Blood & Shadows

Seventeen

All I hear is the rain and my own breathing. Vrythien's confession leaves me hollow. He killed the bard because the bard loved me. Jealousy over the fact that the Bard got what he didn't. I'm a symptom not the problem itself. It was like the one he ended up bound in silver for, only now a century and some later he no longer has pity for himself. He saw a shade of what he could have been and wanted it snuffed out at all costs.

I pull myself to standing and tilt my head up to stare into those intense ruby eyes. His face is blank, that mask fixed securely in place veiling all emotion. Or worse yet, that's the real him under everything, that he's really in all truth been emptied out and all that remains is a void.

Statue still he looms over me, tilted in just the right way to block the rain from hitting my face. Loneliness gnaws at my heart, that sick prospect that I am well and truly alone. Which I now know for a fact I am.

"I have no one, Vrythien. You did that to me. You cut out my heart surely as you drove the blade between the ribs of the only two people who loved me. I should have been safe. My father could have severed the threads of fate. I could have learned myself back from the lips of those who loved me, but you took that from me."

"Because I love you," he whispers the words and I meet his gaze with an intense glare.

"Love me? You said it yourself, you've never been loved by anyone. Never been shown kindness so how can you show it back? And the most twisted part of all this, I don't know whose done worse to me, you or Razeth!" His name comes a growl from my lips full of rage. I don't know all of what Razeth did to me, I know with clear unflinching certainty what Vrythien took from me. I move to step around him and he grabs my arm, instantly tendrils of shadows pull his arms back. It would be so easy to rip him to pieces, to take out my rage of all that had been taken from me out on him. But that would make me no better than him, I take a slow breath and the shadows dissipate and release him.

"Never touch me again," I don't say it, my shadows speak the deepest recesses of my mind and I step around him. He doesn't stop me this time as I head back for the gate. No matter how pissed I am, I can't help wonder if his grave is here somewhere, empty and neglected--like his heart.

#

When I return to the tavern room, I waste no time and conjure my own bed in the corner and a divider to give myself some privacy. Funny to think a day ago I longed to show Vrythien care and now I want nothing to do with him. I took the bard's journal, but even as I sit on the bed in damp clothes and muddy boots I can't bring myself to read it. The door opens and I peek through the slots in the folding curtain to see Vrythien enter. He strips off his boots and looks through the pack--he's looking for the bards's book. When he doesn't find it, he looks up at the screen and I swear our eyes meet before he looks away.

I turn from him and return to bed, clutching the book I fall into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

For a full ten days I find myself ignoring Vrythien, even as he helps Faeriel and Geraent wake up I keep my distance from them all as I make my own notes on the spell. I shut myself away not willing to think about anything else. Time to time someone sets a plate of food on the other side of the curtain as I focus on the spell. It's a delicate and intricate thing, the threads are woven bands of power each with their own unique command.

I have to go to Mirae's Mercantile, an absolutely dreadful tourist trap of magical sundries but it strikes me as the place a wizard would keep their distance from. Warlocks, sorcerers and all different less learned flavors of mages buy goods from there. Innercity has Saelis's Satchel, it's connected to a cafe that overlooks the cliffs.