[2] WEEPING MONK║you're not what I was looking for

42| Lighthouse Keeper - 𝐈

═ 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘒𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳 ═

[TW// repressed grief, reference past trauma, mild mature content]

Lancelot learns a bitter detail of his past whilst Ari is conflicted further about the choices she is to make in this war to keep her people safe. Elsewhere, Hector voices a concern for his brother.

❖
don't resist the rain and storm
I'll never leave you lost at sea.
I will be your lighthouse keeper
bring you safely home to me.
❖

Ari startled awake in her cot, panting erratically as if fighting her lungs for the air to calm the rush that was racing through her veins. She snapped her face to check the dagger laying with her sword and saddle bag below the level of her cot, expecting that perhaps her vision had been it's fault but no, it was not glowing beneath the sheath this time. There was no magic or higher power which had caused her mind to toss and turn as she slept. This time the nightmare was her own.

She felt like she were falling again through the waters. Drowning in the bitter chill. If that was not enough to make her eyes water, she saw too the face of the paladin who she had nearly killed on that verge before the rocks of the riverbed finished him. The one who she choked with her powers until he could not breathe. She squeezed the life from him as if he were no more than a wet cloth for her to wring out into the river. She saw her hand, her veins turning to black not gold as she killed him. It mixed in with the other vision from her sleep, the dream-like painting that she could not rationalise.

It was the garden full of faceless people, the boy, the girl, the child, until one by one they faded into the battle field. The blood staining the blades of grass beneath the thundering grey sky and she was at the centre of it all, looking out across the death and destruction. That which she had inevitably incited because the others were right, there was no choice remaining for a bloodless war.   

A blinding light is what caused her to wake, to spring upright and grip onto the sheet of her cot as if her life depended on it. Her knuckles whitened around her grasp for seconds which dragged on to feel like minutes, the feeling of falling never leaving her. She pulled the blanket off of her restless body, swinging her legs to plant her feet on the solid ground.

Ari strained to see anything for the lantern at her cot's side had almost burnt out. Her feet were cold in the hardened mud as she instinctively pushed her way out of the tent into the night for any sense of relief that the forest air could bring her.

~

Lancelot twitched in his sleep, then twitched again more forcefully a moment later and gasped a sharp breath as he rattled himself out of his slumber into the dark of night, a hand which was closest shooting out and gripping to his sword down beneath his cot in an instinctual reaction. His eyes snapped immediately to Squirrel who was fast asleep, not disturbed by his abrupt awakening.