3. What Time Has Stolen #2
“The Sokar and her shapeless, colorless, body. Pale skin, white hair, silver eyes. Like a thing grown old yet somehow clinging to life. Never aging. Never changing. Is she a child? Certainly, she cannot be a woman.”
“Auryn…”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “It’s alright. Believe me, after fifty-three years of it, I have outgrown the need to contradict every voice that would judge me.”
His hand tightened on her shoulder, but he did not answer. And Auryn did not expect any such thing from him. After all, he could not force Krystopolis to bend around her. To accept her. Enough that he’d bled to crown her his Sokar.
But I won’t lay dormant forever. My time will come.
The right moment for change. I have Seen it.
Have paid the price to witness it. As long as I can be by his side in some capacity, as long as I can find my own purpose, my own freedom, then I will keep fighting against this cage in my own way.
And I will protect him this time. I will not allow this Void to take even one more piece of him from me.
This time, she took his hand, guiding it to her heart.
“I am myself, as I have always been. I’ve just missed these eyes,” she brushed a finger to his cheek, “these eyes that truly see me.”
Another silence lingered, this one less heavy. There was hope in it again, but this time Auryn did not step away.
“I’ve brought you something,” Kailorien said, his voice suddenly gruff. “It’s not a rare tome like all the treasures in these Archives, but when I saw it,” he pulled something from the inside of his inner cloak pocket, “I thought of you.”
In his hand was a small trinket. A glass orb trimmed in gold lay within an icosahedron, each side carved with a mystic symbol she’d never seen before. It was worn smooth at the edges, as though hands had handled it too often. Attached was a chain.
Auryn didn’t move.
Only stared at him.
At the gift.
At the man beyond it.
The man she’d waited for, yearned for. She didn’t know what to say, and so she did not speak. Not right away. Kailorien didn’t move. Still held out the trinket. Her hand trembling, she took the bauble from his hand, cradling it in her palm as though it might dissolve.
Dizzy, she leaned in.
Close enough to feel his body heat, to breathe him in.
“Your sweat still smells strange.”
A callback to their time in the Moores. A test.
Kailorien blinked without recognition.
A moment.
And another.
Time raised its head, then. Slowly, like a thing waking at the dawn of Growth after a stasis. For a moment, the chasm between them narrowed.
I’ve found a lost piece. This is one of them. But he doesn’t wish for me to know.
For a split second, confusion shimmered in his magefire gaze. Then gone. Suppressed. Traded for a mask and a smile.
“Well then,” he said, stepping closer, “Would you like to take a bath together?”
For a long breath, neither of them moved. Auryn kept her gaze steady. Empty. His grin faltered.
“You still have a proclivity for cooking yourself in hot water?” she asked.
Another test—a shield with her tiny, fragile hope hiding behind it.
He froze.
Hesitation. A quiet laugh escaped his throat—dry, disbelieving.
“You’re still calling it that?” he grinned, voice a little rougher than before. “After all this time?”
Thank the Stars. He kept this one. The magic did not take it.
She blinked again. “It’s what you do. You heat water then steam in it. It smells like broth. That’s cooking.”
“You bathe, don’t you, little one?”
Her heart skipped. Little one. Another piece they’d been allowed to keep. She raised her chin. He wouldn’t have known that her room didn’t have a bath. That she had to sneak to the Servitor sometimes to take one.
“Not in boiling water.”
Kailorien’s face crumpled, a choked laugh escaping into the crook of his elbow as he turned away. His shoulders shook as he tried to maintain his dignity.
“I forgot,” he murmured. “You’re impossible.”
Auryn reached past him to set the trinket on the table beside her seat, speaking so softly she thought he might not hear. “And yet... you keep coming back.”
Kailorien cleared his throat and grabbed a nearby chair, sitting on it with his arms folded across his chest. “How could I not when you haunt my every waking thought? You’ve missed me too, haven’t you?”
He said it with mirth, but he could not hide the fear in it.
The ache, the anguish at the thought that she hadn't missed him. That he was beyond forgiveness. Auryn’s lips thinned into a line.
His fear mirrored hers. Because in this moment, she did not yet know what he had lost and what they’d been allowed to keep.
She stood, turned, and padded to him. With each motion of her bare feet, his eyes widened. He tensed like a man preparing to be struck.
When she was close enough, she lifted one of her legs and leaned on the part of the chair open between his thighs. Her fingers reached out, one hand settling on his armored shoulder for balance and the other caressing the dangling emerald teardrop at his ear.
“And if I have missed you?” she asked, her voice edged with frustration. “What then, Kailorien? Would you stay longer this time before you run off to the Surface to find me another puzzle box?”
His hands came up, one hovering, the other resting on her hip. The flame within her belly roared, weakness snaking once again into her knees.
“You know why I left,” he said, and there was hope in his voice that she understood.
“Vargrún,” she nodded. “And the rest?”
She stopped there. Wanted to ask a thousand questions, to demand an answer for why he never told her about the Rite of Scars. Of what he was giving for her. For them.
But, it wasn’t his fault. Not all of it. He was the Resh’Agar, carrying the entire city on his plated shoulders. Bound by Doctrine. Sworn to Estar and his Companions. The Sight had warned her, and she’d chosen this path.
:: You chose to become sovereign::
She exhaled. Blinked. Rubbed at her forehead. Her head was still pounding.
“I never meant to leave you with mere trinkets,” he murmured.
She lowered her voice. “It doesn’t matter. I am not being fair." Another circle against her temple, but the pounding persisted. "Should you not be in the Companions' Hall?”
“I won’t go,” he said. Sharp. Sure.
Auryn tilted her head. “Won’t go? It is mandate for the Resh’Agar to consummate his Reckoning with the Companions.”
“They can wait.”
“For what?” she asked, confused. Off kilter.
Kailorien? Neglecting Doctrine? She couldn’t fathom it. Couldn’t comprehend it. She tried to back away, but he caught her wrist.
She lost herself within his gaze, and suddenly time accelerated as though someone loosed its bindings.
His aura overwhelmed her. Hot. Hazy. Longing.
Now that he was so close, the Bond flared to life between them.
Like stone shattering glass, it burst through all of her fear, her defenses, her caution.