by Requiem
If there had ever been, or ever would be a time of peace in the Northlands, then it was now.
Tentative peace, perhaps, but peace all the same.
Five years from the day she accomplished the impossible…
Once upon a time, the reigning King of the Northlands’ life had been in grave jeopardy. It was during those tense, fragile years where the country was turning it on itself, turning against itself, when no one had been united. When everyone sought someone else to blame, and when mayhem and highwaymen had been the rule, not the exception.
When a certain young woman had run for her life, from no one and from everyone, because the sound of her voice took on a life of its own, and became more than simple vibrations in the air that tickled the inner ear of anyone who was listening.
And that young woman encountered all means of people and strangeness, from Necromancers, to Fate, and even Death itself- or, more specifically, himself.
But, like all stories of the oral tradition, certain details were left out, some events forgotten. And while the story of the woman with strange powers who saved the King from certain demise had been the hot topic of conversation for no less than a year afterwards, the stories of her companions did not. And as such, no one remembered Amrial, or what had happened to him.
Except for Roesaleine. She remembered him; in fact, there was nothing in the world that could make her forget about him.
Five years of quiet regret…
The spotlight was never a place where the young woman wanted to be. So no sooner had she saved the life of the very King who was currently maintaining this tenuous peace in the country than she fled- not the country, but the castle. The town. And for a long, long time- for the first time in a while- she traveled all alone.
Life was unfair. The King was safe, but her dear friend was gone. Had she known that saving the monarch’s life would have ended the very life of the one person to whom she owed so much… Well, Roesaleine wasn’t sure what she would’ve done. Found another way to save him, perhaps? Waked away and have let Fate have her way of things? It was hard to say, in hindsight, how she would have avoided this. But maybe it was inevitable- another one of those unfortunate events that would occur, regardless, one way or another (particularly if Fate saw fit to make it so). One thing she had always wondered and now would never know was: had Amrial known? Had he been aware that by using the power of her voice to counteract the death that was coming for the king, it would, in essence kill Death- and therefore, Amrial- himself?
Five years, and answers still too few…
These thoughts were constantly on the young woman’s mind, to this day. And she would take the time to ponder them like she was doing right now, at this time of early morning, watching the sunrise on the porch of the Inn at which she was currently staying.
Roesaeline still traveled, even though her life was no longer in direct danger. But that didn’t mean she’d stopped running. How could you just settle down after losing someone so important to you, and pretend like you could move past it, forget about it like the pain of a stubbed toe?
Not to mention that, despite the good she had done saving the life of the King, the eerie and untameable powers of her singing voice were something she never learned to harness. The effects of this curse continued to plague her well after the good deed had been done, well after she no longer had someone to talk to, to help her take a different perspective on it. That person was gone- and so was her resolve to ever make peace with the jinx that was her own singing voice. Roesaleine had no real reason to stop traveling, to stop running, and all thanks to that. You couldn’t stick around in one place for too long before people started to pick up on something that was not quite right with you, not quite safe.
Five years, and not much the wiser…
It was sheer luck, she believed, that she had run into that child-who-was-not-really-a-child deep in the woods that cloudless night, two winters past.
That creature who had offered her exactly what she had been seeking all along- solace, reprieve from one of her burdens, the only one that could really be addressed. That creature couldn’t bring back Amrial- she had asked, when it had first offered to bargain, claiming its ability to grant a wish. But when she finally found it in her to describe the perils of her voice when she sang, well, that creature had taken great interest in helping her. And, true to its word, it had granted that wish- a voice that could sing to children without terrifying them, a voice that would soothe instead of harm. A normal singing voice, for an otherwise normal young woman.
The only thing on which she had never been clear was what the thing had asked for in return.
“Something of which you are making no use, human girl.” it had requested, eyes bright and shining. “May I have it?”
“I… suppose. If only I knew what it was.” Roesaeline had agreed before she really thought it through, brow furrowed.
“If you aren’t making use of it, and won’t miss it, then what does it matter?” It had mentioned, leaning in close enough that she could feel its breath on her face. “Let me have it. Its absence won’t affect you in any way, so long as you are living.” And then it smiled, and it was the most eerie thing the young woman traveler had ever seen. “I promise, you won’t even realize it is gone. Do we have an agreement?”
There was nothing more but for the desperate young woman to agree, so badly did she want to be rid of the curse of her voice. And so the child-thing had put a tiny hand over her heart- and she had felt nothing. And when she opened her eyes to ask what it had done or was going to do, it was already gone.
Five years, and missing something precious…
Roesaleine never thought back to that day- she never had the need, because whatever her agreement with the creature had been, it had kept up its end of the bargain. Now she sang all the time- to herself, to the children she encountered in her travels, inside, outside, and everywhere. She hummed to greet the sun when it peaked over the horizon on this morning, from the porch of the inn, singing what she imagined the colours orange, red and pink would all sound like in harmony. And even though no one was yet awake in the small village in which she currently found herself, she knew that no one would wake up screaming, or hallucinating, or dropping to their knees, thinking they were having a heart attack. It was a beautiful thing, to sing without worry.
And yet, there was still something in her heart that this new pastime didn’t touch. And she knew without thinking that it was the hole that Amrial had left behind; a hole that she had never tried to fill, because it would be impossible. And Roesaeline had grown tired of chasing impossible dreams.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
It had been five years since those fateful notes had rung in the great hall of the king; five years since the blissful venom of her savior voice soothed his heart to a peaceful stop. On cold nights when the wind blew its icy exhale through bare winter boughs—in those rare moments when the wandering souls ceased their tireless trek and paused beneath the moon—he could still hear the notes reverberating like the most crystalline of chimes on a gentle breeze.
Death rarely made a point of connecting with the souls he guided, the confused and frightened remnants of lost human spirits. They existed as part of the universe’s scheme, a fact of existence as plain as the heat of the sun or the soft glow of a full moon. Where life lived, Death lurked; it was a simple equation whose solution yielded balance in reciprocity. A newborn’s first cries could greet his mother’s ears for the slow, sad decay of wizened eyes and wrinkled foreheads. Eventually, he would greet them all in their own due time. Paying visits late in the night, settling in the midst of hazy summer twilights or shifting white blizzards, knocking unannounced at the front door or simply sneaking like a shadow through the back, he was the guest everyone anticipated but few acknowledged.
He was no god, it was ture. He was a comfort only to the sick and pain-stricken, and rarely—if ever—to the living. He did not answer prayers, he served no higher being, he could not be swayed by flattery or dissuaded with a hard bargain. But he was a friend, a guide, a companion; he was the gentle hand of reassurance on the newly-departed’s shoulder, the welcoming embrace to the next realm of existence. Of all forces at work in the world, he was one of the few that could boast of being truly neutral. It was with good reason that wise men whispered, “Death waits for no one,” for they, in their age and experience, could speak with the finality of the self-aware, at once closer and no further than any other with breath in their lungs.
And it only made sense that Death himself should die, that he should feel the stand-in for his soul be severed from a physical vessel like all those he ferried. He knew what it was like to experience the sensation of ripping, of wrenching, of the juxtaposition of writhing paralysis brought on by a thought dragged inexplicably from the ground of all logic it had ever known. He knew what it was to endure the ritard of a heartbeat and the slow cessation of breath. He’d endured the sinking of his chest knowing it was never to rise again with an inhale. The sweats, the tremors, the spilling of blood—he was no stranger to suffering, no foreigner to sickness, no passerby to injury.
Yet on that day all those years ago—a span of time that felt an eternity and an eyeblink all at once—Death at last knew what it was to feel loss. To realize he was fading with every soaring note that escaped his companion’s crimson lips—it surprised him, but it didn’t alarm him. That was one thing, and this was another entirely. He hadn’t the energy remaining in his physical body to feel fear. Instead, he’d allowed it to happen peacefully, to avoid the struggle no matter how badly his flesh and blood wanted to fight back the inevitable demise. If for no one else, than he’d known he had to do it for his unintentional murderer, his sweet, unassuming, kindhearted friend who had unknowingly sacrificed her friend for the prospect of living a long life in peace. He was doing her a favor, trying to tell her that it was not he that mattered, but rather her, and the consequence of her life and happiness.
But as the song played on, he crumbled; the marble tile, cold as his preternaturally pale skin, rose to greet his skull with a sickening thud. He would never forget—even as he existed there without a memory, without a form—the look of panic in her previously-hopeful eyes, the crease in her smooth brow when the realization of what was happening struck her in that moment. It was the poignancy that struck him and made him hunger for life again, that made him, if only for a moment, fight what he knew he could not stop. For then, right then, he was Amrial in the purest form he could ever be—absolutely, heart-wrenchingly human. He was drowning in an abyss that pulled him further into its blackness the harder he struggled to escape, and yet all he wanted was one breath of air, one last hand on her shoulder, one last embrace before the surging tide took him away. One last song.
And then it was over.
Death had little concept of time when he did not take a physical form; he had no means by which to judge its passage, no way of knowing when the night ended and the day began. Years were meaningless to an entity that could not age. But he knew, if only distantly, that the time since his musical passing had not been so long as to consume a human lifetime. He had yet to meet his companion again as the soul that would leave her contented life, and in that fact he took comfort. She was alive, if not well. And as Death, Death with a breathing friend, he could ask for no more than that.
Distantly, he knew it wouldn’t last, that she, like everyone else who had come before her and would be born in the future, would meet him again one day. When it came, he had no way of knowing how he would react. He would recognize her, surely; just as he could sense that she still roamed the earth, so too he would sense when her voice would sing no more. But it was a tender issue that Death could not quite grasp; it was a situation for Amrial, not the force that governed him.
It came like a bolt of lightning—a white hot crackle through the ice of his domain, a sudden shift in temperature that was gone as soon as it burst into being. It caught him off-guard, blindsiding him with its searing jolt of electricity; the emotions swirled like billowing storm clouds in a hot summer sky. They enveloped him before he understood what was happening, and soon it was not the frozen, airless void that housed the dark force of his being, but rather the shape of limbs, of fingers, of toes; of lips and eyes and firing thoughts. His consciousness came to like a drowning man finally breaking the surface of a tumultuous lake, his body fumbling to control itself as warm blood flooded its veins and oxygen filled his lungs. His nose burned with cold as he drew his first breath; his trachea was aflame, his belly full of scalding fire, his throat raw as he tried futilely to swallow the agony away.
It was only after he lied there in stillness, the soft grass of the clearing cradling his naked body, that Amrial realized what had shaken his lean frame.
They were sobs.
Silent tears streaked down his icy cheeks, turning to small puffs of mist as they rolled from his skin to mingle with the nighttime dew. He drew a breath slowly, experimentally, and opened his eyes for the first time since his last final lullaby had resounded upon his ears. “Roesaleine,” he whispered to himself upon his exhale, his voice raspy from the cries of pain. Roesaleine is dead. He couldn’t speak the words out loud. Not here. Not as Amrial. And yet Death had surely felt it too, for it had forced upon itself a vessel of flesh and blood to express the grief it was incapable of feeling.
He allowed the cold night to descend upon him like a wintery blanket, stirring only when the shivers racking his newfound limbs were too violent for sleep. He dragged himself unsteadily to his feet and wandered toward the smell of smoke, his dark unruly hair freezing in messy ringlets where his tears had drenched the silken strands.
It did not take long to steal the clothes to dress himself from the unsuspecting family at the edge of the village; it took less time still to make himself presentable in his new wool overcoat and sturdy leather boots. Hunger gnarled at his belly, but he ignored it in favor of his fill of water from the nearby stream, doing his best to sort through the strange river of emotion coursing through his newly-born system. He would find her, he decided. He would find her, wherever her body may be, and he would dispose of her remains in the proper ritualistic fashion—or, if it were being taken care of by her new family, her husband or children, then he would attend the funeral as a longtime friend, paying all the respects he should have given her when she was alive. Was this what it was like to want closure? Was this feeling of emptiness the same sensation all humans felt when Death came to visit?
The sky was brightening now. He took temporary comfort in the songs of birds perched high in the forest canopy as he strode back to the village, his breaths strangely obvious in the early morning cold. Where he was, he could not say, but this gathering of shacks and cottages seemed as good a place to start his search as any. With someone like Roesaleine, who had saved their kingdom’s monarch, surely someone would have an idea which direction he should take. Perhaps they, too, would be in mourning.
So heavy was his grief that amongst the thick harmonies of the birds’ morning symphony he could have sworn he heard a familiar melody, a timbre that seemed at once foreign and familiar, comforting and heartbreaking. A song for Roesaleine, he thought darkly, his feet silent as he made his way deeper into the village, following the trickle of smoke from a central chimney where it was obvious someone had already woken to greet the day.
A day that wasn’t as bright as it should have been. A morning without a melody, a dawn without a fanfare. And he was devastated that he had to witness its break on the eastern horizon.
-----
o.o.c. :: ugh, god, don't hate me, please!
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Two years ago, such would still have been the case, and it would have resulted in her hasty exit from the village and a venture onward to a place where no one knew her or knew of her, before she could once more be pegged as the girl with the cursed voice. But not anymore; now, the notes were nothing but notes, and the tune was nothing but a tune- beautiful and melancholy and haunting. Heartbreaking, and suitable for a heart that hadn’t been whole for what felt like a very, very long time.
No, the designs of this song were not meant to entice shadows and demons dance and writhe before the eyes of an innocent and unsuspecting audience, or to manipulate their hearts and minds and twist them in directions that should not be possible. This was just a song, a melody like any other, and it was meant for no one but herself. There was so little from which to draw solace these days- at least, in her case. So, on late nights or early mornings such as this, she would sing to remind herself of how far she had come since her days on the run five years ago.
Because Roesaleine desperately, desperately needed to find a reason for happiness again.
And was this not reason enough? A voice that would sing, but not harm. A voice that would sing, but not manipulate. A voice that would sing, but that would not kill.
Would not kill…
The very essence of that thought was attached directly to an icy, sharp pain that shot up her stomach and into her chest, forcing her breath to catch in her throat, trachea constricted and vocal chords paralyzed instantly, and the melody to come to an abrupt stop. This was not the result of any physical aliment, and Roesaleine was not sick; these small attacks were commonplace for her these days. They only ever occurred when she was singing, and her song carried her thoughts to memories of him; happy memories, sad memories.
Last memories…
The young woman brought a hand to her throat reflexively, the way one does when their airway is blocked and they choke, but it just as quickly drifted down to her chest, just above her heart. The real source of the pain whenever she thought of Amrial. I killed him… Five years later, and she had yet to reconcile that fact. I am not a danger anymore. But I was before- and he died. Because if it, he died. Because I killed him.
Had Roesaeline known then what she knew now- how the dreadful memory of Amrial’s kind, dark eyes closing for eternity would haunt her, how that deep-seeded feeling of loss and guilt and emptiness would never lift- then she couldn’t say for sure if she would have ever agreed to save the King’s life by singing Death to death. To this day, she couldn’t help but believe there must have been another way… She had been too brash, reacted without thinking, and now he was gone. The King lived, and continued to reign well and just over the Northlands, but Amrial was gone.
“Miss…” Roesaleine was torn from the melancholy attack on her heart and throat by a small and meek voice that, on looking up, belonged to a boy- a street urchin, by the looks of it- standing not five feet away. Surely no more than twelve, the waif’s hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his tattered trousers, shoulders hunched up to his ears as he looked on shyly with bold blue eyes that were under the illusion of being bigger than they were, considering his thin frame. “’Beg your pardon, Miss, but… Why did you stop?” And within that innocent question was such a heartfelt plea that it was impossible to miss: Please, keep singing.
This wasn’t the first time a child had been drawn to the soft, crystalline quality of her singing voice that carried over the breeze. It had been a dream of hers, once, that she would one day sing children to contentment. Now that the dream had been realized, she had little to no interest, because it all hurt far too much.
“Some songs are too sad to drift and be carried so freely on the wind.” Came her quiet reply, steadfast, but bloated with genuine remorse. Oh, just look at what had become of her! A cold woman who denies a child, short in fortune and in luck, a simple song to carry with him as he spends another day begging and foraging for food. And with no excuse save for her own, wretched intolerance of the pain.
Fumbling in his pocket, the urchin withdrew a filthy hand and extended it to her. In the centre of his palm sat a tarnished copper coin, glinting dimly in the fuchsia light of early sunrise. “It isn’t much,” he bit his chapped lower lip. “But it’s all I have. It’s yours, if you’ll sing me your song, just one more time…”
One of the few parts of Roesaleine’s heart that was still intact slowly fell to shatters, and she was sickened by a whole new flavor of guilt. Was this boy actually offering her money to continue singing? Times like this, she wondered if the creature who had taken the evil out of her voice had truly fulfilled its part of the bargain… For even if it could do no harm, a homeless lad should not feel tempted to spend his last copper coin on the opportunity to hear a song, no matter how lovely the tune or the voice.
The young woman heaved a soft sigh and made a quick decision then, reaching into an aged leather pouch hanging at her hip, overtop the indigo travel gown that had long since replaced the wispy vermillion fabric that had once adorned her body. From the pouch, she withdrew something heavy and wrought iron, and placed it in the street urchin’s palm, closing his dirty fingers around the coin and the key to her room in the inn behind her.
“Room number nine on the second floor has been paid in full for three more nights. Two meals a day are included in the fee.” She smiled softly at bewildered look of surprise that fell upon his youthful features. “My apologies for not giving you a song, young man, but I hope that this will serve as adequate compensation.”
“B-but… you’re staying there. This is your room, Miss. Where else will you go?”
“Truthfully, I do not know.” Roesaleine turned to the east and shielded her eyes against the everbright flame of orange that was the rising sun. “But I do think it is time I moved on.”
Picking up her indigo skirts, she adjusted the matching cloak around her shoulders and drew up the hood to shield her eyes against the early morning sunlight, and was off before the street urchin could so much as thank her, or ask her name.
Boots kicking up dust over unkempt roads and passages, the young singer felt reassured in her decision to just keep moving; once a wanderer, always a wanderer, perhaps. She spent no more time in any given town, city or village nowadays than she had five years ago, when she had been dangerous and wanted. It was surprising how little had changed since then; about the only thing different about the Roesaleine Sejourah of now compared to the Roesaleine Sejourah of fives years past were her clothes, gone from bright and vibrant to dark and somber. Only a few shades removed from black was the indigo that adorned her now- and appropriately so, perhaps, since for five years, she hadn’t moved far from a state of mourning at losing her dear friend. Fate had been cruel, but life was crueler still, for Amrial- her motivation, her hope, and her light in dark places- was gone, while she was still here, and alone. More alone than she ever remembered being.
Sometimes she thought she saw his face in odd places; the clouds when they gathered, a reflection in a cup of tea. Sometimes the wind spoke his name, and when she passed through establishments alongside the ocean, it mimicked his voice in the crash of waves on the shores.
Or, on early mornings such as this, she would pass a stranger who wore his face, and had to do a double-take before her hopes could get too high, and she would move on.
But…wait. Wait.
Roesaleine came to an abrupt halt, kicking up dirt as she did so, and spun around to get a better look at the stranger- the sole person around at this time of morning, besides herself. She had but barely glanced at his face as they passed, but that confident gait was all too familiar. As were those unruly dark locks, that firm jaw, and those kind eyes of which she had barely gotten a glimpse in passing, but which she would recognize anywhere.
But… it can’t be. It just isn’t possible…
“Amrial?” Her voice sounded far away in her ears, but the name- a name she hadn’t spoken in so long- felt light and familiar upon her tongue as she made the simple inquiry to the stranger in passing. Expecting to be wrong, mistaken, and heartbroken all over again- but she just had to know, just to be sure…
((o.o.c: ASTRO. I ALMOST CRIED. SRSLY IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL. ;___; But Oh man, I obsessed over this post and it still isn't up to my past standards >_<;; I am so sorry for how crappy it is!))
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Physically, he supposed he looked the same. In stark contrast to his wavy dark hair, his smooth skin held its usual icy pallor, perpetually cool to the touch despite the warm blood in his veins. He was tall and of lean build, with bright gray eyes that adopted the color of his surroundings and shifted as quickly as a day’s changing light. The shape of his face—all sharp angles and chiseled features—was unusual but not unattractive, his expression brooding by default but soft enough to earn nods of friendly acknowledgment on crowded streets. A good specimen, he presumed of his body; a worthy set of armor to house the dark force that fueled it from behind those mysterious eyes.
So why, then, was it so difficult to move, so strenuous to breathe? The breeze played its condolences across the bare skin of his cheeks, but even its tender touch wasn’t enough to quell the strange ache that gathered in his chest. A shiver that had little to do with the temperature rattled the bones of his spine, and he stuffed his hands self-consciously into the deep pockets of his stolen overcoat. For the first time he could remember, Amrial wished he, too, could die—that he could banish himself from the flesh that was now an aching prison and return to a world where he felt nothing, saw nothing, experienced nothing. But the part of him that existed as Death was buried too far from reach beneath layers and layers of grief that he didn’t know how to begin to excavate. He’d wanted to be human, after all, and now he was paying the consequence of that poignant humanity.
His breath appeared in a writhing cloud as he exhaled into the chilly morning, and he slowed his pace as he watched the swirls dissipate. He was further into town now, but he was only dimly aware of the residents’ slow stirrings as the dawn broke the tree line. Fires were lit, waifs had emerged from their dingy shadows to prey on the conscious of sleepy mothers and craftsmen, the stray animals stretched and blinked and began their daily routine of begging for scraps of nourishment. They were all blurs in his peripheral vision, existing in a distant haze that seemed as unreal as the state of his whirling thoughts. He’d learned what it was like to die; now he had to learn how to live in the aftermath—to live, in a sense, with Death—and that was the hardest lesson of all.
It wasn’t until he had wandered through nearly the entire length of the village that he realized he’d passed all possible sources of information on his companion’s—his late companion’s—whereabouts, and with a heavy heart whose weight was almost too much to bear, he corrected his path and turned back around. He kept his head down, eyes studying the wheel-marks and footprints on the half-frozen muddy road, pointedly avoiding the gazes of passersby as he went. He didn’t have the energy to be social, but more importantly, he didn’t have the heart. It was a disservice to her, to Roesaleine…
To Roesaleine?
He’d paid the passing flash of indigo cloth no heed as he made his way back into town; in fact, he hadn’t been aware of it at all until he heard his name take flight upon the steady wind. At first he thought he’d imagined it, just as he’d imagined the sound of her song amongst the chirping of the birds. But he stopped in his tracks all the same, almost afraid to turn around, afraid to see that he was acting a fool, that his mental status had degraded in his mishandling of his mourning, and terrified most of all to find out that she was not there, just as he knew she couldn’t be—and yet even as his posture stiffened, he knew he was going to look, to give in to the impossible hope that she had indeed just called his name. Acting a fool, indeed.
Slowly, with all the care of a man convinced he was dreaming, he swiveled to face the source of the voice. The breeze toyed playfully, excitedly, with his hair, and with stormy eyes beneath dark furrowed brows, he took in the equally-hopeful face that he’d been longing to see for what may as well have been an eternity.
For several moments, he didn’t move; he was paralyzed with shock, with joy, but also with confusion. Without a single uttered word, he approached her, placing his hands gently on her shoulders as though testing against an illusion, and lowered his face just inches from hers as their eyes locked. For a long time he simply studied her, gazing into the intensity of her eyes as though their depths alone held the answers to the myriad questions that now threatened to spill from his lips.
Instead, he murmured a single, soft, relief-filled word, the syllables ringing with the finality of absolute recognition: “Roesaleine.”
There was no question in his voice, no hesitation. His grip tightened on her shoulders, and he leaned forward to close the gap between their foreheads, his eyes fluttering closed as he savored the warmth of her skin against his. And at last, in as simple a gesture as that, he could finally breathe again...
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
She had to be mistaken, because there wasn’t even a fleeting chance that he could be here right now, moving and breathing and alive. It couldn’t be her friend- it couldn’t be Amrial.
Her initial thoughts were dark and bitter riddled with suspicion. Who was this imposter? This distasteful charlatan bearing Amrial’s face, giving her hope where there was none? How dare anyone be so callous and vile as to manipulate what was left of her broken heart, stealing the image of the dear friend that she had lost, while guilt continued to eat away at her insides and continually darken her outlook of the world around her? What dark, sinister sorcery was this, and who was responsible for it, for she would give them a piece of her mind!
But then he was approaching her, this uncanny likeness of her beloved, lost companion- and she felt the weight of his hands on her shoulders, and then he spoke her name…
That voice.
