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Pain was something she could handle. Pain was tangible– a festering of her stigmata, a blister on her soul. Pain was easy, sometimes. Easy to inflict.
Loss was unimaginable.
Shadowheart felt a part of herself ripping away. She’d made an amputee of herself, a mutilation of her so-called faith. She felt pain, and loss, and above all, disappointment in the only mother she’d known.
She hadn’t known Shar, had she? She hadn’t known her anymore than she’d known herself.
Shadowheart-who-wasn’t was bleeding, and raw, and lay her hands upon an angel. There was an obtrusive nothingness coursing through her veins. But what she’d feared more than anything was when the nothingness slunk away to lick its wounds, and the angel touched her back.
She felt nothing as they took the fight to Ketheric Thorm, and for once, the nothingness was uncomfortable. She was a stranger in her own skin. Magic had become eerily cold, yet jumped to her hands just as readily as before. And yet her body was the same– quick to harm, quicker to heal.
The angel had stared at her with a profound look of understanding. No, more than understanding. Empathy. She took Isobel into her arms and Shadowheart had never felt more alone.
Isobel was beautiful, in that typical, Selûnite way. Monochromatic. Radiant. Something that Shadowheart had been taught would burn away anything it touched.
All she wanted was to touch.
Dame Aylin was a vision, but that went without saying. A literal angel, a demigoddess, born from divinity and moonlight to be striking in every sense of the word. She was a handsome woman, all danger and broadness, standing seven feet even without her winged helm. She was made for holiness, and made from it. The sound of her voice alone dared gloom to approach her, all well knowing there was no place for darkness in her presence.
Shadowheart was just as she’d been named– a shadow. Not something to be remembered or redeemed, but dissolved in contact with light.
Gods, did she long to be nothing at all.
If not for all he’d driven her to face, she could’ve admired Ketheric for the fight he put up. He’d left them in more pieces than any mortal deserved to be, but Aylin had become the most fragmented of them all, until that gleaming flesh knit itself back together, glued by liquid gold. Aylin was moonlight itself, and no sword could dismember it. She was her mother’s rage, the anger of something divine, but Shadowheart suspected it was the mortal in her that led to her wrath. If she’d learned anything at all, it was that gods could not love. And what was righteousness but a love for a life worth living?
She felt barren in a way she never had before. Darkness came quickly to her fingertips. Emptiness clouded and filled her mind. And Shadowheart, she-who-was-neither, had no mother to guide her.
There was abandonment, she’d found, in being able to see clearly. A looseness in her chest when she could no longer be led. Was this what it was like to be alive? Was this what it was like to be a person?
There was revelry that night, because no victory with adventurers could be left uncelebrated. Shadowheart sat at the edge of camp, and found a sort of cold contentment in that none approached her. After all, it was hardly out of the ordinary for the Daughter of Darkness to want to be alone.
She was starting to understand Karlach, and her desire to be held.
Gods, and all the divine incapability that came with them– all she wanted was to be loved.
Shadowheart felt something shift beside her. Something silver flickered in the corner of her eyes, and then there was a quiet rustling. She really was losing her touch, she thought to herself, as none other than Isobel sidled up next to her.
Her instinct was to reach out. Her reflex was to strike. She forced her hands to do neither, and only inched away as Isobel knelt in the grass just to her right. The Selûnite seemed to care little if she got her white robes dirty, and Shadowheart wasn’t sure whether to feel bitter or admire her for it. She decided on curiosity instead. The Thorms were clearly of good stock– a doctor, a general, a priestess. Gerringothe and Thisobald had proven unremarkable in life, perhaps, but there was a touch of something greater in the Thorm family tree. There had to be, for its only living heir to bed a demigoddess.
Ah. There was the bitterness. It always seemed to come back to Shadowheart, like a chronic sickness.
(Shadowheart couldn’t remember a time when she’d actually been sick.)
Isobel had brought a bottle with her, and she raised it when she finally spoke. If Shadowheart looked closely enough, she could see herself reflected in the glass. (Had she looked like this before? Was she even she? )
“Karlach told me you liked Blingdenstone Blush,” Isobel said. It came out a bit suddenly, and seemed to shock them both.
