The last memory she has of him replays itself. She wakes and he is there: bulwark against the slithering fragments of demons, those breaking against him like they were no more substantial than paper planes. Him waiting, quiet, for her to wake. “We fly” and they’re flying up and through all of the ugliness and there is a bright green shock of light from his left side. What happened in between then and now and what could have filled five hundred years? But she couldn’t ask.
And was he surprised to see her at all? He has a good poker-face.