by the spring.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to be found.”
Stardust’s brow furrowed. “But you did come here.”
Mercurial didn’t reply right away. The creek rippled around his legs, silvered by the rain.
“This is where the glamour thinnest,” he said finally. “Some days, if the wind hits right, you can hear the Knights that came before. Their echoes before they fell.”
Stardust stepped into the water, clumsily. He winced at the cold but pressed forward anyway until he stood beside Mercurial, their shoulders inches apart.
“Does it help?” he asked. “Listening?”
“No,” Mercurial murmured. “But it reminds me I’m not the only one who was left behind.”
They stood in silence then, the only sound the roar of rain and the soft rush of the creek. Stardust’s bioluminescence glimmered faintly in the water, a ghostly aurora that swirled with the current.
After a time, Stardust shifted closer. “You’re trembling.”
Mercurial glared up at him. “I’m not cold.”
Stardust blinked. “I didn’t say you were.”
A long pause. Then—
“You are disturbingly good at that,” Mercurial muttered.
“At what?”
“Seeing things I’d rather not say.”
Stardust’s voice was a whisper. “I don’t mean to.”
Mercurial turned to look at him. Really look. Rain clung to Stardust’s lashes. His shoulders were shaking, not from the cold, but from something quieter—something like grief or longing.
“You’re not used to cookies staying, are you?” Mercurial asked.
Stardust’s lips parted, then closed. He looked down.
“No,” he admitted. “They usually don’t.”
Another silence stretched between them. Then Mercurial did something he hadn’t done before. Slowly, cautiously, he reached out and took Stardust’s hand. Just once. No ceremony. No words.
Stardust blinked, looking down at their joined fingers like they were some impossible artifact.
“You’re warm,” he murmured.
“You’re not,” Mercurial said. “But I guess I’ll live.”
Stardust smiled, small and shy. The glow in his chest brightened, casting soft light over Mercurial’s wet dough.
The rain kept falling. But they stood still—together in the heart of the storm, faerie and fallen star, both a little too lonely for their own good.
They met again in firelight and chaos.
The air was thick with smoke, copper-sweet with jam, the ground churned to mud under a hundred frenzied footsteps. The forest, so often a place of whispers and green silence, had become a battlefield—howling with fury, alive with screams.
The invaders came not from the sky, but from a twisted mountain pass: spice-wielders with firebrands and teeth filed to points, a mercenary horde that sought to raze the heart of the woods for the Silver buried beneath its roots. They tore through wards like paper, snapped enchanted trees at the trunk, and turned the deeper paths into hunting grounds.
Mercurial had known it would happen someday. All things decayed—especially peace.
He moved like lightning through the underbrush, too fast for normal eyes. His glaive was streaked with dark jam, his wings pumping, one ankle already twisted. Spells hissed from his lips like venom—bright runes burning briefly against his skin before launching into the fray. His expression never changed: cold, measured, dangerous.
And then, in the middle of it all, a flash of blue light—blinding against the smoke—and he turned, too late to avoid the explosion that followed.
He hit the ground hard, rolled through wet ash and leaves. When his vision cleared of the dripping mercury, the shape standing over him was one he hadn’t expected to see again so soon.
“Stardust,” he rasped, coughing through the smoke.
The cookie stood framed in flame, bioluminescence pulsing bright and erratic. His cape had been scorched to scraps, revealing the glowing filaments that ran under his skin like circuitry. But his face was the same. Soft, startled. Still not quite made for war.
“Mercurial,” he said, voice cracking, “are you—?”
“Move!” Mercurial snapped, dragging himself upright as a spear flew past and embedded itself in a tree with a thunk.
Stardust flinched, then turned, raising his hand. The air shimmered—and bent. Not with magic, but with force, a ripple like heat off a supernova. The charging attacker was flung backward into the underbrush with a sickening crack.
Mercurial blinked. “You have been holding out on me.”
Stardust turned back, looking almost embarrassed. “You said not to glow too much. I thought—”
“Well, forget what I said. Glow harder.” Mercurial pulled himself up with a hiss. “Can you still walk?”
“I didn’t come here to walk.” Stardust reached out, grabbed Mercurial under the arms before he could argue, and lifted him with surprising ease. “I came to help.”
Mercurial didn’t fight it. Not this time.
“I thought I told you not to follow me,” he muttered as Stardust carried him behind a cluster of burnt brambles, shielding them both from the next wave of projectiles.
Stardust crouched low, gently setting him down. “You did.”
“And you didn’t listen.”
“I never do,” Stardust said, eyes meeting his, blazing. “You’re my gravity.”
Mercurial froze. For half a second, in the middle of spicefire and ruin, he forgot the sounds of battle. Forgot the jam. The fear.
And then the moment passed.
“Fine,” he said, grabbing Stardust’s wrist and dragging him back to his feet. “Then stay close. And if you’re going to get me killed, it better be dramatic.”
Stardust smiled gently. “There’d no other way.”
Lightning forked above the tree line as the storm returned with vengeful fury, echoing the battle’s crescendo.
Mercurial moved like the cutting edge of the storm itself.
