Anwen’s Reincarnation

Content warnings: body horror (handling of body parts and organs), mentions of death, reincarnation, light reference to suicide ideation.

When Elian heard the crash, he was in a shallow pool, crouched in the water that came up to his bare chest. His fingers dug for the smoothest shells lodged in the sand before he pulled them free and tucked them into his bag.

He often collected shells on his never-ending island that he’d come to fondly name Banin, named after his first finned companion back when he’d become a water guardian, a keeper of seas, lakes, and rivers. Banin had been a nameless patch of island poking out of the endless sea when he’d first been exiled to it. Now it was, for all intents and purposes, his home that he’d only loved because he’d become familiar with it.

They had spent the last three centuries hating and loving each other, Elian and his island.

Solitude had been his companion for those long, lonely years, a silent presence walking next to him, invisible footprints in the side as he made his own set alone.

Until.

In the moments after the crash broke the endless, eternal silence of Banin, a breeze lifted the pale blue hair from his neck that hung in wet waves. Elian looked into the distance, seeking a source, but only saw waves for miles ahead. They were the same waves that had greeted him, taunted him, every morning as they made their gentle way towards the shore except it wasn’t the same. Not in the way it always had been.

It wasn’t until he closed his eyes that it came to him: not a glance of someone but a something, on another island across the sea. A small one, just like his, made for someone like him too. That something pushed away and pushed out, skimming across the waves to find him.

In the water, Elian felt threads that wound their way around him, a warm kiss that he had forgotten the taste of. He saw shades of green hair, a voice that spoke softly to him, a peal of laughter, a flutter of wings. He reached out as if he could brush his knuckles over feathers that grazed the air.

“Who are you?” he wondered aloud, using his worn voice for the first time in too long. It was whispery, like something had scorched his vocal chords, and he cringed, not wanting to mar the other person’s presence with the grating sound. And yet as soon as he spoke, the noise was tugged away by a gentle hand, cupped around fingers that held his voice up to their ear.

Another guardian, like him? Discarded and worn down by the world? A guardian who knew the scent of tears and the cracks of heartache. Or someone different, come to save him. Come to see him. Both. He turned his face to the sun that still managed to peek out at times, his only hope, and he begged: see us both. Guide me to them, whoever they may be. Let them be guided to me too.

There was something buried beneath that magnetic call, something he couldn’t quite figure out, and it drove him half mad. The crash, the presence, the sounds.

“Who are you?” he asked again, eyes on the endless, shapeless distance.

He asked it every day, the question repeating as he treaded water as far as his island would let him go. Elian knew the boundaries of his exile, knew what would happen when he crossed them, but every night he returned to his cave, he giggled with an insanity that came with staring into a void that couldn’t be filled.

“Who are you, who are you, who are you,” he muttered, shoving through waves, every new day. It had been months since he’d heard the crash. Every day, he had asked the water to give him just an inch more.

All over his body, his skin peeled off in thin layers, not yet enough to expose muscle, but it was enough to sting in the salt water. Punishment and give, because he got an inch closer, breaking the terms of his exile. Every night, as he was forced to return to his beloved Banin, Elian wept into the craggy ground, wondering what — who — waited for him out there. And every day, once again, he set out, gained his extra distance, and paid in pain.

Once or twice, Elian let himself drift on the waves, let them carry him, because wasn’t it futile to chase the expanse of water with no end, following the far-away presence of something he may have even dreamed? He laughed until water clogged his lungs, and he surged to the surface, heaving and choking.

Find me, he begged to the sky. His tears slipped into the sea. Find me, he screamed into the water. Find me, find me, find me.

When Elian’s skin was raw and peeled, when he started to bleed from the cracks, and hope was only a second away from being lost, he saw the peak of an island. A volcano rising into the distance made more tears stream down his worn face.

More months, more distance allowed. The volcano got closer, and Elian sent a chorus into the air to call out for the presence. Months after the crash had broken him from his exiled reverie, Elian finally reached the only other island he had seen in three hundred years and collapsed into the sand as the island introduced itself in a rhythmic beat that he’d learned to listen to when he was a guardian in the Dwell, before being exiled.

Two bodies sprawled, both broken, separated on the island of Novo, one not like the other.

Time passed until Elian cracked dry eyelids open and lifted his weary head. A voice whispered in his ear, carried on the wind. Find him, find him, find him. He exists on the wind, in the flames.

