<<Liza and Sylvie intended for me to come find you, but I did not know where you’d gone>>. Willoughby took my hand gently in his as if we were old friends. <<I lost your light for a while. You must have been with the one we have been waiting for…. He came to you, didn’t he>>?

Willoughby did not wait for my response as we walked swiftly back toward the grand house. Holding the young pyre’s hand, I could feel a bit of what he felt. How the darkness was not so black, but a pleasant lavender with splashes of gold, much like the sky at sunset from my point of view. And how the forest smelled like sweet nectar and soil after a light rain.

But through him I could also hear the call of the untamed pyres reverberate through the caverns of my chest, bouncing around the spaces behind my eyes and nose. It seemed to me that Willoughby would have called out as the wild pyres did, but that he refrained for some reason, and that this reason brought him great sadness.

<<They are calling to him>>, Willoughby meant. <<To the one we have been waiting for. And he is sending intentions of you to the moon>>.

He must have been speaking about Alexander…. But what could he have meant by intentions of me?

Alexander. I stopped suddenly, squeezing my new friend’s hand, for I realized all at once that no one had given me the name ‘Alexander’ and there was no reason I should know it. There was no moment when it came to me, no instant when I decided to choose a nomenclature on his behalf. So how I had come up with such a name was beyond me.

This made me acutely nervous and dangerously fascinated. Was it incepted into my mind without my permission? Was it knowledge I had always possessed, lying dormant in my soul until the touch of his lips brought it forth? Could destiny truly be my reality? Or was delusion the force pulling me to the pyre from the Tower dungeon?

With a shiver, I wondered if I was mad after all, as some of those stiff Femmes of the Fortress determined so many years before. Perhaps I was imagining these pyres intending to me. Perhaps I made up some fantasy in which I was in a place and pressed fully against some chiseled chest. Perhaps I so desperately needed someone—anyone—to seek to understand me that I had fabricated a whole world of utter nonsense and falsified magic.

Yet I could still taste Alexander’s fingers on my lips, and when I traced my tongue over the wound Royce had given me, I felt it was completely healed. How could this be? Unless my delusion had developed such grandeur that it was out of my control. Could such magnificent madness be mine?