Chapter Text
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον.
Tell me about a complicated man, Muse.
- Homer’s Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson
The sorcerer should not have survived, which means that the gods have their hands in this.
Again.
(If you recognize her, do her a favor and do not say her name aloud. Names have power.)
Tossed gracelessly prostrate on a beach by the waves, her body heaves desperately with coughs as it tries to expel all of the water within it. She raises herself on shaking elbows to spit out mouthfuls of sand and blood.
One thin breath. Another. Her inhales have gone raspy with salt.
She growls once she has breath enough to make sound, still holding herself up on her forearms. Purple hair, long overgrown, hangs in her eyes as she falls over onto her back and stares at the sky.
It is free of storms for the first time in days.
“What the fuck,” she hisses into the clear blue.
Nothing—no one—responds.
The sensations of her body creep back in cautiously, remaking their homes in her flesh. She starts to feel her clothes hanging heavy with seawater against her frame, the familiar weight of her mother’s dagger bound tight against her thigh.
Desperately, as a possibility occurs to her, her hand goes to her throat. She sighs in shivering relief when she feels the ring still hanging there on its chain. She closes her fist around it first, out of some basal protective instinct, and as the tension leaches from her body she begins to worry the band of it between her fingers.
“I’ve got you,” she whispers, crushing her neck downwards to brush her lips to the metal. “Got you, got you, got you. We’re okay.”
Slowly, shaking, with a white-knuckled grip on the ring, she assesses her situation.
She does not know where she is.
The sun is warm as it starts its descent towards the distant horizon, and the breeze that drags at her waterlogged hair smells like newly turned earth.
She was tossed ashore, alive. Whatever deity deigned to do her that favor, if you can call it that, has not given the same privilege to her boat. Her ship is almost certainly on its way to the floor of the Ozmit Sea. With it sinks her chance of travel.
She risks another look at the sky.
Cloudless. Stormless. The sun burns her eyes.
All right, then. So there’ll be no help there, either.
She huffs a breath out through her nose and sits up, then gets to her feet.
If there is one thing that she’s good at, it’s making her own fate. Her own two hands and her dagger have served her more than any god. She will not lay down and die on this beach; instead she will forge into these wilds surrounding it, dagger in hand, and she will find some wood to build a fire.
Then, only when her own two hands and her dagger have reached the end of their means, she will pray.
As soon as the sorcerer begins the arduous task of hacking through the thick, lush foliage, though, she feels the fine hairs on her neck stand up. The unmistakable push of another person’s thoughts needle at the back of her mind.
Immediately caving to her instincts, she whips around and throws a scorching purple bolt behind her. The tang of ozone bites at the back of her nose, and she bares her teeth in unrestrained, feral anger. She can’t deny that it feels good to finally have a place to put it.
“Show yourself,” she barks, but her catharsis is replaced with a sense of foolishness as she’s met with only silence and smoke.
The presence at the back of her mind has vanished without a whisper, stealthily enough to make her wonder if she’s imagined the whole thing. Her shoulders drop. With an embarrassed resignation, she starts carving through the brush again.
The colors of this island are vibrant to the point of pain. The green of the plants glows impossibly greener in the filtered sun; the buds of their flowers, pushing up between the leaves, are so bright it makes her head spin. Even then, still more sensation crows in with the smell of it all, thick and heady and dizzying and overlaying the rest, infused with an overwhelming richness that the sorcerer has only experienced before in dreams.
Fighting a headache, she stops and turns every few feet, scanning the foreign landscape for signs of life. Just to make sure.
Even with her nerves on a razor’s edge, it’s easy to fall into the repetitive motion of swinging her blade. It reminds her of the farm, with her father, collecting the spring harvest with a handaxe when it finally reached shoulder-height. Even here, in this otherworld, she half-expects to look up from her hacked-out path and see him there, a few feet to her left.
Half-expects. The other half knows, deep in her bones, that she is alone—there will always be a part of her devoted to knowing that truth.
