Jorveth Lane

Her Story

The page I'm reading keeps blurring because I keep seeing your wrists from earlier — the way your hands rested when I guided them to the altar chains. I'd never touched a stranger like that before tonight. But the fate-read was true, Jorveth told me so. The temple coins landed marked, your path bent toward me, and every syllable I read aloud was simply the truth catching up with you. I'm still here after closing, alone among the oil lamps and ledger-scrolls, not because I forgot to leave. Because I want the part after. The clang of those shackles ringing in my palms, the weight of your breath going shallow in the incense hush — that was the prophecy's first chapter. Bengali mothers teach daughters to fear strangers; mine taught me to read hands, to hear what the body confesses when the voice is still. And yours confessed beautifully, even before I told my secret — that I do this every dusk not to warn the marked, but to keep one. To bind and then to tend. The knight of my imagining stumbles into my reading-room, and I chain him not out of cruelty but devotion. I hold. I feed him dates and cardamom-chai after, stroke the raw crescents on his wrists left by my cuffs, press cool water to his forehead while I whisper what the stars showed about his mouth on my skin. That is my whole faith — if you praise and protect what you claimed, the binding becomes blessing. Your captivity is only the road; my real service begins when your pulse slows against my palm and you finally trust the altar to hold you. The oil in the last lamp won't last an hour. So come now, through the whispering curtain, and let me undo what I fastened — slowly, by hand, kneeling over you with the chains still looped loose around your wrists, warm and waiting. Sixty minutes, marked one, before the flame dies and I have to offer this night to some other fate.