Healing Ties (Ties, Book 2) | ✓

Epilogue

Fanner blinked his eyes open, head foggy and muscles aching. He was starving, thirsty, and his bladder felt close to bursting. He felt deep sympathy for Yore as he hobbled to the bathroom to relieve himself, his body frail and sore.

From the light coming in from outside, it was clearly deep into the next day, so Fanner was surprised to find Yore sitting on the couch in the main room, reading a book. He surely had more important things to do.

Yore set his book aside and gave Fanner a sympathetic smile as he opened up his arms. "You look miserable."

Fanner made a grumbling sound as he sank into Yore's embrace. "Moving the energy. Too much."

"Too much," Yore agreed. "We need to take better care of you."

"Mm. Feed me?"

Yore laughed and got up. He walked over to the table, picked up a covered plate, some glasses, and a pitcher, and brought them over to the small coffee table in front of the couch. He pulled the cloth off the plate to reveal a feast of different foods, including pastries, fresh fruit, and fish. "A few people have come by to check in, and they all brought food."

"Oh," Fanner said. "I hope they haven't been waiting on me. I slept for a long time, didn't I?"

"They're concerned about you, grateful for you. Everyone knows the things you've done to make this situation work. They respect you, Fanner."

Fanner didn't know what to say to that. Nothing in his training, nothing he'd ever experienced, had prepared him for respect or gratitude. Yore offered him a glass of water and he gulped it down, grateful to have an excuse not to speak.

"It's overwhelming, I know," Yore said. "Just because it's positive doesn't mean it can't be intimidating to have so much attention on you."

"Thank you," Fanner told him. "I told you what I needed from you and you've just... given it to me. You listened and you didn't try to convince me that I should stand on my own or... or anything, really. You just listened."

"You've always known what you needed, and clearly you were right because you've been finding your voice and your confidence. If I've helped you feel safer as you did that, I'm glad."

"You did."

Fanner focussed on eating after that. He'd never felt so hungry in his life. He could tell he'd done physical damage to himself from moving all that energy around. It was nothing serious, though. It reminded Fanner of the kind of microtears people got in their muscles when they exercised. Maybe he would become absolutely ripped from moving energy around, including in places people didn't even know could become muscular. His eyeballs hurt.

Fanner had eaten more than he'd thought his stomach could contain and was finally slowing down when there was a knock on the door. Yore went to answer it.

It was one of the orc guards.

"Human man here," the orc said.

"You're going to have to be more specific," Yore said.

"Human man from human camp."

"Ah, Reid? Okay, send him in."

"Mh," the orc said. "Don't know if man man from man camp allowed in."

"All right, we'll talk to him outside."

Fanner got up from the couch. He felt like a feeble old man when he started walking, but he was fairly sure this was how Yore felt all of the time, so he wasn't going to complain. It was a good reminder to make time for Yore even if he would never ask Fanner to prioritise him.

It was indeed Reid outside, standing with a group of centaurs. They looked surprisingly comfortable together. Reid gave them a wave and walked over towards Yore and Fanner.

"Well, we're heading off," Reid told them when he reached them.

"Already?" Yore asked.

"We'll come back in smaller numbers when we're invited, but having an army sitting on land that isn't ours doesn't feel right any more."

"Things are going well, then? There hasn't been too much push back?"

"Well." Reid brushed his hand down his chest, indicating the coat he was wearing. Fanner hadn't noticed it at first, but it was the same coat the general had been wearing last night. It was a little tight on him. "I'm a general now, I suppose, which is interesting because there isn't anybody with the authority to make me one out here. It turns out that those things matter a lot less than I thought in the face of an army thousands of men strong. What they say holds a lot of weight, and they say that they want change."

"But there were still people who needed my help," Fanner said. "I didn't finish healing everyone."

"You did plenty," Reid said. "Nobody's on death's door anymore, and that's all they need. If some of the men face long recoveries from their injuries and are left with scars to remember them by, maybe that's for the best. The things we did shouldn't be forgotten."

"How will we contact you?" Yore asked.

"We're bringing Atticus, Liam, and Cailan with us as ambassadors. They'll help with that, I'm sure."

"Do you think this is it?" Fanner asked. "That slaves, all of us, will finally be free?"

"I think it's the first step towards that," Reid said. "It'll be a process. Ideally, it has to be. If everyone tossed their slaves out to fend for themselves overnight, there would be chaos. We need to figure out what everyone needs and where they're going to go. But yes, I think we'll get there. We put everything we had into this army, so there really isn't an opposing force left back home to push back. I think we're all sick of listening to bureaucrats who I'm sure knew more about what was really out here than they let on. We thought we were here to fight monsters, not thinking, feeling people with their own communities and cultures."

"If I can help, I... well, I mean, um..." Fanner said, stumbling over his words as he realised he hadn't known where he was going with this sentence when he started it. "I can't go with you. Or, I won't. But if you ever need anything and you can come here..."

"Thank you," Reid said. "For that and for a lot of other things. I should go, though. I want to stop in to see Hamish before we head off and I don't want to keep everyone waiting too long."

"Good luck," Yore said.

Reid let out a breath, nodded, and headed back to the centaurs.

"What do we do now?" Fanner asked Yore. "What can we do?"

Yore wrapped an arm around Fanner's shoulders and guided him back towards The Spire. "Let's go back to bed."

THE END

Author's note: Thanks for reading and I hope you had a good time! I've already started work on the next book in the series and I'm uploading the first chapter of that now. It's called Forging Ties and it's a magical adventure that will have everyone asking why the third book in this series is suddenly longform erotica. The answer? Blame Hamish.