Some destinies cannot be shared.

They must be carried alone — quietly, privately, at great cost. The ones chosen for them do not get to explain themselves. They only get to act, to sacrifice, to walk away from everything familiar and step onto roads that have no maps and no witnesses. They lie to protect. They leave to preserve. They betray the ones they love most so that those people never have to know what is coming.

It looks, from the outside, like abandonment.

From the inside, it is the heaviest kind of love.

She had walked that road for a long time. Further than she had ever imagined she would have to. And somewhere along the way — in the mud and the ash and the silence of a battlefield that had emptied itself around her — the certainty that had carried her began to thin.

Was this right? Had it ever been right?

She had no answers.

But the sky, as it turned out, had been watching.

And it had something to say.