Every flick of his glaive was poetry written in jam. He channeled strikes even as he limped, lines flaring across his dough and vanishing in bursts of cold light. When he spoke, the wind obeyed. When he pointed, mercury surged from the mud like snakes, dragging invaders into the earth with a sucking, gurgling cry.
Stardust followed, close and glowing, each step warping the air around him. The rain sizzled when it touched his skin. Stars curled around his arms as he raised them, bending light into pulsing waves that tore through the enemy lines. Some fled at the sight of him—a radiant being whose presence was neither magic nor mortal, but something they had no word for.
“Left!” Mercurial shouted.
Stardust turned just in time to catch a hammer’s downswing with a shield of hardened light. The blow glanced off with a blast of heat, sending steam into the air. He stepped forward and drove the force of a star-pulse into the attacker’s chest, sending the armored brute flying through the remains of a willow tree.
“You’re getting better at that,” Mercurial muttered, crouching beside him.
“I’m angry,” Stardust said, eyes blazing.
Mercurial gave a crooked smile. “Good. Hold onto that.”
The invaders regrouped near the old clearing, where the veil between realms had once been thin. Their leader stood atop a felled stump, clad in peppersteel armor, helmet shaped like a beast’s horned skull. She raised a mace that hissed with anti-magic—a weapon forged to break enchantments, to slice through spells like silk.
Mercurial recognized it instantly. His wings fluttered once, instinctively. He turned to Stardust, quickly scrawling a symbol into the mud with the tip of his glaive. The same one on his head.
“This is a binding rune. Not for them. For me. If I get pulled under—if the glamour tears again—I need you to anchor me.”
Stardust frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to. Just be there. Focus on me. Speak my name.” He didn’t add the last part: Don’t let me get lost. That was a truth too fragile to say out loud.
Stardust nodded. “I will.”
Then they ran.
They hit the clearing like a stormfront—Mercurial to the left, a blur of steel and silver, Stardust to the right, a beacon of radiant force. The front lines buckled as roots burst from beneath their feet and pillars of light shattered their formations. Mercurial leapt high, glaive flashing, slashing across the back of the cookie’s helmet before vanishing into the shadows.
Stardust, meanwhile, pressed forward, ignoring glaives that bounced off his skin. He moved with purpose, mouth murmuring soft syllables from a language not made for breath. Light gathered in his palms. He flung it forward in great arcs, carving holes in the enemy ranks.
And then—the flaming mace found Mercurial.
It caught him mid-dodge, slicing across his ribs with a hiss like steam. The enchantments woven into his clothes failed in an instant. His flight faltered.
He hit the ground hard.
Mercury pooled. Stained the bark.
“Stardust—!” he gasped.
Stardust turned, saw him crumpled at the base of the scouting tree. A ripple of dread shot through him.
He darted—no hesitation—sliding through mud and ash, grabbing Mercurial as his body glowed.
Wings spread like sails.
A long tail, that of a comet’s, trailed as he took off.
“Mercurial, stay with me,” Stardust whispered, hands cupping the faerie’s face. “Stay here. You’re still here. You’re not gone yet. You're still—”
“Say my name,” Mercurial choked, eyes wide, fingers curled into Stardust’s shirt.
Stardust pressed his forehead to Mercurial’s.
“Mercurial Knight Cookie, you stubborn, angry, beautiful thing. I see you. Come back.”
A burst of stars.
When the smoke cleared, Mercurial was still there.
Breathing.
Alive.
Stardust cradled him against his chest, trembling.
“I didn’t let go,” he whispered. “Not once.”
Mercurial groaned weakly. “You talk too much.”
“Shut up. I’m heroic.”
“You’re soaked and glowing and smell like burnt moss.”
Stardust laughed, raw and relieved.
Around them, the enemy was in retreat. The woods had rallied. Creatures of bark and claw poured from the shadows. The trees had awakened. And the woods had decided it wanted them alive.
Mercurial closed his eye, one hand still gripping Stardust’s collar.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he muttered.
Stardust nodded. “Yeah. Later.”
The battle had ended, but the wounds remained.
The forest was quieter now, as if holding its breath in the aftermath. trees still bled sap where the fire had kissed them too deeply, and the deeper roots trembled with a pain that no spell could easily soothe.
And in a shaded glen behind a curtain of wild bluebells, Mercurial slept.
Or, rather, he pretended to sleep.
He lay on a bed of soft moss woven with silkmoss threads, his ribs wrapped in linen damp with salve, the faint scent of myrrh and emberroot hanging in the air. His wings were bound, suspended gently in a tension net that Stardust had strung between two bent branches—elegant and eerily precise, like something born of science rather than magic. Mercury dripped down his neck, his arms, his body, dripping onto the ground below. One eye was covered with the dripping remnants of his hair.
Stardust sat beside him, knees drawn to his chest, hands glowing faintly where they hovered over a burn along Mercurial’s side. The spell-light shimmered pale and soft, tracing across skin like moonlight across water.
“You’re terrible at resting,” Stardust murmured, not looking up. “You keep tensing. It messes with the healing.”
