You remind him of her. Not in a way that stings, not a slap in the face. A gentle ache underneath the bone of the breast. Something in your smile. The way your eyes light up when you start a new story. The way you turn your head and listen to the sound of the trees, or the birds, as if they might be speaking to you. The way you long for an escape. It's so familiar; it’s so beautiful. He’s been grieving for over thirty years. Maybe it's finally been long enough for him to fall in love again.
It begins in earnest when you start to notice the owl. It has a tawny back and a pair of wide, unblinking dark eyes in its pale face. Those bewitching eyes seem to draw you in every time your gaze connects. It can’t be the same owl every time, that’s what you tell yourself at first. But you had never seen a barn owl in person until the day it landed on the lamp post outside your house, and now you seem to see them everywhere. It must be the same. You feel it must be watching you. Following you.
It has been a hell of a day-- one where you can’t help feeling that a single straw more would break not just your back, but break you completely. You can bear it no longer. The night is black and starless when you finally allow yourself to succumb to it. You have been clawing so hard through it all with no support. Just your raw will and a silent, watching bird. Tonight, that changes. Shuddering, and curled in a heap you feel the warm touch of a gloved hand. You look up into a pair of strangely familiar dark eyes.
You take his hand, and he helps you to your feet. The look in his piercing, starry eyes says that he is as entranced by you as you are by him, though you don’t understand how that could be the case. You feel your aching heart pounding in your chest. Somehow you understand that he has been the owl the whole time.
“I’ve brought you a gift,” he purrs in a voice like the fading echo of a bell after it's been chimed.
Words fail you for a moment but stumbling over them you ask, “What is it?”
“A door.”
You step with him through the offered door, your fingers never leaving his gloved hand. For a moment, the world spins around you and you are uncertain of your footing; uncertain of where you are; uncertain of everything except the hand that’s holding yours.
And then the world rights itself. No, it really rights itself. Your breath catches in your throat and the world is right and true in a way that it has never been for you before. You look out upon his kingdom and your heart knows it; the home waiting for you since you first drew breath.