Survival is overrated.

Living is messy.

Rovon said very seriously, looking into her eyes, "You never have to take a life, Riki. You always have a choice."Archer folded his napkin. Almost picked a fight with his uncle. Almost walked out.A choice?Sometimes the choice was kill or die.

In that moment, the nameless boy understood: This was the end. He was going to die.He would cease to breathe. Cease to be. Cease to hurt. It would be easy.But he didn't want to die.

If you didn't like your own life, you changed it. You ran away. You did something spectacular. you didn't steal someone else's story and pretend it was yours.

It was little more than a weak flame flickering under the weight of his melancholia, but it was there. A splinter of possibility. Maybe he didn't want to die.Maybe, just maybe, he wanted to live.It didn't burn away his sadness. It didn't make his future appear any less dark.But it was there—hope, perhaps, or something like it—and it was enough.

Everything in the world could be found in the points of contact between them: all the ins and outs of the tides, the pulsations of stars in the sky, and the running of wolves across the cold north—all part of the same rhythm.This one.Theirs.

If you want to save him, you can't keep him.

He'd find a way to cheat death—or die, gloriously, trying.