Playing with Fire - Of loss and grief

Epilogue

The wind.

It was only the wind, howling its way into her bedroom and her mind, shaping her dreams into a confusing mess of memories and bad omens. Whispers and spine-chilling moans slithered into the inn through every crack in the wooden walls they could find. The wind was cold and brought heavy black clouds to cover the night sky and shroud the White Lady and her Blue Child. The two moons couldn't show their light that night, and a storm was coming.

Aiwyn woke up because of the cold, far away from that comfortable and luxurious room that was, more or less, hers. It's been a couple of weeks since she left that warm place, fit for an elf and suitable for a night of storytelling. Now the cold seeped into her body and made her curl into a fetal position to remain warm, the bed sheets pulled close to her. There was no way to get warmer when the window was open, and eventually her consciousness emerged just enough to realize that. The elf sat up, shivering and rubbing her eyes as she tried to understand the bad feeling that tried to scream from the back of her mind to tell her something was wrong. Her mind still swayed between the vague and blurred realm of dreams and the crude and blunt reality, trying to take a grasp of that premonitory itch. It was a distant feeling, a bad omen so curious that it took her a second to name it...

A man. She'd lain with a man and woke up alone - of course, her bed wasn't supposed to be so cold, and the window wasn't supposed to be open. Sliding off of her bed and covering herself with a large male linen shirt, she walked up to the window and took a look outside. She squeezed her eyes against the chilly wind that sent her hair lashing at her back and shrugged. It appeared that every living being went looking for cover to prepare for the storm to come, and not even the rats wandered outside. A leafless tree just outside the inn bent to the will of the wind and its ghostly and naked branches tapped against the window of another patron's room. She wondered how they could sleep when the creaking of the tree hurt her ears from where she was, and hoped the innkeeper had given the patron a good price.

As she was about to shut the window and ponder over the idea of returning to bed, she heard a nervous horse at the stables. She waited a minute to check if the horse would keep on neighing nervously, but it didn't. It might be the animal simply reacting to the static of the storm to come, it might be nothing since horses can fear their own shadows, but that bad feeling didn't leave her still, so she grabbed her staff and stepped out of her room.

Perhaps he had just gone out for some fresh air but... who was she trying to fool? She was worried.

Not a single soul roamed through the night but her, it seemed. Aiwyn regretted almost instantly her simple linen shirt. She should have put on something that could protect and cover her body a little more, but now she was halfway to the stables and the darkness was so deep she had to make the top of her staff glow and let its light guide her like a candle. She heard the horse again, this time closer.

The stables were not as calm as she would expect. Her staff showered the place with its soft light and revealed the outline of the different bays, a few of them occupied. The nervous neigh of the horse was not the only noise that filled the place, the only one that could be heard above the howling of the wind. A war direwolf also sniffed the air and growled at the darkness, and she carefully approached to try to figure out what was wrong. She was barely through the door of the stables when a strong hand pulled her by the neck. A strong, rough, sailor's hand.