Night came rather quickly.
Ares had remained frozen in the shelter, his heart rate spiking dangerously every single time the leather tent flap fluttered in the breeze. He wasn’t sure if he anticipated or dreaded what was about to happen.
Was he actually sweating...?
He flat-out refused to admit it.
He had no reason to be so worked up, yet his racing heart begged to differ.
Could he really cross that line with her?
If he were to be honest with himself, Elowyn was undeniably a stunning creature. Her independence and striking features made her more than a little distracting. But this felt like walking blindfolded off a cliff.
Worse still, he was in zero physical condition to deliver a stellar performance.
Why couldn’t the impatient woman just give him a proper grace period to mentally prepare?
When the leather flap rustled open again, Elowyn slipped back inside, causing Ares to snap to attention with the vigilance of a cornered beast.
"Why are you still sitting around?" she scolded gently, heading straight toward him. "We can’t perform the binding rites here. Come on."
Ares stared at her, completely paralyzed as she helped him up to his feet.
Wait. They weren’t doing it in the shelter?
Stepping out into the night’s chill, Ares grabbed his walking stick for dear life while Elowyn forged ahead, guiding him toward their supposed destination.
Perhaps it was the fact that he had no idea what was going through her head that unnerved him the most.
At last, she brought him to the hidden clearing, and Ares halted in his tracks.
The sight before him defied every panicked assumption his overactive brain had conjured.
What he saw was a small clearing, carefully prepared in the snow, with just enough room for two people to stand within its bounds. A circle had been drawn into the earth, the loose stones and pine needles already swept aside.
Small stones had been arranged around the circumference, each one placed beside the next with a care that suggested she had put a lot of effort into this.
At the center sat a shallow wooden bowl. Beside it lay two smooth stones, a short strip of clean cloth, and a small knife.
A modest fire burned near the edges of the clearing, built from dry twigs and sheltered cleverly between two boulders to fend off the mountain wind. A few evergreen boughs framed the sacred perimeter, their dark needles frosted with glittering snow dust.
Above them, the night sky stretched vast and unbroken, scattered with countless glittering stars. A silvery moonlight washed over the jagged mountain peaks, bathing the clearing in an ethereal glow while their distant shelter faded into the shadows.
It was a humble arrangement, yet Ares found himself standing completely still, all his previous panic instantly melting into quiet awe.
"...Is this the binding rites you meant?" he breathed, his voice slipping out in a hush.
Elowyn nodded, a soft, genuine smile illuminating her features against the silvery moonlight. "The binding rites can’t be performed without a man and a woman. That’s us, isn’t it?"
Ares slowly raised a hand and facepalmed.
A wave of mortification washed over him. The sheer, colossal magnitude of his own misunderstanding was enough to make him wish the snow would open up and swallow him whole.
How did he misunderstand her intent?
Why didn’t that tiny menace he adopted inform him about this?!
As he stared down at the altar, he asked, "you really did all this by yourself?"
"Of course."
"Why?" he turned to her, a mix of guilt and half-baked irritation tightening his chest. "I was just sitting warm inside while you were out here doing something we should have done together."
"I promised you wouldn’t lift a finger, remember?" she reminded him, her tone gentle and unwavering. "And honestly, I wanted to. It finally dawned on me how completely clueless you are about IronFang traditions, so it felt right that I handled the preparations."
Ares studied her face in the flickering firelight, entirely disarmed.
She was completely oblivious to the heavy, romantic gravity of what she had just done, or perhaps she was just too fiercely independent to seek help. Either way, the armor around his heart cracked just a little more.
He exhaled quietly. "You could have still told me. I would have helped."
"I know," she murmured, looking away as a faint flush touched her cheeks. "But like I said before, I wanted to. You’re still healing, Ares. You’ve already given me a lifeline by agreeing to this fake marriage—let me carry this part."
Something in her answer made him pause.
This is a fake alliance made by two strangers who had found themselves in a severe predicament, so by all logic, they shouldn’t have bothered with superstitious pageantry. A simple lie told to the tribal elders would have sufficed.
However, looking at the fierce, earnest devotion in her eyes, the cynical argument died on his lips. He wouldn’t dream of stripping this moment of its meaning for her.
Silently, Ares crossed the threshold into the stone-lined circle. He dropped to one knee, ignoring the dull ache of his healing stitches as he ran his thumb over the surface of a smooth river stone.
"What role does this play?" he asked quietly.
His interest immediately fueled her enthusiasm. Elowyn knelt beside him and picked up the stone’s matching counterpart, a small smile playing at the corners of her lips.
"A foundation," she answered, her voice dropping into a tender hush. "We don’t have the grand altars of our ancestors, but we can anchor ourselves with something real. Like the stone I named you after. Clever, right?"
