Chapter Text
Sine Tempore
She was tired.
A woman out of time, she had seen generations come and go, as best as she could, keeping her people, her city, her legacy safe, and happy, and healthy. Prospering. Loved.
With wells of deep memory, she tracked the ages and crafted futures; passed through the eras, and walked through the eons, leaving trails of golden-auburn sweetgrass-tinged light and emerald-summer fathoms-deep gazes behind her alongside the spring-time new growth that still sprang from everything she touched. Still, there was no sign of age upon her.
But she was tired.
She had tried to keep a peaceful easiness; had tried to exemplify the goodness in fertile soil, and the steadiness of the mountains. To provide the quenching and life-giving waters of the rivers; only truly showing the tumultuous and deceptively drowning undercurrents and riptides of a white-capped sea – bringing down the terrible and dangerous raging thunder of her storms – when necessary.
Preferred to keep the hearth-fire burning warm and comforting, over any kind of conflagrant inferno, despite that firestorm still flaming within.
The world had enough out-of-control fires – especially ones that smouldered unseen - nowadays.
Tal’Dorei had changed. She had seen kingdoms rise and fall, cities sundered, great rulers pass into tyrants and politics shift and swirl; Exandria had become so nebulous in itself; unrecognizable from the world she had once known.
But she had shifted too, like the winds she still governed. Adapted and grew and lived.
Still, tried to just be.
Loving.
Loved.
Sunny-side-up and green to the end.
To be just Keyleth.
Of the Air Ashari.
Vessar, by marriage, and Tempest by birth and deed, but still… just Keyleth.
But she was wiser, now. Sage and wisdom-driven. Calmer. Lazy-flowing-streamed and gentle ocean-breezed.
But, so, so tired.
…
One day she woke, and knew.
She looked out the same open-shuttered window and made cooing noises to the bluebirds on the sill, holding out her hand for them to perch and peck and twitter sillily. She smiled - which still came easy and mirthful – and looked down over her village – which was still wind-slung and mountain-cooled – and waved at the few early risers. She smelled firewood burning, warming homes, and hammers singing their crafting song, tinging and echoing through the quiet in their muted-bellows and wind-chime way; caught earthy scents in the air, all wet-lush-dew-humid and cornhusk withered-silk.
There were new sounds, too, now; sounds of progress and invention and innovation. But Zephrah remained much as it always had; sleepy and slow and tight-knit-old-fashioned-neighbor-loving.
She looked out over the small gardens full of nourishment and shops dotted with their flower boxes; people of all races and colors and creeds, that she had loved dearly for time out of mind; out over the world that she still thought was so beautiful it made her ache. From the smallest insect and tiniest sprout, to the sweeping vistas of the valleys and the untouchable peaks of the mountains she had dared to climb, it was so wonderful, this world; this life. The new-fresh-clean damp-dappled scent of rains on a field; the quiet stillness of white-blanket snow. The blue of the sky and the reaching of a stalk toward the life-giving bright, or the lonely, forgotten drip of waters deep within the earth’s caverns, where even still life was present and ongoing and persistent.
The persistent smiles and calling-out greetings of the people of this world, who sometimes had known nothing but war, despair, desolation; still held love in their hearts.
The world was so beautiful.
Also, precious, and rare, and so blink-of-an-eye-tragically-short, for the ones she had loved.
Like the autumn leaves, with their antique-sweet cloying fragrance and ageless crunching underfoot, what had begun nub-new budding would green and flourish and grow. Live, and then slowly yellow and fade in its time. Wither and brown and fall; nourish the next cycle, the next generation. The next.
Keeping the world spinning and living and loving.
Rapturous sorrow in every raindrop that fell from a leaf; hollow-melancholic bliss in every birdcall and sun-dappled shadow cast across a forest floor. If you stopped, and stared, and noticed, it would break your heart.
Indescribable, like the touch of someone’s hand. The sound of their laugh. The scent of their skin.
So wonderful, and full, and joyous.