Dried blood stained the sand where he’d fallen and he tore blisters open and picked at broken skin. He was unraveling as he walked, still testing the exile’s parameters. He hiked through a beach that mirrored Banin’s, crossed through a thickest of forest, and came to the incline of the volcano that had been the reason to keep swimming and walking. The presence was stronger now, as he took each painful step on ripped and peeling feet.

Here, the glimpses of a life were more potent, and Elian searched the lava below that scorched his face for more greedy snatches.

Suspended above the volcano’s deadly form was a…

Elian didn’t know what it was, but it had been three hundred years since he had witnessed the death of his first love, been exiled for his role in it, and found peace in his isolation. He had forgotten what the thump of his heart felt like when he longed. When he craved. He reached out a hand to it but was pushed back so hard that he fell, crashing his way back down the volcano.

He sobbed, scrambling to climb back up, not wanting to be parted from whatever it was up there that called to him. He didn’t want to deny himself any of this, even if he didn’t yet understand it.

When Elian was exiled, he had been presented with the terms from the higher guardians: one thousand years on a lone island with only the water to keep as company. He would find no merciful end in the waves, nor would he know companionship or freedom until the thousand years were up.

Unless.

There had been one loophole to his exile. He’d thought of it as a cruel joke at first.

Save another, save yourself.

In three hundred years, he hadn’t seen another soul.

The other higher guardians had laughed giving the terms. What was one thousand years for beings like them, who commanded the elements and phases of the moons, suns, and everything in between? Nothing. But time had worn away at him, whittled him down, until he barely remembered what his own face looked like. Isolation had carved a home in his bones that he had learned to live with, learnt to love instead of another soul, and Elian had told himself every day that was a better fate. Solitude couldn’t hurt him; what better lover?

But the volcano held something that felt like the whisperings of something he’d long forgotten.

A name rang through his mind again. Anwen. Anwen. Anwen.

It struck him deep and he straightened. His mind stirred, blinking off cobwebs of disuse. Anwen. He knew the name — another guardian from the Dwell. Elian blinked, gasping, and he was back there, seeing his home as if he stood in it. A man walked past him, green hair curling around his neck, wings beating to lift him off the ground as he created his own tiny whirlwind to send Elian’s hair off his neck. They shared laughter, drunken conversations as Elian showed him the pools of life, and Anwen showed him the skies of every world.

It wasn’t the man he had watched die with a heart that had rotted away over time and neglect from an empty love. No, it was the man whose bright eyes and secret smile had sought him out at every gathering.

Death lingered in the air, inviting itself into Elian’s space. Two broken bodies on Novo and one had gotten back up. Another…

An image flashed through his mind, making him stagger back precariously. Parts of a body, scattered over the island; a body and mind fractured, lost in death and ruination. But death was a precarious thing, and broken things could be fixed.

Save him, save yourself.

Elian turned his back on the dizzying presence that sang to him, lulled him into safety, made his lips want to part and spill every thought that he’d had in the past years. He’d burrowed into loneliness and made it his dear friend. But now…

He didn’t want to be lonely anymore.

There could be two broken bodies on Novo, pieced back together. Death reversed, a guardian made anew, second chances arising. Endings had never been Elian’s friend but he could make it a beginning.

He would find the scattered pieces of Anwen, save the guardian, break his own exile, and return to the Dwell.

*

Novo was far bigger than Banin, full of hot springs nestled within deep woodland. Mushrooms scattered across paths, forming rings that would lead nowhere, and fireflies flitted through the air, dancing over tree branches. After the beach and caves of Banin, seeing so much natural surroundings made Elian’s heart sing for every bit of wildlife he’d missed on his island. Of course, he had immersed himself in his natural element of water, made friends with the finfolk, and collected shells, but he hadn’t walked through woodland in a long time.

As he twirled through a spiral of fireflies, he realised he had no idea where to start. How could he find a man’s body to piece him back together? And a guardian at that, beings forged by the magic that powered both the Dwell and guardians?

Save him, save yourself, he reminded himself.

Dread weighed on his shoulders as he searched the woods for anything useful. When he tuned into his surroundings, he heard the faintest beat of a heart, the same echo he’d heard when he collapsed onto the shore. It was as if it guided the birds flitting through the trees, and the wind that tumbled past him, as if it was the whole life of the island — that singular heartbeat. Anwen’s heart, buried deep. As Elian listened, his knees crumbled and something sank in his chest. His own heart, weighing down, too heavy to bear for a minute. He could feel every overwhelming thing that caused him to cry out. He knelt on the floor, dried mud coating his knees, and wept. The longer the heartbeat went on, the more the weight pulled at him until he was devastated, until a sense of hopelessness overrode everything else.