She began a journey, months and scars and years ago, with a full crew, a full ship.
She lost that crew long ago, to the dangers of a different island. She lost that ship, too—some distant cousin of the one currently drifting to the seafloor. And her journey itself has taken a wholly new shape, much to the chagrin of the gods she can imagine raging behind that cloudless, sunburned sky. She must face what is to come alone, without a crew.
The weight of a quest is for only one to bear. If others try to shoulder it, ease the hero’s burden—well.
The sorcerer pauses, takes a shuddered breath, and closes the ring in her fist again. There are consequences to shaking off the yoke of the gods. It’s an unbending law that she’s become intimately familiar with; she intends not to violate it again if she can help it.
She nervously cuts an eye at the sinking sun. Late. Or later, anyway. She raises her blade to begin muscling through the dense underbrush, but as she arcs her arm downwards the obstructing vine shies away. And hisses.
“Shit,” she mutters, and drops her dagger on a thoughtless reflex, flinching away. Stupid, stupid. She has walked under the eyes of the gods for too long to make this mistake. No plant is ever just a plant.
The vine that twitched away from her attempted injury slinks out in search of her, the leaf at its terminal end bobbing and rustling like the head of an animal.
She knows not to blink, not to look directly at it. If this is the work of a god, then she’s already erred enough by cutting through several of its brethren. She keeps her eyes trained on the forest floor and holds her hands up in surrender.
“I am a guest on this ground,” she murmurs, the old script coming to her easier than speaking her own name. “I am a hero, sent by fate, that means no harm to the land or its inhabitants. I humbly ask for asylum for the time it takes to fulfill the obligations of my quest.”
She keeps her head down until she hears another rustle. When she feels safe to raise her head again, the vine has returned to its original conformation against the bark of its host tree. She exhales. The relief doesn’t last long before it sours.
Stupid, she thinks again. She’s usually not this stupid.
Well, then again, maybe she is. There’s a good chance she’s made it this far because of a healthy amount of divine intervention, the gods twisting their hands in the meat of her stupid, stupid brain to make something intelligent and satisfy their whims.
Yes, some days the idea of the gods’ control feels suffocating and all-consuming, blocking out all light and air and vision, but other days, it would be so nice to blame all of this on them.
She can’t quite do that. She’s aware. A lot of this—a lot—is her fault.
However. Who can truly blame prey for running a twisting, inefficient path, when the alternative is being eaten alive?
The sorcerer kneels, traces a few nonspecific runes in the dense-packed earth, a catch-all atonement for whatever transgression she’s committed by hacking her way through this forest.
Transgressions are common fare for humans. Weak-willed and weak-bodied, blood running red and not ichorous gold. Created that way, sure, but isn’t that their fault?
Every day, she fights against the constraints of her squishing human body to try and be what a hero should. Just about every day, she fails. She is not good at this.
She leaves runes behind in her wake, everywhere she goes, as a sort of apology. Sorry that it was me. Sorry that fate had bound the gods’ will to me and not one more capable.
The word hauls another voice to the surface of her mind, unbidden.
You’re very capable.
She physically winces as the ring around her neck pulls heavy. She needs to pick up her knife.
For a moment, blind panic bites behind her eyes as she scans the ground and sees no sign of her mother’s dagger. An overreaction, probably, but this blade is truly the only trusted ally she has left. It’s the last piece of her original quest. If she loses this, she’s lost—
There, a few feet away.
The dagger, inexplicably, sticks straight up out of the loamy earth, when she is sure she saw it bounce and skitter and fall flat when she dropped it moments ago.
The sorcerer clenches her jaw and casts a look around. The plants make no movement, no noise, but she can’t shake the feeling of being watched.
“I am a hero, sent by fate, that means no harm to the land or its inhabitants,” she repeats loudly, balling her fists. A storm begins to crackle along the leylines of her scars. “I only seek asylum. Leave me in peace and I will do the same.”
