Welcome.
She considers it for a moment, smiling. She considers all the welcome she had felt in Nordlys—the vast tracts of forest and seashore, foothills and mountain slopes. The hollowed-out halls of her northern home, the snaked corridors of fire-lit granite and the comforts of straw and cotton and body heat. The welcome of Edana, the way her beaches had come like a soothing mother, gathering Stella to its breast as she sputtered and coughed for breath. The lamplit streets of Isdel and the in-betweens. Even the tattered, spilling edges of the Outlands…
So much welcome, she isn’t quite she knows what it means anymore, what it promises. All the things proffered in welcome—the tenuously sown fabrics of life and love and lesser things. She is not sure she wants it, but she holds it anyway and nods her head.
Perhaps, in time.
“Thank you, Azrael.”
Sleep comes for her, sudden—as if brought along by another cool purl of wind from the distant jaws of larch and pine beyond the lake. She shivers, jaw clenching a little as she does, eyelids beginning to suffer the rebuff of rest. She blinks, feeling herself drift and become heavier, gaze trailing, watery, across the mirror-like pool to where she had set up camp that dusk, tucking her belongings under the crook of a fallen tree for safekeeping as she wandered through this now-known Denocte.
She had once imaged the stars as loosened souls, following Lief to the other side. Imagined her mother among them. Then her father. “There are worse places to end up when your time has run thin.” She wonders what her father has been muttering to himself under his whiskey-breath as he watches her navigate the winds of life and nearly laughs, stifling it into a smile and shake of her head.
“Vade in pace, it was a pleasure meeting you. Perhaps I will stumble upon you at the festival, and we can exchange knowing glances,” but this time, she does allow herself an exhale of a giggle before she nods and watches him return to the clutches of his home.
She considers it for a moment, smiling. She considers all the welcome she had felt in Nordlys—the vast tracts of forest and seashore, foothills and mountain slopes. The hollowed-out halls of her northern home, the snaked corridors of fire-lit granite and the comforts of straw and cotton and body heat. The welcome of Edana, the way her beaches had come like a soothing mother, gathering Stella to its breast as she sputtered and coughed for breath. The lamplit streets of Isdel and the in-betweens. Even the tattered, spilling edges of the Outlands…
So much welcome, she isn’t quite she knows what it means anymore, what it promises. All the things proffered in welcome—the tenuously sown fabrics of life and love and lesser things. She is not sure she wants it, but she holds it anyway and nods her head.
Perhaps, in time.
“Thank you, Azrael.”
Sleep comes for her, sudden—as if brought along by another cool purl of wind from the distant jaws of larch and pine beyond the lake. She shivers, jaw clenching a little as she does, eyelids beginning to suffer the rebuff of rest. She blinks, feeling herself drift and become heavier, gaze trailing, watery, across the mirror-like pool to where she had set up camp that dusk, tucking her belongings under the crook of a fallen tree for safekeeping as she wandered through this now-known Denocte.
She had once imaged the stars as loosened souls, following Lief to the other side. Imagined her mother among them. Then her father. “There are worse places to end up when your time has run thin.” She wonders what her father has been muttering to himself under his whiskey-breath as he watches her navigate the winds of life and nearly laughs, stifling it into a smile and shake of her head.
“Vade in pace, it was a pleasure meeting you. Perhaps I will stumble upon you at the festival, and we can exchange knowing glances,” but this time, she does allow herself an exhale of a giggle before she nods and watches him return to the clutches of his home.
FIN.
☽