Ares offered no reply.
He simply held out his hand, accepting the smooth stone from her palm. The subtle skin-to-skin contact sent a sharp, electric shock through his nerves, entirely unrelated to the mountain chill.
With deliberate care, Elowyn placed her stone at the edge of the perimeter, and Ares immediately leaned forward to do the same, setting his stone flush against hers. Two separate weights now rested alongside one another.
Elowyn picked the wooden bowl next.
"There is one detail I need to explain," she said, her voice dropping into a reverent whisper. "This is the core of the binding rite—the blood-binding. It’s an ancient law observed by every clan in these peaks. Blood acts as our mortal witness, and our spoken vows bind us to the sky itself. We offer a drop to the bowl, and then we join hands as we speak our vows."
"What about the cloth?"
"To bind our hands together, briefly. It is a symbol of unity."
"Of course."
Ares didn’t hesitate.
Picking up the small blade, he examined it first before pressing it lightly against his skin, drawing a single bead of blood that slipped free and dropped into the bowl. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Without ceremony, he passed the knife to her, and she mirrored his steady motion. Her blood dropped into the center of the bowl, mixing immediately with his.
Elowyn set the vessel precisely between their paired stones. Slowly, she lifted her chin to the frozen expanse above, closing her eyes as the cold air brushed her skin.
As if in answer, the howling mountain winds suddenly quieted, up to the point even Ares couldn’t deny the strange shift in the air. Overhead, the great canopy of stars flared with an incandescent, breathtaking brilliance, a luminous, celestial witness to a union born of desperation, now burning with something entirely unexpected.
"Heavens above," Elowyn began, her voice ringing clear against the stillness of the mountain. "Bear witness to this union. We have encountered each other as strangers, now brought together by circumstances neither of us could have foreseen. Yet we stand here by our own will, choosing to bind our lives together. Whether fake or not, it holds our purest intentions. May you bless this marriage and grant us safe passage through the days that come. May we find strength in one another when the world offers us none,and may neither of us betray the trust we place in the other."
Ares stared completely transfixed. The dying wind caught strands of her dark hair, framing a face illuminated by starlight and quiet grace. She was, quite suddenly, the most captivating creature he had ever seen.
When her eyes fluttered open to meet his, she extended her palm. It was an invitation across an unbridgeable chasm. A warning bell rang faintly in his mind. This dangerous charade was bleeding dangerously close to reality, yet his hand moved on its own, sliding forward to clasp hers.
"I take Ares as my husband," she vowed, gripping his fingers as skin met warm skin. "I vow to honour the bond we forge this night, to uphold my part in the life we shall share, and to stand beside him through whatever trials fate may bring."
The sweet cadence of her speech melted into something fragile and profoundly intimate.
"Let the heavens remember my words, even if the world should forget them."
Silence followed.
"You try," she said to him. "You don’t have to think too much about it. Just pour out what you want from this and let the heavens help you with the rest."
Ares held her gaze for a heartbeat longer before turning his face toward the stars. He felt stupid. But where was the harm in it?
"Heavens above," he began, his voice steady and dark as velvet, "I kneel before you and take Elowyn as my wife. I vow to honour this union, to keep faith with her, and to protect the trust she has placed in me."
The words drifted through the freezing mountain air, striking with the solid weight of an oath carved in stone.
"I shall not abandon the responsibilities I accept tonight, nor turn away when hardship comes upon us. Whatever fortune or misfortune awaits us, I shall stand beside her for as long as our fates remain joined."
He looked down at Elowyn.
"And may I prove worthy of the vow I make."
Something in his final words made her look at him more closely, stunned by how quickly he came up with that.
There was no flowery poetry or sweeping declarations of eternal passion here. Ares offered no illusions of a fairy-tale romance; he acknowledged the cold reality of their fragile alliance and grounded it in absolute truth.
He offered her his honour.
In a world were promises and trust meant absolutely nothing anymore, a profound, aching warmth unfurled in her ribs, convincing her that she would take his quiet vow over a thousand hollow declarations any day.
Without a word, she shifted her hand within his, sliding their palms together as the cold night faded into the background.
Reaching down, Elowyn picked up the strip of white cloth.
With gentle, unhurried care, she brought it to their locked hands, winding the fabric in a tight, steady spiral around their fingers. Every pass of the linen felt like an anchor dropped into stormy waters, sealing the vows they had just spoken to the sky.
Ares shifted his fingers, instinctively tightening his grip around hers as the cloth secured them. The cold winter air swirled around the clearing, but between their palms, the heat was electric, radiating straight to his chest.
He looked down at their bound hands, then raised his gaze back to hers. The moonlight carved the sharp angles of his face, softening the hard edges of a man who had lost everything, yet somehow found something worth holding onto.
The ritual was complete.