Each decision in Kvothe’s life was a crossroads — and each of these choices was represented by its own scar.

Ironclad. The scar he’d claimed was already old and healed by the time that they met, but it was no less his for that truth. After all, without that scar — without her exile — she would have never found her prince. Would have never known the brief happiness that he gave her. Their dance in the Inlet’s flowered clearing. The warmth of his touch and his words. The laughter of their bright, bold daughter. All of it so beautiful, so fleeting, that it felt more like a dream than reality.

All of it — herd and King and home — gone in the blink of an eye. All of it lost.

Tyr. She hadn’t run to him right away, and Kvothe would regret that decision until the day that oblivion claimed her. If she’d only gone to him… if she had only gone, then their first son would still be alive. But Aslan — her little lion-child — had paid the ultimate price for the dark seeds of doubt she’d allowed others to sow against the golden bachelor. And while that might make it unfair to attribute the scar on her heart to the Lagoon’s General, the red woman did so without even the barest glimmer of resentment or even blame. It wasn’t a thing that needed to be claimed or countered. It simply was, like the rise and fall of the sea or the endless cycle of the seasons.

Like the light that inevitably came after even the longest nights — the sun setting on her grief and rising on the birth of Frey. The stars of her uncertainties winking out, yielding to the dawn-bright pastels of what Tyr made her feel. The soft pinks of her love, subtle in their expression but strong; unyielding even before the trials they’d faced. The pale yellows of her joy. The muted oranges of the courage he’d helped her to find, interspersed with the ash-gray tatters of her lingering fears. Because she’d already lost so much, too much. Because she couldn’t bear the possibility that she might lose any part of this new life. And so — in the wake of her twins’ harrowing birth, of Kirel’s brush with death — Kvothe had made another choice.

A choice that dripped blood-red down her muzzle, darkening its ashen skin and leaving the taste of rust and salt on her lips. A choice that would soon leave a scar of its own.

The pain of that wound was nothing, though — nothing — to the bite of the chestnut Friesian’s fears. Lurching forward, she began to follow the chaotic trail left in her daughter’s wake, listening for the sound of the girl’s hooves and hearing nothing but the thundering beat of her own heart. Leaping over a fallen tree that loomed abruptly from the shadows, Kvothe stumbled and almost fell. “Kirel!” The General’s companion half-shouted and half-sobbed, sucking in a sharp breath as she imagined the girl encountering a similar obstacle. Only in the nightmare of her thoughts, the red girl did fall. She fell as Aslan had, the life gone from his little body before it had even fully come to rest.

In her reckless and anger-fueled flight, Kirel might find the one place where her mother could not follow her. The one place from which she could not be brought back. And Kvothe… Kvothe hesitated, knowing that she faced another choice. She could either face the twin pains of her distance and her failure to find Tyr, who would triumph no matter what the odds — or continue to follow their daughter’s increasingly-faint trail, and hope that she was not too late.

Seconds stretched one into another while she struggled to think through the fog of her panic and the dark cloud of her fears. In the end, it was the memory of the General’s grief that finally moved her. Trembling, the slender mare turned in the direction that his scent was strongest, brushing beneath the spindly fingers of branches and between the fanged jaws of a briar-patch with as little caution as their child, who by now had stopped to contemplate the waves of the Lagoon’s western shore with pinned ears and bared teeth. A shore that lay in the opposite direction, and that caged Kirel almost as well as her mother had for the seasons since her birth.

“Tyr?”

Kvothe's voice, rough with emotion and sharp with urgency, was almost unrecognizable. But her scent, the shape of her silhouette, and the softness of her gaze — these were things that time had not yet managed to weather; ways that the stallion might recognize the return of his long-absent Companion.