She had never forgotten the velvet of that voice, smooth and unearthly and soothing. The same voice that had spoken reassurances to her frightened heart at the time when her voice had been so far beyond her control. The same voice that nourished all of her hopes, and that had talked her out of lying down and giving up entirely and instilled in her the confidence that kept her feet moving. The same voice she had heard, drifting on the breeze for five years, now.
Her spine was rigid with chills when he spoke her name is that soft baritone, and she felt warm from the top of her head down to her fingertips before their foreheads even touched.
Amrial…
No... This was no imposter. His skin was as pale and as cool as she remembered, and he still towered over her by just a hint past a foot. There was no likeness in existence that could embody the image of her friend so well, and even if there was, she had confidence that she knew him well enough to identify any such trickery.
But there was no shadow of deceit to detect- because this was Amrial. And he was standing right here, with her, right now.
“Amrial…” She murmured, her voice cracked and weak for no good reason, carrying his name on the fog of breath that gathered in front of her. Shaky hands rose from her sides to cup his face as she searched his eyes, grey as storm clouds, for answers. How was this possible? How could he be here, when he was dead? She had seen him die- she had killed him, sung the life right out of him. She’d watched it happen the first time, and then over and over again in her unforgiving memory.
Not even the most insignificant detail of Amrial’s death had escaped her, and she had relieved it each and every day, at least once a day, day since he had left the land of the living, and consequently, left her alone.
In the presence of the King, whose life had been endangered and whose fate had been sealed by Fate herself, Roesaleine had embraced her curse, and she had sung. And something in the musical notes emanating from her vocal chords, delivering on the still air of the throne room, had latched onto his vulnerable soul like barnacles to the side of a seafaring vessel. Holding it in place, tethering it firmly to its body and therefore to the earth plane.
And, vicariously, destroying the death that sought it- which, she’d come to realize far too late, meant that she was also destroying Amrial.
So concerned had she been for the nearly fallen monarch, kneeling near his level form when he’d opened his eyes and drew breath again, that she hadn’t noticed her dear friend sinking to his knees nearby, his heart slowing, his lungs failing to draw breath. Had it not been for Vitali, the unfathomable necromancer whose morals and intentions eluded her to this very day, then she wouldn’t have witnessed the light fade from her companion’s grey eyes, like the sun disappearing behind a cloud, never to shine again.
“Roesaleine Sejourah.” The tricky necromancer hissed, drawing her eyes to meet his own, cold and blue and somber. “You will want to come here. He hasn’t much time.”
The young singer’s lifeblood had frozen in her veins before she could even discern the connotation behind his words, and when he moved aside, the sight of her friend’s body, prostrate and barely moving on the floor, stole her breath away.
“Amrial.” She was at his side in less than a second, warming his frigid hand with her warm fingers. “Amrial, open your eyes- look at me, Amrial!.” And he did- one last time.
And then, his eyes had closed, the gentle rise and fall of his chest had ceased, and he never looked at her again.
No amount of crying on the shoulder of his exanimate body had brought Death back five years ago, and she had cried long and well, up until Vitali was forced to pull her away from the deceased for fear she’d dehydrate. No amount of hoping, or praying, or even singing had reversed the detrimental and devastating side-effect of being the monarch’s savior- and she had tried. As she’d sung him to death, she had tried to sing him back to life... But what was gone, was gone. It hadn’t been beyond her capabilities to save the King because he hadn’t been dead, but merely in the process of dying, and her song had clung to those tendrils of life and held it steady, until it found its way back to the vessel in which it belong.
Amrial’s eyes had closed too quickly, the life essence depleted before she’d thought to sing it back into his body, and as a result, his own demise had been final. Even Vitali, whose hobby and profession revolved around toying with the very fabrics of life and death, had declared it beyond his abilities to coax life back into this human embodiment of Death, and even if it were possible, that was one balance he loathed to upset.
So what had happened? Why now, five years later- after five years of mourning and loneliness and regret- was Amrial walking, talking, and breathing again?
“How... But you’re... I don’t understand...” Roesaleine’s words were whispered, completely without voice, shocked as she was by this unexpected encounter. Her hands slid from his face and pressed against his chest. Beneath her right palm could she feel the steady rhythm of a heart- blood pumping through his veins. Amrial was standing, and walking, and talking, and breathing, and he had a heartbeat. He was alive!.
Her temporary loss of voice was short lived once she felt the hot sting of tears behind her eyes. “I don’t understand...!” No sooner were the words out that she choked back a sob and pressed her forehead into his chest, letting the tears fall freely and her shoulders shake from the intensity of this emotional catharsis. “You died. I saw you die. I killed you, Amrial! My voice killed you... How are you still here?” Fistfuls of his coat were bunched in her shaking fingers whe she finally forced herself to meet his eyes again. Salty tears streaked her face, and continued to stream down her cheeks like little rivers in a rainstorm. “It’s been five years, Amrial... Where have you been...?”
((o.o.c: I AM CRYING. Not sure if crying because Roesaleine is crying or because I am still unhappy with the quality of my prose. :C ))
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
He was Amrial, yes, but he was also Death—a part of his human existence that he could neither deny nor suppress. Where his soul would have been was a force of nature beyond his conscious control, and to ignore a fact so potent was as foolish as it was impossible. Roesaleine had never forgotten that. He’d seen it when he met her eyes; he could feel it in the way she would place a gentle hand on his arm for reassurance. She knew the darkness that fueled the life behind his storm-gray gaze, and yet she’d kept him by her side in spite of all that. The chill of his skin beneath her warm palm, the shadows that played unnaturally across his paper-white skin, the way his unusual face bore a perpetual, impenetrable expression of stoicism—the young singer had allowed his companionship with a grace and a tolerance and an understanding that he’d never seen in another soul.
She’d never known it, but she’d made him human.
But on that day all those years ago, in the confusion and chaos of the king’s grand banquet hall, she had forgotten. Even as her song had filled the farthest reaches of the arched ceilings and the marble corners of the vaulted walls, he hadn’t been disappointed. In fact, as the life seeped from his body, he’d realized with a sad sort of acceptance that he was glad. He had traveled with the dark-haired young woman for months, coaxing back the confidence that a lifetime of running had buried beneath layers of fear and self-doubt. He knew firsthand the stress she experienced on a daily basis, the terror she felt against a part of her she could no more suppress than Amrial could push back Death. They were very much alike, the two of them; their friendship in the face of their individual hardships had seemed as easy and natural as the clouds of their breath on the chilly morning air.
So when Roesaleine Sejourah finally took a stand and faced the demon she housed within, Amrial couldn’t have felt anything other than overwhelming pride. After a lifetime of enduring blow after blow of abuse hurled by the world, she was fighting back, taking matters into her own hands, and showing her attackers exactly what their persecution had nearly quelled forever. He’d smiled as he lie there on the marble tile, the strength seeping from his limbs as his soul writhed against his failing body. She was showing them. She was proving herself. She was freeing herself, liberating the battered and broken pieces that tied her to a life she refused to accept another day. And if ridding herself of those miserable anchors included his elimination too, then he would willingly fade for the good of her long, rich future.
But he couldn’t explain why, even with those thoughts in mind, he’d suddenly found himself unwilling to leave her without a fight to stay in the picture. He remembered a hand on his sweaty brow, a pursed pair of thin lips and a set of eyes that betrayed a concern that seemed laughably out of place—Vitali had knelt at his side as Roesaleine sung, the necromancer who had never seemed to have been able to make up his mind about whether to help them or hurt them—and he remembered terse words between muttered curses as the strange man’s thin hands checked for a pulse at his throat.
Using what little energy had remained in his system, Amrial had reached out, tangling his fingers in the necromancer’s tunic so tightly that his knuckles turned a whiter shade of pale. Death met his eyes with the fiery expression of the dying, and a flicker of recognition flashed in Vitali’s stare that made them both freeze in light of their silent exchange.
But all at once, Amrial was back, his pain suddenly evident in the crease of his normally-smooth brow. Vitali had tried to peel his fingers from his sleeve, but Amrial only held on tighter, waiting to speak until Roesaleine’s background song had nearly reached its end—waiting until he knew it was too late to turn back, knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that one of his breaths in the next few moments would be his last.
“Take care of her, Vitali,” he’d hissed weakly, his voice barely above a whisper as the air escaped his cracked lips. In the buzz of the room and the cries of panicked nobility, the syllables were nearly lost. But he’d seen the understanding in the necromancer’s eyes, the momentary expression of incredulity—and then the man was gone, rushing across the hall to summon Roesaleine to fading Death’s side.
The next thing he knew, he was looking at the singer’s familiar soft features swimming before his eyes, the edges of his vision fading to frame her elegant face as she grasped his hand and ordered him to look at her—but he was already gone, the life slipping from his blood as Death broke free of its fleshy hold and sacrificed, at the prompting of Roesaleine’s melody, the vessel that had housed it through those months of thick and thin.
To be standing there once again in her presence, to see those same bright eyes brimming with tears of relief and confusion this time—it was the answer to a prayer he hadn’t known he’d been reciting. His own relief was so paralyzing that all he could do was stand there, savoring the heat of her palms on his cheeks, hardly daring to believe that the indigo-clad woman whom he’d strode past on that road was the same Roesaleine whose demise had blinded him to her presence with grief. When her hands found the cloth of his coat, he opened his eyes once again, afraid he’d simply hallucinated, or had somehow summoned the spirit of a clinging ghost with the intensity of his misery. But she was there, as real as he, as alive as he—and he found he did not know how to react to the barrage of conflicting emotion that flooded his thoughts.
She was dead. Her soul had passed. And as prone to mistakes as Amrial was, Death was not so fortunate—and neither could understand how this reunion was happening, how it was possible that she could live while her soul had departed.
“Roesaleine,” he said again, the incredulity heavy in his voice, his tone thick with questions that he could not yet articulate. “Roesaleine, I came back for you,” he continued, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. He cleared his throat, glancing up and down the road to find it absolutely vacant in the warming light of the aging dawn. “I came back for you because—because you’re not supposed to be here!”
The sadness in his words came across more harshly than he’d intended, and before he knew what was happening, the torrent of feelings broke free of logic’s dam, and he was steering her to the side of the path. His fingers relinquished their hold of her shoulders and traced the length of her arms to squeeze her hands. “I died that day, Roesaleine Sejourah.” He drew a breath, voice breaking beneath the implications of his words though there was no trace of blame, no trace of bitterness. The emotionless mask she’d known him to wear had cracked to betray his own bemusement and grief, and when he met her gaze again he reached up to wipe the stray tears on her cheeks. “It was right that you killed me, Roesaleine, but…I was not supposed to have killed you.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
It was her name. It had always been her name and, like words too often spoken, abused verbally to the point where they become nothing but arbitrary vibrations of vocal chords, had long since lost meaning to her ears.
Except for when he spoke it. The way in which he enunciated the three phonemes of her given name turned it into something noteworthy with his gentle bartione, something reverent and important: not just a name, but an honourable designation that connoted something far bigger than she could ever dare to be. To this day, she failed to understand how she appeared to his eyes as someone, something, so significant. Truly, he thought too much of her.
And yet, never would she tire of hearing his spoken interpretation of her name, for when someone addresses you as if you are meant for wonders, eventually, you will start to believe it.
Up until that ash-grey morning at the King’s palace, when their paths had finally parted and he had gone where she could not follow, she had believed it.
At least, she had thought the awed timbre of his voice was reserved for far more positive musings, until she detected an undercurrent of urgency. Or perhaps she’d imagined it…
Far too stricken with shock and relief and a myriad of other thoughts and feelings through which she could hardly dare to parse, the young woman allowed him to lead her off the path, pulling the both of them beyond the scope of public viewing. Early as it was with the first newborn rays of dawn, streaming sheets of yellow and orange over the landscape, an audience had yet to gather to witness their reunion, but it wouldn’t be long before the people of the village nearby would rise from their beds to greet the day, that the farmers would get an early start on their work. And when they did, she wished to be as far from the crowd as possible- and to be alone with the dear friend who, for five long years of pain and regret, she thought she had lost.
I came back for you…
His hands were as cold as fresh snow, but his words warmed her like nothing else, melted the icy doubt that coated her heart, soothed the ache of longing that had ailed her body and mind for five years. But how? How had he come back for her, when she’d both watched and felt the delicate essence of life leave his mortal vessel? Death possessed capabilities beyond all imagining, and she was well aware that everything out of the ordinary she had witnessed- his travelling through the shadows, his (dreaded) ability to sniff out threads of life and just as quickly extinguish them like flames in a breeze- was but the smallest hint of his repertoire of abilities. But not for a second had she considered that Amrial- whom she largely considered separate from Death, as both entities were qualitatively dissimilar from one another- could rise again after suffering such a fatal, final fall. He was fundamentally a walking, breathing irony, since Death- and its vessel, Amrial- apparently could not really, truly die.
…because you’re not supposed to be here!
Roesaleine snapped out of her the calm reverie that glided on the delight of hearing her cherished companion’s voice, laying eyes on his sophisticated face, touching a body that was alive and well, breathing and blinking and talking to her. Because beyond the heart-aching sweetness of this reunion, Amrial wasn’t making sense. What she had foolishly misinterpreted as exaggerated relief, floored by the mere fact that they found each other here and now when she could have been anywhere else in the world, was in fact incredulity. Something had him startled, shaken and confused. That urgency that laced his words and glinted in the depths of his stormy eyes hadn’t been imagined.
“Amrial, what’s the matter?” The young woman expelled soft breath in a mist of white, searching his face for the answer to his anxiety. “Why shouldn’t I be here? Has something happened? Are we in danger?”
For five years, the Nortlands had known nothing but peace under the authoritative but fair rule of King Rheigio. Consequently, danger these days was few and far between. Nothing could be done to rectify the occasional rogue or highwayman that intercepted ignorant travelers on less known roads and deprived them of money, provisions and dignity, but such threats had always existed, and always would. Additionally, a few civil disputes between a couple of the Kingdom’s smaller villages had yet to diminish, but they were trivial at best, and the popular prediction leaned towards a quiet resolution spurred by depleted time and energy.
But there were no highwaymen in sight, and since petty village skirmishes did not concern her, Roesaleine couldn’t even venture to guess as to why she ‘shouldn’t be here’. Was there somewhere else she was supposed to be?
But perhaps it was still too soon to say that peace encompassed the Northlands, for in fact there remained the single possibility of a threat, and it lay in those who had opposed Roesaleine’s rescue of the King’s life. While he remained a popular monarch among many, pleasing every whim of every individual in the thousands upon thousands of people of which the Kingdom comprised was impossible, and there had been a handful of people who had been far from happy to hear that some young woman who possessed a hypnotic voice with eerie qualities had pulled Rheigio out of the clutches of death. After all, his demise would have delivered the perfect opportunity for others who sought the throne to aggressively pursue it, as he had no heirs.
It hadn’t been long after Amrial’s spirit had passed onto other realms that Vitali had warned Roesaeline of this possibility, had tried to convince her that while circumstances might start looking up, they weren’t fully out of the dark yet. To the necromancer’s credit, in the days afterwards that the two of them had spent at the King’s palace, he had honoured Death’s last request of him: Take care of her, Vitali. And although he was nowhere near a nurturing person, and never the first to offer a hand or a shoulder for comfort, how could he deny a dying man a last wish? So he had taken it on himself to make sure the devastated young woman got out of bed in the morning, reminded her when she had to eat, while mourning her departed friend had taken her so far from typical human routines.
But, in spite of his tolerance (she couldn’t really call it kindness), a week later, Roesaeline left, without a word to the King or to Vitali, regardless of the danger of traveling alone. She’d needed to leave- she’d needed to move on. From everything, and from everyone.
(And, secretly, Vitali was all too glad to be relieved of his responsibility to her: he’d kept his promise to the best of his ability, after all).
However, in five years, not once had the young singer found herself faced with anything more than sadness loneliness: no danger, and no close calls. So why now, five years later, was something suddenlt amidst? What had Death seen as so important as to regenerate its human vessel to warn her?
“Amrial…” Her hands gave a gentle squeeze against his own, her thumbs rubbing soothing circles behind his knuckles. “Why are you looking as me as though I am already dead?”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Her soul’s passing had prompted his physical materialization in the first place; no other source could have generated such power, no other spirit could have triggered his emotional transformation. And yet here she was, looking up at him with her warm brown eyes so full of relief and concern, with breath lifting and dropping her slender shoulders and a heart that pulsed warm blood through her veins. For a moment he was so convinced he’d been wrong that he had to bite back a nervous chuckle, and he could forget the pang of grief that had plagued him since his reappearance. No, this was no specter; Death, even the living manifestation of Death, could make no such mistake.
He had conversed with ghosts before, of course, most recently as a result of the necromancer Vitali’s vile trickery in steering them down that left-hand path; he knew what it was like to guide a trapped phantom from one realm to the next, to comfort them, to converse with them in a language no living being could properly understand. This did not feel like that. There were no chills rattling his spine, no snippets of black wind flickering on the breeze; the woman that stood before him was as real as the brightening dawn, as authentic as the memory that had kept him satiated as an entity in the aftermath of his most recent mortal demise.
He gently unwrapped his fingers from hers and reached up to cradle the sides of her face with his cool palms, absorbing the warmth of her skin as though his touch alone could restore the strange imbalance of forces that had somehow reunited them in this world. In many ways, she was precisely as he remembered her. A bit thinner, perhaps, and swathed in traveling silks dyed dark with blue and indigo, but the soft expression in her eyes when he met her gaze had not changed in the slightest. Her hair still fell in soft dark waves about her elegant face, tousled by the wind as any living creature’s would be, and the curved river of tears that left its streaks down her smooth cheeks glistened like the melting dew on the frostbitten grass.
“Roesaleine.” The name rolled from his tongue in a whisper once more. He would never tire of speaking that name, those three delicate syllables that meant more to him than any other word the human mouth was capable of uttering. Amrial relaxed his hands and once again allowed them to drop to her shoulders, still not quite daring to believe he was interacting with the woman he’d been so sure was…well, dead. The thought sent a shiver through him, and he stepped away abruptly, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he tensed. She was alive, it was true; he could not deny what he had now witnessed for himself. But something still felt wrong, something he could not quite explain. And as much as he did not want to explain it, he had no choice but to press on. Roesaleine was nothing if not strong, and therefore he knew he could not keep the startling truth from her any longer.
“I look upon you as though you were already dead,” he began, reiterating her question in preparation for his strange and grim answer, “because, Roesaleine Sejourah, you already…you already are.”
He drew in a deep breath, watching her carefully as he spoke. “You brought me back here, my dear,” he said quietly, gazing at her through the clouds of warm breath that swirled before him as the words spilled forth. “You brought me back here because I felt you leave. I felt your soul take its departure, Roesaleine. Do you know what that means?” The words jammed in his throat, and he took a moment to compose himself before he went on. “I thought you had died. I met your soul in the afterlife, I felt you there. And in that moment I was so afraid, so stricken, that only a human body could interpret the emotions that nearly drowned me.”
Amrial reached forward and wiped a tear from her cheek with a gentle thumb, his lips forming a small frightened smile despite himself. “I do not understand how I am with you now, speaking with you now,” he admitted softly. “I am so very relieved to find you, and even if I cannot explain how we are here now, I will not be one to argue the opportunity.” He leaned forward to wrap her in his arms, pulling her close, then stepped away to speak once more. “What does this mean, Roesaleine? Can you tell me you know what this means?”
o.o.c. :: THIS IS THE WORST OH GOD I AM SO SORRY. ;____;
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
The young traveller’s body found itself rigid, momentarily paralyzed by the impact of his words, in much the same state it had suffered the moment she had seen him close his eyes forever on that heart-rending day when she had lost the truest friend she had ever known. She was dead? Honestly, truly dead? Roesaeline was far from any expert at detecting deceit, but the very nature of Death was a dichotomy; black and white, dead or alive, with no room for grey area and vague implications. And as for Amrial… Never had she witnessed him express anything but truths, or at least what he believed to be truths; after all, what had he to gain in pressing falsehoods on her? Particularly one of such magnitude: the suggestion that somehow, unbeknownst to her, the passive (and, of late, melancholy) existence that she had called her life had somehow come to an end.
But… no. No, it couldn’t be. The dead did not shiver and shake, stricken by the wrath of midwinter’s frost. The dead did not fall asleep, comforted by the warmth of newly lit fire, or enjoy the sweet taste of chocolate or the bitter indulgence of wine upon their tongue. The dead did not close their eyes at night to enter that subconscious world of sweet dreams and terrible nightmares, only to wake again to the world of the living with the rising of the eastern sun.
And while the dead could mourn, they could not cry, for tears manifested from pain- and pain was a gift, a warning that something was damaged or amiss, but concurrently a reminder that you were, in fact, still alive.
“Amrial.” She breathed his name on frosty air and inhaled his scent of musk and darkness and new beginnings, wishing for some excuse to remain wrapped in his embrace as she was. But he had her at arm’s length again all too quickly and her attention returned to the image of him, not once allowing her gaze to stray from the genuine concern on his face, the warmth and sadness of his dark eyes. “Amrial, I know not what it was that restored this body for you, or what otherworldly force saw fit to pity a lonely soul such as myself and bring you to me once again.” Hope spread from her prism-like eyes to touch her pink lips and turn them up at the corners in as genuine a smile as anyone had seen since Amrial had been taken from her. “But… my sweet friend, I fear you are mistaken. Look.” Lifting his heavy but gentle hand from her shoulder, she placed it alongside her neck. The gentle rhythm of life thrummed steadily against his fingertips, the hard work of a broken heart that somehow still managed to function enough for her to continue to draw breath. So as to reassure herself, she extended her arm for her finger to reach his neck in turn, shoulders sagging in overwhelming relief to feel the pulse beneath his cold skin. “My heart, like yours, has yet to cease beating; I am not merely a spectral image of myself.”
But he looked on at her with an expression of such profound confusion and relief that she hardly knew what to tell him. Speechless was the woman who had, once upon a time, remained so silent for fear of her own voice. The sound of snowflakes gliding on the winter-chilled air and settling on the dead and frozen ground beneath their feet could nearly be heard in that brief moment of silence that settled between the two while they contemplated how the other had come to be here, and whether their eyes were, in fact, deceiving them.
“Amrial, I wish I had answers to your queries.” The young woman shook her head slowly and dropped her fingers from his neck, only to find his hand again, cold to the touch but so warm to hold. Her fingertips grazed the scar- yes, it was the same scar!- he wore on his palm as a reminder of the many times he’d faced dangers unspoken, if only to protect her. She could remember tearing away vermillion silk from her skirts to bind the wound that had only barely begun to heal in full before he had died… “Your very nature is complex and beyond any human understanding… And all I can offer is the reassurance of my standing before you right now, that whoever it was that has passed on and awakened you as Amrial once again, it could not have been me.”
As she spoke, the snow began to fall in earnest, snowflakes thicker and greater in number than they had been moments ago. They settled on her friend’s shoulders and in his unruly dark locks and caught in her eyelashes to mingle and melt with the last of her tears. “Come; a storm brews, and travel is unsafe when your footsteps are covered. Let us seek shelter while we wait it out.” Weaving her delicate fingers in between his, she gave his arm a gentle tug in the direction of the town from which she had just come.
OoC: HUSH. IT WAS NOT. There is no such thing as a bad post with Amrial in it. <3
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Coupled with the reality of Roesaleine’s new predicament—however fortuitous their reunion—Amrial found himself at a loss for what to say or what to do. He did not know whether to smile or to dissolve back into sobs, to furrow his brow with confusion or wrap his arms around her in a tight, possessive embrace. It was a struggle to accept that which he did not understand, but he also knew that such a sensation had frustrated humankind for millennia—the infuriating knowledge that one simply did not know. Whether or not what he was feeling now was a part of that age-old routine, he could not say, but it seemed too great a risk to question the unprecedented balance their discoveries had clearly established. And Amrial, as starkly black and white as his nature required him to be, was not one to toss dice when he did not know the consequences of his gamble.
When she breathed his name, the warmth of her exhale twisting like an autumn fog between them, he had to bite back a swell of sudden emotion. His feelings tightened in his throat, and as she positioned his icy fingertips to the notch in her warm neck beneath her jaw, he released a thick breath of his own. Her heartbeat pulsed steadily, reassuringly against the gentle pressure of his touch. Their internal rhythms locked into synchronicity when she in turn pressed her hand to his throat, and for several moments, their perfect harmony hypnotized him—she hypnotized him, the very surprise of her existence, her animation, the very real drum of life pumping hot living blood through her body.
