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Calorouga Shark Media.
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Hello and welcome to Twelve Nights, a Christmas paranormal romance thriller.
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This is episode four. Christmas Morning, Luke ninety.
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I remember everything, every death, every conversation, every almost touch
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in a frozen gas station parking lot, the way Elias's
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voice sounds when he says my name, hopeful and heartbroken
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the same time, like a man who's learned that hope
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is just another kind of hurt. I remember the collector's offer,
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the choice it wanted me to make. And I remember
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the thread I saw in the moment before impact, gossamer,
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thin and glowing, stretching between my heart and his. Tonight,
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I'm not going to the gas station tonight. I'm going
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to mile marker forty seven. The party is the same
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as always, Marcy's blinking sweater, Dave's spiked eggnog, the ice
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sculpture melting slowly toward the shrimp. I grab my coat
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and slip out before anyone can stop me, my heart
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pounding with something that feels almost like hope. The highway
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is empty Christmas Eve, nearly midnight, everyone else already where
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they're supposed to be. I drive past the gas station
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without stopping. I can almost feel Elias's confusion from here,
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his centuries of routine rupted by my absence. But I
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can't explain yet. I need to see it first, need
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to understand. Mile marker forty seven appears in my headlights
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at eleven forty nine. I pull over to the shoulder,
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fifty feet before the curve. The guardrail gleams dully in
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the darkness, and I can see the patch of black
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ice ahead, waiting for me like it's waited ninety times before,
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patient inevitable. Except nothing is inevitable, not anymore. I get
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out of the car. The cold hits me immediately, sharper
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than it should be, and I know the collector is watching.
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It's always watching. Here at the place where the loop closes,
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where my death feeds its endless hunger, I close my
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eyes and reach from my threshold sight. The world shifts.
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In the space between moments. Mile marker forty seven is
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a wound. I can see the accumulated trauma of ninety
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deaths layered on top of each other, each one leaving
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its mark on the fabric of time. Blood and metal
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and broken glass playing on an endless loop just beneath
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the surface of reality and running through all of it,
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thin as spider silk, bright as starlight. The thread, it's
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not just connecting me to Elias. It's connecting me to
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the loop itself, to the moment he made his bargain,
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his blood and desperation crystallized into something the collector could hold.
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The thread is the debt, and the debt is what
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keeps me trapped. But here's what the collector didn't tell me.
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The thread goes both ways. Elias bound himself to me
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when he made his deal. His existence tied to my loop,
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his hope tied to my survival, his heart tied to mine.
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Across hundreds of nights I couldn't remember. He gave everything
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to save me, and now I'm going to give everything
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to save him. Sloane. I opened my eyes. Elias was
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standing at the edge of the road, having walked here
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from the gas station. His face was pale, confused, afraid.
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What are you doing? Why didn't you? I needed to
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see it, I said, the loop, the debt. I needed
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to understand how it works, and do you? I think? So?
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I walked toward him, my feet crunching on the frozen gravel.
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The collector said the only way to break the bond
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was to choose death, to stand at the threshold and
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willingly step through. But it was lying, or at least
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it wasn't telling the whole truth. What do you mean
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The debt isn't just yours, Elias, it's ours. You gave
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everything to save me, but I never gave anything back.
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The bond is on balanced, That's what the collector feeds on,
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not death, not time. Imbalance, one person owing another, one
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person sacrificing while the other just receives. Elias shook his head.
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You didn't ask me to save you. You don't owe
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me anything. That's not how it works. I reached out
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and took his hand. His skin was cold, always cold,
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the temperature of the space between moments, but I held
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on anyway. I've been thinking about Clara, the woman who
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tried to free you. You said she failed because she
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tried to cut your chains and the collector just bound
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her instead. But what if the problem wasn't her method.
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What if the problem was that she was trying to
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break the bond instead of balance it. I don't understand.
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You gave everything for me, your freedom, your centuries of service,
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your entire existence, the collector holds that debt because I
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never matched it. But what if I did. I squeezed
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his hand. What if I bound myself to you the
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same way you bound yourself to me, not breaking the chain,
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completing it, making the debt equal on both sides. Elias's
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eyes widened. Sloane, that would make you a debt walker.
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You'd be trapped like I am, walking between moments, collecting
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what's owed. No, I shook my head. That's what the
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collector would want, two servants instead of one. But a
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balanced debt isn't a debt at all. It's a bond,
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an exchange, something freely given and freely returned. I stepped
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closer to him, close enough to see my reflection in
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his dark eyes. I'm not going to serve the collector.
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I'm going to bind myself to you, and you're going
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to bind yourself to me, equal and opposite. A closed circuit.
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It can't feed on you. Don't know if that will work, no,
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I admitted, But I know the alternative. I die forever,
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or I serve forever, or I choose to die and
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maybe break free alone without you. I reached up and
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touched his face, and this time he didn't pull away.
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I don't want to be free if it means losing you.
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I didn't want to die alone three hundred and ninety
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loops ago, and I don't want to live alone.
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Now.
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Elias closed his eyes. I could feel him trembling under
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my touch, not from cold, but from something older, deeper,
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a sentry and a half of loneliness cracking open. I've
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loved you for so long, he whispered, across so many loops,
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and every single time I've had to watch you forget me.