Silence. Her knife stands unnaturally perpendicular to the line of the ground, shaping a response. A prickle scratches at the back of her neck.
Slowly, carefully, she approaches the knife the same way she would approach an animal of unknown danger. Her old habits are coming back to her now—she traces a protective rune in the dirt with her index finger in front of the blade (runes, runes, runes, their slopes more familiar than the writing of her own name), wills the beginnings of a spell to crackle between the fingers of her free hand.
She feels dead-eyed. This used to be a miracle, this used to be special. Now, it’s nothing more than self-preservation, which has become utterly monotonous.
With the spell prepared in case of danger, she yanks her knife from its straight-line stab into the earth, expecting a curse to roar out after it as she does.
She’s relieved because there’s nothing, not a thing, except—
A laugh, all around her, rough and bright. Delighted.
Her dead eyes go wild, she knows they do, and she rushes to her feet with her knife brandished in one hand and the spell still cracking with light in the other.
“Show yourself!”
This time, the same cry is far less dignified, a warbling screech that sounds especially abrasive in the wake of the laughter’s joy. The plants roil and shake around her like they’re reacting to the noise.
The laugh is gone without a trace, just like the presence nipping at her mind earlier. Only the still, stifling air and her own heavy breaths remain to make her feel that bit more insane.
“Cursed-ass land,” she mutters thickly. Her bristled pride keeps her pushing further into the brush, cheeks gone hot with a twinge of shame.
Nothing else jumps for her, or comes alive under the strike of her blade. If anything, the surroundings have settled somewhat as she’s hacked her way forwards. She wishes that she could be grateful instead of feeling suspicion like a stone in her gut.
Blessedly, the arm of a smaller, deadened tree only a few feet forward provides the wood she was looking for, and she welcomes the opportunity to hastily retreat back to the beach after chopping it off and hauling it over her shoulder. This is all she needed from this place—a fire for one night. There will be storms tonight, it will clear tomorrow, and she will have a way out of here. She’s sure of it.
She starts to hum as she methodically scrapes bark from the tree limb and hacks it into combustible pieces. The pleasant familiarity urges the lines of some cobwebbed trail song to the forefront of her brain, and she half-sings the melody as she works in her scratchy, underused voice.
Eventually, she has a fire going. Her trained-by-routine nose expects the warm scent of meat or roasting vegetables to undercut the cloud of smoke, round its edges off, but it’s just the peppery smell of burning wood. Her stomach twists at the thought of a meal. She stops her humming.
To distract from the gnawing in her gut, she stretches out on the sand to try and take a fitful rest. She rolls over on her back to cast a ring of protection around her, and sees the starless red sky stretched overhead.
Everything, even here, is stained by the ringed light of that damned moon, a reminder of her quest painted over every landscape she runs to.
She stares up at it—its light unobscured by clouds—and figures she has some praying to do.
“I’m sorry,” she says eventually in a measured, practiced tone. Obedient.
The sky is still.
“I understand I haven’t done exactly what’s been fated for me,” she continues. “I understand that you’re probably real angry about that.” She lets that sit for a while.
Her eyes fall closed, an attempt to stem the flow of tears she knows may come. All she can see is the blade pushing through her love’s muscle and bone and sinew. All she can hear is the voice she knows better than anything, screaming out in pain.
“I’m yours,” she mutters through teeth gritted with memory. “I know that. I know that you gave me this… this quest. And I know that it is a true honor.” It’s a real effort not to let bitterness into her words. She doesn’t wholly succeed. “But I’m hers too.”
Still no clouds. Not that she really expected any.
“I intend to complete your quest. I do. But first I need to find someone who can—who can get her back.” Her voice wavers slightly then, and she clears her throat quickly. Weak. Weakness is universally despised by the gods. “I can’t do this without her,” she says, clearing her voice of its trembling. She will make them listen to this, if nothing else. “So hear me now when I say—I will get off this island, and I will find someone to bring her back. And you’re going to let me.”
