Rhoann sank down into the water, shifting to salmon-form. Salmon were supposed to be creatures of great wisdom.

I need wisdom.

He spiraled down, into what passed for the depths of the Pool. Past strange items, discarded by humans, some overgrown with weeds or half buried in silt.

Fae did not love, other than near blood kin. He knew this from his mother’s tales, and from a Fae’s instincts. Yet Fae desired other Fae, or humans — again, a truth known more from the tales than from his own experience, though he had found physical pleasure at his own hand often enough.

So what was this, that he felt for Mac, if not love or a desire he had never known? This emotion so strong, he was determined to spend whatever of his own magick it might cost to heal a stranger, solely because doing so would make Mac’s heart sing?

Or was it only for Mac that he proposed to do this thing? He suspected his own heart might sing as well, were he to see Lucien’s eyes open. To learn their color, let them wake emotion in him.

But the cost of that song? Spending magick, irrevocably, for a stranger, the way his mother had once spent her magick for him.

No. Lucien’s healing would be Rhoann’s gift to Mac. That was all. That was enough strangeness, enough impossibility. More than enough.

A school of tiny fish swam past him; unthinking, he snapped, caught one, swallowed.

I have never felt this way. Never so determined to bring joy to another. Never so eager to feel a touch, to know pleasure in the body of another.

Sunlight gleamed in the water, a liquid touch.

Is this love?

The water was cool, comforting against his scales. It surrounded him, set him apart.

Is this… SoulShare?