“Yes,” he agreed in a whisper, eyelids fluttering closed as the lacy snowflakes plummeted from above. “You are here. You are alive.” It was reassuring to say these things aloud. When he opened his eyes to look at her, his expression was far less grim. The cold flakes clung to his hair and eyelashes just as they did hers, and as the wintry breeze swirled the clouds’ frozen tears about them, she did indeed look spectral—lost amongst fleeting glimpses, existing only between quick blinks and sidelong glances. If she hadn’t been holding his hand through its thickness, he almost would have believed he’d been fooled. An all-too-familiar grieving ache shot through him despite the warmth of her body as she took her place at his side and threaded her arm through his. The possibility of this conversation having been for naught was simply too devastating to consider.
“Only you could have awakened me, Roesaleine,” he said quietly as they walked, grateful for the physical activity as the air temperature dropped even lower in the prelude of the storm. “I am human and I am prone to mistakes as any other passerby; I can be tricked and lead astray by the cunning and the determined. But only you hold the power to summon me back to this realm. And I fear Death is not quite so susceptible to making such errors.”
Though his tone had grown conversational, the confusion behind his assertions was as evident as the mist that had begun to seep from the forest on either side of the road. Yielding to the increasing howl of the wind through the bare, spindly canopy, he lapsed into silence as they made their way back into the village, whose sluggish early morning start seemed to have given way to quiet anticipation of the blizzard. Windows glowed golden through the blue-white haze, guiding them like coastal beacons to the promise of warmth and shelter. He followed Roesaleine’s lead, brushing the stray flakes from the sleeves of his overcoat as they stepped inside.
“You know your way here,” he commented lightly, curiously. “How long have you spent in this township?”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
“While the feeling is purely figurative in nature, I can’t say that I have felt very much alive since I thought I lost you.” She offered a small and decidedly unconvincing smile, behind which lurked the pain of five long years without his encouraging presence by her side. “But while a small emotional death can by all means be noteworthy, I hardly think my mourning you is the reason you have come back to me.”
Something sparkled in the corner of her eye and trickled down the sunkissed skin of her tanned face, the perpetual colour of tea stirred with milk, and she brought up her free hand to wipe the rogue tear away with the sleeve of her travel gown. The garment in and of itself was an oxymoron, because travelling in a gown was profoundly uncomfortable in the dead of winter with little guarding her legs against the bitter cold. Once upon a time, she had donned a man’s attire during her travels, on her way to saving the life of the King. The singer hadn’t had it in her to ever be so scandalous as to wear a pair of pants again without the reassurance of a certain trusted companion.
Turning her wet eyes back to his face, Roesaleine gave Amrial’s arm a gentle squeeze. “If my broken heart were really enough to revive you, Amrial, then you would have found me again five years ago.”
With the storm rapidly picking up, the flakes falling harder and thicker by the minute, Roesaleine resorted to following her own footsteps as she led her companion back to the village, the growing white-out conditions obscuring her vision and blurring the path to town. For all she’d been travelling incessantly for years, in all seasons and through all manner of weather and precipitation, one could never truly grow accustomed to the harsh winters of the Northlands. And as the young singer’s hands and legs were already growing numb with cold, she decided to throw any further discussion to the wind until the two of them had a roof over their heads.
Only a handful of workers and a few children at play populated the streets of the village of Osmadth on this snowy morning, and few took notice of the tall, dark figure and his indigo-clad companion as they tracked through the cold, white blanket that was quickly reaching their ankles. The shops had yet to open their doors to the public, but the inns put up their signs at dawn and only took them in several hours after dusk. Fortunately, Osmadth had no shortage of inns, and the windows of the particular lodging she had just recently left were already glowing yellow and orange with lighted lamps, while two or three people wandered up and down the steps.
“In here,” she suggested, casting her friend a quick glance over her shoulder before leading him inside.
They were greeted with the tingling sensation of warm air from a newly lit fireplace on their chilled faces the moment they opened the door, and Roesaleine couldn’t usher Amrial inside fast enough. She barely realized how hard she was shaking with cold until she saw that her grip on his arm (tighter than she had meant it to be) was causing tremors along his captured limb. Mumbling a soft apology, she released him, however reluctantly.
“I don’t know how long or far you have traveled to find me, or if it would even make the slightest difference, given that your regular temperature is several degrees cooler than that of the average person’s,” she offered a quirky grin at the observation. “But there is nothing better than a cup of hot tea on a snowy day with a friend. So let us resume the deliberations over your re-manifestation over a hot beverage; it’s far more comfortable than standing amidst a brewing blizzard.”
OoC: This is so bad and I am so sorry that it is so bad. :c But at least you know why I cannot word today.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Their silent trek back to the village allowed him time to admire their surroundings. The Northlands, though renowned for their long harsh winters, consisted of beautiful dense forests and a range of terrain types that set it apart from the rest of the vast kingdom. Mountains loomed to the west and met with the long northern coast, giving way to central flatlands and swelling foothills that were home to some of the most breathtaking views Amrial had ever seen. Their journey five years ago, though he obviously had more important things upon which to focus, had been a lovely one aside from their stresses and hardships. He could understand why its residents endured its vicious cold and endless winter snowfalls; when it all melted away in the spring, when the bluebells carpeted the underbrush and glowed azure in the pastures beneath a proud sky, when the birds sang from lush maple canopies and soared over wrinkled valleys, it was worth every drift and every shiver those long dark months.
He kept that in mind as they trudged down the white blanketed road, their feet already sinking in a cushion of fresh powder. Blinking away the flakes that had collected in his eyelashes, he was grateful when they pushed inside the inn to be greeted with a blast of warmth from the roaring fire opposite the door. When his companion untangled herself from his notched arm, he finished brushing off the snow from his coat and ran his fingers through his breeze-tousled hair. With a crooked smile slung on his thin mouth, he reached over to Roesaleine and brushed his fingers across the top of her head. Half-melted flakes splattered from her smooth dark hair to their feet, and he shook his head with amusement as they made their way to the table nearest the fire.
“You’re still shivering,” he commented, shrugging off his wet overcoat and slinging it over the rusted iron hook on the wall. Before taking a seat himself, he pulled out one of the chairs and gestured for Roesaleine to sit. “Take the seat nearest the hearth,” he suggested, sliding in next to her once she had settled, “and I shall make you a cup of hot tea.” His smile broadened, evening out its previous lopsided grin. When the innkeeper, looking rather bleary-eyed as he stumbled in from the back kitchens, approached, Amrial ordered their beverages and leaned back against the rickety chair.
“It was your soul,” he said quietly, tracing the wood grain in the tabletop with his eyes. His mirth faded quickly, and for several additional moments, it was only their soft breathing and the crackle of the growing flames that filled the air between them. He looked up at her when he spoke again. “It wasn’t your broken heart, Roesaleine, It was your soul. That’s what I felt, that’s what brought me back to this world, a world in which I did not expect to find you so…so well.” He reached across and took her hand in his, squeezing it gently. “But I thought you were gone just as you thought I had gone, and if it’s any consolation, I believe our hearts are now adorned with matching cracks.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
But if the young woman had learned anything from her travels five years ago, it was that almost nothing was permanent. Places weren’t permanent, and- sadly- neither were people. The only enduring force that she’d hoped to have perished along with her friend were the feelings harbored in her fragile heart, but alas, their longevity had proven to outlast life- and Death.
Permanence meant hurt. Hurt meant suffering. And suffering inevitably led to the death of an individual, corporeal or otherwise.
So little was left of Roesaleine Sejourah that further suffering could mean her end.
Murmuring a humble ‘Thank you’, the young traveler took a seat next to the hearth as she shed the shades of indigo that were her travel cloak, hanging it behind her seat. The flickering blazes of the young fire danced in a kaleidoscope of blue and yellow and orange, and her shoulders relaxed as it breathed warmth on her back and gradually began to evaporate the melted snowflakes on her clothes.
Seeing his smile drew one out of her as well. “Have you ever prepared a cup of tea, Amrial?” She teased, all in good nature, and tucked her hair behind her ears while the Innkeeper passed the order on to the few serving staff that were awake and on duty. “Because I cannot recall a single occurrence. Do refresh my memory if I am wrong.” Come to think of it, there was very little to do with mundane human habits and conducts in which she had witnessed him partaking. After all, though his kind and endearing nature made it so easy to forget, Amrial was not human through-and-through.
The playful smile on her pink lips faded to a relaxed line as he lowered his voice and recited his concerns, though the apprehension in Roesaeline’s prism-like eyes did not match that of his own in intensity. “My soul?” She leaned forward and repeated, just as softly, more in seeking confirmation in case she had misheard. “But, Amrial… you realize that that is impossible.” The young woman spread her hands on the table, as if to remind him of the living, breathing, and very much alive body across from which he sat. “For if that were true, I would not be here right now, discussing whether or not you are truly able to make a decent cup of tea.” The corner of her mouth quirked into a half-grin, a pitiful attempt to lighten the heavy air caused by his concerns.
For fear that he begin to think she wasn’t taking him seriously, however, she let the terrible quip fizzle and die and placed her other hand atop his knuckles, capturing his fingers in a vain attempt to penetrate that perpetual, moderate cold that kept them prisoner. The heat from her palm reached her eyes in a warm gaze of relief, touched by his words. “Regardless of what you think you felt, my friend, I am here- and you are here- and we are both very, very well.” She affirmed, her mild Southland lilt carrying the words barely above a whisper. “We two have faced trials and hardships undue, both together and alone, but we are here, now. Let us bear our matching scars together, and with pride.” Reflexively, her middle finger traced the jagged scar on the inside of his palm, recalling the dedication and support that had led him to acquire it five years ago, while he’d sought to protect her.
“Here you are, Sir, Miss.” The Inkeeper’s daughter, a young slip of a girl barely older than fourteen, wandered out from the kitchen and placed the two steaming hot beverages before them. “And, Miss- pardon me for saying, but I woke this morning at dawn, and the first thing I heard was your song…” Her voice trailed off, dreamy with an appreciation and admiration that nearly made Roesaleine blush with modesty. “You intend to stay for a while longer, don’t you? I’d so love to hear it again, even just once…” Perhaps realizing the weight of her plea and feeling it might’ve been too bold, the young lass suffered a brief look of embarrassment and bowed her head once before scurrying back to the kitchen.
But it wasn’t the boldness of the lass’s request that made it stand out. The mere fact that she had asked at all- that she wanted to hear Roesaleine’s song- was evidence of the single most profound difference in the young woman, and that was her voice. People weren’t running from it anymore, or condemning her for it, but just the opposite, they sought it. No longer a woman feared for the demon qualities of her song, her dream- the very dream she had confided in Amrial, as long ago as when they had first met- had been realized: it was no longer a weapon. Like the sound of raindrops on a windowpane or the peeping of tree frogs at the birth of spring, it was just another sound, pleasing to and desired by human ears.
OoC:
"...I believe our hearts are now adorned with matching cracks.”
omg Astro HOW. UGH. HOW DO YOU EVEN. WHY U MAKE AMRIAL DO THIS TO ME.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
It kept him grounded, locked into the human mindset that he was not infallible, was just as susceptible to the woes of living as any naturally-born creature walking the earth. It made him feel genuinely human to his very core—which of course was a lie to himself—but he found reassurance in the falsity all the same. He noted then, watching the golden light dance a crackling winter waltz with its shadowy counterparts, that the dancing flames upon the hearth were not unlike the presence of his long-lost companion. She, too, made him feel alive; the journey they had taken together five years ago, as strenuous as it had been, had only brought them closer together in the face of hardship and the overcoming of obstacles. They had forged a bond few ever established in a lifetime. And as it turned out, not even Death could keep them apart—from either side of their pair.
Amrial smiled lightly at Roesaleine’s good-natured teasing. “I will prove it to you, then,” he replied tartly, arching his brows to meet her playful challenge. “We did not have much of a chance for proper tea on the road, as you may recall.” Shaking his head to himself, his cheerful expression fell as Roesaleine continued to speak. “Impossible,” he repeated, his smooth brow creasing tightly as he contemplated the implications of the word. “My dear, I can only hope there is truth in what you say.” He squeezed her fingers gently, his gray eyes stormy with sudden grimness as he met her bright gaze across the table. “But you are right in that we are here now, together.” A smile graced his lips, but it did not quite touch the concern in his eyes. He looked down at his palm, tracing the outline of his physical scar with his stare. “Our scars are our own,” he agreed. “Our flags and our medals. Evidence of our strength to mend.”
He was not too proud to admit a mistake or a lapse in judgment, and he did sincerely hope she was correct in her sanguine reasoning. For if she was not—well, Amrial did not want to think about what that might imply, not just yet. Premature worry was wasted effort, and it led only to unwarranted heartache in a time when ignorance should have inspired bliss. It was enough, he decided silently, that they had been reunited. If he could not savor the warmth of her company when he had come to this reality sure of her demise, then he had no right to don his skin and bones again. They were there for each other as they always had been.
Nevertheless, he was thankful for the mousy innkeeper’s daughter’s interruption when she came to their table with a scuffed silver serving tray in dire need of a polish. She placed it before them with a clatter. Amrial watched as her small hands placed the steaming kettle and the empty cups before them, at once startled and intrigued by the young girl’s sudden words. His attention shifted to Roesaleine, who seemed strangely uncomfortable at the topic whose problems should have been resolved years prior.
“What does she mean?” he asked when the girl had made her departure, gazing at his friend through the swirls of airborne steam. “Have you been singing?” The eagerness in his voice was a sudden departure from the dark uncertainty that had decorated his tone previously, and for a moment he forgot about the piping hot tea that had been served them. When he smiled this time, it was full of pride. “I commend your mastery of your voice, Roesaleine Sejourah. You truly have come a long way.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
“I fear the strength is yours alone to bear, Amrial.” The young woman murmured, fingers driven by her nostalgic mind to gently trace the fine white line across his soft palm once more. It was with such reluctance that she finally drew her hand away from his, feeling she had finally exhausted all excuses to keep his hand captive in her own. And yet, she still, she found her faith in her senses to be shaky, wondering if her eyes and her hands and her ears deceived her. It felt like too much to hope for- not only to have Amrial alive, but to be reunited with him, overwhelmed with the implications and possibilities of old friendships and new beginnings. What were the chances she was still deeply asleep back at the other inn, dreaming this beautiful illusion in the solitude of a dark bedroom?
Tucking her locks of ebony behind her ears, she briefly dug a fingernail into the back of her neck, welcoming the dull pain with a soft sigh of relief. Amrial was real; this was really happening. She needed to accept it as truth and move on from it now. “But, regardless of who bears what reminders these earlier years… oh, Amrial.” Roesaleine’s sigh was so deep that one would think she was ready to completely deflate, like sails in the last dying breaths of a gale. Paired with the mystified look in eyes that were anything but dry, more emotion and sincerity couldn’t possibly be injected into the look she gave Death’s corporeal form when she seized his gaze with her own. “Finding you again… this is more than I ever dared to hope. Please believe me when I say that you were the single most important bringer of change in my life five years ago, and once again, you return as the single most welcome happenstance I have encountered in five years.”
When the Inkeeper’s young and awkward daughter brought them their tray of empty mugs and pot of steaming tea, complete with a ceramic creamer full of fresh milk and a tiny dish of sugar, Roesaleine opened her mouth the thank the girl, only to be interrupted by the adolescent’s request. It would be a full out lie to claim that the plea surprised her; ever since the demon in her voice had been exercised, encouraging a more liberal release of the notes that emanated from her throat, this was a request with which she was presented at least once on a daily basis. Sometimes she found herself complying and trading a song for a handful of coins, just enough to get her through another day, but more often than not, her heart broken wouldn’t allow for any precious song to be put up for a trade. Not when she was reminded every time she sun a tune of how her voice had, once upon a time, led to the demise of someone she held so very dear.
Thankful that the lass decided to take her leave in haste, before she had to decline her wish (for when you were asked to do something you love far too often, you began to love it less and less), she flashed a flat smile in Amrial’s direction and offered a shrug. “I seem to have made a habit of humming a tune or two when feeling particularly down or lonely these past few years. Although, as much as I would love to bask in your praise and admiration, I fear I am undeserving of either and both.” Tracing the wood grain of the table with her eyes, the young woman suddenly found herself unable to meet her friend’s stormy gaze, for fear he would only find grave disappointment in what she had to say.
“I never mastered my voice, Amrial. It continued to reach beyond my control long after you were gone… In the years that have passed, I simply found a way to tame it indefinitely. Or, rather, I found someone who was capable of blunting its bitter edge forever. I was certain that I could be happy again without the burden, but…” When she finally found the strength to look up, Roesaleine could only shake her head. “Not much has changed, except that instead of invoking hallucinations onto the eyes and ears of those who happen to hear my songs, it has become a means of occasionally earning some money.” She smiled without humor. “Do not be fooled, my friend; I am afraid I have not become the strong and capable person that you wish to see in me.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
But his wordlessness was a thick silence nevertheless. Though his hopeful expression did not waver even as she breathed her excuses, he found he could not quite locate the words to respond to her rather startling—or rather, puzzling—news. Remembering the tea, he scooped a spoonful of the dry, withered leaves into two squares of cheesecloth, then gathered the beige fabric around the mound and secured the bundles closed with the scraps of twine the young woman had left them. He dropped one into Roesaleine’s mug and then his own, wrapping his fingers around the handle of the warm kettle and slowly filling each of their glasses with water fresh from a boil. He watched calculatedly as clouds of rich brown stained the clear water in graceful, slow motion swirls, the breath of his exhales dispelling the steam as he studied his reflection in the dimming liquid.
When he looked up to meet his companion’s eyes, he wore a slight smile, his storm-gray eyes unreadable as he straightened his posture and studied her. From the way she avoided his gaze, from the way her eyes traced the scuffed tabletop and the gentle shaking of her head, he sensed her shame. His throat tightened at this realization. Did she fear disappointing him? Did she fear his disapproval? And, more importantly, how could she think him capable of feeling those things towards her at all? He may have been Death’s physical incarnate, but he was not a monster; he was her friend, not a dark force before which to cower and please.
When his brow furrowed tightly, it was not with the disgust she dreaded, but rather with intense concern. “You had come so far with mastering your voice,” he said finally, his voice reinforcing the worry and care in his eyes. “You did master it, Roesaleine.” He tried to smile, but the gesture was more bittersweet than warm for the memories it conjured. He took a sip of his piping hot tea and continued. “Don’t you see? At last you had tethered the wild force within you, and you made it bend to your will. In saving King Rheigio, in singing the death from the room, you defied the wiles of Fate and at last commanded what had restrained you all those years.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his once again, giving her fingers a tender squeeze. “You must promise me never to view my death as a failure on your part. My passing meant that you succeeded—it was a sign of your progress, of your power.”
He took another drink of his tea, savoring the temperature on his tongue as wholly as the flavor itself. The words he spoke, though intended to be comforting, were not easy to process. He couldn’t shake the feeling of uneasiness that accompanied her confession; whether it was merely the side effect of his curiosity and the lingering sensation of his grief, he could not say, but it was plaguing him all the same. “If I may ask,” he began, hesitating, “how is it that you managed to tame it indefinitely?”
Interrupting himself with another swallow, he folded his arms together and rested them on the edge of the table. “If the taming did not come from within, I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
The very thought made her want to chuckle, although in the moment it felt highly inappropriate, so she pressed a fisted hand to her smiling lips as he handed her a mug, steaming with the hot scent of dark, rehydrated herbs. Lifting the mug to her lips and taking a small, experimental sip, her tired features arranged to accommodate a genuine smile. “Well, now; it seems I am proven wrong, and you shame me with new enlightenment into your skills with tea leaves and hot water.” She teased, placing the mug on the table before the heated pottery could burn her fingers. “You will never run out of ways to surprise and amaze me, Amrial.”
While the comment lent a small, blissful reprieve from the spotlight, the focus of the conversation seemed reluctant to deviate from the topic of her voice. And while Amrial would have found out eventually (assuming, of course, that they were to pick up where they had left off five years ago and continue on as company for one another in the travels that lay ahead), the young woman found herself entirely unprepared to discuss the technicalities that led to the taming of her voice so soon. Yet here she was, and the questions had been asked… And there wasn’t a single fibre of her being that would allow her to feed him any form of a lie.
“You’re wrong,” came her quiet response to his assertion that she had mastered her voice. Roesaleine found herself unable to look up from the steaming beverage, watching the water deepen in his earthy shade of brown as the sac of leaves steeped. “I never mastered my voice, Amrial. I had not mastered it when I sung life back into His Majesty, Rheigio, and I did not master it in the aftermath. Can’t you see?” Forcing her idle gaze from the mug of tea, she searched his familiar and reassuring face for the faintest trace of understanding. “All of this time, for as long as I can remember, it had mastered me! Up until now, my entire life had been structured to accommodate it. For days after your death, even after order and the closest semblance of peace was restored to the Northlands, I feared to so much as speak, lest my spoken word resemble musical notes and mayhem arise once again. Rheigio is alive and well right now not because of what I did, but because, at that single, crucial moment, my voice saw fit to behave. And I have never been able to replicate that moment… Particularly, not when I most needed to.” Not when she had sought to sing life back into Amrial.
Already winded from her short rant, Roesaleine paused to pour a few drops of milk into her tea, turning it from dark mahogany in colour to a beige that was a shade lighter than her skin. “What I am trying to say is… I didn’t tame it. I got rid of it. Or, rather, I got rid of the demons behind it that were the source of the mayhem.” Vague was her explanation, but how was she to explain something that she herself hardly understood?
The only answer to that was as best as she could, so with a small intake of breath, she proceeded to try. “Two years ago this winter, I ventured through the forest bordering south the village of Kalay. The wind does no blow quite so bitter, surrounded by the protection of bark and branches… There, I encountered someone- something- that, through some uncanny intuition, was able to sense that something weighed on my heart and on my mind. They offered to trade for freedom from preternatural quality of my singing voice, in exchange for something that they claimed I would not miss.” She gave a slight shrug of her shoulders and took another sip of her tea, cooled as it was from the milk. “They were right in that; to this day, I have my doubts that they actually took anything at all in exchange… But, whatever it was that they did or did not take, I can sing, Amrial. For my own comfort and that of others’.” Again, that small, tired smile teased dimples at the corners of her mouth. “I thought it was the key to my happiness, something to encourage the ability to move on… I was wrong, in believing that. But, if nothing else, it has provided me with a means of earning enough currency to keep myself alive.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
So he found his solace in simple tasks and routines, grounding himself with items to complete with his hands. Making tea, as it turned out, was just another mundane activity that kept him in check—gather the dry, curly leaves, tie closed the cheesecloth or burlap, boil the water. He smiled through the steam at his companion, pleased that she was taking such delight in his entirely ordinary performance. He knew from their previous journey together that she was equally aware of the importance of keeping one’s mind occupied; they’d shared with one another their fair share of personal troubles, and hand-in-hand they had worked through the worst of them on an equally-unpredictable path.
Granted, they had had little time for the small things during their previous excursion; between dodging armies, outsmarting bounty hunters, and discerning between truth and falsehood in the words of Vitali the necromancer and Fate the conspirer, they’d had their hands quite full enough. Amrial wrapped his fingers around the warm mug and took a sip of the scalding tea, conscious of the smooth scar on his palm that had become hypersensitive to heat as he returned the cup to the scuffed tabletop. He ran the thumb of his opposite hand overtop the silvery line on his skin and cleared his throat, looking to his friend as she spoke. For a moment, he was lost in the way the shifting light of the raging fire danced across her eyes, deafened to her speech by the renewed flood of wonder and relief that washed over his heart.
But a she continued, as the words she spoke began to sink in and take on their meanings, he furrowed his brow. Where his pointed question had begged for explanation, he found now that her description raised more questions than it answered. Perplexed, he took another swallow of tea. “Roesaleine,” he addressed, cocking his head to the side, “you have been blinded to the truth of the past by your own conscience.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his own again. Though the gesture was meant to be a reassurance to her, he realized the contact comforted him in a way he could not explain. It hit him all over again how much he had missed her, and he responded with a gentle squeeze. “You were mastering your voice. It was not luck, it was not fortuitous circumstance that allowed you to sing life into the king. Fate never would have seen to that.”