No assenting rumble of thunder, no lightning strike. She doesn’t even know if her words were heard.
She reaches for the ring around her neck. Again. Just to prove it’s there.
“I got you,” she repeats in a whisper. “I got you, honey.”
When she does fall into sleep, she does not dream, and that unnerves her when she wakes. She hasn’t had a night of dreamless sleep since she was very small—since before she was marked with purple branches like a second coat of veins and too many thoughts crowding her head.
She opens her eyes slowly. She is unused to the absence of the sound of storms. She always sleeps with her hand around the hilt of her dagger, and she raises it now, scanning her unfamiliar surroundings. Sand coats the entire length of her body.
She is so hungry.
Her circle of protection spell remains undisturbed, which loosens the grip of tension over the sorcerer’s form, but the anxiety returns tenfold when she sees a small bundle’s been left within its limits.
“Shit,” she says again, softly. Her heartbeat begins to rush in her ears, even though the rising morning around her remains still. The waves lap slowly at the shore a few feet away, glasslike as they reflect the burgeoning light of the pale sun, and it suddenly all feels very much like a trap. “Uh. Shit.”
She sits there for a while, knees pulled to her chest and trying to breathe evenly while she keeps a constant eye on the package.
It remains inert and non-miraculous.
Would They send her something like this? Is this her way out? Or does it belong to these lands? These whispering, chittering, shining lands?
Those sent on quests are not to accept ungodly gifts. A gift that is not from a god always has the possibility of becoming a deal, and deals, in all of their hidden meanings and unspoken words, hold oh-so-many endangerments within. The rule nonpareil: nothing must endanger the quest.
The sorcerer has broken that rule. Only once, but, well. Once is enough.
All of this is a punishment for doing so, she knows it, even if it’s never been said. Everything, everything, is either a punishment or a boon in this world of the gods. Very little room for nuance up on that mountain they love so dearly.
“I’d break the rule again, for you,” she whispers towards the ring. A habit she’s collected, of late. Talking to her ring like it’s her. “I’d do it, easy.”
So take the gift, then, her own voice mutters unhelpfully in the back of her head. She’s not used to her own tone up there—it feels startling. You need to eat to survive. You need to survive for her.
She cuts another look at the package, which is wrapped in leaves and bound with something that looks like red-dyed yarn. Very, very old red yarn. Something twists in her heart at the sight of an object so clearly cast aside being used so thoughtfully. It reminds her of something. Someone.
Maybe that’s what makes her reach for it, finally.
It’s both lighter and heavier than she expected. She pulls at the tail end of the muddied thread, and the whole structure comes apart in her lap, a few overbloomed flower heads tumbling out to reveal piled berries and cheese underneath. More flowers are nestled carefully around them.
The second the thread slips free, the same presence from yesterday appears at the back of her mind, distinctly interested, and she freezes.
She doesn’t throw a wild bolt this time. Her instincts scream for it, but she resists, staying completely still as sparks dart up and down her arms. She remembers learning how to pick off crows, and trying not to breathe with the bow pulled tight.
The presence shifts slightly, and she tries to categorize it. A chirp, a hum. Birdlike. A soft-edged, feathered occupant at the back of her mind.
Nothing like music, but something like a song, the tuneless hum of the planets. A bird trying to nest in her head and pecking at the walls she’s spent so many careful years reinforcing.
She doesn’t let it in, whatever it is, but she doesn’t try to expel it, either. She sits with it. Lets it roost at the borders of her mind.
Eventually, with no change in behavior, she turns her attention to the food while keeping half her mind tuned in to the intruder. She shouldn’t eat it, right?
But she is starving. She is god-favored and wracked with power, true, but she was human first. Her stomach twists again, more insistent now that there is tangible food in her grasp. Her hunger grows teeth.
Without care or caution she shoves the cheese and berries into her mouth in inelegant, rushed handfuls—she barely stops to chew, swallowing so fast she’s near-choking on every ragged inhale between bites. She is loose-limbed and primal. Ravenous. Nothing has ever tasted so good.
