EPILOGUE: AMOR VINCIT OMNIA

Where Love Wins

________________________________________

Years later, Paimon sat in a small apartment in Brooklyn and wrote in a journal.

He didn't know why he wrote. Maybe because Stolas had taught him that writing helped you remember. Maybe because he was old now—truly old, human old—and he wanted to leave something behind.

He wrote about the fall. About the long centuries. About the becoming. About Stolas and the stars. About Buer and the dying. About Sitri and David and the wedding where she'd finally stopped falling.

And he wrote about love.

The philosophers were right and wrong, he wrote. Love isn't an idea. It isn't a feeling. It isn't a transaction. It isn't a weapon.

Love is the thing that survives.

It survived the fall. It survived the centuries. It survived our attempts to kill it, to use it, to forget it. It survived because it's not ours to kill. It's not ours at all. It's the thing that holds everything together—the music, the silence between the notes, the stars, the children looking up at them, the dying hands we hold, the faces we see and are seen by.

We thought we fell because of pride. Maybe we did. But we rose again because of love. Not the easy love—the given love. The hard love. The chosen love. The love that keeps choosing, every day, even when it hurts. Even when we're scared. Even when we'd rather burn.

That love—that love conquers all.

Not because it's magic. Because it's the only thing that's real.

He closed the journal. Looked out the window. The stars were there, faint through the city lights, but there.

He thought of Stolas. Of his quiet voice, his patient eyes, his certainty that looking up was enough.

You were right, he thought. Love is seeing. Really seeing. And being seen.

Thank you for seeing me.

He put down the pen. Turned off the light. And for the first time in longer than he could remember, he slept without dreaming.

Outside, the stars kept watching.

They always would.

________________________________________

THE END

_______________________________________

Amor Vincit Omnia. Love conquers all.

Not by force. Not by magic. Not by triumph.

Just by being there. Just by surviving. Just by showing up, again and again, in every generation, in every heart, in every moment when someone chooses to see instead of look away.

The demons fell because they forgot how to see.

They rose again because they remembered.

And that's the whole story.

That's always the whole story.