Paragon

⊰❉⊱ 82 ⊰❉⊱

I knew when I saw it.

In its uniqueness, its beauty and its simplicity. The way it was bound delicately by a metal that was either titanium or platinum. The stones were dark but not quite onyx, they had the faintest purple hue within them. It was captivating. It was Quinn.

"Selena!" I called, hearing the sound penetrate the silence of the vast vault. "I've made my decision!"

She strolled around the corner of clay pots and walked calmly to where I was. She then looked down at the ring I sought and nodded with a small smile.

"Something old and something new." She murmured.

"How so?"

"The stones, they can't even carbon date because they're not from earth. They fell from a meteorite in the 18th century. But the fixing I had bound once we had the technology for a stronger metal to hold them–I couldn't risk them being lost to something as weak as gold." She finished. Then she lifted the glass back and removed the ring with its box and held it before me.

"And the metal?" I asked in curiosity, noting that it had the faintest blue-ish tint to its chrome finish.

"Tantalum, one of the rarest stable metals we have... and pretty damn strong." She offered it to me.

I took it carefully and gazed at the alien rocks more closely. Definitely a hint of violet inside them. But it was beautiful. She would wear it as she wore everything... effortlessly stunning and striking me with an awe that froze me.

"You are gloriously in love." She mused.

I flinched out of my thoughts and saw a strange warmth on her face I thought I had imagined. I saw Elders as indifferent–ambivalent, uninterested in such things after their time... I never saw what she revealed for this moment.

"Sounds like you are familiar." I blurted, without thinking through my words.

But she wasn't shocked by them. She seemed to want to live in them for a slice of time.

"As I said before... I was once." She answered, taking the ring back and pocketing it in her jacket. I frowned, she had lived, worked and as it appears... loved alongside mortals. But she spoke with endings and closed words, not ones that left those doors open. Ones that experienced and never tried again.

"Can I ask you a very personal question, Selena?"

The use of her name seemed to rip her out of her thoughts and she met my eyes with her carefree demeanour back in place. She smirked and gestured around us.

"What better place to do so?" She drawled.

"Did you fall in love with a mortal?" I asked slowly.

Her smile faded but she kept the air light, refusing to delve into whatever history stayed down here. She snorted and started walking in a particular direction back past shelves of clay pots.

"I did say you could ask..." She chuckled, continuing forward. So I strode to keep up beside her in this maze.

"I won't press you–"

"You remind me of him so much, you know..." She surprised me with an answer.

So, I listened.

"He was a soldier too. Only, he fought in the Second World War. One that I had no say in. How could I?" She laughed in irony, "A woman... With no place on the battlefield–that the mortals would tolerate anyway–no chance to save him, or to stop him. His sense of duty was to mortals he never knew, fighting for those that did not even speak his language or share any of his values–so much like you." She finished in a quiet voice.