The peace that had descended upon Ina's cottage and lavender field was profound, but it was not the simple, untroubled peace of before. It was a peace hard-won, a conscious choice made in the shadow of an impossible truth. Their love was now rooted in a stark understanding: she was a candle, and he was the sun. They would burn together brilliantly, but her flame had a predetermined end. This knowledge lent a new, poignant intensity to their days. Every touch was memorized, every laugh was savored, every shared sunset was treated as a sacred relic.
Juraj was different, too. The wild, untamed god had been tempered by the fear of losing her. His passion was now layered with a fierce, almost desperate tenderness. He watched her with the focus of a man trying to memorize the lines of a beloved face against an approaching dusk. He no longer took her presence for granted, and his love for her was a palpable, sheltering force, a warm cloak he wrapped around her mortal fragility.
But the other gods had not forgotten. The council on Biokovo had watched the reconciliation with grim disapproval. Perun saw not a love story, but a ticking clock attached to a cataclysm. Morana saw a defiance of the natural order she embodied. Their patience, mediated by Vida's gentle counsel, had run out. It was time for a more direct intervention. Not a thunderous confrontation, but a subtle, insidious poison. A reminder from the goddess of endings herself.
The dream began not as a nightmare, but as a beautiful, crystalline winter morning. Ina stood in her own lavender field, but it was transformed. A hard, silver frost coated every stalk and leaf, glittering under a pale, weak sun. The world was utterly silent, the air so cold it hurt to breathe. She was not afraid, only curious, wrapped in a strange, numb detachment.
Then she saw her. Morana.
The goddess stood at the edge of the field, a figure woven from moonlight and hoarfrost. Her hair was a cascade of ice-white, her skin so pale it was almost blue, and her eyes were the chilling, pale blue of a frozen-over lake. She wore a gown of woven shadows and spider silk, and where her bare feet touched the frost, new, intricate patterns of ice bloomed.
"Little mortal," Morana's voice was the whisper of wind over a frozen grave, soft and utterly devoid of warmth. "You cling to a summer that is not yours. You build a house on a cliff that is crumbling into the sea. Let me show you the view from the edge."
Morana gestured with a slender, white hand, and the scene shifted.
Ina was no longer in her field. She stood in a humble, stone hut, not unlike her own, but older, sadder. A fire sputtered in the hearth, fighting a losing battle against the chill. In a chair by the fire sat an old woman. Her back was bent, her hands gnarled and twisted with arthritis, resting on a woolen blanket covering her lap. Her face was a web of deep lines, her eyes clouded with cataracts, staring into the middle distance. She was humming a tuneless, broken song.
And kneeling at her feet was a god. Ina recognized him from Juraj's descriptions—the Shepherd. His form was still powerful, his shoulders still broad, but his face was a mask of such profound, helpless agony it made Ina's heart clench. He was holding one of the old woman's crippled hands, his own strong, youthful fingers stroking the paper-thin, spotted skin.
"My love?" the old woman whispered, her voice raspy and thin. "Are you there? Is it dark already?"
"I am here, my heart," the Shepherd said, his voice thick with unshed tears. "I am always here."
"I'm so cold," she murmured.
He chafed her hand, pouring a tiny, careful trickle of his divine warmth into her, but it was like trying to heat a glacier with a candle. The scene was one of love, yes, but it was a love that had become a prison, a vigil over a slow, inevitable decay. The god was trapped, forced to watch the vibrant woman he had loved become a ghost in a failing shell.
"See the devotion," Morana's voice hissed in Ina's ear, cold as ice. "See the eternal lover, chained to a corpse that still breathes."
Before Ina could scream, the scene dissolved.
Now, she was on the banks of a wide, turbulent river—the Neretva. A river nymph, her form half-made of swirling, clear water, was weeping. Her tears fell into the river, each one causing the water to swell. Before her, on the bank, lay the body of her fisherman. He was not old, but taken by a sudden fever. His face was waxy and pale, his strong hands still clutching a net.
The nymph's grief was a physical storm. The river, responsive to her anguish, began to rise, bubbling and churning. It overflowed its banks, not with a violent crash, but with a relentless, weeping creep. It swallowed the reeds, then the path, then the first huts of a nearby village. The nymph didn't notice. She only saw her dead love, her sorrow so vast it was drowning the world.
"And see the consequence," Morana intoned. "A love that should have been a quiet song becomes a flood that washes away the innocent. Her grief has no end, and so the destruction has no end."
The scene shifted one last time, and it was the most terrifying of all.
Ina saw herself.
She was in her cottage, decades hence. She was the old woman in the chair. She felt the deep, bone-aching cold, the frustrating fog in her mind, the painful stiffness in her joints. She looked down at her own hands resting on a blanket and saw her grandmother's hands—veiny, spotted, trembling slightly.
And she saw Juraj.
He was exactly as he was now. The same dark, unruly hair, the same powerful build, the same soil-dark eyes, full of a vibrant, immortal life. He was kneeling before her, just as the Shepherd had, holding her aged hand. But the love in his eyes was now mixed with a gut-wrenching pity. He was looking at a relic, a ruin of the woman he loved.