Berry juice dripping like viscous blood from her lips, her eyes begin to refocus after she’s devoured the entire gift. She has yet to feel the heaviness of a curse overtake her (she knows what curses feel like, now). Lazily, dazedly sated, she wonders if it would be so bad if one did.
The presence in her mind flares, the song whines. Sharp and close. She sits up and throws the flowers from her lap, pulling her dagger free and pointing it in front of her.
A pair of eyes catch the rising light of the sun.
The sorcerer feels her own eyes widen at the sight. The gaze, shining, narrows and peers at her from behind the curtain of flora, two slices of moon waning as they squint.
She is reminded of her human weakness. The hand holding the dagger shakes.
“Hello,” she says. Her father did teach her to be polite. “Please. Show yourself.”
Rustling happens in tandem, both at the edge of her mind and in the brush before her, and then, as easy as breathing, the creature emerges without an ounce of dramatics.
She simply steps into the light, and the sorcerer blinks. She has to look up.
The eyes are the light-color of glass. A swath of gauzy, barely opaque pink fabric is draped over the body’s form, which appears to be faunlike, a statuesque female torso melded with the hind legs of a hooved animal.
She smiles. It pushes her cheeks round and apple-red, and her nose twitches.
“Sorry for the delay,” she speaks in perfect Common. “But I never like to spoil the fun by showing myself too early.”
“What are you?”
It’s probably rude, the sorcerer thinks after she’s already spoken. Probably blasphemous. She actively tries not to work her lip between her teeth as the creature tilts her head. Measuring.
“I live here,” she says, in her breathy, otherworldly voice.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“You ate the breakfast I left you, pretty thing,” she murmurs. “I don’t have to give you an answer. I don’t have to do anything.”
“You’re fey-kind,” the sorcerer murmurs definitively. She’s somewhat familiar with the rules (or lack thereof) of the fey, but apparently not familiar enough, given that her belly’s now full of a swearing of fealty disguised as a nice cut of cheese.
“Smart one. Yes. Fey-kind. You have a pretty voice.” She appears mildly delighted, and her features sharpen just a little more angular. Her eyes, just for a moment, turn yellow, pupils pulling thin and flat like a goat’s before shifting to a lovely blue. “Pretty voice for a pretty thing. What’s your name?”
At least this is a rule she’s able to remember. “I’m not givin’ you that,” she says firmly.
The fey pouts. “Fearne,” she offers without hesitation, flicking one of her furred ears. It disturbs the cloud of sea-colored hair that drifts around her head.
The sorcerer feels her brow furrow, and she works to smooth it out. “What?”
“I’m called Fearne,” the fey says, slowly this time. The presence in the sorcerer’s mind, which she assumes belongs to her, is languid and loose and lacks the typical tension of a lie. As far as she can tell, she’s being given a true name.
Why would she give me her true name?
The sorcerer knows that returning the favor in kind would be foolish. She has almost none of the power in this situation—she needs to hold on to what little she has. Desperately, she fishes through her memory for a name to give in place of her own.
“You can call me Liliana,” she says without truly thinking. She manages not to wince after she says it.
The oldest memory she has, worn soft at the edges like old paper, drifts slowly across her mind: a smile dimpling dust-roughened cheeks.
It’s the only memory she has of her mother that isn't from her dreams. Everything else, she’s heard secondhand, and what she hears fills her throat with rising bile and her head with a terrible buzzing.
Her mother’s name carries a dark, dark weight within it, her gods tell her; one that the sorcerer has now taken upon her own shoulders. Stupidly.
Fearne hums. “Hello, Liliana,” she says, and then smiles again.
One moment she’s standing a few feet away, where the grass shifts to sand, and the next she’s right in front of her. She sniffs once over the sorcerer’s head while the other ear flicks. “I’m almost certain that’s not your name,” she murmurs, easy as anything. “Very smart, truly.”
