In the end, there was no ending. Only a life, lived forward.
Aria woke each morning to her daughter's voice and her husband's warmth and the quiet hum of a seal held safely by a circle that grew stronger every year. She ruled beside Vael, the two of them grown so alike over the years that the kingdom had long since stopped being able to tell where one queen's wisdom ended and the other's began. She watched Helsa marry her patient lieutenant at last, weeping openly through the whole ceremony the way Helsa always wept at joy. She watched Maren grow from an impossible toddler into an impossible girl into something that would, in time, become an impossible woman, wanted every single day of her life in a way her mother never had been.
She thought, sometimes, of the girl she had been. The Beta
