I don’t deserve your pity or your kindness.
How his heart ached to hear her say such a thing. She painted herself the villain before she even spoke, but Zevulun knew in his heart that she could never be. The way sorrow clung so heavy to her voice that it made the soft notes tremble told him truth enough. The more she prefaced what woes she was going to tell him of, the more Zevulun felt he understood her. Foolish, perhaps, to think such a thing when she hadn’t even begun to speak, but Zevulun knew all too well of shouldering the responsibility of heartache and punishing oneself for whatever loss they suffered.
Zevulun stayed quiet as she spoke. He listened to her words and pictured her stories in his head; a guest, understanding the gravity of being allowed to shadow the memories of a sorrowful stranger. Her past tales of lovers brought faces and stories of his own into his mind, reaching for personal understanding to connect to how difficult each situation had been for her.
When finally she came to the conclusion, her reveal at being kept somewhere that felt like a prison inspired a fierce, hot anger in his belly, but Zevulun did not react to it as he wanted to. He only breathed a warm sigh of breath against her white-striped skin and gently pushed a lock or two of her silver hair aside - he’d been doing that, idly touching her to keep her tethered to the physical world while she relived her past - and watched what he could see of her profile with eyes as white-blue as glacial ice that floated in Tinuvel’s Bay.
He wanted to tell her he’d fight for her. He wouldn’t let her return to a place that made her feel trapped with all this worry and sorrow driving her madly into heartbreak. But this wasn’t the place. This wasn’t his moment. She wasn’t here, pressed up against his body, cold and damp in the winter night because she needed him. A fight could bring more drama she didn’t want to bring herself, after all. Zevulun was old enough to check his ego, but if he were younger he would have been fired up with proclamations of all the ways he would be the one to set her free and see her smile again.
“We often don’t see what’s right in front of us before it’s too late, especially when trapped in sorrows..” He agreed quietly into the air after a brief lapse of silence. “Much to our later regrets.” Zevulun knew he didn’t need to repeat her point, but it was more to show her he understood better than most what that path could lead to.
“When I was three, the love of my life, the first mare to teach me how beautiful love was, disappeared into thin air. With her, our yearling daughter. My first child.” His throat tightened. No matter how many years it’d been it was hard to think of Avalon and Izizel and not feel that horrible, all-too-familiar ache in his chest. “She left behind our twin sons - they were barely a half year old. It wasn’t like her at all, but I couldn’t find any trace of her or foul play. I lost myself to the grief that followed and clung to the Bay with a paranoid fear that she would come back the moment I left it.”
Zevulun’s eyesight drifted out, down to the water they’d climbed from hours ago, and beyond as if he’d suddenly manifest Avalon through the mist.
“She never did.” He concluded with a heavy sadness in his voice and a sigh that followed. “I lost my father only a few months after I lost her, and the grief nearly drove me mad. I could only just keep going on because I had our sons, our twins… but if I hadn’t had them…” Zevulun lapsed into a brief pause of silence, then sighed. “I was just so focused for so long on what I had lost, I failed to see what I had in front of me the entire time. Those who still needed me. A daughter, who I never met until just a few weeks ago who’s fully grown, a queen in her own right... and it breaks my heart every time I think of how much of her life I missed. How much I can never get back. No matter how present I am now… Nothing is going to change the selfish choice I made in the past. There are others, too… that I’m probably never going to meet or know. No matter how good of a father I have been to my sons and no matter how good of a father I am to any children I am blessed with from here on out… none of it makes up for the fact that in the past, I abandoned my other children because I couldn’t see past my own woes.”
He only meant to share how well he understood shouldering the blame for the troubles one faced, but his own eyes became watery with tears and his voice strained for a moment, making him stop and clear the emotion from his throat before he continued.
Zevulun’s eyes moved away from the Falls and back onto his company.“You deserve to love again. To find someone you can trust again.” She had to know she hadn’t been wrong in seeking that - even if when she finally decided to, she came across someone who made matters worse.
Once more he fought against the bitter anger that welled up inside to think of any stallion taking advantage of her, making promises to her broken heart only to reveal there was no actual indication of healing it.
“I don’t want to bring any more trouble into your life,” he said, knowing what he was going to follow-up with would invite it anyways, “but if you would like, I will help you find a way to be free from your prison. You shouldn’t be locked up, not anymore. Your soul deserves peace from all the tragedy it has suffered for so long, even if peace seems a foreign concept.” He wished he could show her the Prairie right then, in the late spring afternoon when the breeze was lazy, the grass was plentiful and the sky was blue with the most picturesque white clouds. That was where he had found peace when he thought he never would again.
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