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

65| When Storms Gather (Part Two) - 𝐈𝐈

[Mentions of blood. Minor injury. Fire. Peril.]

The forest fire rages on.

They both flinched at the sound of hooves squelching in mud nearby.

"Patrol," Ari murmured. It was going to pass right by them.

Lancelot gripped her hand harder and led her to some place quieter, further within the woodlands until it were almost difficult to walk for the uneven ground and thickets of bushes. He hadn't said anything at all by the time that they stopped minutes later.

He took the basket from her and set it down before gently turning Ari by the waist and nudging her to sit upon one of a series of rocks. She looked up at him and Lancelot had to look away, her face a reminder of his failings twice over.

"Lance, you're scaring me," she said as he began to pace.

Gods, he did not mean to. But preparing himself for a delve into his past was both necessary and uncomfortable and he could not seem to stand still. Passing his palm over the hilt of his sword.

It took a deep breath to get him to stop and face Ari, a few feet between them. Her eyes pinched with her worry.

"I didn't tell you everything of what I saw in the Between," he confessed, "the first time." Her look as her head dipped forwards willed him to carry on. "In the Burning Night, when I ran from court— I heard cries. There was a girl, and she was trapped beneath beams... just like your father had been." Recognition as well as something else, like she knew what he was going to say, flickered across Ari's face though she reined it back. "I pulled her out and we ran together. But one of Carden's men caught her with an arrow."

That vision of holding her as she bled crept into his mind and Lancelot shuddered. He wet his lip, blinking through the sting fading in from the corners of his eyes. "She died on the ground in my hands."

Slowly, Ari's shoulders fell, and the pinching corners of her eyes softened.

Lancelot's stomach churned and twisted. The scars across his back tightened. "She was the first who died because I could not save them."

"Do you know who she was?" Ari asked.

The shiver ran all through his skin and into the sinew of his joints. This was all wrong— she should not have to learn this from him. He'd promised to not speak it... but he had come this far.

"Her name was Arianne," Lancelot croaked, watching the softness flatten on Ari's features. "She was Sunborn."

Silence fell. Around Ari's eyes twitched. Lancelot waited, his muscles all tense, while the wheels that were spinning in her mind came to realise what he was trying to tell her.