When at last he met her eyes again it was like falling into the sea. Wild and shining and deep with an ancient love he could barely comprehend; a jewel of the heavens that he’d captured with the net of his heart. The star forever upon his brow.

Why, he wondered, were all the finest and brightest things in life so rendered with pain, if only in the knowing the years would so soon be lost?

She was a plucked flower in his hand, beautiful and perfect and beginning even now to die.

Yet it was she that had chosen.