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An arm wraps around her shoulders, living and warm and guiding her away from the crumpled body on the floor. She leans into it unthinking, her heart an empty void.
Shaking her head, she turns back. Reaching for him, as though she could.
And still he is there – reaching for her, what remained of his cloven helm obscuring half his face... the other half bloodied, desperate, defeated, but still he reaches for her as though she could save him from this obscuring darkness.
Their fingers nearly touch, as always they do.
But if only they did.
The world shatters to pieces around them, as he is pulled into the darkness and she is dragged into the light.
And the Princess of Coneria awakens in her bed, bright morning light streaming through the cracks in the window shutters.
***
Sara sees him from a distance, always. If ever he deigns to look her way, she had never once noticed.
But the question eats away at her, and no sage or holy man yet has unraveled the answer to her dreams. So on her strolls through the castle gardens, she watches as he toils away and grows bolder still.
Hunched over a flowerbed, he blinks up at her when her shadow falls across him and grows still. Torn, it seems, between his planting and showing reverence to his King’s daughter, he fumbles to his feet and bows.
The guards have never taken any notice of the gardener, and Sara wonders by his reaction to her presence if anyone else ever has.
But up close, he resembles the man in her dreams, for all that he wears no tarnished armor and the chilling desperation in his expression as he is swept into the dark is instead one of mere confusion. He’s been built from a life of hard work, and his hair is carefully braided. But his eyes are keen as any mage.
“My lady?” he asks, in a voice she can’t remember but is comfortably warm and somehow familiar.
She doesn’t know what to say, and so she answers with a question.
“Do you dream?”
“I do...” he ventures forth, but no further.
Sara swallows.
“Of darkness and of light, and of the world shattered between them?”
The gardener sucks in a breath, and lets it out again slowly.
“Of darkness, only.” His eyes close, and he shakes his head before opening them again. “And of a voice, melodious as a harp, calling from within it. Or perhaps without, I never can tell for certain.”
Sara’s heart skips a beat.
“Whose voice?”
He regards her oddly, not as though he might not understand but as though he never perhaps put much thought to it. And rather than answer, the gardener stoops to pluck a flower from the earth, which he tucks it behind her ear with reverence and a perplexed smile.
There is no fear in him as she reaches for his hand, and Sara can only think that he could have been a knight.