Something in Shadowheart’s stomach churned. She couldn’t drink now– not after today. Not after what she’d seen of Isobel’s brother. “No, thank you.”
Her smile faltered, but only for a moment. When Shadowheart finally brought herself to look at her, look properly, Isobel’s eyes were miles away.
“What?” Shadowheart asked. There was a bit of sharpness to it. More than she’d intended, perhaps, but intentions were not needed to make it jarring on her ears and on her tongue.
“I’m the only one who gets it, you know.” Her eyes were still painfully distant. Lost. Cloudy. Gray. “The only one here who’s seen a parent become a monster.”
“Shar is more than my mother,” Shadowheart said. It felt like being drenched in cold water. She stopped herself– a slip of the tongue. Reflex, not instinct. “Was more than my mother. She was…” There was no word for the Lady of Loss. By definition, she encompassed the vastness of Nothing. She felt a breaking in her throat as she spoke her next words. Every syllable became shattered glass. “She was everything.”
“And she killed you.”
"Killed me?” Shadowheart’s head whipped back, the end of her braid brushing Isobel’s robes. Black on white. The briefest touch. She couldn’t feel it, and it didn’t burn. “I’m still alive, as you can see.”
Isobel’s eyes bore into hers, that silver becoming something sharp, like a weapon unsheathed. She was present, and the suddenness of it shocked her. “She killed you. So much has been taken from you, from us both-” And there was that profound sadness again, tinged with something Shadowheart could not understand. Isobel stopped to let out a slow breath, as if to steady herself. Shadowheart saw the rippling of something beneath her sleeve. A muscle flexed. “-que a’sum, you do not know who you are.”
Que a’sum. Something twitched in the back of Shadowheart’s mind, and it wasn’t the tadpole. A language she once spoke, but could no longer.
Isobel must have seen the confusion on her face, because she put on that sad little smile and shook her head. “We are both in mourning. You have lost much, and I should not take any more from you. Even if it is only your time.” She turned to leave, letting the bottle rest unopened in the grass.
“No, stay,” whispered Shadowheart. She didn’t know something barely spoken could ring out so loud. “Please.”
For a moment, she was scared Isobel didn’t hear her. Half-elven ears could only offer so much aid in the midst of revelry, and they were the only ones left sober. (She’d learned quickly, despite the lost memories, how much she liked wine. She didn’t want to remember how much she relied on it.) Without the bottle, she wasn’t sure how her own company would keep. Like the acidity of her tongue, Shadowheart could turn to vinegar. She wasn’t sure why anyone would want to be around that, least of all now.
Despite it all, Isobel sat back down next to her. Shadowheart shoved the bottle aside.
“Tell me about Aylin,” she said quickly. “Just… talk to me.” Anything to keep from being alone.
It wasn’t pity that graced Isobel’s bright features, but a softness she had not expected to see. It was beautiful to see, and it didn’t hurt. The bitterness was gone. There was a lightness, if anything, that replaced it. Shadowheart felt strange, and she wasn’t entirely opposed to it.
Isobel told her of how they’d met– Aylin on her travels away from her mother’s side in Argentil, and Isobel the daughter of a Selûnite high priestess. She was the Beacon of Reithwin, and Aylin its shooting star. Like moon and moonlight, they quickly found themselves unable to exist without the other. Aylin was the gold to Isobel’s silver, and it wasn’t long before the topic of marriage was broached. Isobel told her that her father would never have approved, and that one (or both) were in for heartbreak.
It made perfect sense to Shadowheart why they kept their love a secret, heartbreak be damned.
Perhaps there was something to that. A strength in opening oneself to light, to opportunity. Perhaps Shadowheart, Daughter of Darkness, she-who-was-and-wasn’t, had more to learn than to remember.
And love didn’t have to hurt.
Selûne crept from her seat in the sky behind the trees as Shadowheart listened to Isobel speak. Minutes became hours. It all seemed to fall away in moonlight, in little fragments of something divine. Aylin could rest for the first time in a hundred years. For the first time in a century, Selûne could peel her eyes away. Her Chosen was alive. Her sister was silent. Her daughter was free.
Pain was easy— Shar had proven that. But the thing about pain, the thing about everything, was that it ended.