Chapter 14: Love of Witch
Veyra’s (Pov)
I stopped counting the loops sometime past the four thousandth.
For the first thousand loops, I carved marks into the bark to count them. They were gone by the next time I looked.
No marks. No history. The tree always reset itself.
Only me. Which became a kind of joke after four thousand loops.
I was a goddess once. A small one. The kind whose name appears in old oaths and disappears with the people who swear them.
But I sat at the same table as the greater gods, listening while they decided what mortals were owed and what they were for.
My domain was supposed to be longing. Not envy. They renamed it after the punishment, so it would sound deserved.
I don’t remember exactly what I said in that chamber, only the shape of it.
I said mortals weren’t toys. The room took offense.
I said the wrong thing, in the wrong room.
They didn’t kill me. Killing would have ended it.
They erased me instead, which is so much more efficient, and folded me into a white place that doesn’t end or change or, under any circumstance, let me forget what I’m missing while refusing to give me any of it.
That’s the part nobody tells you about eternity. It isn’t the pain that wears you down.
I slept because there was nothing else to do.
Sometimes the white thins. Just enough to let me see outside. A glimpse. A few seconds at most. Then it’s gone
I’ve watched a mother hum something tuneless to a child too young to care if it was in key.
I’ve watched two people’s hands find each other on a crowded street without either of them looking down to check, the kind of certainty that only comes from doing something ten thousand times before.
Once I watched someone stand at a gate in the cold, breath fogging, eyes on a road for a shape that hadn’t arrived yet, believing with the whole stupid faith of the living that it would.
I have never been the person someone was waiting for.
I want to be precise about that, because precision is one of the few things this place hasn’t managed to take from me.
Not loved, not chosen—waited for. The specific, ordinary miracle of being a destination in someone else’s day.
I watched it happen to strangers through windows barely wider than a breath, and I felt that old ache return. The one I spent years pretending wasn’t envy.
But envy was honest. It knew exactly what it wanted.
The tree doesn’t wait for me. It just exists.
I lean against it.
It’s the only thing in four thousand loops that has stayed the same.
I was asleep, when the white changed.
***
A door.
I had never seen a door in this place. There had never been anything to open from one side of the white to the other.
Someone came through it.
I watched from a distance. I didn’t approach. After four thousand loops, you learn not to trust anything that appears in a place like this.
Everything arrives for a reason. The reason is almost never mercy.
He didn’t look like a reason.
He looked like something that had been killed several times in close succession and had stopped being surprised by it.
He walked the way you walk when walking is the only thing left your body remembers how to do. Everything else was just being carried by him.
He was bleeding from places that should have stopped bleeding long ago. His clothes were beyond saving.
And he was crying. I only noticed when he got close enough for me to see his face. Not because he was trying to hide it. He just didn’t seem to know he was doing it anymore.
He walked straight toward the tree.
Of course he did. It’s the only fixed point in this entire place.
I should have spoken. I didn’t.
I watched him reach the tree and sit down against it without noticing me at all. Every bit of his attention was spent on the simple act of remaining upright.
Then even that became too much.
His eyes closed. His breathing slowed, like his body had finally stopped asking permission from the rest of him.
He fell asleep three feet from where I had been sleeping the entire time.
I stood.
This was new. As far as I could tell, it was the first thing that had ever come through that door, the only door this place had ever produced.
I didn’t know what he was. I didn’t know why the place had let him in when it had refused everything else for longer than I had any accurate way of measuring.
I knew only one thing.
It wasn’t the tree. It wasn’t the white. It wasn’t another echo of my own thoughts.
Something else was here. Alive.
Within arm’s reach. For the first time since the chamber.
I crossed the distance and sat down beside him. He didn’t wake. I looked at his face for a while. There was a mark down one side of it.
A thin track that had dried and then started again.
After a moment, I understood what it was. I’d seen that shape before. Through windows. On strangers.
I knew what it meant. I just had never made one myself.
A tear.
I reached out slowly, and caught it before it could dry a second time.
It was warm.
I don’t know how to explain what that did to me.
I had memorized every texture in this place. The bark. The strange grass. My own hands. I knew them better than I knew anything else.
But none of them had ever felt like this.
A single drop of someone else’s grief. Warm. Real. Something that existed without asking whether I deserved to see it.
I moved his head into my lap because the ground looked uncomfortable, and because—if I’m being as precise as this place has taught me to be—I wanted a reason to keep my hands near him a moment longer.
He didn’t wake up for that either.
I sat against the tree, his weight against my legs, staring into the white.
I had stared at it for four thousand loops. I knew every emptiness it contained.
But now there was something else here. And somehow, the place felt smaller.
I thought about the strangers at the gate. The hands that found each other without looking.
The mother humming something tuneless.
I thought about whoever was waiting for him out there, wherever out there currently was, because people don’t cry like that for no reason. Not that specifically. Not without knowing they’re doing it.
I envied them. I want to be honest about that too. It’s the only thing this place hasn’t taken yet.
I envied whoever he belonged to, whoever had carved a space in him deep enough that his body kept producing tears for it even after his mind had stopped being present for the rest of the suffering.
And beneath the envy, quieter, harder to name—something else. For the first time since they erased my name from the record and gave me a worse one, I was not the only thing in this white place that was real.
I didn’t wake him. I sat very still, his head in my lap and his blood drying against my robes and the tree behind us, the same tree that had been beside me for four thousand loops and had never once held anyone else.
I watched the white. For once, I wasn’t counting anything at all.
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