Chapter Text
She always descends from another world, destined never to be a part of his.
The dazzling expanse of the moonlit lake glimmers with mystical intrigue, as though the dark scenery cloaked in pristine shrouds of white have opened a portal, and an enchanted storybook world unfolds while the sun is remiss in its vigil. Bathed in luminous, silvery tones, the enigma of night is no longer left to the imagination. And yet, some of the mystery still manages to enrapture.
Deirdre looks right at home in this ethereal plane, as though she materialized from a realm as fey as herself to revel beneath a starry winter sky. Arvis wouldn't be surprised if she were made of something like fairy dust or shimmering gossamer, or something as equally spellbinding but untouchable, ephemeral, a wisp of a woman he had a right to see but never have.
She brings the ice and moonlight to life as she spins on a ballroom that glistens like quartz. She's dancing, laughing her trickling laugh, and it dips him into a bittersweet trance where memories of her doing it with him sway. He permits himself to sift through incomparably precious sands of his time, one in which he could ignorantly have and not just see, until it slips through him and leaves him empty. He shivers beneath his thick layers.
Arvis releases a hot stream of breath that fades into the night as he pulls his focus away from reminiscing on his fool's paradise now lost and into the bleak frame of reality: Sigurd had been spinning with her lovingly fixed in his arms for this entire scene. She had never been alone out here; other Heroes slid and tripped across the water's slippery surface — even Julia, hand-in-hand with Sigurd's son — another curious source of rankled deprivation from him; how happy the four of them looked in their mutual company — but for a while, all he wanted to fixate on was her. Dreamy, inveigling. A smile that she bore for him, once upon a time.
Resentment boils in his gut, but her distant shining face coddles it to a tepid stillness. Resentment turns to resignation. Resignation, loneliness. Loneliness, a regret: he lacked the power and foresight to defy his abominable fate. The weakness in his soul chased after her eternal companionship, while the high-minded part of it clung to loftier ideals ever teasing him, always just within grasp. It took retrospect to realize just how wretched the sum of his existence had been in the Grannvale scheme of things. Success, peace, and everlasting love had been intoxicating illusions, and he sobered up far too late to stop his mistakes before he set them into motion.
Here, even in a land removed from the one besmirched by his sordid history, his ignorant deeds still haunt him. When Deirdre forgot herself a third time, the baser part of Arvis crying for her love schemed to maneuver her true feelings toward him instead, as though he could get away with masquerading in paper lies a second time. However, Sigurd stood between them. Rather than clash against him, he followed the lesson his mistake had taught him at last and didn’t force it. He let her go where her true heart would dictate in the end. Sigurd and Deirdre deserve more than that much.
He had already lost her before. How much more could it hurt a second time?
At least she wears a smile. Would she still do it with him in Sigurd’s stead?
Watching her spellbound by Sigurd's face as though he were the earth and she his faithfully-orbiting moon forces him to swivel around. He recognizes the folly of gazing hopelessly from the shelter of dense conifers. He draws his heavy cloak closed as he departs, which accomplishes nothing in abating the chill enveloping his shoulders when it creeps in from the heart.