The stone left Ash's grip the way a held breath finally leaves a body — not stolen, not pried loose, simply lifted, gently, by a woman with no visible hands beneath draped dark fabric, the instant Maren's word settled into whatever unseen ledger this world kept for promises exchanged in earnest.
He flinched at the loss of it. Maren felt the flinch travel through the black light still surrounding both of them, a ripple of something that might have been confusion, might have been grief for a thing he'd only held for the length of a single terrifying hour and had never understood in the first place.
"It's alright," Maren said, quiet, close, one hand finding the edge of the black light without quite daring to touch what lived inside it. "It's alright. We're safe. That's what matters."
The black ring did not fade immediately. It held, tight and rootbound, for a long moment — long enough that Lady Death, stone already vanished somewhere into the folds of fabric that weren't fabric, paused at the threshold of her widening dark seam and looked back, unhurried, at the two of them.
"He'll come back to himself," she said, to Maren, not to him. "Slowly, probably, the first several times. That's normal, for something so new to carrying a weight that size. It gets easier. Not easy — I won't promise you easy, that would be a lie, and I don't deal in those, whatever else people say about me. But easier." A pause, and something in her hooded stillness turned, briefly, almost gentle. "You did well tonight. Both of you. Not many souls his age survive their first real threat with anything left standing. Fewer still survive it with someone still choosing to stand beside them afterward."
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"Will we see you again?" Maren asked, before she could stop herself.
"When it matters," Lady Death said. "Not before. I don't make a habit of hovering — that would rather defeat the purpose of protection, if the protected spent every day looking over their shoulder for me instead of living whatever life they've managed to build." She inclined her hooded head, the closest thing to a farewell gesture either of them had seen from her. "Take care of him. He's going to need it, more than he knows, for a very long time yet. And take care of that." A glance, brief and unreadable, at the healing line along Maren's throat. "You'll want the scar, eventually. Most people who survive something worth surviving do."
The seam closed behind her the way it had opened — slow, unhurried, without sound — and then the Between was simply gray again, cracked and healing, empty in every direction, as if nothing at all had happened.
Ash's black light finally, gradually, began to unwind.