Chapter 264: Chapter 264 – Voren’s ‘surprise’

"Ready?" Voren asked, standing from his chair.

"Bed," she said simply as she rose to her feet. They got into the car, Voren pulled out of the parking lot and turned in the wrong direction.

Seraphine watched the road for a moment, cross-referencing it against the route back in her head. "This isn’t the way."

"No."

"Then where are we going?"

He glanced at her sideways, and the faintest suggestion of something crossed his face. "Surprise."

She looked at him, thought about pushing it, but there was approximately zero times in her experience that pushing Voren on something had produced a result she wanted.

She turned back to the window.

"Fine," she said to the glass.

The drive was long enough and warm enough and the hum of the engine was steady enough that her eyes started going heavy before she’d fully decided to let them.

She told herself she was just resting her eyes, and was asleep within four minutes, coming back to consciousness all at once.

The sound of lots of water moving fast, pulled her up out of sleep before she’d even finished deciding to wake up. She straightened in the seat and blinked, and the world came back in pieces.

Dark sky. Moon overhead. Trees all around, taller than the ones near the packhouse, older-looking. And that sound everywhere, filling the air, rushing and alive and constant.

"We’re here," Voren said.

She looked out the windshield. And then she saw it.

"Oh my—" The words dropped off her tongue half-finished. She was already reaching for the door handle. "Where is this place?"

The waterfall came down from a height she couldn’t fully gauge in the moonlight, white and silver and loud, breaking against the rocks at the base and spreading wide and flat and clear.

The moon sat almost directly above it, throwing light across the whole thing in a way that made the water look like it was lit from the inside. The air around it was cold and clean and tasted like something she couldn’t name, something that reached back into her chest and pulled at something she’d packed away a long time ago.

She was out of the car before Voren had fully stopped talking.

"We should have come while it was still light," he called after her, stepping out himself, "but the rain had other ideas. Moon’ll have to do."

She wasn’t listening. She was already moving toward the water, arms slightly out for balance on the uneven ground, and the smile pulling at her face was the kind she didn’t know she was wearing.

"I’ve loved waterfalls my whole life," she said, half to herself, her voice lifting slightly over the rush of it. "Since I was little. How did you—"

She didn’t finish the question. She was already at the edge of the water, crouching down, letting her fingers drag through the cold current where it spread thin and fast across the flat rocks at the base of the falls.

Behind her, Voren stopped walking.

The smile that crossed his face lasted only a second before something heavier moved through it and replaced it. Something that had history in it.

He watched her crouch there in the moonlight with her hair loose and her shoes getting wet and her whole face open in a way it almost never was, and he didn’t answer her question because the answer wasn’t something she was ready to hear.

Not yet. Maybe not for a while.

He let it go.

"How long has this been here?" she called back, tipping her head up to follow the falls to the top. "I grew up not far from this territory. Someone should have mentioned it."

"Most people don’t know it exists." He came up beside her, looking up the same line she was following. "Not even the families who’ve lived out here for generations."

She turned that over with the expression she got when a fact didn’t quite line up with her internal map of the world.

Voren stepped past her and started making his way up the side, careful, picking his path, using the rocks that had held long enough to be trusted. "Come on. Watch your feet."

She followed.

At the top, the world opened up. The falls dropped away below them in a clean, rushing line, and the view from the cliff, pack land rolling dark and silver in every direction, the moon hanging fat and low, the sound of the water filling everything, was the kind of thing that didn’t have a good sentence to go in front of it.

Seraphine crouched at the edge and dipped her hands into the lip of the water where it ran shallow before it tipped over, watching it break and fall and break again at the bottom. "There’s nothing more beautiful," she said, and she meant it completely.

Voren stood a little back from the edge and looked at her, and thought about all the things he remembered that she didn’t, and said nothing.

"I’m going for a swim," he said.

She looked up. He was standing right at the cliff’s edge now, facing her, his back to the open air and the long drop behind him. Something easy and loose in his posture, like standing at the edge of a waterfall backwards was simply a reasonable place to be.

"Voren—"

He let himself fall.

Backwards, clean and quiet, just tipping back into the air, and then he was gone.

"Voren!" She lurched forward on her knees and looked over the edge, eyes cutting through the moonlit water below, searching the surface, waiting for him to come up.

He didn’t come up.

Five seconds. Ten. The water moved and churned and reflected the moon back at her in broken silver pieces and there was no sign of him, nothing, and her heart had gone from zero to absolutely not in the space of a breath—

A presence landed behind her, close, and sudden, she spun around.

Her expression went flat. Cold. The blend of warmth and worry that had been sitting all over her face a moment ago packed itself up and left without a word.

"What do you want?"