So beautiful; that could break your heart too. If you let it.
She felt a gentle calm settle over her freckled shoulders. A wispy-tainted warmth that tasted like home and felt like forever, and reminded her of a once-upon-a-time-woman.
The world was so beautiful.
But she was ready to leave it. Had finally found that peace.
…
She knew it was time.
…
She took her time, brushing out her tousled red locks and donning her circlet. Making her bed. Touching the smooth, wooden surfaces of the home she had shared and been cloistered in, both. Lighting the fire and taking a few mementos from a familiar wooden chest in her closet. She tucked the blue and black feathers behind her ear, tying them into her hair.
So many reminders and memories in these rooms. Ghosts drifting through the halls she swore she could see as clear as day; echoes of love, haunting the spaces with beautiful traces – moments remembered and relived and seen for a moment and an eternity together.
She took her time, reliving. Remembering. Revelling. She had all the time in the world, after all.
As Keyleth stepped through her vine-strewn and branch-tangled doorway for the last time, she felt that same tranquil-ready-almost forever feeling double; a peace she hadn’t felt – truly – since before that black-bannered day, so long ago now. She watched a group of children dash pass, their little feet slapping against the stone and their laughter high and bright and as clear as day. Their hair – some her own red, some so brown-black it looked blue in the highland sun - trailing behind them, seeming to unnaturally flow like water as their voices faded to the winds.
A raven cried from somewhere above, on the roof, and the flap of its wings as it took flight felt like fate. She touched the gem around her neck.
It was time.
That young, knobbly-kneed and stammering girl, now a regal and ethereal goddess. That lost and spinning, spiralling, unsure girl, oh how far she had come.
How far they had taken her.
She passed through the market, the square, the trees, strolling-time and feeling the sun on her face; the breeze in her hair, and the stone under her bare feet. She ran her hands along stalls and benches and the bushes; she smiled, demurely, and tipped her head to the townfolk, silent but serene. Touched every part of her legacy she could.
Keyleth patted the grizzled brown bear who padded beside her, one of many who had been by her side during the lonely years, the good years, the bad; a final parting gift from Whitestone, his own muzzle white now; “go watch the kids, ol’fella,” she spoke low, kissing his brow. “They’ll need you; thank you for keeping me warm and safe.”
She continued through Zephrah, cataloging and capturing the sounds and sights and feeling of the town living around her. This place. Her place. Their home. The orange-gold-perfect light cast long shadows and shone through the morning.
She felt ghostlore-thin; like a living-memory herself. Antediluvian and young at once. She took a moment to close her eyes and listen to the wind through the leaves and the billowing fabrics that had lulled her to sleep almost every night of her life. She felt a raven perch on her shoulder.
She opened her eyes and absently scratched its chin as she continued her last-lap of her home; she thought she caught a glimpse of black leather, feathered and haunting, the form hidden by each wind-blown pass of those white linen sails of Zephrah. Taken by the gusts and revealing a spectre from her past with each ocean-wave flap of their woven-walls. She blinked and it was gone.
As she approached the two great trees, she let the grasses grow in her wake and the flowers bloom, so vibrant and so fragrant: snowdrops and dahlias, forget-me-nots and daisies; she hoped the children would gather them and toss them into the air; pick them for their parents, for their school-yard-sweet crushes. Hoped they would be enjoyed.
She simply hoped.
She had always been good at that.
Keyleth left the bustle behind and approached the Raven Tree, kneeling at the roots which reached out abandoned-home-grey and silently-austere. She placed her hand against the living-tombstone – that leviathan memory marker – and bowed her head.
She felt his hands on her shoulders, phantom-flicker-faded but fortune-solid. She closed her eyes again, softly, and let a lazy smile fill her; “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Of course I did.” Tomb-gravel and as timeless as she was.
“I didn’t think you could,” she rose and kept striding towards the cherry – the ghost of that under-bough-wedding-kiss still on her lips all these years later – and the shimmering-lost-ghost-presence of him just on the periphery of her; like a gliding-grey shadow, flickering; still.