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What you look at me like a stranger, what you
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drive away, knowing what was coming, unable to stop it.
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His eyes opened, full of tears. If this doesn't work,
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if we try this and it fails, I'll have to
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watch you die, knowing you loved me back, knowing what
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we could have had. The cold deepened. The collector was coming.
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I could feel it gathering at the edges of my
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threshold sight, a vast and ancient presence, drawing itself together
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like a storm. It had heard us, understood what we
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were planning, and it was not pleased. You cannot balance
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a debt with more debt. The voice came from everywhere,
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shaking the air rattling the guardrail. You are not a
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debt walker. You have no standing to make such a bargain.
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I have threshold sight, I said, turning to face the darkness.
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You said it yourself evolving into something new, something you've
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never seen before. A human with threshold sight is still human,
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still mortal, still bound by the laws of Then let
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me show you something new. I pulled Elias toward me
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and kissed him. It wasn't a gentle kiss. It wasn't tentative,
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or questioning, or any of the soft things a first
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kiss is supposed to be. It was desperate and fierce
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and full of everything I'd learned across ninety loops of dyeing,
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the value of moments, the weight of time, the unbearable
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brightness of connection in the face of oblivion. And as
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I kissed him, I reached for the thread in my
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threshold sight. The gossamer strand between us blazed like a
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live wire. I could see the imbalance, his side, heavy
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with sacrifice, mine light with receiving the collector's grip on
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the debt, feeding on the inequality, holding us both in place.
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I poured myself into the thread, not my death, not
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my service, my choice, my love. Every moment I'd spent
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learning him across fractured time, every fragment of memory, I'd
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fought to keep every version of myself that had looked
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at this impossible man and thought yes him. Whatever the cost,
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I gave it all, freely, completely, a matching weight to
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balance his sacrifice. The thread sang. I felt a leah's
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gasp against my mouth as the balance shifted, felt the
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collector's grip shudder loosen, something fundamental changing in the architecture
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of the loop. The thread wasn't one sided anymore. It
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was a circuit, a bond, two people choosing each other
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across impossible odds, giving equally, receiving equally, a debt that
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owed itself No. The collector's voice was different, now, smaller, confused.
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This is not You cannot watch me, I said. The
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thread completed itself. I don't know how to describe what
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happened next. It was like dying, except instead of darkness,
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there was light, like waking up, except I'd never been asleep.
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The loop shattered around us. I could feel it coming apart,
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ninety iterations of Christmas Eve collapsing into a single moment.
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All that accumulated time, releasing at once, and in the
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center of it all, Elias and I bound together by
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something the collector couldn't touch. When I opened my eyes,
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I was lying on frozen ground. The guardrail was beside me,
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but there was no crash, no blood, no broken glass,
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just cold earth and dark sky and the first pale
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hint of dawn on the horizon. Dawn I'd never seen
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dawn before, not in the loop. The loop ended at midnight,
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resetting before the sun could rise slowne. Elias was beside me,
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his hand still in mine. He was staring at the
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lightning sky with an expression I'd never seen on his face.
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Wonder maybe or disbelief. Is it over? I asked, I
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don't know. His voice was hoarse. I can still feel
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the between spaces, still see the moments underneath moments, but
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the collector, he shook his head. I can't feel it anymore,
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the chain that bound me to it, It's just gone.
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I sat up slowly. My body felt different, heavier and
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lighter at the same time. When I looked at my hands,
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I could see faint traces of light running under my skin,
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like veins made of starlight. The thread internalized part of me.
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Now we're still bound, I said to each other. Yes,
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and we can still see between moments, still walk through time.
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Yes.
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Elias turned to look at me, and there were tears
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on his cheeks. Freezing in the cold air with something new, Sloane,
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something that's never existed before. Two threshold walkers bound by
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choice instead of debt. I don't know what that means.
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I don't know what we are now does it matter?
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He laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of him, rough
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with disuse. No, I suppose it doesn't. I leaned into him,
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and he wrapped his arms around me, and we sat
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there together as the sun rose over mile marker forty
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seven Christmas morning, the first Christmas morning i'd seen in
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what felt like a hundred years. What now, asked, I
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don't know, Elias admitted, I've been bound for so long.
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I don't remember what freedom feels like. There might be consequences,
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other debt walkers, entities like the collector forces that won't
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appreciate what we've done. He pulled me closer. But whatever comes,
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we face it together. That's the deal we made, that's
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the bond together, I agreed. In the distance, church bells
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began to ring Christmas morning, calling the faithful to celebration,
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marking the end of the longest night. I thought about
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all the people waking up to presence and family and warmth,
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never knowing how close the world had come to something
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ancient and hungry. Maybe that was okay, Maybe that was
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the point, ordinary people living ordinary lives, protected by those
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of us who walked in the spaces between. I looked
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at Elias, at this impossible man who had loved me
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across centuries and loops and deaths, who had broken every
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rule he'd ever followed. Because I didn't want to die alone.
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Merry Christmas, I said. He smiled, a real smile, unreserved,
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the kind of smile I'd never seen on his face before.
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Merry Christmas, Sloane, And for the first time in ninety lifetimes,
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I didn't die at midnight. I lived. Thank you for
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listening to Twelve Nights, a Romance weekly holiday series. We
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wish you warmth, connection and someone to share the Longest
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Nights with.