𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭
Her past haunted her. Her future loomed like darkness. She wasn't prepared for all of this. After all, she was just Estelle, the Star Summoner.
(Siege and Storm/Ruin and Rising)(Nikolai Lantsov x oc)(First book in the Sa...
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Jealousy
Estelle wanted to leave right away from Kribirsk on her own, but she was forced to wait a day to heal and gather information. She'd withdrawn from meditating for so long, and she needed to catch up for all the time she'd missed watching the world.
A son that had run away, now dead. The division of stranded First Army soldiers made it back home, though not all survived. Bridges were burned, built again, used before they fell from the weight of it all.
Not always literally. Estelle loved metaphors.
Ana walked into her tent, distracting Estelle from the private conversation she was listening in on. "Am I interrupting?"
"I'll have plenty of time to listen to it later," dismissed Estelle, waving Ana towards her. "How's Kribirsk treating you?"
The deaf girl shrugged, pulling up a stool to sit on across from where Estelle sat, cross-legged, on her cot. "I always need a translator, so I think it would be an understatement to say that I miss the sea."
"Sorry about that," Estelle apologized. "Do you regret coming, at least?"
She shrugged. "When I start to see the overall good we've spread because of this, maybe. We'll see, I guess."
They sat in silence for a while. It had also been a while since Estelle could say she enjoyed the silence. When there was quiet, bad things always followed.
For some reason, not this time.
It was refreshing to breathe in the lull of the tent, not a single worry about him invading her mind in sight.
"I'm leaving tomorrow," Estelle signed. "It'll help me get ahead and plan out our strategy before they get to Os Alta. I can scout it out and make a few stops along the way, as well. I don't need a returned prince, a Sun Summoner, and his ensemble slowing me down."
Ana nodded. "Will you go visit your parents?"
That was a question that Estelle hadn't expected. True, their encampment was near Terev, a town by the Shu Han border. But Estelle hadn't seen them, or the rest of her family since she was fourteen. When she'd fled the Little Palace, she knew that the first place the Darkling would look was there. She wouldn't put her parents at risk like that.
They were one of the people she checked in once she was healed enough to do so without keeling over from exhaustion. They seemed relatively good, still living in the same camp as before she'd left. Her cousins—all of her cousins—were just as they always were, just older. They didn't seem as traumatized as her parents, but they all had something Estelle hadn't expected.