He tried to smile. “You could not have sung life into me with all the magic in the world, my dear. Because there are two parts to such a deed—when you invite life in with a song, so too do you dismiss death. And you never could have fought both forces at once. You cannot blame yourself. I never wanted that for you.” He shook his head. “I apologize deeply, so deeply.”
He brought the steaming mug to his lips again, draining the last of his tea with a great swallow. He filled his glass once more as Roesaleine continued to speak, his bemusement only heightening with the seconds that slid by. “I do not know what it is this being could have taken from you,” he responded after a moment of silence, his gaze flicking down to the darkening liquid in the glass before him. He folded his arms on the edge of the table and leaned forward, his pale face stony with deep-rooted concern. “I am glad for your success since this…this trade, but, Roesaleine…”
Amrial’s voice trailed off, and he felt his throat tighten with dread. Too often such trades resulted in longing for that which the barterer claimed would not be missed, but this case was far more complex than a simple exchange of goods.
“Will you sing for me, Roesaleine?” he asked then, quietly, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Your burden lifted, would you sing for me now?”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
“My friend… You are kind to a fault.” Her words flooded with appreciation when she spoke, flicking her gaze downward to watch as his large hand embraced her smaller one, gentle enough to portray affection but strong enough to suggest she wasn’t the only one reluctant to let go. “You don’t know… You can’t say for certain that it was impossible for me to have brought you back. You might be Death, but you are also Amrial. You are also human… There might have been a way around it. Had I more time…” She trailed off, but the rest needed not be spoken, as she was heading into redundant territory. He already knew how badly she’d missed him, how she had mourned him, and there was no reversing the past or chasing shadows of things that had been. He was here; they were here, together, and the past could put itself to sleep. Or, at least, the parts of it that had not worked out to her favour, or to his.
Taking a thoughtful sip of her steaming beverage (and finding herself genuinely surprised at its well-balanced flavour; who would have guessed that Death could make such a good pot of tea?), Roesaleine’s smile no longer reached her eyes, and instead conflicted with what appeared to be an unmistakable trace of sadness in its purest form. “If what you say is true, and that I really had been on my way to harnessing the power of my voice… Then these five years passed hold more guilt and regret than I’d thought.” Putting her mug down so gently upon the scuffed tabletop that it barely made a sound, she covered his cold fingers with her free hand and offered a quiet apology with her eyes. “I like to think that I am and always have been a fairly independent individual, one with her own drive and ambition… But I would be lying if I said that my drive didn’t die along with you, Amrial. I guess… I guess I just gave up. On harnessing the voice that has harnessed me all my life, and on a lot of other things… As ashamed as I am to admit it, my wandering has never been so purposeless as it has been these past five years without you.”
But hadn’t that always been the case? Roesaleine Sejourah had been nothing more than the shadow of a frightened girl who could hardly aspire to be more when she had met Amrial. It was their time together, the journey that they had made together, and the trials that they had tackled in unison that had shaped her as a person and brought to light her strengths and, most importantly, her confidence.
And all because he had remained by her side, a solid pillar of endless benevolence and constant encouragement. Never had she thought such a firm pillar could fall…
The liquid in her ceramic mug began to grow cold from neglect while the young wanderer could suddenly only see fit to stare into the deep-hued water, as if it would offer up answers to the what ifs that had followed her like an ominous shadow since she and Amrial had been forced to part ways. “No, Amrial, I apologize. I knew that you would have wanted me to continue to grow and come into my own, even if you were not there to see it happen… And yet, here I find myself very much the same lost, little girl that you once knew. By giving up as I had, I let you down. And for that, I am so deeply, deeply sorry…”
But, for all she had shied away from any further attempts to master her voice, she had at least embraced her volition to put an end to how it haunted her, one way or another. That was when she had traded it away.
“I know… I realize it was a coward’s way out,” she mentioned, misinterpreting his concern for the trade. “But it allowed me to move on, as best I could. Truly, I am not convinced that the entity took anything from me at all; perhaps the demonic quality of my voice was all that it wanted. In which case, it can keep it.”
Though, in the long run, what difference had it really made? For the past three years, nothing had left her feeling more exhausted and despondent than a request that she sing. At times it was necessary, when circumstances demanded she exchange a song for a handful of coins, but it had never managed to bring her the joy and closure that she had thought it would. As a result, it was a request that she often turned down, unless she found herself in dire need of a room at an inn or a meal to give her the energy that she needed to move on to the next town, village or city.
And in five years, Amrial’s request was the first that she felt truly happy to oblige. For everything he had done for her, a song was the least she could offer in return.
So she leaned in, closing a good deal of the distance between them, allowing the notes and vibrato to glide on a whisper, out of reach of undeserving ears.
Because this song was for Amrial alone.
OoC: Ugggh this post is le crapppp I am so sorry. BUT to make up for it I sang for you. XD THAT MAKES UP FOR IT RIGHT. p.s. it's not even a real language hahahaha. And it's not even that good because whenever I pressed record suddenly I COULDN'T SING PRETTY. Sounded fine whenever I WASN'T recording but you know how it is.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Her words, whether or not it showed upon his face in the shifting light of the inn, affected Amrial profoundly. Her affection, her reliance, her total faith in his purpose and intentions—it was overwhelming to hear such genuine praise spoken aloud, and her speech garnered within him a swell of emotion he could not identify. He became very still, watching her through the swirls of steam from his cup, completely oblivious to the fact that what he was feeling was something that he had every right not to know how to react to. The initial stirrings of his fondness for Roesaleine had ignited as though her touch had struck flint, transitioning from gentle glowing ember to a blaze that rivaled the dancing flames upon the inn’s own hearth. And what coursed through his system now—a bizarre, fluctuating combination of fear and endearment that had him wondering if he had taken ill from the cold—was akin to love in its purest, starkest form.
Mechanically, he lifted his steaming mug to his lips and drank deeply, finishing off the remainder of the beverage in a handful of scalding swallows. He felt a little better when he surfaced and placed the empty glass on the table, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest. Studying his companion as he did then both heightened and lessened his internal tumult at once. For a moment, he did not even process the meaning of her words; he simply heard them as musical syllables, spoken but eternally mellifluous, distinct in their rhythm and melody that communicated on another level entirely. But what was missing—what he seemed to be striving to hear despite not knowing exactly what he was listening for—was that strange edge that had always lurked upon her tongue, the hint of something darker, more dangerous that he had learned to detect long ago.
His previous discomfort shifted from that tremulous breed of unfamiliar feeling to a weighty burden of dread, of worry. Of course she was missing that part of her voice; had she not just explained that she had sacrificed her wild gift in exchange for something it was claimed she would not yearn for? But there was something else that troubled him, something beyond the facts as she reported them. His brow furrowed deeper, and he leaned in close to hear Roesaleine’s song.
Their faces were so close they nearly touched, and he could feel her warm, gentle exhales on his chilled skin as she sang. His eyes fluttered closed as the tone and vibrato glided to his ears, and he remained still as a marble-sculpted statue until her melody came to a quiet close. The wind of the storm outside howled its applause as if on cue, and Amrial leaned slowly back, his face more concerned than ever.
He had been absolutely transfixed—but for all the wrong reasons. Where he had always known her melodies to be mystical, ethereal, evocative, this particular arrangement of notes and time seemed hollow, empty. The power behind her voice had not compelled him to listen, but rather the shock of its absence—and the absence of that final piece, the trait that had eluded him while she had been speaking. For while it was she who sung, while the song was portrayed by the same voice aurally, it was not Roesaleine Sejourah who had performed for him. It was her shell.
The realization struck him with a physical jolt, as though his understanding had tangibly shifted to the forefront of his mind. He had solved the riddle, sorted out the evidence, arrived at his conclusion—and yet the victory of comprehension was swallowed by sudden frustration, sudden sadness. “Roesaleine,” he said quietly, sternly; more harshly than he had intended. “I think I know what was taken from you in that forest.”
He clenched his jaw, posture rigid. The darkness of his words seemed to hang over them like a ghost in anticipation of the answer, the tension as thick in the air as the smoke from the flames.
“It’s your soul, Roesaleine. It took your living soul.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
The world as both of them knew it had turned off time and gone utterly still.
Not mad and malicious and lashing out at its fear of the unknown, writhing with shrieks and shouts and cold misunderstanding like it used to. That was the world that Roesaleine had come to know, growing up as yet another innocent girl in the neighbouring Kingdom of the Southlands. It was the world that every gray morning, she had woken up to reluctantly face and had learned to dread. A world from which she had hidden, thirsty as it was for her bewitched blood.
No, this was another world entirely, a calmer world born of the secured reign of King Rheigio, and her freedom from the demons that haunted her cadences and tones. A world that fell silent and reverent when her lips parted to release the melodies previously held captive by her disinclination to sing.
Movement ceased for that brief handful of seconds that Roesaleine Sejourah’s song glided on the still air of the inn. The shuffling and the scuffing of busy feet came to an abrupt halt in the backrooms, and the waiflike innkeeper’s daughter paused in her dusting off the surface, her small, freckled fingers ceasing its methodical up-and-down sweeps of the grimy dust-rag, arrested and wooed by the weary traveler’s gentle melody.
For while her voice was void of the enchantment that had both saved and ended two very different lives five years ago, it possessed yet another quality that enraptured the hearts of listeners: a feeling so strong that no careful combination of words in any human vocabulary could do it justice. A more potent, eternal magic, one that could not be harnessed, and could not be helped. It existed of its own volition, in the gazes that Death and the young woman exchanged, in their fingertips when they met, in the bond that had been formed, and then severed, and then strengthened the moment they reunited.
Roesaleine sang to Amrial from the most private chambers of her scarred heart, rendering the rest of the world guilty of eavesdropping, for the song was meant for him and his ears alone. It was, perhaps, the first time in very, very long that the young woman’s melody had carried so deep a meaning, but she was sure to keep it short and sweet, so as not to spoil too much of a good thing. So as to save for later the feelings that ran even deeper; feelings that she was not yet ready to express.
Just as quickly as life had paused to soak up every individual inflection of Roesaleine’s song, it resumed like nothing had happened, as if every ear within range had not listened in on that special moment. The only one whose expression hinted at the impact her song had had was Amrial- but it was not at all the sort of impact she had imagined.
His statuesque shoulders looked stiff, his face had gone positively ashen, and his eyes- those stormy eyes in which she had witnessed so much affection but moments before- were hard, confused. Perhaps even angry.
A slap across the cheek couldn’t have stung more, and the young woman felt blood warm her face, as the very subject she’d thought had been laid to rest was suddenly resurrected. He had missed it; the feeling, the message, the meaning of the song her voice had woven for him. It had gone right over his head, for his mind and attention had apparently dwelt elsewhere. “I thought we were finished with this.” Came her quiet murmur of a reply, her full lips barely moving to form the words while her prismic eyes all but bored a hole in the table. “My soul, Amrial, is not gone. It is not lost or stolen or traded away, because if it were, I would be dead, and as such we’d have reunited under very different circumstances, and on another plan entirely.”
Lips pressed together, she exhaled slowly through her nose, still aching from what had very much felt like an indirect form of rejection of something she had offered, yet did not fully understand. Wrapping her fingers around her mug of hot tea a tad too tightly, she brought it to her lips and took a long, contemplative sip before speaking again. “What you’re telling me is that you think the root of the power of which I rid my voice was directly connected to my soul. And while I know you mean well, and are eager to deduce an answer…I don’t believe that those two things are not mutually exclusive. And for once…” She trailed off, sucked in a breath and put down her mug with more force than what was necessary, enough to startle the inkeeper’s daughter such that she dropped her dust-rag. “For once, Amrial, I think you are wrong.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
What bothered him most, he realized, was that he could not understand how she remained in the realm of the living, sitting opposite him and sipping at her tea as though she’d never had a chance transaction in a distant forest. And while Amrial was puzzled and concerned, the force that governed him quaked within his core in confusion. Even with a human consciousness, Amrial knew this particular situation was absolutely unprecedented—a being without a soul simply could not be; without a life force animating flesh and bone, the flesh and bone would dissolve and decay and disappear as the hands of time twisted and turned. Even he, as human as Amrial was, was inhuman in that he had no true soul to govern his skeleton, skin, eyes; Death was the driving strength keeping his heart pulsing and his lungs breathing.
How, then, could Roesaleine manage? Though the young woman’s gaze stared intensely at the tabletop, pointedly ignoring contact with his own, he studied her with a strange combination of admiration and suspicion from his place across from her. It was not she that he mistrusted, of course; from her reaction to his declaration, he could easily see that she neither believed him nor wanted to believe him, and that was certainly no symptom of deceit. But whatever creature stole away the piece of her had somehow gained entry to her deepest level of existence, of self, and his very real fear was that it could strike again—or perhaps strike another. Had it replaced her soul with another’s? What had it done to ensure she did not perish, did not crumble to the earth in a fatal but deal-pleasing blow?
His head reeled with that possibility, and he fought the urge to reach out for her again, to reassure himself for the umpteenth time that she was there, that she was okay, that she was not—at least not consciously—the doomed victim of an inconceivable trade. But the facts were plain, and still she did not believe him. Perhaps her ignorance was her savior; perhaps that was what kept her head so level, her eyes so bright. Positivity could have a profound effect on even those closest to passing, he knew. But from what she had relayed to him about her life in his absence, she had been living in a dark shadow of her former progress, distraught with grief and guilt and perpetually plagued by the poisonous thought that she could have done something to prevent Amrial’s death.
A storm of emotion crashed suddenly upon the shore of his gray eyes, allowing a small flashing glimpse into a raging tempest of feelings he could neither identify nor properly convey. Not knowing how to interpret what was now drowning his heart and mind, he tensed, his jaw tightening in frustration. No, it was not just frustration—it was anger, anger stemming from how deeply worried he was, which in turn stemmed from how genuinely he cared for the dark-haired young woman. Her strangled tone and dismissive words only made his fists clench in his lap, for how could she not see what stared her in the face, the answer to which all their evidence pointed?
“Roesaleine Sejourah,” he said darkly, the eerie calm of his baritone piercing the buzzing air of the inn like an arrow launched from a longbow. The tension in the room begun from Roesaleine’s forceable slamming of the mug thickened dramatically as he spoke. “I cannot pretend to know all the answers to the world’s problems. But there are some things about which you do not know, about which you cannot know or understand.”
Realizing his voice had risen somewhat in volume, he lowered it once more before he continued, his words leaving his pale lips slowly, pointedly, insistently. “And I am not wrong on this.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
Perhaps she had taken it too personally, too hard. Or, worse, perhaps her hopes had been premature. Perhaps she should have sung a different song entirely, and not have laid what was left of her heart bare, only to be overlooked and, thusly, further bruised.
Perhaps, like a naïve young teenager, she had let her impatient heart outrun her completely, leaving her in the dust of regret and her overeager blunder.
While it served as no good excuse, Roesaleine was human, and every connotation, virtue and vice associated with that applied to her existence. She erred, she failed, she made mistakes. In fact, for the past five years wrought with cold guilt and hollow loneliness, she had felt like nothing more than a single, walking mistake.
Reuniting with Amrial didn’t change any of that. In fact, the euphoria that flooded her veins on discovering that he was alive clouded her already precarious judgement, made her jump to conclusions that warranted more careful consideration. What a dangerous burst of hope it was that caused her heart to race and her fingers to tingle with the adrenaline rush.
But that rush had all but dissipated completely, evaporating like a dewdrop on a hot stove, and a new feeling clenched her heart and curled her slender fingers into semi-fists. While she was by no stretch of the truth a particularly angry person, the young woman knew anger as thoroughly as she knew love. The problem was that both of those sentiments happened to be fueled and nourished by some degree of passion, and as a result, could exist simultaneously, and feed into one another.
And it was because of her depth of affection for and adoration of Amrial that- for the first time, for as long as she’d known him- she wished he would shut up, leave the topic well alone, and just bask in the happiness of their defying all odds and finding one another once again, alive and well.
“You are contradicting yourself.” Roesaleine’s words provoked more of a bite than she had intended, and for the moment, her eyes refused to meet Amrial’s, looking past him and staring at the bare wall to her right. “You admit that you cannot know and cannot explain everything. So how can you be so sure that I unwittingly gave up my soul in exchange for the peace of mind of knowing I can sing without condemning myself? Forgive me, but it sounds no more certain than a hypothetical guess, and I grew tired of guessing games when I parted ways with the necromancer, Vitali.” For spending any amount of time around the aforementioned individual could quickly cause one to resent riddles and games in any form.
Amrial was Death; she was fully aware that he consisted of more than the mere flesh and blood and storm-grey eyes that all but captivated her every time they met her gaze. There was much that he knew that she did not, and probably never would. However, walking the world of the living had put him at a significant disadvantage. And while his ability to blend and fit in was next to flawless, there remained plenty that he did not understand- that he could not understand, unless or until he himself experienced it first hand, and successfully managed to describe it with the proper vocabulary.
Death was, in short, no closer to perfect than was humanity. And in this case, whether he could see it or not, Death was mistaken.
Her tea forgotten, Roesaleine sat up straighter in her chair, shoulders stiff and rigid as she pulled her equally stiff hands onto her lap. “Look at the facts, Amrial. I’m sitting here, in front of you. I am talking, I am breathing, and you have touched my skin and felt my pulse- I am alive. And even the simplest fool can deduce that anyone able to draw breath, and with a heartbeat and the ability to respond to their own name is driven by an immortal soul.” It wasn’t until the words had passed her lips in a stiff sort of staccato- suggesting she was near a breaking point- that the realization dawned on her that he could interpret them as a slight, implying that he was a fool. And had she been in any other mood, she might have been inclined to apologize.
Taking in a slow breath, Roesaleine’s unusual eyes- flickering like live embers- finally upturned to meet Amrial’s. “So lay it to rest, already. I am not dead, and I am not senseless enough to have sold my soul!”
It had not been her intention to yell, but the white hot ire burning in her throat seized her words and took them to levels far beyond quiet, casual conversation. At the other side of the room, the inkeeper’s daughter stopped dusting and retreated to a back room, and a stranger looking to book a bed or a meal took but two steps past the door, paused, and turned to leave- the both of them deciding it best to let the tension in the air run its course and fizzle out before they carried on with their day. And as a result, Roesaleine and Amrial were left alone in the cramped dining area.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
And more than anything, he wanted to fix her.
The narrow scuffed table between them seemed to cower from their mutual rage, frightened of being the sole separator of their growing feud, and Amrial planted his hands firmly on its edge in an attempt to hide the trembling of his fingertips. He realized distantly that this was clearly no way to demonstrate his affection, and yet the flood gates had already failed; the subsequent tidal wave of his emotion now flowed turgid and violent through his system, and like a great river swollen from the uncertain sadness of spring’s torrential rainfall, he could never hope to keep it in its banks. So, too, was he unprepared for such a disaster—he had, of course, been angry in past lives, but never had it felt like this. Never had he wanted to shout and sob at once with ire and concern. Never had his icy fury burned with such passionate physical pain in the core of his chest.
He gritted his teeth and swallowed hard, releasing his iron grip on the table when he realized he was making quaking ripples in the surface of their remaining tea. It rocked as he relinquished his grasp, threatening to teeter to the floor and shatter its contents on the rugged wooden floor of the much-traveled inn. Though he made no move to stabilize it—indeed, he did not even break his glare with Roesaleine—it managed to right itself with little more than a few drops of spilled water from the kettle spout.
He spread his hands then, lifting his shoulders in an incredulous shrug, and drew in a deep breath to continue. The words left his lips more harshly than he had intended, but still his words were no sharper than his companion’s had been. Her defensiveness spoke to him of her desperation, of how badly she did not want to believe the truth he now knew to be absolute; and strangely enough, that refusal—that complete lack of faith and trust in his reasoning—wounded him far deeper than any physical cut. A wallowing ache coursed through his veins with every swift beat of his irate heart, and his frowned deepened, his eyes flashing stormy fire as he searched again to meet her gaze. Perhaps he had been wrong to take advantage of the confidence she’d always seemed to have in him. In its absence he felt only anguish, a distinct flavor of agony that tasted of fire and disappointment, of bitter heartache and sour indignation.
“My presence should be proof enough!” he cried, bringing a hand to his chest as he leaned forward in outrage. “I felt your soul, Roesaleine. I felt it. And the grief I felt was what summoned me back, what brought life to this form once again! Don’t you see?” He bit down on his lower lip with frustration until the metallic taste of blood washed over his tongue, and he swallowed it away tensely. “I am here because of you, because I thought you were dead, because I wanted one last glimpse before I was robbed of you for the final time!”
His baritone sliced through the empty room like a knife through flesh, the obvious hurt in his eyes quickly masked with the remainder of his anger. He lowered his tone when he continued, his breathing heavy and ragged with his own despair. “You forget that I am able to draw breath, Roesaleine,” he said bitterly, the density of his tone weighing heavy in the silence. “You forget that this heart beats as well, and that I have a name as any other. And where is my soul, I implore you? My immortal soul?” His question was strangled with the struggle of capping his frustration, yet he pressed on. “If I am here, then it cannot be impossible! Improbable, perhaps, but the reality stares us in the face all the same. I do not take you for a fool, Roesaleine Sejourah, and never have I. But I question your wisdom now in denying what has the potential for the direst of consequences.”
Chest still heaving, he lowered his voice to a near-whisper as he leaned across the table, narrowing his eyes as he watched her. “I only hope you are right,” he murmured coldly. “Never have I wanted more to be in the wrong.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
But the world around them was rendered temporarily irrelevant, and was consequently the last thing on Roesaleine’s mind as she held Amrial’s ardent and fierce gaze, heated and driven to the point where she could no longer discern where the hurt from his disinterest in her song ended, and her ire over something else entirely began.
However, observing the electric thunderclouds that thickened in his eyes- those eyes in which she had only ever found gentleness and understanding- moved something inside of her. And her unyielding insistence on his contradictory claims and less than acceptable hypotheses that eventually spurred him to rise and grip the table as though he might throw it nearly made her rethink her stance.
Nearly, but not quite.
“What I see standing before me is you, Amrial- a being whose existence cannot be explained by the same circumstances as my own.” She hissed back, her voice distorted by the heavy pulsing of her heart in her throat. “You cannot draw that parallel just because we both happen to draw breath and have a name of our own. You stand before me without a whisper of a soul because you are not even human, and the same cannot be said for me!”
But not unlike Amrial, this attitude was grossly disproportionate from her general identity. Roesaleine was not a violent or an angry woman, and those words, like every word she had ever spoken or every note she had ever sung, were not intended to hurt. And it was too late to take them back by the time her agitated mind absorbed the undertones of her accusations- the bitter and unfair connotation that they were more different than they were alike. The suggestion that perhaps everything they had suffered together at the hands of Fate and otherwise held little meaning, after all.
Too livid to make the apology she already owed, yet not proud enough to stop caring or to fail to understand how those careless words had probably made him feel, the exacerbated young woman felt her adrenaline reach its peak and then gradually dissolve. And like a candle to oxygen, the diminishing of the fuel made for a much smaller fire.
“Aren’t we all ‘certain’ of things that turn out only to be possibilities, every so often in our lives? Just like I was certain I had seen the last of you- and yet, here you are. Here we are.” The first sign that she was laying this spat to rest was that she was the first to avert her gaze- although part of that might have been inspired by the reluctance to acknowledge the disappointment she read in his eyes, as fluently as the words in a book. “Can you truly not be wrong? Can Death not be mistaken, Amrial? Never?”
The hardness around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth began to soften, and the tightness left her shoulders as that momentary spike of anger plateaued into something else: a bud of uncertainty, of insecurity, that began to blossom as the gears in her mind touched on and revealed to her the potential consequences and implications of Amrial’s hypothesis, should he be right. “…how are you so certain that it was my soul that you felt pass on to other realms? Is there not a possibility that it could have been someone else’s, Amrial? Wouldn’t I, of all people, have felt myself being robbed of my own soul?” Roesaleine searched his stone-chiseled face, from the stormy depths of his piercing grey eyes to the flat line of his mouth, seeking the tiniest indication that he could be wrong, that he was overreacting on a hunch, and not on a truth.
And there it was, in the metamorphosis of her expression- gone from the furious visage of a woman scorned to someone suffering from the shock of a terrifying possibility, that the very desperation that he had suspected all along finally solidified into something almost palpable. Because what if- just what if- he was right? What did it mean to be alive without a soul, and when it finally came time for her to die, what did that infer for her existence?