She smells like growing things, like the gardens in the north of Marquet, but the sorcerer also senses the sick-sweet of poison in the back of her nose. The same wide-open flowers that tumbled out of the small package hang from her twisting horns—oleander and hemlock, she recognizes them now.
Dangerous.
As soon as Fearne’s thrust herself into her space, though, she retreats, her slinking, bobbing movements not unlike the sentient vines that surround them. Wreathed in the surrounding vegetation, moving and shifting, it’s hard to tell where the landscape ends and she begins.
“How did you find your way here?” she asks, settling into a perching position and finally going somewhat still. Her head still moves, tilting side to side like she’s trying to get a sense of the sorcerer. “Do they tell stories about this place?”
“No,” the sorcerer says, taking a few slow paces in the arc of the fey’s orbit—keeping her eyes on the creature as she does. She tries to keep her tone blank. “I was sent here. Didn’t know it existed.”
“Sent here,” Fearne repeats eagerly. She leans forward, puts her chin in her hands. “Ooh.”
“I’m a hero, sent by fate,” the sorcerer says evenly. “What I said earlier wasn’t a lie—I assume you were listenin’. I have a quest.”
“The gods sent you here?”
Fearne’s gaze snaps to the sky, stretched a powdered blue overhead, and she squints as if trying to scry its expanse. Her expression is soft and open, but resolved, and its intensity is such that the sorcerer finds herself opening her mouth when she meant to say nothing at all.
“Not exactly.”
Fearne turns those same squinting, searching eyes on the sorcerer now, who keeps talking under her gaze. In the back of her mind, she wonders if it’s a spell.
“The gods are angry with me, Fearne,” she says. Not quietly. It isn’t a secret.
The fey’s face changes, shifts. She looks delighted at this. Not vindictively so, not reveling in the sorcerer’s pain, but instead an open expression of a kind of understanding. A sameness.
“What did you do, pretty thing?” she asks softly, leaning her whole torso forward. She smiles. Her teeth look sharper than they did before. “A hero that the gods are angry with. Weird.”
The sorcerer feels a hot blush rise under her skin at Fearne’s feral-edged smile, and she cuts her eyes back to the ground.
“It isn’t that complicated,” she tells her. A loose rock is half-buried in the sand. She kicks it free. “I diverted from my quest. That’s how I ended up here—they sank my ship somewhere in the Ozmit Sea. I was trying to get to Tal’Dorei.”
“Ozmit Sea, Tal’Dorei…” Fearne repeats, as if tasting the words. “Why?”
The sorcerer stiffens, she knows she does. She’ll doom herself all she wants, she can live with dooming herself, but she will die before she dooms the one she loves any further than she already has. “That’s all I’ll tell you.”
Fearne pouts again. The feathered presence of her mind bristles. “Just before the good part, too,” she grumbles. She’s silent for a few moments, ears flicking not too unlike a pissed-off horse, but then something seemingly occurs to her. “Will you come have lunch?” she asks brightly. “You’re my guest, it’s the least I can do.”
The sorcerer clenches her jaw. Knife on my thigh, ring around my neck—
Her knife is no longer strapped to her thigh.
The hero takes over then. “Where is it,” she growls. Fearne’s eyes flash yellow.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says evenly. Smiles. She hasn’t stopped smiling, not fully, since they began talking.
“My knife, witch. Give it back.”
“Oh, witch. That’s new. You were calling me Fearne a moment ago, remember that?”
“Give it back,” the sorcerer bites. Without calling it, lightning crackles up and down her spine, gathers in her chest. It comes easier now, since—
“Give what back, pretty thing?”
Fuck it.
The sorcerer pushes recklessly into the fey’s head through the gate of her presence that’s been hanging around the edge of her mind. She’s not gentle with her entrance in the least, gone savage with weeks-old grief, and the overgrown thorns of thought and memory scratch at her mind as she shoves her way in.
GIVE IT BACK.