He was left with one singular thought: how could he go on?

It was the lacking hope of not knowing where to go now that everything had changed. The death of his former lover, and now the death of Anwen, the chance to fix what was broken, the sorrow of knowing if he failed then he not only failed himself.

He gasped, trying to inhale more air into his lungs, when something wrapped around him, tight. It wasn’t a vice but a comfort. With his forehead pressed to the ground, Elian took in a deep breath and felt his chest expand. He was okay; he could do this. He could shoulder the solitude a little longer if it meant finally finding that soul that would make him sing.

Slowly, he got to his feet, only to find the very thing that had eased the distress caused by the heartbeat, which still pulsed in the back of his head, a thump, thump, thump encompassing Novo. A pair of lungs were entangled in the tree branches above them. A broken part of the trachea kept them hanging precariously on the thick tree limb, waiting to be plucked. They still beat in a sickly rhythm as if they fought to keep Anwen’s breath even and deep.

Was he meant to climb up there and collect them? He’d spent years hunting for the smoothest, shiniest shells; now he was hunting for body parts.

There was no blood on the branch but the lungs were there for the taking.

A lurch in his stomach, Elian climbed the tree, and held the organ in his hands.

They pulsed in his palms, the pleura a slimy residue on his skin, but he slid them into the bag he usually kept for shells, and watched as the beige canvas darkened. The trachea stood out, bumping his hip as he trekked back to the volcano and lay the lungs at the opening like an offering.

“Grant him breath once more,” Elian wished, and then left in an endless search for the rest.

A hand was buried in the sand, chipped paint on nails, so human-like Elian blinked at it only for a minute. It wasn’t a skeleton but flesh, knuckles prominent and the skin still so smooth. He scooped it up in his palm. Another hand clawed its way out of a cave mouth further down the beach, as if trying to escape to find its body once again. A ring was on the middle finger, a remnant of his status as a guardian.

Anwen’s legs were together, bent at crooked angles, bruised like an apple that needed to be peeled anew. He would heal all of this, he thought; recreate Anwen, breathe life back into the lungs he’d plucked, and hear how Anwen’s heart beat for his own life, rather than the island. As he carried each part back to the volcano, that tug he’d felt on the first day of the crash only grew.

Soon, his search became frantic. It wasn’t about his freedom anymore but about needing to see Anwen whole. Knowing that each part was being loved, each individual fracture of him was worthy of love and care, patching it back up together to create a whole image. Anwen would live again. He would find his way back to himself, rediscover the very life that would immerse itself through his broken bones, heal him, and bring him back to Elian’s waiting attention.

He found Anwen’s brain pierced through by thorns amongst a rosebush, all of the prickled barbs making it bleed out a darkness that couldn’t be contained — not yet — so when Elian held the brain, knew all of the wonder it had contained when Anwen was alive, he ran his fingertips over the punctures and whispered love into each one as if that alone would be enough to patch them up. It wasn’t; he knew that, but he tried anyway, talking away to Anwen’s mind as if he alone could work a miracle. He plucked a rose free and slid it behind his own ear.

It was heavy, this organ, and it made him recall all they had done in the Dwell when Anwen was alive. That first meeting — Elian asking would you be able to help me out? The sorrows, the heartache, the confessions spilled at night when nobody else was awake and he shouldn’t have felt like it was only them in the world but he did. And then everything that had come afterwards — the noises Anwen had learned he could pull from Elian during the times when he was vulnerable enough to let his clothes be tugged free and his mind unravel; the confidante through tears, through stresses, through every I will help you. I will listen. I will be here. And although Elian’s heart had long turned to ashes from anger and distress, Anwen had seen it and held it tenderly and told him all the words he’d never heard before — the words he’d needed and craved to hear.

So as he cupped the guardian’s brain and set it inside the volcano where Anwen’s spirit had hung for almost three months now, he was driven mad by the need to guide him back.

Back to me, his brain whispered, and Elian allowed himself that small, selfish thought because he wanted Anwen. He wanted him wholly, even as he acknowledged his grief, as both collided in his heart, and he looked at them both head on.