“Do I really look to you like someone who is missing their soul? Is there something- aside from the obvious difference in my voice- that is leading you to believe that I am hollow?” For all of Roesaleine’s shortcomings, she had never once assumed that Amrial saw the world and its people through the same lenses as she did. And it made her curious as to why he looked at her now, as though she were a few degrees less of the human being he had known.
And perhaps that, above all else, was what frightened him. He was concerned for her, of course; he did not know what to make of her situation any more than she did, and he could not predict with any level of confidence what the ultimate outcome might be. But to stare vulnerability in the face—his own as well as his dear friend’s—was as humbling as it was infuriating. He was not in the best state of mind to react to such a challenge, but the realization was a necessary piece in the puzzle of his existence, of the forces that had summoned him back to his mortal limbs and bones. The more he knew about the world, the more he survived, the more troubles he learned from, the more obstacles he overcame—the more certain he was that his overall knowledge was lacking and inadequate. No longer could he use the excuse of inexperience to cover his deficiencies.
The thought made him feel heavy, made him feel profoundly human, and what was perhaps worse, he began to think Roesaleine could be right. What made him so sure that he had the answer? Just because Death had sensed her departure did not necessarily mean he had been in the right, and frankly, Amrial did not know if his preternatural counterpart had the potential to be mistaken in that way. He couldn’t answer her question, her question that seemed simultaneously furious and frightened, a question that was both perfectly logical and completely impossible to know. He swallowed back a bitter response, bit his tongue, and tightened his hands into white-knuckled fists.
While its human embodiment managed to hold on to a small part of Death’s governing wisdom, Amrial was not ashamed to admit that he mad nearly as many incorrect assumptions as he did correct ones. He had known just as many victories as he had defeats, but his track record with situational outcomes held little relevance in a scenario as dire as the one they beheld now. But this was a matter dear to his heart and close to his makeshift soul—Roesaleine’s safety and well-being hung in the delicate balance between ignorance and detection, and part of the reason his fury had surfaced with such abandon was that he feared the consequences of the former. Leaving a wound unaddressed, even an invisible one, made it prone to festering and infection, a combination he knew better than anyone was fatal to mortal beings.
And yet she seemed to be relaxing now, her ire abating. His jaw dropped with dismay at her nonchalance, unable to see or sense the fear and doubt he had raised through his own white hot indignation. “Appearances can be deceiving, Roesaleine,” he told her, his voice harsher than he intended but full of strangled feeling. “You know this. We treaded the left-hand path. We placed wrongful trust in those who cloaked their cruel intentions with praise and empty promises. Of course I have been mistaken, but not…” He faltered, his words halting in his throat. An ache shuddered through him, a deep stab of remembrance and fear, and he cleared his throat. When he spoke again, his dark voice was hardly above a whisper. “But not about this, I fear.”
And he did fear. He feared more than anything. Overcome with the effects of her apparent incredulity, her unwillingness to listen to his concerned reason as a loyal companion, and the defiance he misinterpreted as lack of faith, he shook his head slowly and stepped from their table without meeting her stare. Before he realized what he was doing, he had clenched his jaw and strode for the door, pushing quickly through against the wind to disappear in the white toiling haze of icy snow.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
But would that not hearken to denying a wound might be infected before the distinct symptoms of contamination set in? Was it not the same as claiming perfect health, merely in light of the absence of any discernible pain?
Amrial might not be able to tell provide her with a flawless answer, void of the shadow of any possible doubt. But, likewise, the young woman was no more certain as to the circumstances surrounding the newfound “safety” of her singing voice. Denial and technicalities could only serve as a sturdy crutch for so long; eventually, the truth would come full circle, and if it did not play in her favor, the crutch would buckle and crumble, and she along with it would fall.
For all her insistence on concrete evidence and her tendency to waive what was only possibility, Amrial’s concern had planted that tiny seed of doubt in Roesaleine’s heart. And while doubt alone required no nourishment to sprout into a tree of cutting apprehension, her dark-haired, stormy-eyed and disquieted companion’s final words before he left her alone in the dining area of the inn made Roesaleine’s throat tighten and her heart accelerate. Did Death’s very own gut-feeling not lend just as much credence as Death’s word? Was there even a difference between the two?
Standing there, facing the bare walls, prismatic gaze fixed on knots and rotting spots in the aged wood, it couldn’t have been spelled out for her any more clearly: Amrial, despite that he was riding on an insightful guess and suspicion alone, was convinced that she was condemned.
And, maybe, she was.
It felt as though time had slowed to a viscous crawl between the time that Death’s own embodiment looked away from the stubborn young woman, and the second the door out of which he’d stormed slammed back into place, buffeted by the ruthless winter wind. And with a door and feeble wooden walls separating the two, allowing Roesaleine’s mind the quiet that it required to process all that had previously occurred, everything fell into place, the improbable no longer seemed impossible, and the savior of the Northlands’ own King was humbled by the reminder of her own mortality, and just how fragile it could be.
“Amrial…” She breathed his name on dead air, staring at the colourless shadow of a presence he had left behind. And, before she knew it, she was turning on her heel- travel cloak forgotten on the back of the chair- and sped across the dining room, forcing the door open with her shoulder and nearly getting taken by the wind as it pulled at her unprotected body on the porch of the inn. “Amrial!” The very same whistling wind took the words out of her mouth, took the voice out of her lungs, and tore her cry up into tiny shreds that would never reach her friend’s ears. With that in mind, she forged ahead, feet kicking up snow when she caught a glimpse of his coat through the whiteout of the blizzard.
It must have been divine intervention that kept her legs steady and her balance intact as she attempted to run through snow that bordered on knee-deep, catching up to her companion at what felt like a snail’s pace. The cold stung her face and her legs already began to ache through her threadbare boots, but she would not turn back. She would not let him walk away. She would not let him out of her sight.
Not like this.
Struggling ahead, one step at a time, Roesaleine shot her hand out to grab ahold of Amrial’s sleeve when it was barely within the reach of her fingertips. Fisting a handful of the woolen fabric, she halted him in his steps and pivoted in front of him, using her body as a feeble barrier between him and his departure.
“Don’t you dare- don’t you even think it!” When she yelled this time, it was not wholly out of anger, but to compete with the brutal gusts of wind that tore her volume in half. Pressing the flats of her hands to his chest, she hooked her fingers into his coat, her gaze teetering on the precarious fence between fury and desperation.
“Do you have any idea what it was like? Wandering this world thinking I had killed you, thinking I would never see you again? Only to have you suddenly re-emerge in my life, just to walk away? Well? Do you?” Something else glinted in the singer’s prismatic eyes that flickered from blue to brown to green, depending on the angle at which you saw them. Something even more palpable and cutting than the vehemence she had displayed inside the inn. That something pooled in the corners near her lashes and trickled down her cheeks, leaving trails in their wake.
“Because I will be damned, Amrial, if I let you walk away from me now!” Roesaleine’s voice cracked on the last word, and she managed to press her forehead against his chest before the last of her resolve crumbled like an eroded stone and her shoulders shook with sobs, muffled still by the wind that would not give up.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
The roar of the storm droned querulously on, his dark unruly hair a wild halo tethered to his scalp as the gusts tugged at every lose end attached to his statuesque form. Even the thick wool of his overcoat could not dissuade the prying tendrils of the polar wind, and he clenched his jaw against its bitter onslaught as he painstakingly placed one foot in front of the other in gradual succession. Mechanically, he trudged through the undulating drifts, making little progress for his tremendous efforts. But he stubbornly realized that he didn’t care—he pushed through the exhaustion, the disappointment, the sadness; he marched on through the storm with a heart that felt as cold and betrayed as the frozen landscape. And like the village, the forest, the trees, the hills, he simply had to succumb to the frosty resentment, clinging to the hope of a springtime thaw.
His thoughts had ceased their tiresome rush through his mind as he walked, but it left him feeling as exhausted mentally as the physical fatigue of his protesting muscles. He felt empty and hollow, a stinging pain emanating from his chest with every pulse of his overeager heart. Whether or not she continued to have possession of her soul, perhaps it was not Roesaleine that was the flesh-and-blood shell of herself—perhaps it had been him all along. Like any human being, Amrial had his fair share of faults, and he feared looking back that he had been too selfish in his argument, too caught in the fading current of his former sadness to understand his friend’s very real fears and reservations. Of course she would not want to believe that her soul had been stolen from her, and it was even less likely that she would want to accept that she’d given it away on her own accord. How had he not seen through the rage?
But he grieved in a different way now as he made his way through the storm, making his best guess as to where the nearest road would be. He could not go back, not after they had shouted at one another, not after she’d left him feeling so wronged and broken. Even if it was his fault, even if he’d pressed too hard in convincing her he’d found the answer she’d been looking for, it was too painful—if she did not feel she could trust him as she had before, if she did not consider him a friend and comrade any longer, then he was not certain he could handle a more direct rejection than the one he’d sensed in her outburst. Death had spent the equivalent of five years outside of time, space, and physicality in silent, quivering wistfulness, unable to identify the feelings behind the quakes. But Amrial—Amrial knew now what that torture was, what that quiet suffering stemmed from.
Roesaleine had made her way into his existence like a shadow—silently she crept forward, growing as time strode on, an ever-present affirmation of life and light and perception. She mirrored his thoughts and actions in a way that harmonized with and complemented his own unusual melody, dancing to the rhythm of his heartbeat with surreptitious steps so soft he hadn’t noted their presence until she had stormed emotionally away. His pulse seemed irregular and uncertain now that its accompanist had departed her position. And without her there, he didn’t know how long he could keep time—or even how much longer he wanted to.
The grip on his arm startled him, and he turned just enough to see a blur of indigo cloth and long dark hair against the white backdrop of the blizzard. Before he could speak, she had launched herself in front of him, her small hands outstretched and pressed to his chest, halting him in his knee-deep tracks. The shock in his eyes flashed like lightning, but this time there was no trace of angry electricity in the sea of stormy gray. He hardly heard her words over the cry of the gale, but with a pang of warmth, he realized it didn’t matter. He saw the desperation in her eyes, the desperation that had nothing to do with her affliction and everything to do with…well, with him.
He outstretched his arms, placing his hands on either side of her neck as he angled her elegant face upwards. “Yes,” he told her finally, truthfully, his baritone taking flight with the swirl of white snowflakes. “Yes, I do think I have some idea.”
And with that, he leaned forward, closing the distance between them and pressing his lips ardently, passionately to her own. He pulled away, his expression still stoic, and wiped away the trail of tears upon her cheeks with his thumbs. “None of that,” he instructed her, smiling somewhat. “It seems you’ve forgotten your coat, my dear. Let us get back inside before you wind up buried.”
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
And in that moment, the world witnessed the impossible as Death himself carved and secured an everlasting place on the very heart of an otherwise insignificant young human woman.
Roesaleine Sejourah, on looking Death in the face and meeting his beautiful eyes, perceived a myriad of words and thoughts and emotions in his sculpture-flawless features, none of which she could directly interpret. Lightning cut through and flickered in the storm clouds of his irises, just as they had mere moments ago when he’d unleashed onto her his own searing rage and bitter, palpable disappointment in the woman who he’d thought he knew well. Seeing that lightning continue to thrive struck a chord in the sad young traveler, and her first reaction was to flinch, on the assumption that the fire that fueled his anger had yet to extinguish, and she wasn’t sure any of her remaining defenses were durable enough to withstand it.
But it looked… different, the lightning. And Amrial did not meet her anxious gaze with frustration or heart-deep disappointment, not like he had back at the inn when the only glances they had exchanged were wrought with such passionate anger that her hands had trembled with it, her palms hot and touched with its fire. In fact, there wasn’t a hint of that previous anger on his face or mirrored in his posture; only astonishment, and understanding, and something… something else.
Her heart fluttered in her chest, like a caged bird beating its wings in a desperate attempt to break free, to take flight, when he so gently cupped her face in his hands, his stoic visage all resembling all the more that of a chiseled sculpture while it portrayed no emotion. She tried to read the words on his lips to the best of her ability while the howling wind whipped her hair about her neck and face, and stole away his voice just as it had stolen hers. But, try though she might, the young woman could glean no meaning from the movement of his perfect lips; he could be saying anything. Telling her he was disappointed. Telling her he was sorry.
Or, worst of all, telling her goodbye.
The latter possibility caused her throat to constrict, raw and sore as it already was from her yelling combined with the sharp edge of the frigid air, and she couldn’t bear to think it. She couldn’t fathom that he might walk away from her. The only thing more difficult than living her life thinking her cherished companion was dead was waking up day after day without him there, all the while knowing that he still drew breath elsewhere in this merciless world, and it was purely by choice that he was not at her side.
“Amrial…” She breathed his name on the winter wind, for she had no voice left with which to plead, and even if she did, the fervor she had displayed only moments ago in the warmth and comfort of the inn had long since deflated to nothing. It left her with no more than her eyes to portray her plea, and her fingertips hooked firmly in the wool of his long coat in a last meager effort to prevent him from leaving.
But Death did not pull away; he did not push her away. He did not look away, and he did not murmur a farewell. Amrial said nothing at all; his lips did not move, they formed no words. But his lips.
His lips…
There were no words, and there was no warning before the very winter air parted to remove itself from between them, and suddenly, there was no distance, and they were no longer standing apart from one another, but clutching each other as though they shared the same fear- that one meant to walk away from the other.
But parting was not what the kiss described to Roesaleine. The handful of seconds that their lips met said more than either of them ever could; the kiss spoke of warmth, of understanding, of forgiveness, of longing, of passion, of need.
Most compelling of all, it spoke of love.
Compared to the bitter temperature accompanied by the blizzard, Amrial’s usually cool hands felt lukewarm against her neck, his lips only a touch colder than her own, and the kiss and everything that it stood for warmed her. And for that handful of seconds, where not even the air dared to part them, the young wanderer forgot all about feeling cold at all.
It was with great reluctance that she let him pull away, her fingers instinctively tightening on his coat just a little, and everything he said that followed was completely lost to her as he wiped away her tears. Her prismatic eyes fixed on his face, searching, interpreting, trying to understand – trying to affirm that that brief embrace meant the same to him as it had to her. Her mind felt as though it slugged through tar, and she was terribly delayed when at last she found her voice to offer a coherent reply.
“Yes- let’s.” She nodded as his suggestion to return to the warmth of the inn, quickly unhooking her fingers from the fibres his thick woolen coat, blushing faintly when she realized how long it had taken her to let go. “What were you thinking, running out here in this weather? You might be Death, but I’ve seen you bleed- and anything that can bleed can surely suffer frostbite.”
She was certainly one to talk or admonish, shaking as she was, knee deep in snow and inadequately clad to endure the well below-freezing temperatures of wintertime in the Northlands.
Re: [Res. Astro] A Voice from the Past
The presence of Death had stretched from the very beginnings of time. From the first stirring of motion in the cosmos, the infant twinkling of faraway stars in the inky black void of space, and the vast swirls of newborn galaxies in their immense sparkling clusters, the notion of finality came into being simultaneously with the prospect of existence. Where there was a beginning, there was an equal and alternate end; where there was infinity, so too was there finiteness. The balance of the universe depended on opposition, on friction; the proverbial glue that held together all things physical, all things real, was the underlying conflict beneath the surface—the continuous molecular pull of contrasting forces that ensured the peaceable coexistence of all matter.
But in all the millennia he’d endured—all the shifts in dimension and reality, all the production and cessation of consciousness, all the earthly changes in politics and poetry he’d witnessed from afar—he had never known anything quite like this.
Time may well have slowed to a halt as their lips met, as Amrial’s breath mingled with Roesaleine’s in an intimate exchange of life, of acknowledgment. Despite the chill of exposure to the storm, he could feel the heat of her body radiating from her smooth olive skin, and even his own perpetually-chilled flesh seemed warm compared to the bitter chill of the frightful wind. He felt simultaneously invigorated and terrified as the touch of their lips lingered upon one another, his heartbeat crashing like rhythmic thunder in his ears, like tropical ocean waves upon a craggy shore. Their angrily-tossed words and furious exchange remained caged in a past he could no longer recall; he was only aware that she had come back for him, she had chased him blindly through the raging storm to keep him from leaving, to keep him with her. The fear and heartache that had fueled his trudging steps of retreat blew suddenly away on the ferocious wind, snapping from their tethers with the force of unbridled feeling wielded by the young singer’s soft lips upon his own.
The remainder of the world dropped away as they slid into place—the shriek of the storm, the drifting snow, the blinding curtain of thick white snowflakes—and it was only Roesaleine, Roesaleine and her cascade of silken hair, the subtle perfume of her skin, the gentle racing pulse he could feel beneath her delicate jaw. It touched him far deeper than the corporeal sensations coursing through Amrial’s veins; it rocked him to the very essence of Death that resided within. His hands slid from their place on her neck to tenderly cradle her upper back, and he pulled her closer against him, their bodies closing the distance and banishing the subzero wind’s icy separation.
When he pulled away, surfacing in the blinding white blur of the surrounding storm, he could see only the vibrant prism of her eyes, and he watched as they searched his own, imploring him, flashing with the very same brilliant certainty that was now cemented in his chest. But he came to reason as he felt her petite frame shivering with cold beneath his palms, and he brushed away a strand of hair from her face as he nodded. “I was not thinking,” he told her truthfully, realizing then that his own fingertips had begun to tremble. “I don’t…I don’t know.”
He shifted positions as soon as Roesaleine relinquished her grasp of his coat, experimentally lifting his feet through the knee-deep accumulation. Their tracks were barely discernable through the drifts, having blown closed with the aid of the fierce breeze’s push. He winced, the sting of the cold at last seeming to register, and turned to his companion with his brow slightly furrowed. If he was finally succumbing to the frigid winter outburst, then she had to be far worse—she had not donned her cloak upon her departure from the inn’s warmth, and he didn’t know how long she’d searched through the haze to find him in her determined chase.
Without hesitation, he bent his knees and swept his left arm beneath her while his right arm cradled her shoulders, and he lifted her easily from the confines of the snowbank as he swiveled to return to their shelter. The storm lashed at him more intensely than before as he faced the stinging gale and slowly picked his way back to the comfortable embrace of the inn, and when he finally reached the stairs at the porch, he carefully lowered Roesaleine to her feet and tugged on the front door. The heat from the golden interior blasted them as they entered, and the snow that clung to their hair and clothes began to melt quickly in the entryway. Amrial shrugged off his wet overcoat and hung it near the fire, returning to their table to see that the innkeeper’s daughter had cleared it of their kettle and glasses.
He placed a hand gently on her upper arm, gesturing to the fireplace. “We should pull our chairs closer,” he suggested softly, his voice hardly a hoarse whisper. He flexed his bare fingers experimentally, outstretching his arms towards the fire as invisible pins and needles seemed to pierce his pale skin. “Roesaleine,” he continued, his expression humble, “I am so very sorry for the harshness of the words I spoke to you. I hope that, with time perhaps, you can find it within your heart to forgive a frightened man his aggressions.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
And not just feel alive, but feel, in every sense, connotation and use of the word.
Roesaleine was anything but impassive. She internalized feelings and emotions with which she could identify, express, replicate or taper to any given situation. She knew what it meant and what it was to be despondent and what made a person shed tears. She understood the helpless rush of laughter that tore unbidden from a person’s lungs when they reached the very peak of happiness. And she- without the shadow of a doubt, taking into account her unacceptable behavior towards Amrial back at the inn- could recognize (and, later, regret) the burning rush of anger, as it consumed an individual’s mindful inhibitions in gradual, white-hot waves.
What assaulted all five of her senses the second that her startled lips touched to Amrial’s, however, was not familiar to the young traveler, and when at first the her pulse sped up, it was in light of stark confusion. And- ironically- what startled her more was that she was startled at all by her reaction. Surely she had loved before; she had loved the parents who had nurtured and raised her from infancy, she had loved the friends she had made as a child and into adulthood. But this…
This- whatever feeling Amrial inspired in her- cut far deeper than familial affections and childhood camaraderie. It warmed her and terrified her and woke each and every one of her nerve endings, and in this instance she had never before realized just how much she wanted Amrial near her, close to her, until suddenly, he was.
And the fact and the feeling consumed her mind and her heart entirely, until there was nothing left but emotion.
When at last they parted to once again draw breath, the young woman found her gaze hopelessly tethered to his own, leaving her quite in a daze as she explored the depths of those stormy irises. Those eyes had seen more than she could dare to ponder, and then some. In them, she had witnessed pride when they looked her way; she had seen sadness, and delight and, most recently, a most passionate vehemence, one that she never would have attributed to him had she not been the cause of it. These were eyes that told a thousand tales
Roesaleine was still stunned from this daze, even when she found her tongue to admonish him for retreating into this raging storm that mirrored his very fury. She wasn’t even aware that he had lifted her off her feet until she found her face close to his shoulder, and the snow-carpeted ground was suddenly so far away.
Shivering beyond her control, the young wanderer tucked her head under his chin, her warm breath tickling his neck while she inhaled the scent of him; a scent that was of its own, resembled nothing, and belonged exclusively to Amrial. It stimulated memories of days past, of the very evening where Death had sat across from her in a tavern, listened to her story, and wanted to help.
Five years later, it was still his unsolicited desire to help.
The blast of warmth folded over Roesaleine like a blanket when Amrial pushed through the doors of the inn, and it awakened her from the semi-daze that had seized her mind since that unexpected kiss. She carefully set her feet on the floor, realizing for the first time how violently she was shivering, and by the time he thought to suggest pulling the chairs closer to the roaring fireplace, she was already there, crouching by the hearth, just inches from the sturdy brick and hot stone that kept the licking flames at bay.
And when Amrial settled in across from her and turned to face her, expressing the sincerest of apologies for ill-advised behaviour, all the young woman could do was stare blankly ahead-
-while the rage that she’d thought had run its course once again ignited, eating away at her composure like the flames of the fire as they slowly consumed the fibres of the wood, leaving only the ashes of what it had once been.
“Harshness?” She whispered, the fire picking up the multiple hues of her eyes- green one moment, then blue, then brown, and finally an almost iridescent union of the three. Roesaleine turned to look at him, and the expression that her face wore spoke of anything but forgiveness. “Aggression? Do you think…” Her voice caught, and suddenly her hands were shaking again, but for a whole other reason than in response to the cold. “You beg my forgiveness for harshness and aggression, but you don’t realize… you don’t realize…”
Her hand came into sharp, quick contact with the side of his cheek before she even knew what she was doing.
And, once again, the poor Innkeeper’s daughter was stricken with disbelief as she tried to go about her duties of preparing the dining room for breakfast, helpless to the tension that was building in the room once again.
“You were going to leave me.” Roesaleine hissed, drawing deep breaths that did nothing to calm her once-again agitated nerves. “You walked out of this inn with the intention to leave, over a senseless argument! I thought you dead for years; I yearned to see you again, knowing full well it was impossible. And when you do turn up in my life again, by some miracle, you walk away from me… And you don’t think to apologize for that?”
Hot tears pooled in the corners of her prismatic eyes, then quickly trickled down her olive-tinted cheeks that bore a mild blush from the cold, allied with her rekindled temper. “How far would you have walked, had I not stopped you, Amrial?” She demanded, only seconds before she fell apart completely and buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking with quiet sobs.
Her anger encompassed too many things at once, and it finally overwhelmed her: Amrial’s return, their dispute, his decision to walk away, her decision to give up something that could very well have been her own immortal soul…
Roesaleine Sejourah was a mess, and in pieces, and she didn’t even know how to begin to pick up the shards.
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
The gentle warmth of the raging fire was scalding against his icy skin, his fingers and toes tingling with the electric sensation of blood returning to their tips. He truly had been foolish, rushing out into the winter weather, and yet he did not regret his decision, not even as he sat uncomfortably chilled above a puddle of melted snow at his feet. Though despite Fate’s mischievous interferences in his last worldly journey, Amrial wasn’t entirely certain he truly believed in the influence of what the redhead embodied—he had seen too much, accomplished too much, lost too much as a breathing being of the earth to fall for such wiles—and yet he knew that had he not stormed from the inn and into the winter tempest, he would not be so certain of what he felt now.
The facts that had stared at him so obviously before, that had blinked and laughed and clung happily to his arm since their chance encounter on the road outside of town, now felt as natural as the breath in his lungs, as the pulse in his neck. Which was, frankly, not natural at all—the animation of Death was its own balanced juxtaposition—and yet that’s precisely what made it so exhilarating. As the numbness in his limbs gave way to sensation once more, he couldn’t help but wonder if the feeling that toiled beneath his skin was a result of his muscles’ thawing or the bizarre electrical energy that seemed to flare whenever he glanced over to his companion. It was a new experience indeed, and even though he hadn’t any idea what to make of it, he clung to it like the setting sun clutched desperately at the darkening sky of night—half in ecstasy of what lie ahead, half in panic of the fall, painting its cloudy canvas with broad strokes of orange and pink in a fanfare worthy—and frightened—of the impending thrill.