"My Juraj," her older self whispered, her voice a dry rustle. "You haven't changed a bit." There was no joy in the statement, only a deep, weary sadness.
"Neither have you, ljubavi moja," he lied, his voice soft, the words a well-intentioned cruelty. "You are as beautiful as the day I met you."
And in the dream, old Ina knew he was lying. She could feel the vast, unbridgeable chasm between his eternal prime and her pathetic decay. The love that had once made her feel like a goddess now made her feel like a burden. A thing to be cared for, pitied, and eventually, mourned.
"This is your future," Morana's voice was final, absolute. "This is the only future. You will become his regret. Your love story will become his eternal sorrow. Is that the gift you wish to give him? An eternity of winter, born from your selfish summer?"
The frost-garden, the hut, the river, the aged face—all of it shattered.
Ina woke with a gasping sob, bolting upright in bed. The tears were already streaming down her face, hot and frantic. She was trembling violently, the phantom cold of the dream still clinging to her bones. She looked at her hands in the moonlight, half-expecting to see the gnarled, aged hands of the vision.
"Ina?!" Juraj was instantly awake, his voice rough with sleep and alarm. He reached for her, his hands warm and solid on her shaking shoulders. "What is it? A nightmare?"
She couldn't speak. She could only shake her head, sobs wracking her body. She turned and buried her face in his chest, clutching the fabric of his shirt as if he were the only solid thing in a world that had just revealed its terrifying truth. The scent of him—earth and life and sun—was a brutal contrast to the deathly cold of Morana's presence.
He held her tightly, his arms a fortress around her. He didn't press her with questions. He simply held her, one hand stroking her hair, the other making slow, calming circles on her back. He whispered soft, nonsensical words in that ancient tongue, the rumble of his voice a vibration that slowly began to ground her.
"She was… so cold," Ina finally choked out, her voice muffled against his skin. "She showed me… she showed me everything."
Juraj went very still. He didn't need to ask who "she" was. The unnatural chill that had lingered in the room, the scent of frost and decay beneath Ina's terror—it was Morana's signature.
"What did she show you, my heart?" he asked, his voice dangerously soft.
Ina poured it out in a broken, hiccupping torrent. The aged shepherdess, the drowned villages, the vision of her own future self—a pathetic, withered thing being pitied by her eternally young god. "She said I would become your regret," she wept. "That my love is a selfish thing that will only bring you an eternity of sorrow. She said I was giving you a winter, Juraj. An eternal winter."
A low growl, the sound of tectonic plates grinding, rumbled in Juraj's chest. A flicker of that ancient, golden light she had seen at the Moreska flashed in his eyes. "She dares," he whispered, the words laced with a divine wrath that made the air crackle. "She dares to poison your dreams with her bitter truths."
He cupped her face, forcing her to look at him. His eyes were blazing, not with anger at her, but with a fierce, protective love. "Listen to me, Ina. Morana deals in half-truths. She shows the end, but she ignores the journey. She shows the winter, but she scorns the glorious, blazing autumn that comes before."
He wiped her tears with his thumbs. "Yes, you will age. This body will change. But do you think I love you for this shell?" He gestured to her form. "I love the spirit that resides within. I love the kindness in your hands as they tend the earth. I love the courage in your heart that let you return to a god. I love the music of your laugh and the fire of your passion. That is what I love. And that does not age. That does not wither."
He took her hand and placed it over his own heart. "The Shepherd's mistake was to cling only to the physical form. The Weaver's mistake was to let her grief spill out and harm others. Our story does not have to be theirs."
"But the pity in your eyes," Ina whispered, the image seared into her mind. "When you looked at… at the old me. It was pity, Juraj."
"It was not pity," he said, his voice raw with emotion. "It was awe. Awe that this magnificent, fierce, beautiful soul had chosen to spend its one, precious mortal life with me. That you had trusted me with your spring, your summer, your autumn, and your winter. To witness the entirety of a life like yours… it is the greatest honor a timeless being could ever know. It is a privilege, Ina, not a sentence."
His words were a balm, slowly seeping through the cracks in her terror. He was not seeing the future with dread, but with reverence.
"Morana wants you to fear the end," he continued, pulling her back down into the circle of his arms, holding her close. "She wants you to live in the shadow of the last page, so that you never write the glorious chapters in between. Do not give her that power. Our time, however long it is, is ours. We will not let the specter of the future steal the joy of our present."
He kissed her forehead, her eyelids, her tear-stained cheeks. "Let her have her frost. We have our field. We have our love. And that is a force stronger than any winter."
Slowly, the violent trembling in Ina's body subsided. The icy fear Morana had planted was still there, a cold stone in her gut, but it was now surrounded by the immense, warming heat of Juraj's love and his unwavering conviction. He was not afraid of her future. He saw it as a sacred journey he was honored to witness.
She nestled against him, listening to the steady, strong beat of his heart—a heart that would beat long after hers had fallen silent. But for the first time, that thought didn't bring a wave of terror. It brought a strange, solemn peace. He was right. Their story was their own. She would not let the goddess of endings dictate how she lived her beautiful, fleeting, and infinitely precious beginning. She closed her eyes, not to dream of frost, but to feel the solid, life-giving reality of the god who loved her, here and now, in the quiet dark.