Tributes

Chapter Forty Nine

Something was here, buried in the mud. He dug down, giant paws pushing the dirt away and staining the white fur brown. Something important was here; he was sure of it. It pulled to him. Winding around his bones and tugging him to find what was there.

"Master?" a girl called, stumbling over to him. "Did you find something?" she tilted her head, long brown hair tumbling over her shoulder, green eyes wide and curious. She knelt next to where Tyreol was nosing and began to dig at the ground with him. After a few moments, there was nothing in the mud but the urge to explore remained. "I don't think there is anything here, Master."

He stopped digging at her prompting and looked at her. She grinned back at him, eyes sparkling and flowers decorating her hair. He nuzzled her as she laughed. She pressed close, warm and alive, hugging tight. "Ah, Master, you never change, do you?" There was a shift in the air, and she was no longer the beaming young girl she had been. "You always find ways to hurt the ones closest to you beyond repair," she combing through his fur. "You should stop, you know. Trying to be what you're not."

The air turned cold, her voice numb. Tyreol looked down at where he was digging. A hand was half-hidden in the dirt, blue and dead. He turned to look at her, but the woman's face was gone, leaving a skull with hateful green flames glaring at him. She screamed.

"Evia!" Tyreol woke up, the name falling from his lips as he sat up. Or rather, lifted himself off the sleeping fae underneath him, disturbing both creatures in his bed.

He looked around, ignoring the grumbles of complaint as he looked around him. She wasn't there, of course, she wasn't, but it had been so long since he'd seen her face even in a dream there was a tiny spark of hope. His heartfelt heavy. Furious with him or not, the idea of seeing Evia again warmed him. To see what she had become. It would never happen. Evia was a warm-hearted person but black and white in how she saw the warm. Once a person had lost her care, it would never return.

He slumped back down, resting on Airean as he let his heart steel itself a moment. None of his people was happy with him at the moment. He couldn't show himself being hurt. He was a god of war; he was supposed to be stern and unyielding.

A hand ran down his hair. "It has been a long while since you have dreamed of your first, Master," Helian murmured. "That can't be a good sign."

Tyreol shouldn't. Airean was here, and he did not trust Airean. But. "I wish she were still mine," She was technically, and that hurt more. She had left him empty. He'd been young and stupid. He thought she'd come back, but she never had. None of them had. All four of them had vanished from his life without a trace, and he only had himself to blame. Worse yet he'd repeated those mistakes several times over.

"It is no good to wish that. We both know she is not anymore."

"I miss her."

"I know, I do too. But she isn't coming back," Heilan rubbed Tyreol's back. Heilan missed Evia in the way people missed a childhood memory. Fondly but knowing it was impossible to return to that time.

There was a moment as the god pulled himself together. "I was betrayed again," Tyreol muttered.

"Not quite. You were very cruel, you know. To Luke," Heilan pointed out, his tone blunt and to the point. "You hurt him a lot by doing what you did."

Tyreol sat up again, twisting to the side and looking over at the door to his room. He didn't say anything for a few moments, thinking over everything at had happened. The hurt expression on Luke's face when it had clicked Tyreol had broken his promise morphing into the scared one in the forest, it was hard. He could lose Luke the same way he'd lost Jake, and Evia. Even keeping him in the castle for the next few decades might not work.