He looked over to the dark-haired young woman, and though he was somewhat sheepish in light of his apology, his stormy eyes were bright with the hope of forgiveness. Once again they had been reunited; once again they had survived an obstacle thrown their way by the extenuating circumstances of petty disagreements sparked by grief. It was thanks to her this time, however; she had done the rescuing, the convincing. She had shown him a reality he’d failed to notice in the tempest of unfamiliar emotion and paralyzing concern, with the light of her prismatic eyes guiding him in bursts of shifting color to the place within his own heart that she resided—where she had always been, he realized at last. She had become as much a part of him as his heartbeat, as the blood in his veins, as the lingering scar of that decorated his palm.
But then she was frowning, lines forming in her olive skin between her sculpted brows, and before he could react with a query of his own, she was lashing out. She wielded her hot words as a weapon, striking the flesh of his mind like a whip, breaking the comfort he’d found renewed in her presence—and he couldn’t move, could hardly draw breath. She’d stolen the air from his lungs, this time as a result of her flaring rage and pointed, jabbing accusations, and he felt the world around him slow to a tense standstill.
The harsh crack of her palm connecting with the pale skin of his cheek shattered the illusion of stillness as quickly as it had set in. His jaw fell open in shock as his head jerked to the side with the force of the impact. A rare flush of scarlet flooded the site of impact, and his only audible reaction was a soft gasp. For a moment, he could not bring himself to look at her; he kept his gaze fixed on the dancing, shifting flames, terrified suddenly of what he might find in those expressive polychromatic eyes when at last he looked up.
When he finally gathered the courage to shift his stare, his own gray irises were dark and stricken, betraying the deep gash of the wound she had inflicted upon him with that simple—yet forceful—physical gesture. He wasn’t angry; there was no trace of fury in his expression. He looked as weary as he suddenly felt, and he didn’t have the energy for any harsh verbal retaliation. Was this what he deserved? Was this the consequence for the strange feelings that had been threading their way through his system since their previous heated exchange? He had opened himself up to her in a way he had never dared for any other human being, and now it seemed not only had he gone about it all wrong, he had doomed himself by walking away before the revelation had even struck.
“Roesaleine,” he said softly, then paused, words eluding him completely. He watched as the innkeeper’s daughter disappeared back into the kitchen, only half-finished with her preparation of the dining room. “Look at me, Roesaleine. Please.” His voice was pleading and miserable, and he rotated to face her, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He bowed his head beneath the weight of his guilt, then glanced up once more, searching her tear-streaked face for any sign of…of what? Acceptance? Remorse? Was it too much to hope for some kind of affection, however small that might be behind the hate?
He swallowed hard. “I don’t know how far I would have walked,” he admitted quietly, his devastation evident in the darkness of his tone. “Until the storm claimed me, I suppose.”Amrial lowered his eyes. “If I was not welcome in your company, Roesaleine, then I had no desire to remain on this earth. Not without you to accompany me. If the thought of your death was enough to bring me back to life, then I simply could not bear to go on if, after I found you alive and well, you denied me that pleasure.”
He shook his head to himself in shame. “If you can find it within you to forgive me,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper, “I should like it very much if you could relieve me of this misery, the torture of waiting for your pardon.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
Not dissimilar to young children, when they throw a conniption fit over something trivial and work themselves into such an inconsolable frenzy that they completely forget whatever upset them to the first place, the woman was a mess of raw emotions that couldn’t contain themselves. What had happened to tear open her raw heart and cause it to bleed feelings that she hardly understood? What had Amrial said or done to incur the dregs of her wrath, to not only be struck by her harsh words, but the sting of her flat palm as well?
Roesaleine wept hot, bitter tears just as much in her own self-pity as she did in shame of striking – striking! – Amrial. The number of people the woman had struck in her entire life could be counted on one hand, and even then, it had always been under far more pressing circumstances than apologizing over the wrong thing! She had allowed her ill-elicited temper to consume her, to the point where she had hurt the person she cared for the most, and yet somehow validated bemoaning her own tortured feelings?
It was all she could do to hold herself together when Amrial put even less distance between the two of them, his baritone voice tight and unsteady, and his words saturated with raw hurt, raw sadness, beseeching her to look at him. And she couldn’t- she couldn’t, because she was too ashamed and too afraid of how she had upset the calm grey waters in his stormy eyes. Instead, she drew her face away from her hands and stared into the hungry fire, flames licking up to taste the air and glinting off the tears in the corners of her eyes.
But he was right there, so close that she could reach out and touch him, kiss his cheek where her hand had brought a blush to the surface of his skin… The very tremors in his whispered voice, laced with a deeper apology than what she deserved, drew her eyes away from the fire, and her heart was assaulted with the image of the pained expression that her undue harshness had warranted. The raw pain she saw in those deep eyes cut like a knife through the layers of anger and frustration, and Roesaleine found herself regretting her actions right now more than any action she had ever taken in her life. More than anything, she wanted to return to the moment of that kiss they’d shared, the moment when their silly frustrations fizzled out in the cold of the blizzard, and they’d found a mutual forgiveness between them.
Before her overwhelming emotions had gotten the best of her, and she had unraveled the threads of that very forgiveness with the palm of her hand.
“Amrial…” She was helpless but to hear him out, and it only drove her remorse deeper to witness the very same concerns and fears spill from his lips as what had driven her to chase after him in the storm in a first place. Everything that he’d hoped to see on her tear-streaked face was there, and then some, and with an apology and confession of the integrity and genuine honesty that he had provided, her heart ached for the ability to relive the past ten minutes of her life, to do it all over again, and to do it right.
And although the next words to pass her lips did nothing to make up for the awful way she had just treated him, they needed to be heard, all the same. “I’m sorry, Amrial. I…” She sighed deeply enough to practically deflate, and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her sleeve. “I don’t know what has gotten into me… I shouldn’t have said any of that. I shouldn’t have hit you…” Her gaze dropped to her right, upturned palm, still pink from the contact it had made with Amrial’s cheek. “But… what made you think that way? What convinced you that I had become so angry as to desire never to see you again? Why would you ever think that?”
Roesaleine took a slow breath, refilling her lungs with enough air to expand on her apology and perhaps paint a clearer picture of just how much Amrial meant to her as a friend (and more), when the shadow of a rather tall man cast itself over the pair, obscuring the filtered light from the windows. “Pardon me… I don’t mean to pry,” From his square jaw to blue eyes to red-tinted hair that resemble that of his daughter’s so starkly, it appeared that they were in the company of the innkeeper himself. Lucky for them, he was not a particularly frightening man, and didn’t bear the attitude of someone who was enraged by their displays of intense emotion, but neither did he look all too pleased that it was occurring at all. “But with the storm picking up, I expect that every room in this establishment will soon be occupied, so if you’re wanting to reserve one for the night, then it would be best to do so before breakfast is over.”
The young woman got the message loud and clear; get a room, or stop making a scene at the inn. How many times already had hurt outbursts frightened the poor man’s daughter when she only meant to go about her daily chores? To quickly save face, she was the first to stand from her seat on the hearth. “Of course… Please accept my apology for not doing so earlier. The two of us will take a room to share.”
Arching a bushy eyebrow (and looking as though he had actually expected them to choose to leave, instead), the innkeeper shrugged and slid a key off of the loop at his hip, handing it to Roesaleine. “You can pay whenever you decide to check out. And… do keep in mind that there are other people here with very good ears who might not be so keen to listen to any domestic disputes.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
The kiss, too—the kiss they had shared in the swirling white oblivion of a Northlands blizzard—had been rendered strange and uncertain at the mercy of her strike. A physical pain radiated from his chest when he remembered the sensation of her warm lips upon his, at how his hand had fit so easily at the small of her back to pull their matched bodies together. It had been an embrace powerful enough to halt the raging storm in its wintery tracks, an exchange of care and affection that had transcended their mutual frustration. Their questions, their fear, and even their anger had all melted away in spite of the frigid wind, replaced with the warmth of reunion and feelings long unrecognized. But what was that memory now but a reminder of his anguish, his doubts?
But he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her. His gray eyes, slate with a grief he couldn’t possibly express any other way, searched her expression with a desperation unlike anything he had ever known. The sadness over her perceived death had been absolute agony, but not even the throes of that pain could have prepared him for the tragedy of their falling-out. It seemed their sweet exchange in the sparkling white snow had only been the beautiful calm before a hideous emotional tempest, the real cacophony crashing upon them as overpowering feeling rather than anything atmospheric outside the walls of the village inn.
What he hadn’t expected, however, was an apology. The words that departed her red lips startled him, his furrowed brows leaping high onto his forehead in surprise. Her sigh was so heavy that he had to force himself not to reach out to her in physical support; instead, he folded his hands in his lap and waited for her to finish, not yet trusting his voice with speech. It took a moment for him to gather the courage to respond to the questions she posed, and even when he drew in a breath to speak, his inhale trembled as though fighting for its place between hope and uncertainty. “For a long time we traveled together, Roesaleine,” he finally murmured, his tone soft. He tore his gaze away, looking into the dancing vermillion flames upon the nearby hearth. “And for a long time, I grew accustomed to your presence at my side. To your company. Your faith in me. Without that…”
He trailed off, his throat closing abruptly. He simply could not explain—at least not yet. As if on cue, the innkeeper approached, looking each of them squarely with eyes as piercingly blue as the ice forming on the roof of his establishment outside. He could see past the false visage of cheer and the cloak of hospitality the fellow threw over his words, but the heartbroken and confused Amrial said nothing, allowing Roesaleine to speak for the both of them as he cast his gaze down and away. Even the man’s quip regarding domestic disputes did nothing to provoke him; he simply sat passively, transfixed once again by the shifting flames before them, listening past their exchange to the howling wind beyond the walls.
Though it was the young singer whose soul had seemingly left her body, it was Amrial who suddenly felt like a shell—a hollow image of what he was supposed to be, of what he had been just minutes before. He rose to his feet mechanically, as though some other force animated his limbs beyond his immediate control, and followed the dark-haired young woman to the staircase. Ascending behind her, he brought his hand unconsciously to his smarting cheek, allowing it to drop back to his side as soon as they crested the landing. He followed her down the hall to their assigned room, thankful for the distance between them and the bustling kitchen staff and the prying ears of new-coming patrons; when the door closed securely behind him, he collapsed onto the edge of the lumpy, straw-stuffed mattress and buried his head in his hands as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees.
It took only a moment for him to collect himself, to regain some semblance of normal consciousness. He sat up suddenly as Roesaleine locked the door, his eyes illuminated with a fierce determination that seemed to flare to life with the sharp click of the turned key. Springing to his feet, he reached for her as though discovering her anew; his hands cupped her thin shoulders on either side, and after a moment’s pause, he gently pulled her close. Pressing his forehead to hers, he closed his eyes, drinking in her presence as he had when they’d first met in passing on the deserted road. And then, with all the sadness, all the torment, all the suffering and doubt of the past hour behind the passionate gesture, he kissed her again.
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
For like the brilliant luminescence of a candle’s flame and the overwhelming heat that embodies such a tiny spark of fire, to eliminate the burn meant that you would also extinguish the light. And then there would be nothing.
It was from that same integral core—that which lent Roesaleine the courage to caress Amrial’s face—that had moved her hand and orchestrated that quick, passionate assault, the left the both of them equally astonished and equally drained. Had she not cared as profoundly for this man, whose uncanny existence shouldn’t even be conceivable for a myriad of reasons (both comprehensible and otherwise), it wouldn’t have been possible to strike his face with a blow that backed so much passion and power that it stung the tender flesh of her olive-hued palm about as much as stung his cheek.
For was not the most human trait (and, perhaps, greatest flaw) of mankind the inclination to hurt those you held the dearest, when words or gestures wrapped in the gentle cadences of love did not suffice in expressing the songs of the heart?
But although Roesaleine was as human as her vulnerable heart, none of that was any more an explanation than it was an acceptable for excuse for what she had done—of this, she was painfully aware. And as badly as she wished to be the salve that soothed and mended the lesions she’d undeniably scraped along the surface of his already bruised heart, the deeply stricken look that surfaced on his beautiful face made her question whether or not it was truly her right to do so.
Amrial’s words cut into her with such force that it coaxed her own throat to constrict, coaxed more tears into her eyes, and she blinked away before they could fall. But the young singer was quick to realize that it wasn’t so much the voice and phonemes that passed his lips as it was her own sharp sense of guilt cutting into her. And it was a pain that she gracefully accepted and embraced, allowing its jagged claws to embed in the very fibres of her being, in hopes that if it hurt well enough, she would never find herself compelled to hurt Amrial ever again.
“Amrial… I…” She parted her lips and began to speak, only for it to dawn on her too soon that words were lost to her. There were no words suitable to express what she felt, and to try and label the feelings with approximations was simply unacceptable, in light of the pain they shared.
So she turned her attention to the apology that was far easier to express, and met the inkeeper’s disapproving eyes. “Again, please accept my humblest apologies.” The young woman bowed her head respectfully to the large man, palming the key he’d handed her.
Turning from the roaring fire in the hearth, she spared a glance over her shoulder, wondering if the poor, stricken Amrial would require some coaxing to get to his feet and into a room where the two of them would be shielded from prying eyes and eavesdropping ears. But the tall man was already standing, gaze cast downward and ready to follow her out of the foyer and away from the dining area.
There was nothing she could think to say to him as they ascended the dark, windowless stairwell to the third floor, where Roesaleine assumed their room must be, according to the numbers engraved on the key. Too frightened to look back and further observe the pain on Amrial’s face, she took solace only in the soft footsteps behind her, a steady rhythm that synchronized her pulse by half. They reassured her that he hadn’t turned away and fled from the woman who was singlehandedly responsible for his sudden re-evaluation of his revival, and whether or not returning to his corporeal existence had been a fruitless mistake.
She said nothing when he walked past her to the cheap and itchy mattress, where he sat, elbows on knees, and buried his stricken face in his hands. The great Amrial—Death incarnate—hunched over and broken by the likes of a mere woman.
And one who loved him, at that.
Her lungs seized temporarily with a sharp and involuntary intake of breath, one that would have ended in a sob, had she not clasped a hand over her mouth and swallowed it before it could form. With a shaking hand, she turned the skeleton key in the lock below the doorknob, determined that as they would no further disturb the peace, no one would likewise disturb them.
And when she found the courage, she turned her back to the wall to face the gentle man with the heart she had wounded. “Amrial…”
But he was no longer sitting. She hadn’t even heard the creak and crunch of weight giving way on the straw mattress, but Death was once again standing before her, tall and meaningful and with storm-coloured eyes glittering with a passion she could hardly interpret.
And—as she had already so cruelly demonstrated—passion could be construed and expressed in many different, sometimes contradictory ways. His emotion was almost palpable, and the young singer could have sworn that she felt it emanating like buzzing energy from his person, and when he closed the distance between their bodies, she closed her eyes in the expectation that he would—and rightfully so—return the very blow she had dealt.
As it turns out, this was the second time in a day, within the enclosure of just a few hours, that Roesaleine Sejourah’s breath was swept away in a kiss, sweet and sincere and (perhaps, foolishly) unexpected.
At least she was not so slow to react this time around. The young woman hooked her fingers in the cloth fibers of his shirt and stood on her toes, their two bodies already so close that his own racing heartbeat thumped against her chest, and yet it wasn’t close enough. Parting her lips slowly against his, she breathed him in like oxygen, her fingers loosening only to find the tension in his shoulders, then neck, until they settled in comfortable softness of his dark hair.
The kiss was like ice against burned flesh, soothing as it drew out the damaging heat. But as ice soon renders its own unique sting and burn if applied for too long, the ache in her racing heart increased until had to pull away and press her forehead to his shoulder, while her body shook with quick, shallow sobs.
“Please don’t walk away from me…” She heard herself beg, in a shaky, strained whisper interrupted by small gasps. “Please don’t… I don’t what I have done to myself. I don’t know what is going to happen to me, and I don’t know what I will do if you leave me now…”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
Time slowed in its forward procession as Amrial moved in to complete their second kiss, its continuous stream icing over as the force of its current began to ebb. When their lips connected, the warmth of her mouth against his cool flesh halted the marching seconds completely, suspending the universe at a blissful standstill. The inn fell away—the small quarters they had just entered, the gentle glow of warm embers on the hearth, the howl of the blizzard as it raged on beyond the thick leaded window—and they were left a spiritual island, clinging to one another as though each had become the last remaining element in the other’s cold and hopeless world.
Amrial’s grip loosened on the young singer’s shoulders, his fingers moving deftly to her slender waist to bury themselves in the silken cloth of her blouse. His mouth moved against hers with gentle insistence as he tugged her closer, lost in the sensation of warmth that traveled down his limbs with every electric pulse of his rapidly-beating heart. Though his eyes were clenched closed, his senses were aflame; the feel of her hands as they made their way from his sides to his shoulders and at last to his thick dark locks resonated across his skin like gooseflesh, his nerves firing on overdrive at the prompt of her caress. The ambrosial smell of her, too, filled his nose as he drew his long breaths; it was a dangerously sweet perfume that rendered him dizzy with rapturous intoxication, but the searing presence of her body, aligned perfectly with his own, kept him firmly grounded in a new reality he had no desire ever to leave.
A surge of rare warmth crept slowly beneath his skin, flooding his cheeks with the faintest suggestion of a scarlet blush. His hands, absent of their perpetual chill, unlatched themselves from the folds of her clothing and pressed against the soft curve of her back, one running up her spine to tangle tenderly in her dark, wavy tresses. While Death and its embodiment were undeniably inseparable, it was Amrial who shone now, taking possession of his flesh and bones in a way the force that governed him never could manage. Grief had summoned him to the physical realm, but it was love that kept him a part of it—a love he hadn’t even recognized within himself prior to their early morning revelations. Now, fueled by an affection borne of both emotion and physicality, he couldn’t believe he had been so blind to its existence, so oblivious to the power he’d inadvertently kept buried away somewhere deep within—a power that Death had to acknowledge as much as Amrial.
Whatever disagreements they’d had, whatever hurtful words they’d exchanged, they had all dissolved away again, banished by the toiling tendrils of passionate flame that had reignited with the brushing of their lips. He was not yet well-versed enough in the human emotional experience to be capable of feeling much more than the present rush; thoughts of their arguments and even their fateful traipse through the wintry drifts had fallen away in favor of present pleasure, an insufficiency that he would have been thankful for in hindsight. Because all he wanted in that moment—that euphoric moment—was Roesaleine.
But suddenly she was pulling away, pressing her face to his shoulder, her breathing ragged and irregular as a second wave of sobs shook her slight shoulders. His throat tightened, and he wrapped his arms around her in an all-encompassing embrace as he waited for her pain to subside. When she looked up at last, meeting his gaze with her tear-rimmed eyes, his heart broke all over again. “Come,” he whispered, breaking away just enough to ease her to the edge of the straw-stuffed mattress. He wrapped his arm around her, holding her tightly to his side with perhaps more force than necessary, and heaved a heavy sigh of his own. Quiet sobs still shook her frame, each one a tiny gasp that reminded him of what he had said, what he had done.
“Oh, Roesaleine,” he murmured at last, leaning his cheek against her hair, his eyelids fluttering closed as the sting of guilt and regret slowly returned. “I am right here. I am right here, and I am not going to walk away. I will never walk away, never again.” He took a shaky breath, wishing his words could convey the torrent of sentiment behind each strained syllable. When he spoke again, his voice was even softer, huskier. “I am so deeply sorry for all I have done to hurt you. Causing you pain is the very last thing I want in this world. And the very first thing I want…”
He trailed off, sighing once more before completing his thought. “The very first thing I want—if I could have nothing else—is you.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
It was not exactly of the young woman’s volition to pull away from that kiss in favor of making way for heart-wrenching sobs. Never had she been so enraptured with a complete and utter absence of herself—a hypnopompic state of in-between where nothing existed but the two of them and their mingled affections. Falling into sweet embrace with her dark-haired and stormy-eyed companion was as comfortable and calming as retreating under the quilts of one’s bed and closing off the rest of the world; dark behind the lids of her close eyes, and secure, and warm. The everlasting chill of Amrial’s skin seemed to have dissipated completely as though melted by the passion they shared in that kiss, the unleashing of restless feelings and a raw chemistry whose liberation was like a weight lifted from Roesaleine’s shoulders, one that she hadn’t realized was there until it was gone.
But when her heart could no longer hold up to the heaviness of her own shame—for losing her temper and then striking the one person who could singlehandedly keep her from falling apart—there was no holding back the tears, and that beautiful spell was broken.
Leaning into the reassurance of his compassionate embrace, she allowed herself to be led over to the shoddy mattress, where she fell against her cherished companion as though she were suddenly incapable of holding herself upright. Her body felt as heavy as her heart, leaden with unforgiving hindsight.
And finally, when he declared her important in such a way that she was truly able to believe he had come back for her alone, she gently pressed her fingers to his lips before they could spill further unwarranted apology.
“Stop,” she spoke softly, searching his sad eyes for understanding. When at last she removed her hand, her lips took its place—not nearly the calibre of kiss that they had shared moments ago. This one was soft, unhurried, a pure expression of both apology and forgiveness. To reassure him that there was nothing for which he needed to be forgiven, and as compensation for breaking that ardent, breathless spell that had enveloped them in its beauty.
It was with the utmost reluctance that their lips once again parted, but the young woman was loathe to pull away entirely, and her breath tickled his skin when she sighed. “Amrial, you have done nothing to hurt me. You’ve merely forced me to reflect on my behaviour, and I can neither explain it nor apologize enough for what I’ve said and done this morning…” The tips of her fingers delicately traced his cheekbone and jaw, and she swallowed against the pain of regret, misinterpreting the blush that had crept into his skin as a result of their passionate embrace for the blood that the palm of her hand had coaxed into his stricken face.
Roesaleine’s hand trailed down the side of his neck, where it rested lightly between his jaw and shoulder as she went on. “To be very honest, I am not sure that I felt much of anything in the years that you were lost to me. So I can only guess that those years of nothing have caught up to me, and I hardly know what to do with myself, or how to tell you how incomplete I’ve felt in your absence.”
Gracing him with a gentle smile that siphoned the pain from her eyes, the young singer’s hand finally trailed to his chest, where the stable measure of his heartbeat pulsed against the flat of her palm. “It never would have occurred to me that Death would have the capacity to love… And I beseech that he might as well harbour the capacity for forgiveness, for the thoughtless actions of a foolish young woman who didn’t even realize when she traded away her own soul…”
Returning her thoughts to the object of their previous heated argument stole the smile from Roesaleine’s face, and she pressed her cheek against Amrial’s shoulder, her own magnetic fear inspiring a need to be so near him that they’d practically exist as one entity. “What is going to happen to me, Amrial? What becomes of people who have traded their souls when they die?” She was not certain if that was a question that Death was permitted to answer, but the closer she became to Amrial, the more she realized that her beloved companion actually stood separate of the unearthly force that drove him.
For when they had kissed, she had not embraced Death; every filament of the being whose very touch soothed the ache of her heart and the melted the fear that froze her resolve was a living, breathing and extraordinary human being, with whom the young woman had fallen deeply and irrevocably in love.
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
His skin cooled rapidly after the parting of their lips, and he suppressed a shiver as a strange chill suddenly replaced the heat that had flared in his bones. As she leaned against him, he countered the pressure of her slight form against his, tightening the grip of his arm around her shoulders as she wilted into his side. He held her up physically as he had emotionally in their previous journeys, providing the support she needed when her own mind got the better of her. But now, in the aftermath of long-ago remembrances, loving embraces, and outbursts of words and actions now regretted, she was returning the favor—they countered one another in perfectly equal portions, she comforting him just as he consoled her. They were a perfect balance, each meeting the other in the hazy middle ground between guilt and relief.