A day into the fourth month, he found one arm buried in the sand beneath the waves as he dug for more seashells. He would build a shrine for his guardian love, would weave the altar with love, and want, and say I tore apart the island to find you. I needed to know you. So he collected shells and, deep in the seabed, was a buried arm, whole and crooked at the elbow. The other was on the opposite side of the island, and it only occurred to Elian as he lay down yet another part of Anwen to be preserved until he was put back together, that the crash he’d heard almost a year ago now had been Anwen’s body hurtling into the volcano and breaking apart. A heat that simmered life from him, an existence that drained him.

Once he found every limb, every missing bone, every dug-up rib and cavity and organ but one, he listened to the heartbeat. It rattled through the trees, and had done every day for four months, a steady thing that had withstood everything. It still beat strong; it still fought for Anwen even when Anwen hadn’t been able to fight for it.

He was back on the beach, and the shells formed a mountain to begin his shrine when he was ready. At the volcano’s mouth were Anwen’s body parts, laid out in his shape. Some were simply bones connected by something Elian couldn’t see; others still pulsed and twitched, fighting despite death.

He searched for hours, nights on end, days that bled into darkness, weeks that went on for months, as he sought out the heart. It kept him awake at night, urging him to walk a multitude of paths up and down over hill peaks and swimming into the dark ocean. Sometimes the sun broke through and lit up a path — only for him to follow it and feel the heartbeat become faint.

He followed its strength, let it warm him and guide him through his own nights when loneliness crushed and grief weighed heavily. He wanted to be saved and to save. He didn’t know how to do both at the same time. Some days, he lay down on the seabed and let the waves carry him away from the island, unable to fight through his own darkness. The Dwell had promised he would never find his own end in the sea, hadn’t they? Other days, he cried and dug desperately through mud and hard ground and rocks and sand and leaves to come up blank in his endless search.

When he slept it was fitful, filled with dreams of Anwen’s voice, his hands enclosed around Elian’s, his chest empty, and his lips parted. Find it, find it, find it. But how could he, when every time Anwen’s heart was right there, Elian couldn’t quite reach it? Was he stopping himself? Was his brain too fractured, too? Couldn’t he heal and go on while he pieced Anwen together, as he breathed into him? How much longer did he have to save the guardian that he loved?

“Beat for me,” he asked selfishly, hands clenched in the sand. “Beat for me, let me find you. Let me try.”

Frustration built in his chest. Around him, the world went red, veins criss-crossing through his vision, as he was consumed by everything Anwen was. His pain, magnified. His death that Elian couldn’t bear to endure, avoidable. As if he could just pull him back from that brink. As if Anwen might let him do it.

Grief and anger filled his chest when he thought about the possibility of failing this. Of being forced back home, with his healed body, forced to live another seven hundred years on Banin, knowing Anwen was out here, almost whole. They were both so close to where they needed to be.

That pull surrounded him, the same one he’d felt the first day, and he let it wash away his fears and doubts. His anxieties unspooled, letting him breathe easier. He focused on the red, followed the pattern of the veins around him, and hunted. With each step, he felt more sure. More aware of himself and his feelings. In his own rib cage, his heart hammered, finding the rhythm to fall into the pattern of. Elian pressed a hand to it, feeling the thumping beneath his palm, and closed his eyes. He let that second heartbeat guide him on and on, until he kneeled and pressed his other palm to the floor.

Beneath the gritty sand, the other heartbeat pulsed, in time with his own.

He opened his eyes and dug frantically.

His nails were caked in blood, sand, and residue from the body parts that he didn’t want to think too hard about, but he clawed his fingers and braced himself for the fleshy organ that he searched for. How far down did it need to be buried to become one with Novo? His fingers cramped, his back ached, and when he could no longer simply lean forward and search, Elian realised he was slipping into a pit. Sand chafed his skin where it had peeled and scarred back over every day, still relishing in the penance that allowed him to be on the island. The sand poured into every open wound he’d sustained on his journey and he didn’t care. Pain came with healing, with working, and he would welcome it if it meant that there was something better at the end to soothe the ache and burn. Even when it hurt, and the loneliness had been an addiction because it had been the only thing he’d been able to love, the only thing there to love, but now he could focus on something else:

He might not be alone forever anymore.