Mercurial opened his good eye, annoyed. “Then stop hovering.”
“You’re literally hovering,” Stardust replied with a flick of amusement. “It’s medical.”
“You’re not a healer.”
“I’m not not one.”
Mercurial sighed. “Do not try logic on me when I’m half-dead.”
“You are not half-dead,” Stardust said, his tone instantly gentler. “You’re healing. And I promised to help.”
Mercurial turned his face away, the side of his cheek brushing cool moss. “I didn’t expect you to stay.”
“I know,” Stardust said softly. “But I did.”
He adjusted the bandage gently, fingers unnaturally cool. “When you fell, everything in me said to run. That’s what I was built to do. Flee. Survive. Drift.”
Mercurial didn’t respond, but Stardust kept talking. It helped, somehow. Even silence felt less lonely when filled with his voice.
“But I saw you there. Still reaching. Still fighting, even when the forest itself was cracking apart. And I thought ‘if he’s not letting go, neither am I.’”
Mercurial blinked slowly. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Stardust laughed, but it caught in his throat. “Probably.”
Silence followed. Only the rustle of the leaves and the sound of far-off dripping water filled the air.
Stardust reached up and carefully loosened one of the bindings suspending Mercurial’s wing, letting it rest more comfortably along his side.
“You’ll fly again,” he said. “I don’t care what you say. I’ve seen how stubborn you are.”
“I don’t fly for show,” Mercurial muttered. “I fly because I don’t like people touching me.”
“Too late for that.”
Mercurial glanced at him. Stardust met his gaze. There was no pity in it. Just that same quiet awe that had never really left.
“You make this hard,” Mercurial murmured.
“Good,” Stardust whispered. “So do you.”
Then he reached out, slowly, and let his fingers graze over Mercurial’s hand. Not gripping. Not holding. Just being there.
And for once, Mercurial didn’t pull away.
Night fell slowly in the woods, the sky rippling from violet to deep indigo as stars began to flicker overhead—faint, scattered at first, then swelling into constellations as the canopy thinned above them. Moonlight poured through the gaps in the leaves, cool and silver, pooling around the two like a soft-spun net.
Stardust hadn’t moved.
He sat cross-legged beside Mercurial’s resting form, his hand still barely brushing the faerie’s. His glow had dimmed to a low pulse, fading in and out with the rhythm of his breath, like an echo trying to harmonize with the quiet of the world.
Mercurial, for his part, remained still, but he wasn’t pretending anymore.
He was awake. And listening.
To the forest, yes—but also to the steady warmth beside him. Stardust’s presence had ceased to be unfamiliar. It had softened at the edges, like stone worn smooth by running water. He still shone like crystal-light, but he no longer blinded. Not to Mercurial.
The pain in his ribs was manageable now, though he wouldn’t admit that aloud. The worse ache was the one nestled just beneath it, a tight knot of something he had no name for. Something he used to bury beneath sarcasm and solitude.
“I’ve been alone a long time,” he said suddenly, voice low, almost unsure if it wanted to be heard.
Stardust looked up.
Mercurial kept his gaze on the moonlight.
“Not in the dramatic, tragic way. Just... alone. Even when surrounded by others. Especially then.” He shifted slightly, winced, but continued. “Faerie courts are full of words with no meaning. Smiles that conceal knives. Promises twisted like vines around your neck.”
Stardust didn’t interrupt. He just listened.
Mercurial’s fingers curled slightly against the moss. “I insisted I do this patrol alone. Told myself I liked solitude. That I didn’t need anyone.”
“You didn’t,” Stardust said gently. “Not until you wanted to.”
Mercurial’s gaze flicked to him. “You’re too good at that.”
“At what?”
“Answering the things I didn’t actually ask.”
Stardust gave a quiet, crooked smile. “That’s what happens when you spend your life alone in the void. You learn to hear things that aren’t said.”
A breeze moved through the glen, ruffling what was still intact Mercurial’s hair. The wing suspended beside him fluttered slightly—fragile, but intact. Mending. He glanced down at it, then back at Stardust.
“You were gentle with them,” he said. “My wings. You could’ve botched the bindings. I’ve had healers get it wrong before. Especially faerie ones.”
“I memorized the structure,” Stardust admitted, his cheeks warming faintly with a blush that made his glow stutter. “Studied their movements when you flew. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Mercurial stared at him. “That’s… obsessive.”
Stardust laughed under his breath. “Maybe. But I didn’t know if I’d ever see you fly again. I wanted to remember how it looked.”
Silence fell once more, not tense—just full. Like the air between words in a song.
Eventually, Mercurial exhaled. “You’re strange.”
Stardust looked at him, eyes soft. “So are you.”
Mercurial hesitated. Then, with a quiet grumble, he reached over and grabbed Stardust’s hand—not a brush this time, but a proper grip. His fingers were calloused and cool. Stardust stilled, surprised, but didn’t pull away.
“Stay,” Mercurial said.
The word was small. Fragile. And it wasn’t a demand—it was an invitation.
Stardust squeezed his hand once. “I wasn’t planning on leaving.”