He felt he should say something, but words eluded him; the normally eloquent embodiment of Death found that nothing was as he had known it before. From believing his beloved companion deceased to their unexpected and joyful reunion in the infancy of a northern blizzard, Amrial had experienced more by way of emotion in those few hours than he had in all other lifetimes combined. It frightened him; he felt vulnerable, he felt confused, but most of all he felt human. Though it wasn’t the first time he’d been struck with that concept, it held a new, deeply profound meaning to him now that was only identifiable in the glowing light that was Roesaleine’s presence. Her companionship provided a human clarity that allowed his thoughts to resonate like the melody of spring birds on a crisp April morning, like the babble of a spring brook tumbling over stones in its freshly-melted path.
With a gentle squeeze, his hand departed her shoulder, his fingertips brushing the bare skin of her neck as his palm found and cradled the back of her head. He sighed heavily, half with pleasure and half with misery, leaning his cheek against her dark silken locks and allowing his eyelids to flutter closed. For several moments, he allowed the concerns she voiced to hang in the air, and he simply savored the feel of her at his side; for that brief pause, he could pretend that the future was not so uncertain, that the fate of his beloved Roesaleine was not suspended in the air where it could, at any moment, take a plummet to the hazy depths of nonexistence. But it was not a notion that he could ignore for long, and he soon found his throat swelling with the dread of questions left unresolved.
Wordlessly, he parted from her just enough to loosen his arm’s embrace around her shoulders, then slowly eased his companion down with him as he leaned backward to lie on the bed. “Death can forgive when such a thing is due,” he began, studying the ceiling through lids half-closed with confusion and emotion. “I do not believe there is anything to forgive, Roesaleine. Even if you had traded away your soul willingly, that act would not warrant an apology.” His arm, which braced her neck while his hand wrapped around her arm, tightened affectionately.
When he continued, however, his tone was grave and soft. “I do not know what will happen to you,” he admitted, unable to fully mask the fear in his voice. “This is not a normal exchange of souls. You are alive, on first account. Giving away or selling one’s soul generally leads to an immediate death of the flesh, or a severe and quick deterioration of life as the soul departs and continues elsewhere. It seems you are affected by neither symptom, only the cessation of your vocal power.” He cleared his throat and paused, hesitating before he went on. “Can you sing for me again, my dearest Roesaleine? Can you sing of your exchange in the woods, of your soul?”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
She heard him speak the words, vibrations on the otherwise still and quiet air that touched her eardrums, registered in her mind as having meaning. She could feel them, a baritone hum in his throat with her head nestled in the crook of his neck, like it had always belonged there. But most potently of all, despite Amrial’s thoughtful efforts to soften their bitter edge of uncertainty with meaningful touches and affectionate caresses, she could feel the dread that they left in their wake.
That there was no telling what would befall Roesaleine Sejourah, the young woman who had so imprudently, so unwittingly become but half a person, all for the lament of a voice that had caused her more trouble than it was worth.
Feeling the back of her head meet a pillow, and a low, wood-patched ceiling coming into her field of vision, she squeezed her eyes shut to battle further tears that threatened to surge from mysterious and vague origins of her heart. Was it possible to be at once comforted and yet so profoundly, unfathomably afraid? Not even Death could divine what was written in her destiny by her own, ingenuous hand. Not even Dearth could save her from it.
Finding the strength and resolve to shift her weight, Roesaleine faced Amrial on her side, slender, olive-toned fingers pressed against his chest to meet the metrical thud of his heart beneath his breastbone. Close enough that she could hear his lungs draw steady breath, could feel the heat from his body on her face, against her own form that suddenly—for the first time the she could remember, prior to today—longed to be held by his supportive arms, and urgently so.
How was it that she had lost her composure? That she had lashed out, feral and unrestrained, at a being so innately temperate and kind, with such a strong capacity to love unconditionally? Amrial had had every reason to turn his back on her and proceed into the blizzard. Just as he’d have had pause to return her strike, tanning her cheek with the flat of his palm, just as she had done to him.
And yet he had not. He instead chose to welcome her into a warm embrace, to halt her tears with kisses both fervent and gentle, to reassure her when hope was not a given. It was not so much that Death chose to forgive, but that he’d held no such grudge to warrant forgiveness.
Amrial deserved far more than Roesaleine had to offer; more than an embrace, more than a kiss, more than a mere song. And yet she was stricken (and irrationally so) with the deepest of disappointment when he requested of her the latter—something of which she was capable, would cost her nothing, not even a shred of effort. Perhaps it was that her songs had become her currency, these past few years, that she was burdened with such a shameful reluctance to oblige him. She traded songs for food, for clothing, for a roof over her head, and to hear Amrial form the request on his lips, however sincerely, flooded her veins with leaden disillusionment. For her songs had long since lost their unique quality, she realised; exploited to the point of monotony. He deserved so much more, so much better, and she had neither anything more nor anything better to give.
“If you so wish it, Amrial.” She breathed the words on an audible exhale, deflated and exhausted from her earlier swells of polarized emotions. “I… I can try. For you, I will try.”
The young woman drew ever closer, such that nothing—not even the atmosphere—stood between their bodies, and angled her head towards his ear, deft fingers trailing from his chest to rest at the slight indent of his waist.
“Close your eyes,” Roesaleine whispered, her lips brushing his ear, “and be sure to listen carefully… for if this works, I know not if I will ever find it in me again to replicate it.”
Inhaling deeply, she filled her lungs with the necessary air that a song required, and then softly—so softly, that had her mouth not been positioned so close to his ear, he might not have heard—the notes and words spilled forth, past her full lips.
It may very well have been Roesaleine’s resolve, her firm desire to help him understand that spun the string of images in Death’s mind, with each and every lilting musical note. Or perhaps it was something far less explicable, a connection between them that even they had yet to discover, let alone comprehend. But whatever the magic behind it, the young woman’s song, like a whisper of silk on a calm breeze, painted a clearer picture of what had happened that day in the winter wood than any simple recount of events could have done:
It painted her despair, on that cold and hopeless afternoon, when even the brightest of sunlight could not penetrate the darkness that enveloped her like an all-encompassing blanket of gloom.
It painted the creature—a child who was very much not a child at all, in any way, shape or form—who had tasted her anguish on the air, like sugar on the tip of its tongue.
It painted their discussion, their exchange; Roesaleine’s plea to be rid of the curse of her voice, her desperation to continue her lonely life as a normal mortal, if she must continue to live at all, no matter what it took.
And it painted that final moment when the despicable being pressed its tiny fingertips to her throat, ripping the demon qualities of her voice from its very chambers—and with it, her immortal soul, in one simple and painless gesture.
Roesaleine had been so convinced that it hadn’t taken anything at all…
The musical notes on the quiet air of the bedroom faded out with the end of the story, a decrescendo on the softest of sighs, before she spoke again.
“But it lied, you know. It lied to me and took what it wanted.” Her mouth pressed together in a thin line, while she bit back the sour humiliation of ever being so naïve as to believe such an entity. “Had it really held true to its part of the agreement, I should not have been able to do what I just did. It is all the same as before, Amrial… the powers of my voice are not gone. They have merely been subdued, but—clearly—not in full…”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
As Roesaleine nestled nearer, that pang of anguish deepened. But as the gentle heat of her slender form radiated to warm the chill of his own flesh, he also felt a rising determination—a desire to protect her, to shield her from life’s dangers in Death’s loving embrace. She inched closer still; their prostrate forms were so close now that her entire length was pressed to his taller body. A weak smile upturned the corners of his lips, and though his eyes were tired, his expression was true; their slate gray depths shone with warm affection beyond the darker shadows of sadness. He sighed a small exhale that softly tossed the loose strands of her hair about her face, and he reached over to brush his cold fingertips across her forehead to tidy the locks.
He shifted positions slightly and moved to his side, facing her as they lay across the foot of the uneven bed. Her eyes betrayed her reluctance to oblige his request, but beyond their prismatic surface he caught a glimmer of hope—a twinkle of longing that coaxed from him a small nod of encouragement. He reached his left arm over her tiny waist, tucking his fingers around her middle and pulling her yet closer until their hips met and their legs gently entwined. Her breath in his ear as she spoke sent a shiver down his spine. When she drew air to sing, he closed his eyes and allowed the darkness—propelled by her preternaturally beautiful voice—to momentarily swallow him.
Her words—if they were words; anymore, he could not say—were so soft they were nearly imperceptible; despite her lips nearly brushing against his ear, he had to strain to understand the melody. So intense was his concentration that his grip against Roesaleine’s waist slackened, and for the length of her aria he was entranced—lost to a world painted by her words, by the intervals of pitch woven by her vocal cords into a vast tapestry of musical color and heartbreaking story. As she progressed, the picture became stronger, painted before his mind’s eye with her masterful audial brush that left blazing streaks of abstract form floating in streamers behind his eyelids. But amongst the chaos was sense, hidden within the strange composition whose haze dissipated as the young singer continued.
Emerald leaves and dark shadows, flashing eyes that peered from dense underbrush along a serpentine path. Hope, the strength of hope, and sadness deep as the cobalt of a summer thunderstorm. The rhythmic percussion of a pounding heartbeat, the rush of adrenaline and anticipation as cold young fingers pressed against a thin olive throat. And then—suddenly, so suddenly that Amrial emerged from the clutches of his vision with a sputter and a gasp as his eyes flew open to meet his companion’s—there was nothingness, abrupt and absolute nothingness. Without pausing to consider what he had witnessed in animation to her song, he wrapped both arms around her and brought her tightly to him, burying her face into his shoulder as he protectively cradled the back of her head. His heartbeat thundered against his breast bone, half with fear and half with relief, and after a long moment of reassuring himself that she was indeed still here with him, indeed still alive, he relinquished his embrace and pressed his forehead to hers.
When she began to speak, he pressed a finger gently to her lips to quell the pain-filled words that bubbled forth from them. “Roesaleine,” he addressed quietly, his baritone soothing and calm. “Subdued or disappeared, we should be thankful for what remains of your ability.” He reached up slowly and ran a finger over the soft curve of her cheek. “You’ve given us insight. You’ve given me an insight I don’t believe the spoken word alone could have conveyed.” He swallowed. “Fae folk are mentioned in myths, in stories meant to frighten young children into obedience. But what few realize is that they often take the very form of those they mean to scare. I fear—I suspect—that you encountered a particularly malevolent breed that day, and I also fear…” His voice halted in his throat, and he met his companion’s gaze with a wince. “…I also fear that we may not be able to find it again.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
Their reunion had beat all odds, and as such it should have accompanied unadulterated joy and reassurance; they had found one another once again, after all this time apart, existing on different planes, and if that alone was not hope’s own signature, then hope surely could not write. It was as though they two were part of the same destiny, that their paths would always meet no matter how far from one another they strayed.
And yet, this brought the young singer no sense of security, no reassurance, no positive end to which she was confident in looking forward. For all those years ago, despite that they had managed to undo the sinister ministrations of Fate herself, Roesaleine was not convinced that in that victory she had secured her own destiny, taken in by the reigns to be driven by her own hands, her own free will. In fact, since the day she had lost Amrial, since she had watched his stormy eyes close and his tall form go limp in her arms, she’d been overcome with the dark certainty that she had lost any and all control over the paths lain before her.
And it seemed as though she had been right; for while her dearest companion was back in her arms, no longer in immediate danger of being overcome by the very force that drove him, what was paved before her own feet—whether danger or well-being—was unknown. For her foolishness had condemned her, and even Death himself had no answers, and she was as helpless and confused as the day they had first met in the tavern, so many years ago.
“Fae folk…” Roesaleine breathed the word like a curse into Amrial’s shoulder, and her hand unconsciously tightened on the slight dip where his waist met his hips. If she could have held him any closer, she would have, but so desperately was she pressed to him that her own rapid heartbeat thudded through her breastbone and against his chest in a rhythm fervent and anxious. “I allowed myself to be duped, tricked… My grief made me short-sighted, and I should have known better. I should have known the price for what I was asking would be grave, should have known that that creature wanted something so precious… How could I have been so stupid!”
With a single, swift jerk of her body, Roesaleine disentangled herself from Amrial’s tight embrace, and moved from the bed to pace the room in a hopeless, panicked fervor. How could she have been so stupid! To pass the years, holding to her heart the assumption that the childlike devil had not taken anything at all. To think she had been so lucky, that in her lonely travels, the world had finally taken pity on her sad, solitary existence and had thrown her a line, a raft in the sea of misery that had surrounded her since the very day she had become known as the King’s own saviour.
Nothing was that simple. Nobody was that lucky, particularly not her, born with cursed songs and peril biting incessantly at her heels.
“And we may not find it—the creature in possession of my soul. Amrial, do you mean to say that it could be lost to me forever?”
Roesaleine’s pacing came to a stop at the wash-basin at the other end of the room, where she leaned on the table and locked her elbows, supporting the weight of her upper body with the shame that flooded her veins. Her reflection, on looking up and coming face to face with a speckled mirror, reflected the humiliation and disgrace of her own naïveté. Her cheekbones were sharper than she remembered, paving her face with new slants and angles as a result of forsaking the sustenance and nutrition that her body required to keep her up right and moving in her endless travels. The prismatic eyes beneath a fan of dark lashes appeared dull, lined with a faint red hue and beneath which deep half-moon shadows dragged on her lower lids. The young singer was spent; overtired, overtraveled, oversung. She hadn’t the will nor the strength to rise up the very day that she had unwittingly sold her soul to a faerie; and that will and strength had yet to return.
“Amrial…” She breathed his name on a heartbreaking sigh, looking away from her own reflection and casting her gaze on her dear companion’s image in the reflective glass, meeting his eyes with defeated futility. “What am I to do? Do I accept what I have lost and endure what is left of my life, hoping for the best? Do I set off on a blind chase in hopes that the paths before me will bring me once again to this creature, just as they had brought me back to you? I don’t… I just cannot believe what I have done. I do not know what to expect, and I do not know what to do…”
Her gaze dropped as her head dipped, averting her colourful eyes from her guilty reflection in the mirror’s speckled surface to stare into the clear depths of clean water that sat undisturbed in its basin. Was there really no hope? Was that what Amrial had been trying to tell her, without voicing those very words for fear of upsetting her further?
If she was condemned, then what did she have to celebrate in her reunion with the dearest friend she’d ever had? For she could only foresee it ending in sadness, just like it had before, if her hope wore so thin that the chances of repossessing what had been taken from her—what she had unknowingly given up—were negligible, and not worth pursuing.
How was it that in her pursuit of happiness, she had sentenced herself to despair?
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
Pain radiated through his mortal body with every heart-wrenching breath—a spiritual pain, a hurt deeper even than his bones. He had known physical maladies in his many pasts; he knew what it was like to suffer, to feel the life slowly seeping from one’s desperate body. But this hurt was another breed entirely, one too difficult to describe and yet too difficult to bear in silence. It was the agony of missed opportunity, the misery of deflection, the sting of ignorance—and perhaps worst of all, the continuous torment of uncertainty.
He wanted nothing more than to keep her in his embrace for the rest of their shared years, to shield her from life’s stormy contempt and protect her from the evils whose paths intersected their own. If only he could keep her here, safe, warmed by a glowing hearth and the shared heat of their tangled bodies; if only he could pull her soul from the depths of the netherworld in which he ruled, plucking it like a blossom freshly bloomed on an otherwise bare branch. Here, nestled between four shielding walls and a raging winter storm outside; here, warmed by the golden glow of smoldering coals in the fireplace; here, in the supple quiet of one another’s presence—they’d captured their own slice of contentedness, a place from which it was physically painful to depart.
And yet, as the young singer observed, it would be heedlessly reckless to live in such a moment too long. As keenly felt as their newly-revealed mutual affection was on either side of the torrent, the fact that they had been reunited at all constituted a necessity for a great deal of caution. They couldn’t afford to delude themselves. They had already proven their resilience in the face of danger, staring into the eyes of villains who threatened them with more than just icy words and sharpened swords. Building on one another’s strengths, clasping hands and facing their demons together had afforded them a power few could rival and fewer still could overcome. Amrial could only hope that now, after these years spent apart, after the soul-altering confessions and heated words they’d exchanged, they could regain that dominion and prevail against their foes once again.
The situation was perhaps more delicate this time around, but so too had they adjusted their own sensibilities; they knew one another now better than they ever had in their previous adventures, and a relationship with that breed of closeness could only bode well for their cause. When she ripped from his arms, he sat up in her wake, perching on the edge of the bed as she paced the small space at the foot of the mattress. “Roesaleine,” he said soothingly, “you didn’t know. It wasn’t your fault.” His stomach flip-flopped, partially in fear and partially in response to seeing her so genuinely upset. “The fae folk…they pride themselves in fooling even the most astute of travelers. It could have been me just as easily. It could have been any unlucky passerby, don’t you see.”
He watched as she studied herself in the mirror, pursing his lips sadly as her flickering reflection revealed a depth of sadness she hadn’t revealed when she looked at him directly. “My dear,” he said when she’d finished speaking, his voice a murmur. The manifestation of death rose to his feet and stepped over to the dark-haired young woman, slowly wrapping his arms around her from behind as together they faced the shining reflective surface. He rested his cheek against her soft waves of hair, meeting her gaze in the silvery image that stared back at them.
The highs and lows of their recent emotional trials had taken their toll on both of them. Until now, Amrial hadn’t noticed the dark circles beneath his companion’s eyes, nor had he noticed the half-moons that hung beneath his own. They were a pair who looked spent and abused by a world too cruel, and it pained him to see such hardships painted on the soft features of her face. “I do not know what to expect,” he told her quietly, tightening his embrace. “But I do know that we will find that monster, that beast that coerced you into this. And, Roesaleine…” He paused, his stormy gaze intensifying in the dim glow of their oil lamp. “I promise we will recover your soul. I will, if we cannot. I will find a way, whatever it comes to. You have my word, for whatever it may be worth to you now.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
A friend, supposedly lost to her forever, because she had seen fit to fancy herself a hero and save the life of a man who bore no importance to her life (aside, of course, from holding the title of reigning monarch of her home).
No, she was no stranger to regret, this young woman with a continually uncanny voice. It had become a part of her for so long that, try though she might, it seemed near impossible to sidestep its shadow. That losing Amrial had not carried enough darkness to sate her wretched life, but she was now little more than a soulless shell, a body driven, perhaps, but sheer force of diamond-strong will alone. What would become of her? Should her heart cease to beat and her lungs cease to draw breath, would she simply cease to exist while her empty husk slowly but surely broke down, returning to the earth that had sustained it for decades as a final gift?
There were, in fact, fates worse than death, and states of existence far more terrifying than even an eternity of pain. In death, an immortal soul remained intact, remained aware, and moved on as it saw fit. In pain, every agonizing second reminded you that you were, in fact, still alive and capable of feeling it. But winking out of existence, having a mind and a heart and thoughts and feelings one moment, only to be completely erased and have nothing at all in the next… That was terror. That was the very origin of fear, and that fear had settled and made a home in the pit of Roesaleine’s stomach, where it sat, heavy and nauseating and refused to leave.
Feeling the stinging threat of tears press from behind her eyes, Roesaleine squeezed them shut, warding them off to avoid looking more like the hopeless cause that she was. Her tired lungs expelled an audible and shaky breath that did little to fend off those pending tears, and she feared she would find herself letting go completely.
That is, until the sensation of another presence, arms around her waist and another body pressed against her back, snapped her out of the global misery that accompanied her overwhelming fear. Like raindrops on a bonfire, Amrial’s presence and proximity brought her back to the here and now, and managed to dampen the flames of despair that plagued her, his soft, baritone voice close to her ear so sincere and reassuring, murmuring words of hope. And she wanted to believe those words; there was no way to describe how desperately she wanted to feel that everything would unfold to be well in the end, but the truth of it burdened her shoulders like lead, and she could not be certain. And neither could Amrial.
“I feel myself a fool,” she admitted sadly, meeting his stormy eyes in reflective, silver surface of the mirror. “Not only in that I was duped, but because I believed that all it would take was a little magic to erase my troubles and pain. I believed it, in the moment… Because I wanted to believe something. Amrial, what was I thinking…”
The young woman covered his hands with her own, seeking to warm them and drive that perpetual chill from his skin, although knowing full well that it was merely part of the fabric of who he was. And she could no more drive that chill from his skin than he could reacquire her lost soul at will.
Her reflection in the mirror plagued her, taunted her, revealing the face of a fool who had unknowingly given up her soul for a peace and reassurance that she had yet to find, and Roesaleine simply couldn’t bear to look upon in any longer. She twisted her body in Amrial’s arms, so that his hands rested at the small of her back, and her own rested against his chest, with the strong beat of his heart beneath her fingertips. “It isn’t fair…” The young singer murmured as her prismatic eyes met his own. Reaching with her other hand, she gently cupped the side of his jaw, caressing with her thumb the angry red mark upon his cheek where she had struck him. “You have come back to me. You’ve returned, and my happiness should be restored, but here I stand instead, fretting over the second greatest mistake I have ever made in my life… when all I want to do is what I should have done five years ago, and take the time to explore how much you mean to me.”
She then brought her lips to his in the softest of kisses, delicate as a butterfly’s wings, and yet her heart still swelled such that her chest ached, and it was not long before tears trickled from her eyes and down her cheeks, at which point she pulled away, embarrassed and spent. “Forgive me this emotional deluge… I am several paces beyond weary. It strips me of my strength…”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
And that’s precisely what he would do. He’d left her before, and though his abandonment in death had been neither planned nor intentional, he realized upon returning that even as Death he had suffered from the distance between them. As it turned out, even Death could be a fool; he’d been mad not to recognize what had walked so faithfully by his side all those years ago, what had stared him in the face and held his hand through thick and thin. He had belonged to her all along, from the moment their paths had crossed at the dingy backwoods tavern that fateful morning. Too blind to see what shone so brightly, so passionately before him, he’d wandered on with the assumption that she, too, cared for him as a companion—but, naively, nothing more.
He squeezed his eyes closed for a moment, inhaling the scent of her hair as his cheek rested against the soft dark tresses. When he opened them again, gazing upon Roesaleine’s tired face in the mirror, he saw lurking in her expression the same horror, the same incredulity that she’d donned gazing into his dying eyes on the throne room floor. His throat tightened at the memory, so burned into his mind that he could no longer brush it away with thoughts of, I did not know or I believed she would move on. She’d moved on from the reality of their tragedy, but never had she truly departed from the ghost of his memory trekking at her side. She’d wanted to believe in him, and he hadn’t allowed that. He hadn’t fought for that, believing himself unworthy of another hard battle when she had far better prizes behind less dangerous doors.
Feeling guilty all over again, he almost couldn’t bare to look down into her gaze when she shifted in his arms to face him. His cold hands cradled the small of her back with an apology’s delicacy, but he did not speak for fear of his voice breaking beneath the weight of his own foolishness. “No,” he finally said, his voice an emotional whisper. He pressed the weight of his cheek into her soft palm, exhaling softly. “My return does not require you to push your concerns aside for my benefit. Mistakes, my dear, are part of life; without them, we would not learn. A fool is not someone who takes action to remedy their ails; a fool is someone who stands idle none the wiser.”
He would have continued, but he found his lips suddenly occupied by the warm, tender kiss of his dark-haired companion. “Roesaleine,” he murmured as she pulled away, putting his arm on her shoulder and pulling her gently towards him once again, “I am here now, and I am offering you my help in whatever way I can. Come.” He wrapped his arms around her slender shoulders and lifted her effortlessly from her feet, lowering her to the mattress where he joined her at her side. “If weariness were capable of stripping your strength, my dear,” he said gently, propping himself on his elbow to look into her eyes, “we would not be here, together again. And that is precisely why we must fight, do you see? A weaker soul would have collapsed, defeated, but here you are, soldiering on against all odds.” He sighed softly, placing his cool palm on her forehead before brushing aside a few stray locks of hair. “For today, you should rest. And I will be here when you open your eyes once more.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance
“Maybe… Maybe I would prefer to be a fool.” Came the young singer’s whispered confession, her already quiet voice muffled against the fabric of his shirt. “I wish that my only concern was me and you. Just me and you, and nothing more…”
Amrial’s gentle arm was around her shoulders in that moment, and in the next, the sensation of her feet lifting from the ground. Roesaleine didn’t protest, didn’t fight the support that he so kindly offered, but leaned into her companion’s shoulder and gave way to that confusing amalgamation of hope and fear that churned in her stomach, stiffened her muscles and brought tears to her eyes.