A prickling sense of comfort; a safely-stalking-sentinel.
The raven and the doe.
“Her embrace waits for all, even you Keyleth of the Air Ashari, at your own pace, upon your own choosing. You are still so beautiful…” His still-stilted raven-scalded voice was the same as it always was. Mostly.
Was it less stinted, here at the end? When she was closer to him than she had been in years?
Or was it the last of his humanity simply saved for the last love confession he would ever give?
They walked.
“Will I see you there?”
“No. My place is by her side, still.”
Keyleth paused at the cliffside, and took a moment to stand with the petals catching in her hair and the sun still on her face, as she looked out across the expanse of the valley below. Goodbye Dad. Mom, she thought, closing her eyes and letting some small white feathers drift down-soft from her hands, catching and drifting into eternity too. Watched them float and dip and turn and finally fade into the green-touched-purple endless and rolling expanse below. I’ll see you soon.
Would she be waiting as well?
“Zephrah blossoms under your boughs as I knew it would; I am so proud of you.”
She kept her eyes closed, “I love you still, you know that, right?”
She felt the whisper of his laugh against her neck, much warmer than his disconnected words. “And I you;”
Keyleth turned and looked to the cherry tree. His form was still hidden-kept from her, a haze of feathers and just-shade-gone that seemed to disappear as her eyes passed over. Form-shifting and unable to be caught by reality-bent, living eyes, yet. “But, she-”
“I am so very glad you had her. Loved her.”
“Thank you Vax’ildan.”
She leaned her staff against the perfumed bark of her tree, and pressed her forehead against it, taking a moment to breath in its scent. She smelled stone fruit and confectionary and Zephrah; her childhood and wedding and the scent of desire; the smell of her children’s hair; everything.
Smelled cedar. Figs. Love.
“I’m ready.”
She smiled into the trunk, thanking it for the years of life, guidance, memories under its canopy. Knew it would stand sentry in her absence, welcome a new Tempest with its petals. Guard generations of her flesh and blood, still. Keyleth lifted her hands – still lovely pale and paint-flecked orange-stars; the bone-glow and antlered ring still at its place on her finger and sitting alongside the carved wooden one she had gifted - all leaves and feathers and golden-glitter – and her beloved tree opened before her in a great flash of green.
…
The first thing she saw was two brightly-lit figures, barely coming as high as her waist, swathed in brilliant gold and vibrant purple, each; a third form, massive and with a grin as large as those mountains at her back, wrapping an enormous hand around the smallest form as he lifted her aloft, just as he always had. A stately and noble man in blue stood in front, smiling, though his face was obscured by the glint from his glasses. His hand rested on a very familiar shoulder; one Keyleth would know the slope of anywhere; one she had ached to rest her head against – to wrap her arms around – for so long now.
I’m ready.
We have come now to the end.
And somewhere in a forgotten drawer, the final stone on an ancient necklace went dark.
The cloaked figure - no longer concealed to her now, but as living and real as he had ever been - took her hand in his own – it felt colder than she remembered – and led her through the threshold of that lovely tree, one last time.
Led her - as he always had seemed to – to where a shapely, dark-haired silhouette stood, arms crossed and hip cocked out in a stance that was so familiar it was like Keyleth had seen it yesterday. A sob caught in her throat; oh, she had missed her so.
“Took your damn time, Darling,” a voice she had longed to hear for years said, with a wolfish grin.
The deer and the wolf.
“I waited for you.”
Keyleth Vessar, of the Air Ashari, Voice of the Tempest, took one last look over her shoulder to the place she had been born, loved, lost, built a life she had never thought possible; had called home for time out mind: it was dimly fading, but still oh so beautiful.
So was she. Still so beautiful.
Her feathered ferryman nodded once, “go to her.”
And with that, Keyleth dropped the hand of the man who had loved her first, and stepped into the arms of the woman who had loved her last.
…
“You know I never stopped loving you, right?"