Dusk of the Realm

10

Time passes. Even in a Realm where the people remain stagnant; where there is grief in the hearts of those who wish time would stop forever, time survives, and time moves on.

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Tarin's elites dragged him out of the base even as they overpowered Eris. On the trip back to Azure, they mixed Tarin's - and Eris' - water with the sedative potion Eris and her cohorts were so fond of, keeping him unconscious until he was back in his castle bedroom. Eris walked herself into her dungeon cell with the help of the twins, he later heard. The woman was bound completely and without hope of either escaping or harming herself just to in some way hurt Serena, in the case of there being a connection between the two of them. No matter who spoke to her, Eris would say nothing more than 'nothing has changed.'

Once he awoke, Tarin was told by the twins of the immense store of power Eris held inside of her that she had not seemed to realize the depths of yet. He was not surprised. He had felt it for himself, and had always known how powerful Serena had the potential to be. Eris did not seem all that concerned with being in the castle cells of Azure, regardless of the fact that they were reinforced with heavy enchantments that, ironically enough, made casting any magic from inside of them impossible.

Tarin lost nearly all will to endure. The threat went silent once Eris was captured, the base left empty of even the furniture. Triana would not speak to him; the only benefit of which was that he was not banished from the city. The only thing that kept him going was the bit of hope that he could not completely extinguish in his heart. After all, his princess was alive.

A true allegiance, rather than just a casual indifference, was struck between the Fae and the Eternal Ones; King Kavras and Queen Pevana signed the treaty along with Queen Triana, an outward sign of mutual defense. Teams of Eternals had been sent into the mortal world to scour it for the lost princess.

He could not bear to have anything but faith in the possibility of Serena returning. It was salt in his wounds every second of every day, that he could not be joining in the search for her. However, his mind never abandoned its thoughts of her; the images, the sound of her voice, her laugh in his head was all the hope he had left.

He would not abandon it. Even if he abandoned everything else.

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Nobody kept Serena in their house for long. It was too much work, perhaps, to deal with a girl with amnesic syndrome. After a while of making exceptions for her and coddling her as if she was unable to function at all, each foster family seemed relieved to pass her on to the next. It did not take long for this sort of life to take its toll on Serena's emotional state; gradually, she began to feel that there was nobody who would ever care for her. She could not remember anything about her parents, though her social worker insisted that they had both been criminals that she was better off without. Serena did not know how the man knew anything about her parents if everybody, it seemed, knew nothing about the rest of her history. But she did not question it, because there were such greater questions flowing through her vastly empty mind.

She learned her first life lesson when she was only eight years old: Being without a companion made the idea of the future seem grey and unappealing.

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Two years of the Realm wearing grey to mourn their lost princess. Not black, as that would signify her departure from this world, but grey, the middle, the in-between. Grey, that represented a hope that she would someday be found once more.