The give of the mattress beneath her weight played on that sensation of utter weariness, a fatigue that she could not seem to shake. But when she opened her eyes again, Amrial was next to her, close enough that she could count the dark lashes that framed his stormy eyes. “You have always been the one to call me on my excuses, haven’t you.” A weary smile graced her weary face, and for a handful of seconds, reached her prismatic eyes. “It’s part of what I always loved about you… You were the hands that picked me up and told me to keep moving when I was determined to give up and things be. I would not have come as far as I had, were it not for you…”
Reaching with her arm, Roesaleine’s slender fingers caressed the contour of his cheek, before her hand came to rest lightly at his neck, beneath his jaw where the gentle thrum of his pulse reminded her over and over, with every beat, that he was alive. “You make me strong.” She murmured, tired and yet reluctant to blink, lest she miss a second of his smile or the emotions in his deep eyes. “I have told you this before, and Amrial, I stand by it.”
His cool fingers brushed her forehead like a breeze, not enough to make her shiver, but enough to bring down the temperature of the heated worry that wracked her consciousness. The baritone of his voice was like a balm that soothed her fear and agitation, and she had not realized how terribly she wished to sleep until he made the suggestion.
“I don’t want this to be a dream,” the young singer sighed, expelling air and apprehension from her lungs in a single exhale that tickled the hair near his forehead. “Please don’t be a dream, Amrial. I don’t know what I’ll do…”
Lids darkened from restless nights closed over the uncanny singer’s prismatic eyes then, her hand resting at the base of his throat as the beat of his very real heart lulled her tenderly into a hopeful sleep.
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
Her small frame relaxed against him as she drifted further off into slumber. He was glad that she could find a temporary reprieve from the tension and worry he had inadvertently thrust in her direction that day, that her body, at the very least, was able to catch up with it all. A gentle, weary sigh of his own lifted and dropped his chest, and he closed his eyes. Amrial was wise; he could assist her with a great many problems and offer her advice when her quests required such guidance. But here, now, he felt useless, rising up against an invisible foe and fighting an unprecedented battle with little more than hope and determination as the weapons in his hands. Death could provide reassurance for his dear friend from dawn until dusk, but pretty words and good intentions were nothing if not poor cover-ups for a darker uncertainty that plagued him. And he would not lie to Roesaleine Sejourah.
Until her soul was safe once more inside her vessel of flesh and bone, sleep was perhaps the truest solace she might find. And try as he might, Death and his permanence was no match for the mysterious forces of the subconscious; he was too resolute to understand the fleeting nuances of what was more or less ‘living death.’ Sleep, he thought again, the word echoing through his mind like the mellifluous chimes of a calling prayer, Brother. If you do nothing else this night, please keep her safe.
Heaving a slightly heavier sigh, Death settled back into the cushion of the pillow and allowed his eyes to flutter closed, his exhaustion at last truly seizing the fibers of his being and forcing him to submit. With Roesaleine wrapped in his protective embrace, the warmth of the fire, and the wicked howl of the wind beyond the walls, he too began to slip delicately into the pool of unconscious rest…
“Amrial.”
The voice jolted him awake, his eyes flying open. In a momentary panic, he realized that the young singer was not beside him, and the flames had perished to smoldering ash upon the hearth at the foot of the bed. “Alair?” he asked, his voice strangled as he sat immediately upright upon the lumpy straw mattress. “Alair, where’s—”
“Calm yourself, brother.” The dark-haired young man smiled reassuringly, his blue eyes capturing what little light the dying fire cast in the chilly room as he regarded his startled elder sibling. “You are dreaming.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, bouncing a little before furrowing his brow in disapproval at the bed’s unsatisfactory level of comfort.
“Did you receive my message?” Amrial asked.
Sleep nodded once, sliding his azure gaze slowly to Death. “I did." He paused for a long while, with nothing but the uneven rhythm of their breaths filling the silent air. "Amrial," he murmured at last, "there’s something you must understand about her…”
“Her soul,” completed Death hoarsely, casting his stormy gaze downward. “I know.”
Alair regarded his brother carefully. “I am surprised she has managed to fall asleep at all. To lack a soul…”
“I know what it is to lack a soul, Alair,” Amrial shot back, his tone more concerned than angry, his gaze suddenly distant with worry.
“It makes dreaming…difficult,” the Sandman admitted quietly, staring into the faint glow of ash at the foot of the bed. “Not impossible, surely, but significantly more complicated. There is no knowing what she is capable of seeing now, and I can’t say whether it will be better or worse. I can only do so much for her. Brother…” Sleep lifted a hand, draping it upon Death’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. But I will do everything I can.”
Death nodded silently in contemplation. When he turned back to meet Sleep’s gaze, Alair was gone, and Amrial stumbled headfirst into deep, dreamless blackness…
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
When the young woman with an extraordinary voice reclined on the scratch straw mattress, pressed against the cool form of the companion that she had long since thought she’d lost, she hadn’t expected to fall asleep, let alone dream. Suffer a nightmare, perhaps, but she could not quite call it that, either. The images behind the darkness of her eyelids were… well, less images than they were sensations. Snippets of sound, flashes of visions, a tsunami of feelings, none of which really made sense. On one hand, she heard her friend’s voice; Amrial, and another, one that she did not recognize. But as quickly as it was there, it was gone, and her attention was relocated.
Singing. Crisp and clear, like it was being shouted from a mountain, but without an obvious, focal location, as if it was coming from everywhere all at once. Roesaleine knew that voice… because it was her voice she was hearing, in the language of the Southlands in which she had ground up. What she didn’t recognize, however, was the song. It was beautiful, but with an air of urgency, like a warning or a plea…
And finally, when the dream segued into a nightmare, it did not, in fact, segue at all; it plummeted, and the shock value was nothing less of paralyzing. Roesaleine didn’t understand what she was seeing, at first; or, perhaps what she did not understand was why she was seeing it. The yelling and the smoke. The bleeding, the dying, the casualties. The smell…
War. The dark-haired woman was, in fact, witnessing the product of war. She had seen battles, in her day, back when any two of the four Lands on the continent of Uneste did not see eye to eye, but those were different. Isolated, and, most importantly, escapable.
Roesaleine could not escape this. She could not even close her eyes on it, shut out the horrors that burned through her eyes and branded her mind. Paralyzed, unable to turn away, unable to blink as the gruesome scene of men falling, never to rise again, assaulted her senses, and she couldn’t even cry or cry out. There must have been some significance to it, this terrible vision, but whatever that significance, it was buried deep in the dread at the pit of her stomach, the only thing on which she could truly focus, up until the point when she finally opened her eyes.
One hand still rested gently at the side of Amrial’s neck as Roesaleine regained consciousness, the steady rhythm of his pulse a reassuring constant beneath her soft fingertips, but she was startled to find the other hooked fiercely in the front of his tunic. Her fingers were hooked so tightly in the woven fabric that her knuckles were white. Startled and dazed, she let go and eased herself into an upright position, mindful not to wake her sleeping companion. But Amrial must not have been consumed by slumber so deep, for he opened his eyes the second her fingers withdrew from both his tunic and his neck.
“How long have I slept…” The young woman murmured, raking a hand through her thick tresses of dark hair. Sunlight streamed through the window, bright and opaque and high in the sky. The afternoon had not yet passed. “Amrial, I had the most unsettling dream that I cannot even begin to explain…” Something deep in her subconscious mind warned her that until she locate her soul, the missing part of her that somehow survived separate from her body (and from which her body, somehow, also survived separately…), her slumber would not be without such visions. Not now that she knew why her chest felt empty; it would be on her mind until the problem was rectified.
Or, until it became apparent that there was, in fact, no hope…
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
The pale-skinned embodiment of death may not have been physically present on the battlefield, but no man or woman with a weapon in their hands and fight in their hearts could deny his omnipresence. He lingered with the metallic reek of spilled blood; he echoed with the terrified cries of the fallen; he glowed bright in flashes of silver blades. He even dwelled in the sniffles sobs of those grief-stricken by the premature loss of loved ones. At once a villain and a god, he was the one terrible, undeniable constant in the life of anyone bestowed with sentient existence—revered but feared, necessary but grim.
That Roesaleine’s dreams were filled with half-conjured remembrances of violent wars and dark times long past spoke volumes of Death’s eternal legacy, yet had he realized just what she witnessed in the throes of her slumber, it would have drawn yet another painful crack across the surface of his wounded heart. Believing her to be dead—and indeed, knowing that she functioned now on borrowed time—had filled him with a sadness he had not previously known was possible to experience. Coupled with the anxiety of genuine care, the outwardly stoic Amrial fought a raging internal stream of emotion. He wanted nothing more than to keep her safe, to fold her in his shielding arms until the very end of time…
But it was not to be. They had faced long, danger-fraught paths together before; it was time they do it again. This time, however, they had the shared sensation of newly-confessed love, coupled with the bond re-forged at their unexpected reunion in the snow.
When the dark-haired singer stirred, Amrial pulled her closer to him, locking her in a tight embrace as she pulled her grip from his tunic and her palm from the slow pulse at his cool neck. “The afternoon has not yet passed,” he said, his voice muffled in her hair as he pressed his lips to her head in a kiss. “But the storm has abated.” The sunlight filtering through the crude burlap curtains was bright, reflecting from the surface of soft new snowbanks that blanketed the ground. Despite his genuine attempt at optimism—the weather’s improvement should have sparked some kind of heightened mood, surely—his brows knitted together nevertheless. “Your dreams…” he said, trailing off. Death’s thoughts traveled immediately to his younger brother. Should Alair’s dreamsand not have eased such burdens? he wondered.
“Come.” He swung his legs to the side of the stiff mattress and pulled her onto her feet. “Let’s get out of here. We will both feel better, I suspect, if we leave the confines of these walls and begin our quest.” A smile softened his chiseled features, and he opened the scuffed wooden door. “We should gain as much ground as we can during this rare spell of bright weather.” He paused and cleared his throat, and when he began again, his tone was deep and tender. Reaching out to take her hand, he stopped in the corridor and leaned in close. “Dire though our situation may be, my dear, I am thrilled to have you by my side again.”
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
Regardless, their silhouettes didn't fade until her recollection of the dream began to crack and splinter, and the fragments were washed away with the afternoon sun, and the voice of the single man to whom she owed everything: her life, her love, her happiness. "I dreamed... I think I dreamed of war." The young singer mused, touching her forehead where the memory of his cool lips lingered and filled her with impossible warmth. "But I am not going to deign to interpret my subconscious mind at a time like this. I can't begin to guess how much time I--we--have to waste, but I have wasted quite enough time drowning in confusion and woes."
Following him towards the door, the young singer retrieved their outer wear which, in Death's haste and eagerness to help her, he'd forgotten. "Take a moment, now, Amrial," she chided gently, a smile playing on her full lips. "Neither of us will be venturing very far in the snowfall beyond this shelter without means of warmth. Or, at least, I won't." How her preternatural companion's body fared in the wake of the world's harsh elements, snow in particular, given that his body temperature remained naturally cool, but Roesaleine was not like him; she was mortal. Soulless... and yet, sill irrevocably mortal.
In essence, an anomaly. But there was no longer time to pay a thought to that.
Standing on her toes, she helped his arms through the sleeves of his heavy coat before fastening her own cloak at her throat. No sooner did her fingers fall from the bronze clasp that she found them captured by Amrial's cool palms. His breath tickled the hair that framed her face when he leaned in, and there was no falsity behind the smile that stretched her lips. "Amrial," she began, squeezing his fingers with affection, "if losing my mortal soul is truly what brought you back to me, I'd have given it up years ago. Just to have you again." It was not an exaggeration; but Death was intuitive enough to realize that, just as he was likely intuitive enough to anticipate the kiss she instigated.
Releasing only one of his hands, Roesaleine descended the staircase with grace, and approached the small desk where the innkeeper's wife tended to numbers in a book. Offering thanks for the room, and a meaningful apology for the uncalled for behaviour that had occurred earlier on (her palm still burned with the guilt of striking the man she loved), the young woman reached into the pocket of her long skirt and produced the fare for the room, with additional coins to compensate for her outburst. Fortunately, it was accepted without incident or hard feelings, and the woman at the desk wished them well as they went on their way.
In its wake, the storm had added a foot-high layer of snow to blanket the ground. Climbing past the top of her boots, the dark-haired young woman threw grace to the wind as she struggled just to maintain her balance, leaving the premises of the inn. "The better traveled roads should not prove to be quite so great an obstacle," she huffed, lifting her knees high for the sake of mobility alone. "I haven't a clue as to the best direction we should travel, but if we take the path away from this mountainous village--that was the road I traveled to get here--I expect the weather will not be quite so spiteful..."
There was no telling if they would find anything in retracing her aimless steps. But they needed somewhere to start, or there would be no room for hope to survive, let alone grow.
Re: [Res. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
“Indeed, there will be time for such negative dwelling on the road, if we must dwell at all upon our woes,” he drawled, but despite the touch of intended humor, his tone was resigned. It would do no good to hide his reservations; likely she would sense them anyway. “I beseech you not to worry about things beyond our control, my dear,” Death continued in spite of his own trepidation, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “There will be a time for your concern, and while it may be difficult to keep it at bay, we mustn’t distract ourselves with needless fret.”
It was perhaps hypocritical to say such things, but it was beneficial for Roesaleine to hear the words nevertheless. He knew her well, so he was aware that bidding her to pack away her anxieties was futile instruction, but he hoped it would do her good to hear it from his lips. Too long had she wandered her path alone, both in her flight from magic-fearing kingdom authorities and in her more recent travels since King Rheigio’s attempted assassination. Supportive words from a trusted companion and old friend (and more) were precisely what she needed given to her in wake of her fear.
“We have one another now, do we not?” he added, his voice hardly a murmur. He tied closed his fur-lined coat at the waist, then reached out to clasp her hands in his own. Stepping closer to close the gap between them, he smiled. “For all I wish you were not in such a predicament, Roesaleine Sejourah, I fear I am too cruel, for I would not have intervened had I known we would be reunited at such long last.” The kiss she initiated was passionate enough to steal breath from Death’s lungs, and he found himself knotting his cool fingers in her long, dark tresses and cradling the back of her head.
When they at last reluctantly resurfaced, Amrial was glad to feel the young singer’s palm against his own, their fingers lacing together as though never once they had existed apart. They descended the stairs quietly and without incident, stepping from the inn’s front door in a fanfare of squealing hinges. The landscape was nearly unrecognizable beneath its thick blanket of fresh snow, and the sun that reflected from the new-formed banks was temporarily blinding. He reached in to his coat’s deep pockets and pulled forth a long wool scarf, patterned in flecked tweed the same mysterious shade of gray as his steely eyes, that he proceeded to wind several times around his neck to fight the bitter breeze lingering in the blizzard’s wake.
At his companion’s unsteady attempts to make her way to the road, Amrial had to suppress a laugh. “I am sure the going will get easier,” he affirmed, smiling broadly at the look of frustration painted across her sweet features. “Especially with my help, yes?” Without asking permission, he made one bound toward her to close the space between them, then scooped her up and off the ground with one arm at the crook of her knees and the other around her back.
“Until we get to a better-traveled route,” he declared, looking down at her in his arms adoringly, “I shall be your winter sleigh."
She was missing a soul. She should not be standing, walking, breathing in the wake of Death himself, but for how long her mortal body would continue to thrive without that which made her intrinsically human, she did not know. It was her only hope that having the epitome of life's absence as a companion that, should she begin to fail, he would not see to the end of her last breath.
Or that, at least, he would bend his own rules just enough to buy her time...
All of a sudden, the snow no longer gave way to her feet, as they ceased to touch the ground. It was with a gasp, her breath fogging in front of her, that the young singer found herself cradled in Amrial's arms--stronger than she remembered, but no less supportive. Laughter she'd thought impossible, given her current crisis, tore from her lungs, and her arms snaked around Amrial's neck. "But you've already swept me off my feet," she teased, pressing her lips briefly to his cheek. "You did, over five years ago, before I was quite mature enough to realize it."
She would not pass up the assistance, however; her feet were already chilled from the overspilling of snow into her ankle-high boots, and any shameless excuse to be near Amrial made the atrophied wings of her heart begin to flutter again. Leaning her head in the crook of his neck, the world-weary young woman breathed in his cool scent, nondescript yet so uniquely his own, and memories flooded her mind's eye. Gone and risen again, he looked the same, sounded the same, felt and smelled just the same. It was as if he had never really been gone, but just out of her sight, beyond the reach of her fingertips...
"What was it like?" The words fell from her lips before she could stop them, a curiosity that forced its way out of her mind and out into the open. Pressing her lips together in thought, Roesaleine ventured to clarify. "When you... well... I suppose I'm asking what it felt like to die. Or to be dead, considering who you are, and that you are not human... Were you still aware, when your body no longer belonged to the earth, as it doe s now? Were you still you, Amrial? Or were you someone else?"
Or--what she could not bring herself to query aloud--had he been a someone at all, or just the passive force that stole heartbeats and breaths? That which stole life?
With enough grace to realize that the question had, undoubtedly, put him on the spot (and in no way which could be considered fair), the young singer ventured to take weight out of the gravity of her curiosity. "I suppose I am asking for my own obliviousness. You cannot die--not really, even if I watched the life leave your eyes... So why could I not sense you? When death and the dying surround me, all the time and everywhere, and yet you were nowhere to be found... Not even--" Remorse cut her sentence short, until she found her tongue again. "Not even my voice, before I was foolish enough to trade my soul through it, could reach you... And it was you who taught me to sing to my advantage, and with my own intent."
When the better-traveled road through Osmadth yielded itself through the thicker layers of snow, Roesaleine gave Amrial's shoulder an affectionate squeeze, indicating he could put her back on her own two feet. For all she was grateful for his help, the last thing she desired was to become his burden. "If I had known, Amrial... If there had even been the most fragile thread of a sign that you could come back to me, I don't think I'd have been so foolish as to do what now renders me in endangered. Or... would you not be here, now, otherwise?" Prismatic eyes sought the stormy irises of death's embodiment. "Had you not thought I'd died... would you not have returned to me...?"
Re: [r. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
His eyelids fluttered closed for a moment as he walked, savoring the warmth of Roesaleine in his arms, her breath hot and alive on his neck. Her question, though not altogether unexpected, gave him pause enough to hold her more tightly against his torso—protectively, both for the young singer’s sake as well as his own. It was a subconscious reassurance against the aching torrent of recent memory, a pain that was only dulled by the fact that the grief which had stricken him had turned out to be mostly unwarranted. Despite the bittersweet reunion—one whose bright spots of joy cast equally dark shadows of uncertainty—he remained emotionally raw from the preceding experience that brought him back to an existence flesh and blood.
“That is not an easy answer to put into words,” Amrial admitted, his soft tone betraying the sting of remembrance conjured by her query. “It was not my first such experience, although it feels new each time it occurs.” He looked down stoically, his gray eyes locking with the spectral gaze of his companion. Unable to decipher the expression held there, he proceeded with honest caution, hoping that it was only curiosity in its purest form that fueled her questions—that she was not looking for answers regarding her own demise, which he refused to acknowledge as an option. “For me, it is a gradual process. It’s like a sunset, I suppose; an event whose approach I am able to detect and measure. From what I have gathered, most creatures experience their actual deaths rapidly—like diving into a lake. A quick plunge, only without the need to resurface for a breath.”
He lowered Roesaleine back to her feet when the drift-laden road gave way to a lighter dusting, but he did not let his touch stray far. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her tight to his side. “I think you must have felt me, somehow,” he went on, his voice still hushed. “Outside of these bones and muscles and senses, I am not as you know me. Not quite.” An expression that was half-smile, half-wince flickered across his sculpted face. “As I am, here, now, the force that powers me is channeled and filtered by a human body. What results is personality, is behavior, is knowledge—parts of me that must exist inherently, but have no outlet for intelligible expression.”
Suddenly fearful that his description might put her off, he slowed his pace to a stop, stepping before Roesaleine with a knitted brow of concern. “I am me, but I am different. Had I the faintest idea how miserably you had fared since my departure—had I any way of knowing—I would have done everything in my power to return to you. I want you to know that, to believe that.” Reaching out, he placed one hand on either of her shoulders and squeezed them firmly. “Believing that your soul had passed, and that your death had resulted, was what drew me back to this world. It was the only way I could have known—the only way that you could have reached me.” His throat tightened, and he looked to his feet. “Death is no deity; I hear no prayers. Your semblance of dying coaxed human emotion from a force incapable of such feeling, and I was drawn back to this realm in order to feel it. Because I needed to feel it. Because, Roesaleine…”
He trailed off, searching for the proper words to express the swell of gladness that rose in him. Instead, he bowed his head and gently placed his lips upon hers, delivering a sweet, lingering kiss that spoke volumes more than any cobbled-together phrase ever could.
“We have faced uncertainty before, my dear, and we shall do it again,” he murmured. “You must have hope, for you are the only living being whose soul could bring Death to life.”
Re: [r. Astro] Of Life and Death and Inevitable Happenstance [18+]
Not once, in all the time they'd spent together, had Amrial ever asked her to apologize for who she was, who she was not, or what she could or couldn't do. And with her head more firmly on her shoulders, and her emotions relatively placated by his mere presence, she would not ask of him likewise to apologize for any of the above.
The young woman leaned into her lover's kiss, cupping the back of his neck with her palm to prolong it for precious seconds, before she released him and allowed him to utter words that warmed her, but were otherwise wholly unnecessary. "I'm sorry," she whispered, taking his cool hands in her own, prismatic eyes not leaving his for even a beat. "It was not my intention to make you feel remorse. Even forces of nature, such as yourself, cannot reach betray the fact that you are a force of nature. And, like my unharnessed voice, so many years ago, nature will do as it pleases." There had a point in time when she might have been more apt to blame Fate, not nature and circumstance. But considering they had challenged and won against Fate a half a decade ago, that was no longer the case.
"I'll be truthful; I never stopped hoping. I thought I had, at one point... I thought I'd given up." The young singer confided in her companion, fingers laced through his as they tread the chilled, snow-covered earth. "But if that were truly the case, I'd have ceased wandering years ago. I'd have remained static, without purpose, and without the drive to so much as draw breath. But in all of my wanderlust, I think, deep down, I was still searching for you. Because a part of me was determined to find you; determined that you were not gone. So you don't need to persuade me to have hope, Amrial. It is because of you that I was ever able to hope at all, and although you died... you were never dead to me. I know that now."
It was easier, it seemed, for the two to engage in perpetual (and perpetually unnecessary) apologies than to discuss the current crisis at hand: the crisis that was Roesaleine, herself, walking and drawing breath when it shouldn't be possible. And that suited the young woman just fine: because she didn't want to think about it, about the void in her voice where her soul should be. She didn't want to think about it when Death himself could not provide her with answers, because she feared then that answers would, in the end, not be found.
But perhaps Death himself was not the one to consult on such a matter. After all, while Amrial was all-knowing and omniscient in regards to his own domain--the nature of dying and death--it did not necessarily make him an expect on life, and the the quality of living.
Someone who had a inkling into both realms of knowledge and existence, particularly the nature of both... and the illegal loop holes embedded in the fabric between. Someone, therefore, with a keener eye for anomalies, exceptions, and even 'cheats' among the living and dead.
Roesaleine might not have realized that such an expert might be in her very repertoire (small though it was) of allies. Fortunately, that expert realized it, for her.
Death and his companion had spent over two hours treading the cold Northland ground, their footpaths growing more difficult to distinguish as the falling snow gathered in previous tracks before a familiar voice emerged from the outskirts of trees from a nearby wood. "Roesaleine Sejourah," he spoke, the figure tipping back his hood to reveal an even more familiar face. Although the necromancer's hair was cropped in a shorter, more respectable style, his keen, golden eyes and sly smile were just as they had been five years ago, since the last time the young singer had laid eyes upon him. "Roesaleine, Roesaleine... when I last saw you, you were broken. Broken, yet whole, and therefore not beyond repair. Why, now, do I see you smile, with a very crucial piece of you missing entirely? And does it have something to do with the fact that he is once again at your side?"
"Vi... Vitali?" The necromancer's name tumbled from Roesaleine's lips, saturated with the surprise reflecting in her prismatic eyes. "You... I mean, what are the chances that we would--"
"Greetings, Amrial." Just as quickly as Vitali Kristeva had taken interest in his comrade five-years removed, his fleeting attention finally settled on the person who'd always intrigued him the most. The very preternatural manifestation that his practice defied, on a regular basis. "Back from the dead to restore balance to this young woman again, I assume? I'm only guessing, of course, although something makes me doubt that you--or, more importantly, your regeneration--is the reason our mutual friend bears little difference to the bodies that I raise: a shell without a soul."