Exile had been a long solitude but he knew he was meant to have found Anwen’s island. He was meant to fix himself as he found every piece of Anwen to love, even though most buried, to hold in his palms and he carried him back to a place where something else would bring the guardian back to himself. Elian wouldn’t — couldn’t — fix him but he could be there while he gathered himself back.

On his knees, Elian finally scooped up the final piece of his guardian.

The heart.

The thing that had held love and interests and a particular view of the world that had been so beautiful when Elian knew Anwen in the Dwell. A thing that held brightness and joy and selflessness. Anwen’s heart was pure; Elian wanted to return it to the man that needed it.

Blood stained his skin — he didn’t know how the heart still beat, how blood had congealed around it in the ground for long, but magic had long since decided the fate of his world — as he carried the heart to the volcano.

He lay it in the rib cage and stepped back.

Something was missing. But the heart should have been the last part.

He only then realised what part of the pull had been: a flashing glimpse of feathers.

Crying out, Elian raced back down the volcano’s slope, rinsed his hands in the ocean, sank his whole body beneath the waves for a few brief moments to cleanse himself, before racing back into the woods. Then he plucked leaves. Vines would serve as twine, and twigs would be the frame, and each leaf would make up his wings. Once again, he returned to the guardian’s suspended spirit but this time he sat cross-legged on the lip of the volcano and arranged the wings. He tried to remember the span of them on the guardian, letting the leaves sweep out, fanning across the bones and skin and organs. He arranged the vines to string the leaves together, piercing holes through each one, spending painstaking hours crafting.

Elian sang as he worked, pouring life into the death of Anwen, coaxing him back to his body.

As he sang, his own loneliness lifted, and in his mind’s eye he saw footprints he’d made on Banin now exist alongside another set, as if they had always meant to be there.

Death and exile. Life and freedom. Love.

When his hands and basket were empty, and he’d counted the same amount of leaves for both wings, Elian stood back, brushed off his hands, went back to the ocean to rinse them, and found his usual cave to sleep in while he let his wishes float up to the Dwell.

When he awoke and returned, golden liquid — the very magic of the Dwell itself that coursed through every guardian — waited in a clay pot. Beside it was a paint brush. Elian had seen this done before: the mending of bodies the Dwell deemed not yet ready for death and how magic stitched those beings back together. Never quite whole again but something more magnificent. He didn’t think just any guardian could do this job. He thought the ones higher, more senior, got to do it.

And yet he was being entrusted with Anwen’s reincarnation.

Save him, save yourself.

He sang his gratitude to the Dwell — to whoever still believed in him even after his exile — and sat cross-legged the way he had done yesterday, and began to put Anwen back together. His songs turned from thanks into a confession, into torment, into laughter, into tears, and he poured it all into the guardian’s body as it slowly formed into one whole being. He painted with care and thought of every moment he’d spent with Anwen already. Not only the years in the Dwell but the months he’d hunted across Novo and collected every fractured part of him. Nothing was missing anymore. He would stay there at his side through every shaky day of recovery.

As long as they remained together he would be okay.

They would both be okay.

When the ache in his hunched form wouldn’t shift and his eyes were bleary, he still worked. No matter what, he didn’t step away until he saw a body ready to welcome Anwen home. And when he did, he lay next to it and gazed at the sky.

White clouds drifted over Novo, and Elian thought of every day he’d spent watching the sky from Banin, silently accepting his lack of companionship.

Something brushed the back of his hand, and he froze, not quite brave enough to turn his head to see if it had worked yet or not.

It was only when a hoarse voice broke the silence that he let himself hope. “Clouds are fickle things to weave.”

In a voice he hadn’t used for a long time except to sing, he talked back through rusting conversational skills. “I didn’t know they were woven by guardians.”

He didn’t dare take his eyes off the sky.

“They’re not, not by the likes of me. But I liked to do it. I volunteered. When I was…”

Alive hung in the air. Elian wanted to look, to see what had become of his guardian but just feeling Anwen’s closeness felt too good to give up.

“Will you look at me?” The voice was so quiet, so soft; hesitant. Different to what Elian had known before.

“Yes,” he answered but he was slow to turn his head.

But oh, when he did…

Green feathers ruffled in the wind, once the leaves Elian himself had plucked from trees. Thick golden lines ran between each layer of them, and the band at the top of the wings connected them to Anwen’s back. Hair, curlier than he remembered, fanned around his head, greener than it had once been. It was now the colour of the forest — the deepest of greens, rich and earthy. His eyes held so much depth, flickering over Elian’s face, his lips pronounced and shaped. Light freckles dusted his nose, and his cheekbones and jawline angled so spectacularly Elian wanted to reach out and brush his fingertips along them.

