Chapter 30 Always Waiting
Always Waiting
The world I know as the Resh'Agar is gone. No humming stone, no ancient wards, no shuffling of feet and scrape of boots echoing in vast corridors. Just quiet, but not the kind that heals.
I am standing in a small cottage cradled in the arms of a peaceful sunrise.
A sun that shouldn’t be. Not this deep into the Bleed.
Not this far into the Dark. The air breathes differently, as though it hasn’t scented war in centuries.
But if there is something I have learned over the countless ages of my life, it is that the absence of war does not equate to peace.
Beside me is a window, bordered with gossamer gold curtains.
A fireplace stands pressed into one of the gray stone walls, the embers still warm but barely glowing.
Neglected and worn with age. The kind a farmer in the Moores might keep.
At its mouth stands a wooden rocking chair, swaying as though someone just left the comfort of its embrace. But there is no sign of anyone here.
I look around. A faded rug covers the floor, and a table perches in the corner of the room bearing trinkets of all shapes, sizes, and colors.
Some look familiar. Glider carvings, stone figures from the Ebon Sanctuary, weavings from the Climbers of the Azure Fields.
Pieces of Elendria, gathered with a caring hand.
Where dust has gathered on the furniture around these items, they stand cleaned and polished.
Loved.
With the warmth of the hearth, the cottage should feel welcoming.
Yet, a chill curls up my arms. I take a breath.
Then another. At last, I recognize the scent.
Not so much a lack of war or peace, but the rot of solitude, a companion I have known for too many centuries.
It permeates the sparse furnishings and echoes in the drab colors.
This is no home. Merely a shell.
Without warning, the front door creaks open.
It gives a sorrowful wail as a small figure steps inside wearing a simple farmgirl’s dress and boots that look like they’ve seen better days.
The sun shines on radiant silver hair, illuminating a set of narrow shoulders and delicate hands.
My heart lurches again, and without seeing her face I know…
It is my Auryn.
Yet when she turns, when her shabby skirts and poorly cut, shoulder-length white hair shifts with each movement, I cannot breathe.
For it is my Auryn. But not. A girl whose light has dimmed, her silver eyes haunted and exhausted.
In her arms, she holds a basket of herbs and vegetables.
Behind her looms another figure twice her size. I’d recognize the gait anywhere.
Zarrek. But older, his eyebrows gray, his scars wrinkled, and his skin covered in pockmarks. He ducks into the doorway and steps into the cottage. Different armor. Something fashioned of cheap steel and old leather.
No battleaxe? Impossible. Zarrek wouldn’t be caught dead without that weapon.
I expect them to see me. The cottage is too small to hide two men the size of Zarrek and myself. And yet, they do not. Instead, they speak without looking in my direction. I clench my fists, unease knotting in my stomach.
“You should’ve let me come with you,” Zarrek chides. “Don’t go into town by yourself.”
Auryn shakes her head. “I don’t like it when they stare at you. Especially because those stares are meant for me.”
Zarrek steps closer to her and places his hands on her shoulders. Void help me. She looks so small beside him. Like a child looking up at her father.
Zarrek sighs. “I don’t know how many years I’ve got left in me. So let me help you while I still can.”
Auryn’s lips thin into a line. She touches Zarrek’s chest, his runes lighting in response.
“I will not let you fall earlier than you are meant to,” she promises, and the words wrap around my chest like iron bands, shrinking with each breath. Because I know she won’t. Even at a price to her own life.
Zarrek pulls her against him, wrapping his burly arms around her. I can’t move. The bands are still tightening, and soon I am unable to take a single breath. This is Zarrek? The Bloodletter? Hugging Auryn. Speaking to her in a voice I have never heard him use.
“Thessia would have loved it here,” Auryn says at length. Her voice trembles with grief. Sorrow. Pain.
“She would have,” Zarrek agrees.
“Will you come with me next Cycle? To visit her tomb?”
The ground sways beneath me.
“I’ve lost count of the years since we went there,” Auryn continues. “I know it will be difficult, but I want to go.”
Zarrek nods, releasing her then taking her hand in his. His expression shifts into one of anticipation. “I’ll kill anyone that stands in your way.”
Auryn smiles. “That’s not necessary, Zar. They’ve exiled me from Maradryn, but their guards still can’t see past my disguises.”
She pads over to one of the tables and lays out the vegetables into another basket. Rhythmically, but not with purpose. Like a soldier polishing his blade the night before a battle. Moving just so the nerves won’t devour him.
One at a time, she lays them into the next basket.
Then another.
And another.
“I’ll make soup tonight. Will you stay?”
Zarrek grunts, folding his arms across his chest. “Need to stop by the Hollow, but I’ll return.”
Another in the basket.
And another.
“How is she? Your vessar’en…I haven’t seen her in some time.
” Her tone is raw for reasons I can’t understand.
I don’t know who she speaks of, but the pain in her voice isn’t from remembering that person.
It’s from the intimacy of that word: vessar’en—a Glider term for something deeper than a seasonal mate.
“Bring her next time,” Auryn says, and her voice catches at the end. “I would love to see her again.”
Zarrek nods, his golden eyes gentle and soft.
He looks like he wants to say something but turns away.
The sick feeling in my gut intensifies. This man with Zarrek’s face is a stranger to me.
Not my blood brother. Not my Second. I reach out.
Try to say something, but my body breaks out in cold sweat when I can’t speak.
My throat tenses to the point of rending pain, but I am voiceless.
I look down and see that my body casts no shadow.
The bands tighten.
Auryn’s hands keep moving between baskets.
Zarrek sighs then heads for the front door, but just before he steps out, he turns and looks back.
“Auryn…can you…have you…” he trails off.
Her hands stop moving.
The carrot she is holding falls soundlessly into the first basket.
