He reached the spot to find Lyrica sitting on the ground, holding his head in her lap. She brushed his hair from his forehead.
"He tied himself from the Source," she muttered.
"Damnit Colin," muttered Trent Deacons. Mattie Riordan was silent but she stood Guard at Lyrica's back.
"What the Hell was he thinking?" Rostov exclaimed, "Doesn't he know how dangerous this is? Doesn't he understand how much we need him?"
Lyrica looked up with a fire that looked a great deal like his in her eyes, "Do you know how hard that is? To be the one who has to save the world? Do you? He just lost the one person who probably understood how hard that is, the one of the few who would treat him as a person instead of this friggin’ messiah. Do you know how hard that would be?"
Rostov actually took a step back as her words hit him.
"We spend so much time looking at him as this Messiah, we forget he is just a man," he said as he nodded to Lyrica, "my apologies."
"It's not really your fault, Alexei," she said. "I just hate to watch him torture himself. He blames himself every time."
"Da, I heard the list, as well," he said.
"Don't worry, Alexei," She said and gently stroked the hair of the man who's head rested in her lap, "I'll keep him safe."
"I have no doubt of that," Rostov said and walked back into the darkness to give her as much privacy as she needed.
He waited three hours out in the darkness until she picked up the Soullord and carried him back to his quarters. He followed at a distance to make sure she got him in alright. Like there was anything that could stop her if they tried, he thought.
***
The golden Valkyrie bent over me, and kissed my lips. I could see her face.
"Mine forever," her words flowed through me.
I opened my eyes to see that beautiful face a few inches from my own. She was sleeping there beside me. All of my worries of Gods and Goddesses had been just that, worries. My Goddess was right here beside me and I could remember clearly now how she had driven off the darkness that had wanted to consume me.
I reached down and opened the portal I had put in my Stream so I could get drunk and forget for a while. As the portal opened, and the awful pain in my head slipped away, her emerald eyes opened.
I kissed her and pulled her close. Her lips were soft, her skin like silk, and her Soul...her Soul blazed like the Sun. Our Soulstreams merged and we were lost in each other for quite some time.
She is the other half of my Soul. She's the best part and I now understand that I cannot survive without her. She is my life, she is my love. With her at my side, I know we can accomplish anything we set out to do and the future of our world looks just a little less bleak.
Epilogue
A man crouched on a rise looking at the huge facility down on the plain. There was a shimmering portal at one end of the great platform.
The man rubbed at the scars along his right arm. They were the scars from a severe burn. He knew he could reach the portal, perhaps even without the Kresh even seeing him.
There was a disturbance behind him, and he looked down into a ravine to see a group of twenty or so people running up the sloped ground. Behind them a group of ten Kresh loped. They ran around the people in the back and knocked them rolling through the dirt. Then they would let them up to run again.
Rage surged through the man on the hill. He looked over his shoulder at the shimmering portal one last time and snarled in frustration.
Then he turned and leapt seventy five feet to land near the pursued group of humans. Then with a roar of fury he charged into the group of Kresh and tore them apart.
Soullord (Soulguard Book 2) Page 24