The rest of his body was pieced back together but not without the signs of what he’d been through. He bore the trauma of falling apart — of things taking their painstaking time to heal. Where the cracks were visible, the same gold paint from his wings ran along them, the magic of the guardians, recreating Anwen. Not broken, not whole; something new, something in between.

He was beautiful.

The morning sun glinted off the gold paint running through his body like scars of

lightening. They cracked and webbed over his skin, and Elian was lulled by the need to run his hands over them. His eyes met Anwen’s, and his breath hitched. How long had he waited for this moment of reunion?

“You’ve alive,” he whispered.

“Am I?” Anwen asked. “I feel… Weakened.”

A short laugh escaped Elian. “I’m not surprised at all. It’s been a long time. It took me a long time. Forgive me, Anwen.”

But their hands reached for one another, and Elian moved closer to the other guardian who spun clouds and had come back to him. He cupped Anwen’s face with one hand, indeed feeling the sharpness of bones beneath his skin. Every piece of him he had carried, had tended to, for weeks and months.

He slid a palm down Anwen’s throat, brushed over his collarbones, and felt his way down to his chest. Solid and alive, a heart beat under the gold cracks. He is alive, Elian reminded himself. He is okay.

Tears stung his eyes. How many nights had he lain awake in fear that Anwen wouldn’t actually make it? That the trauma would be too great, and he would lose his last tether of hope? Not just for his own freedom but for the chance he gave himself to love again. To hope again. To find another soul that reflected his, both dark and bright.

Their hands clasped over Anwen’s chest, right over his heart.

Elian ducked his head to press his mouth to the pulse, and closed his eyes. Fingers slid into his hair, salty with the ocean’s kiss that he’d found solace in, and he sighed. He mouthed over the beat, reminding himself that his guardian was right there, and he’d grieved enough in his long lifetime and could not bear to grieve again. He hesitated, wondering if he was being too much too soon for Anwen, but the others’ hands only remained in his hair, keeping him pulled close.

“Thank you for coming back to me,” he murmured, voice still a coarse whisper. He brushed his mouth across the scars on Anwen’s chest. Leaves were inked over the top of them that mirrored Elian’s own. They were from centuries ago, the scars long healed. He kissed the length of each line of leaves, before lifting his head to meet Anwen’s.

“I have dreamed of you for so many nights,” he said, continuing his affection. Mouth on skin, hands trembling, not yet daring to touch. As if he touched with more than just lips and words then this whole thing would shatter. “I’ve dreamed of your voice, your touch.” When he came to his waist, and the hips that jutted out, he paused. “Of your body.”

Splinters of gold carved their way up Anwen’s thighs, and Elian’s breath stuttered as he followed the lines, finally daring to touch with his fingertips again.

“Do you want me, Anwen?” he asked, not brave enough to make it louder than a whisper.

His palm flattened on the guardian’s left thigh, trembling.

“Do you want me the way I crave you?”

Anwen’s mouth twitched into a smile, as if he was slowly remembering how to move his magic-soaked body. “You may have dreamed of me, Elian, but I’ve thought of you for far longer than you were aware.”

And then Elian was on his back, fingers slipping through his own, and a gold-scarred thigh tucked between his own. His clothing was tugged from his body, the meager slip of a thing easy to discard, and soon, he was just as bared as Anwen.

Eyes roved hungrily, cracks ran into smooth lengths of skin, palms explored, fingers curled, and lips parted to leave hot paths of licks and kisses in between wanton noises that drenched the air. Anwen’s heartbeat was no longer the island’s lifesource. It was his own once more. It beat inside him, for him.

“Come back to the Dwell with me,” Anwen whispered, Elian’s head nestled in the crook of his arm. They lay tucked close together in a cove where Elian showed Anwen his sleeping arrangements most nights during the months of finding him. “Let’s make our own home somewhere, Elian.”

He was already home, with the guardian. Anwen was home. And soon, Elian would make that home even better by returning with him. Together, they would both find a new home for tired and weary hearts and bodies that had been pushed past breaking points but were finding their way to recovery.

Two guardians, side by side.

One finding his freedom, the other rediscovering his life.