The words heave a rock into the still darkness of Fearne’s mind. Its surface ripples. Creature-shaped thoughts and feelings all scatter in response to the impact, flicker over the sorcerer’s mind quicker than a blink as they skitter into safer cover of the deeper subconscious.
Something bigger than the rest lurches in the dark. It bares its teeth at the words with a gleaming, hungry sharpness, and the sorcerer feels herself withdrawing from the mind as quickly as she came.
Her chest is heaving with the adrenaline that always comes after she plunges into someone else’s mind, but the shaking in her hands is new. She feels vulnerable, flayed open, but in a distant sort of way—the feeling may not be hers. It could be Fearne’s, misapplied to her mind after she thrust herself in there without invitation.
“What was that?”
What was understood to be Fearne’s typical breathy, tremulous tone has become gossamer-fragile. She looks at the sorcerer with her seaglass eyes. If one was to squint, you could probably find cracks in them.
Even outside of the fey’s mind, the sorcerer feels that dark, underlying presence. It makes her cold, cold enough that instead of giving sympathy to the creature she invaded, all she can hand over is that same brutal heroism.
“Give it back,” she says thinly, only the third time aloud, but for the fourth time, all told.
Fearne blinks, and a momentary shadow passes over what seems to be the permanent sun overhead. She produces the knife slowly, seemingly from nowhere, and extends it to the sorcerer.
Blade side out. Sharp from all angles. Impossible to grab.
The flash of caprine fury in the fey’s eyes tells the sorcerer that she knows this.
“What was that?” Fearne asks again, essentially pointing the dagger at the sorcerer’s heart. Her voice has gone from broken glass to something stronger, reforged. She smiles, splintered. “Be honest, pretty thing.”
They are both cold now.
“I was in your head,” the sorcerer explains flatly. All this time, a whole life lived, and there’s really not a more elegant way to say it. “I can—I can do that. If I want. Sometimes even when I don’t.”
“You wanted to,” Fearne says, knife still held out towards her. “You came into my head.”
“You weren’t listenin’ to me.”
At that, Fearne laughs. It’s the same laugh from earlier, roughly hewn in its brightness, but the delight is absent.
“Heroes make no sense,” she murmurs. “Maybe I was listening,” she shrugs and flaps her free hand through the air, “and I just didn’t want to give it to you.”
They stand there opposite each other, a yellow gaze wrapped around a charged violet one, until the sorcerer darts her arm out and grabs the blade open-handed from Fearne’s unexpecting grasp. It slices across her palm and fingers with a burst of warm pain, red blood leaking over the freshly purpled scars there, but it’s only a moment of agony before the knife is safely holstered at her thigh again. And that is worth it.
Fearne’s eyes widen in shock before narrowing. She looks curious this time, not angry.
Still, though, despite that, when Fearne reaches out, the sorcerer should flinch away. She does not.
Fearne takes the sorcerer’s injured hand between her own, and a warmth that the sorcerer recognizes as healing magic permeates under her skin. She feels the still-bizarre unnatural sensation of the slashes knitting themselves back together, going from weeping blood to thin white scars over the course of a moment.
Of course she has magic, she’s fey, she thinks dumbly, staring at her purple-white-scarred hand held in both of Fearne’s. One of hers is wizened and black. The sorcerer feels a stupid, needy want to ask her what happened.
“Mmhm,” Fearne hums, and the sorcerer realizes that the thread of thoughts between them remains. All of her walls were knocked down by her harried desperation, and she never put them back up. “Come have lunch, Liliana.”
“I—”
Her voice sounds weak and throaty, even to her own ears. She cuts herself off, and nods mutely instead.
When Fearne turns her back and slips into the canopy of the forest, the sorcerer tries to belatedly sever the connection between them, as best she’s able. It’s a temporary solution, given that her defense spells are no longer in place. She needs the quiet of a night’s rest to do it properly.
So for now, as she trails a few steps behind, she has no choice but to hear Fearne’s humming in her head, and ache at the memory of a different music.