I was not forged to feel cold, nor to fear it. Yet my skin breaks out in gooseflesh as the temperature in the cottage plummets. When Auryn next turns around, raw pain wells in her eyes.
“No.” Her hand reaches up and presses against her chest. “Not for a few decades now.”
Zarrek grips the doorknob so hard his knuckles turn white. The metal groans and bends against his palm. He curses. “Auryn, you can’t do this forever. There’s nothing for you here.”
“He’s alive, Zarrek. I know it.”
“How? How do you know if you can’t even feel him anymore?”
“Because I do.” Her brow furrows, her voice tight and strained.
Look at me. Auryn. My Auryn. Please.
“Auryn, he’s not coming back.”
I have never wanted to hit Zarrek as badly as I do in this moment. Because he lies. I am here. I am right here. I am in those trinkets on the table. Inside the pain in her eyes. I am the scrape in her voice as she answers.
“I will wait. I will always wait.”
Zarrek makes a sound of frustration, then yanks open the door. The doorknob falls to the floor. Bent out shape. Useless. The clang of it hitting stone pierces the quiet like a spear, and even Zarrek cannot help but flinch at the sound.
“Stop torturing yourself,” he says. “Let me take you to Kael’Vethar. There are people there that can understand. You. Your magic. It’s better than sitting here, looking out a window, and wasting away.”
Auryn’s lower lip trembles. She turns back to the vegetables at the table. Her shoulders shake.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” she chokes out.
Zarrek lets out a pent up breath. “I’ll be back in a bit, little star. Please, think about it.”
The door groans closed behind him.
Auryn tries to pick up the rhythm at the baskets once again, but her hands shake, and she stops. She turns—looking past me, through me—and walks to the rocking chair to sit.
“I know you’re there,” she whispers, and for a moment the bands release my lungs.
I stumble to her side, still voiceless, and kneel in front of her. I put my hands on her knees. Or try to. My fingers slip right through her tiny trembling form. Her shoulders quiver, and when the tears come, I tilt back my head and scream without sound.
Because I cannot touch her.
I cannot comfort her. Hold her. Quiet her.
Cannot tell her I am here.
I can only sit here and let the horror of this vision consume us both as we break apart without each other.
When I can breathe again—when her shoulders stop shaking and her tears dry, untended—something draws my gaze to the lone window in the cottage.
Outside, the flow of time begins to race.
The sun dips and falls on the horizon. Wind blows weeds and grass in all directions outside.
Clouds move across the sky. Rain comes. Thunder. Then more sun.
And all the while, Auryn sits still and untouched in her rocking chair, looking out the window. With me, yet without me.
Zarrek does not return.
Not the next day.
Not the next Cycle.
Someone comes to Auryn’s door carrying a sword I don’t recognize. They say Zarrek has been killed fighting in a rift. His name was added to the list of heroes in the center square of Maradryn. Much like Thessia the Lioness and then her Second, Talia.
Auryn nods. Numb. So very numb.
Time passes.
The cottage blurs.
Auryn spends most of her days in that rocking chair, hardly eating, growing thinner—even smaller.
I beg her to eat. To drink. To sleep.
But she cannot hear.
At last, she stands from that accursed chair and opens the door outside. She rests at the doorway, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea gone cold. Beyond the porch, grass bends in the breeze—endless rows of gold swaying under a pale sky.
I blink, and she changes.
Her hair is longer now, unbound, drifting down her back like silver thread. Farmland rises around her. Grass transforms to wheat and other crops. The ground is tilled and cared for. A village is built.
The locals call her the Silver Witch and keep their distance. Some speak kindly, from afar. But never close. Cycles blur—Growth, Fire, Ice, Dark. Her garden blooms. Then withers. She plants again. Not out of love. Just out of that tired old rhythm. Hands seeking a task, so the heart won’t still.
The world moves on, and she remains—unchanged, untouched, unseen. Not feared. Not hated.
Just…forgotten.
Sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and presses her palm to her chest, hoping to feel a heartbeat that isn’t hers. On those nights, she sheds tears, whispering.
“Kailorien…”
It is my heart she seeks. Again and again. Though each day tells her the truth of my absence, she refuses to believe it.
The Destroyer as my witness, I would cut it from my chest and hand it to her if it meant an end to this Void-forsaken nightmare. But I have no blade, and when I dig my fingers into my body, it stiches back together as though I’m made of memory, not flesh.
One day, she leaves the cottage, setting out to travel the land. I would have told her to be careful, to take rations, supplies—but I’ve long since given up on speaking. I follow her, a useless specter, watching her traverse hills, mountains, valleys, lakes, and rivers.
Alone.
Always alone.
And then, the vision dissolves.
Snow falls from the sky. White and cold. It lands in her hands—melting in her palms.
She turns, looking at me.
I want to roar. Take her into my arms with the pain as our gazes join at last.
At the recognition there.
And being seen.
A flush colors her cheeks. “You came at the very end,” she says. “I never stopped waiting.”
I reach for her, but my hand slips right through her body.
She’s wrong. Wrong! I have been here. Beside her. All of these decades. Watched her hair grow out. Watched her plant and till her garden. Watched the hollow of her life grow deeper with hands too useless to fill the void. But I was never gone. I was always here.
Waiting.
Just like her.
Auryn. Auryn. Hear me. Please. I never left you. Not once.
She smiles, but she doesn’t hear. Doesn’t understand.
“So,” she sighs. “This is what awaits on this sunlit path to peace. Solitude. Loneliness. And the most bitter poison of all—”
She turns and looks toward the sky.
“—hope.”
Again, I reach for her.
Try calling her name.
No words come.
Something pulls on me, ripping me away from her.
And as her image fades into the white vastness of the snow, I cannot even scream.