You knew from the beginning. You knew because the world knew about the intricate and fascinating life-cycle of the Svarrs, and it had been documented and discussed everywhere throughout the media endlessly. And you knew because Vo made sure you understood, before you married them.

Four years is the bonding-period you get with a Svarr. Not quite four years, to be exact. Four years minus twelve days. After those four years Vo would shrink inward on themself like a neutron star shedding its outer layers, becoming smaller, denser, brighter, before emerging in their new form.

“I will not remember you,” Vo told you. And then, to make sure you realized the import of what they were saying: “I will not want to. I will not care.” All the emotions and memories would be shed too, as the Svarr shed their skin and their old self.

“I know,” you said, then. “I understand.”

You’d fallen for Vo, caught by their gravity, tumbling inward toward them. It had seemed so impossible, so exquisite that they might care for you that you would have bargained with the universe for just one more month of being with them. Just don’t let this end yet. Let me have this. Just one more month, just one more.

And this was four years. You got to have them for four years. It felt like a long time. It felt like forever. It felt like enough.

(It wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough, and you could have known this all along if you had let yourself.)

You are hardly the first to wed a Svarr, although you are the only one out of the people that you know. A woman approaches you at the market one time as you and Vo stack your basket full of delicacies and giggle over the root vegetables. “How long?” she asks, showing you the Svarr-wedding rune on her wrist, faded and blurred now, a contrast to the dark definition of yours.

“Eight months,” you blurt, unwilling and yet somehow drawn into answering her.

“So new,” she says, but you are already turning away, taking Vo with you, safe in your bubble of happiness, in your love and your silliness and your joy. And you forget all about her.

Except you don’t, really. You think of her years later, of the starkness and hunger to her face and the bright mixture of pity and jealousy in her eyes.

“What will it be like in your next phase?” you ask Vo then. Really you mean what will it be like, without me?

“I cannot imagine it,” Vo says.

“Try,” you say, like a pain-seeking missile, trying to push, trying to sabotage, trying to hurt.

But Vo enfolds you in their arms and looks into your eyes only, not to the future. “I cannot.”

And you realize, hurtling through your very last year together, that you’d never truly believed it, so you couldn’t really have accepted it, could you? That you’ve internalized the themes from books and movies where love finds a way. That somehow it will be different for you and Vo, despite everything you’ve been told. Despite the fact that future-Vo is outside the light cone of everything that happens now, and they will not be impacted or influenced by any of it.

You are by turns moody and snappy and disgruntled, and you find yourself bitterly resenting those twelve fewer days, because everybody always talks about four years, so it feels like you should be entitled to that, at least.

And then, suddenly and yet not suddenly at all, your time is up. Vo collapses inward, becoming more compact, a small bright mass in the corner of your living room. “I love you,” you say, hoping that the words are sucked inward too, that they make it.

It takes a week, and you camp out on the sofa beside Vo, your hair greasy and unbrushed, eating cornflakes out of a cup when you remember to eat at all.

When Vo breaks out of their shell they are more defined somehow, brighter, shining. More alien.

You could still love them like this you realize, the knowledge blooming in your heart. They are not the Vo you knew but they are so beautiful.

“Vo,” you say, your lips parched, your mouth dry.

Vo doesn’t turn at your voice, stays looking out of your bay window, eyes fixed on the horizon. And when they leave, they do not look back.