Meadow
Force-claiming is not allowed here. This is a peaceful, neutral area meant for socialising.
Posted on February 16, 2021 at 08:43:01 PM by Faldne
His words were twisting things; serpents—as dangerous as they were sinuous when they coiled from his lips. But Faldne found herself listening to them more raptly than the so-called truths that she’d been offered in her previous life, her pointed ears straining toward every syllable as a pair of suffocating lungs might strain for air. It certainly felt as if the breath had been stolen from her when the full weight of what her blood-bathed companion sought to impart settled on her chest. Because like many things, truth was both fragile and subject. Had she not—after all—believed the well-woven lies of her senses only moments before? Had she not been convinced that this stranger who all but kissed the taut curve of her cheek was the one whose truths she desired and dreaded in equal measure?
And if she could deceive herself, then how simple could it be to find the single seed of truth in a field of lies?
It occurred to her, too, that this creature could lie to her just as easily. The familiarity that they had fallen into was in itself a fabrication that sought to veil what they truly were—two strangers who’d been drawn to one another by the whims of a wistful mind. Without asking, the mahogany Icelandic surmised that her acquaintance sought to gain something from this encounter, though she could not hope to define what that something was. Only an instant before, she might have guessed that desire to be of the carnal sort—but then he pulled away, and she was left off-balance again. He might refer to her as friend-in-the-fog, but it was the chestnut who seemed composed of these intangible skeins—lifting some strange veil that had hummed with indescribable energy when he withdrew. And though the absence of his distracting warmth bare inches from her skin was a gift, it was also a privation.
Faldne had all but forgotten her question—buried as it was beneath a strange mixture of yearning and revulsion—by the time that he answered it. But when he did, she knew him again in a way that she had never known another, and listed unconsciously towards him to close the distance that he had created between them. Regrets are easy, and I’ve many to choose from. It was a sentiment that she knew all too well, and one that was echoed within herself—though in the matter of her greatest, they could not have diverged from one another more. Acceptance might be his greatest regret, but letting go of it would always be her own. And as for his greatest deed… “It’s a great burden that you’ve placed on me—to determine what you claim as your greatest deed,” she offered with a glance that might have been pity. “Particularly when I’ve always believed that a shield with no blade behind it is a thing of no worth. Just as any vow that is made and broken.” If her words were a challenge, then that challenge was not reflected in the casual touch of her gaze on his.
“For me, the answer is as simple as it is complicated: they are the same. My greatest deed is also my greatest regret, because in saving those lives I robbed myself of my own. Blind I may have been, but so are wolf pups when they’re born, I hear. And yet their existence is far more content than our own. They are protected, cherished. Perhaps even loved. More than any such as us will ever know.” Her dark head tilted to one side again as she regarded the stranger, wondering how he would receive this answer. In less than the span of a dozen breaths, she had ceded the dark core that only moments before she’d sought to conceal—even from herself.
Because while she knew that mercy had been the right choice, its consequences made it far more difficult to live with than the other path she might have chosen.
“And so now you see,” Faldne prompted when the silence stretched out for too long. “The truth is no shield that I could ever claim, because it is lies we turn to when our fragile hearts need protection.”
FALDNE
forsaken daughter of the sovngarde
forsaken daughter of the sovngarde
Replies:
There have been no replies.
Post a reply: