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How could have they been so careless?
She takes two arrows between her fingers and fires them swiftly, one after the other. A mastery in her art little people could reach. Her hand reaches for more and she fires again, nimble, callous fingers used to a life of exploring and scouting.
A life with a bow in her hands and the wind in her wings.
A life under the bright, warm, hopeful sun of Mondstat.
Her wings are broken now, a mingle of fabric and wood that slows her down, a piece that isn’t her but she can’t let go of. Amber keeps the bundle in her back, for even a fallen flyer will hear the call of the sky to return.
Even a wounded bird can, in time, return and glide with the wind in their wings, the sun in their back, the promise of freedom on the horizon as they soar, and their heart, brave and proud, pounds.
With time.
Do they have time?
She fires again and her aim is true, the arrow pierces through the Abyss Mage’s eye and he screams as he tumbles and falls. Behind him other two mages follow, laughing and dancing as they approach. An unsettling tactic that chills her to the bone.
This time she falls back, looking for cover behind one of the cave walls and using her fingertips to count her arrows.
Not too many.
Not enough.
The warm sun of Mondstat calls, but even the sun can’t shine on a moonless night. Eula dashes by her left and with circular swings of her greatsword she carves through the mages before returning to her side, spinning and dancing, keeping opportunity attacks away. Eula smiles at her, but even her grandiloquent words will ring hollow in that situation. Instead, she raises her sword to her shoulders and changes her stance into a defensive one.
“For this, they will pay” she mutters and there is no room in her voice for fear or hesitation, “quickly, let’s show them what vengeance is, shall we?” Amber nods and grits her teeth, breathing in deeply to calm her hammering heart as she takes another two arrows.
Her aim must be perfect if she’s to fire through Eula’s dance.
“Now!” Eula lashes forward and the other two knights join her, blades up in the air and a cry filling their throats and bouncing off the stone walls poorly illuminated by blue light.
The mages laugh as they come.
And they laugh as Amber shoots them down. She shoots predicting the moves of her allies, the arrows never touching them but piercing foes unwavering. She’s done this before, she’s done this many times.
This is how she fights with Lumine, she’s the support for her blade, she’s the sharp edge when Lumine’s sword can’t strike. Or as Lumine says it, she’s the wind that makes Lumine’s wings soar in the sky.
If Lumine were there…
If Lumine were there she would feel hopeful, as if the sun had shone through the walls of that moonless night.
Another arrow and this time the scream of the mage is muffled by the scream of her ally, Lawrence falls and Amber feels his death in her own guts for a split second. He was never supposed to be there, he is a guardian of the city, he writes to his father and guards the gates.
He’s been pushed through a door he shouldn’t have crossed.
Eula kicks the mage that struck him down and kneels next to him, but it is hopeless.
War has spread them thin, too thin.
Amber fires again, just a second before Eula rises up and unleashes another devastating series of swings, leaving a cold, deadly trail behind every cut. They have no time to mourn. Mourning is for the ones that have time to drown in it, mourning is for the ones that dig the bed they will lower their loved ones to.
Mourning is for the ones that know will outlive them for a long time.
They are not the ones that can mourn, not now.
Maybe never, they are getting swarmed by mages and soon their stand will be obliterated. Soon the knights will be overrun and the Abyss Order will escape and get to the nearby camps they were supposed to protect, to the sleeping knights that trusted their siblings in arms to sleep safely.
They would get to the city and its people.
To Lumine and her golden eyes, her simple and yet beautiful smile.
To the home they had built in the little time they had shared as one.
Eula, once more, spins around, wielding her claymore as if it was an extension of her own, and this time she hits the stone.
She hits it hard.
The wall collapses on itself, sealing the way in and out of the cave the Abyss Order had managed to make their den. She smiles wildly, madly, as she watches her work and drives her the tip of her blade in the soil, holding it in an iron grip.
“You must pay tonight, and the Knights of Favonius will make sure that our revenge is served.” Amber looks at her, counts her arrows and her resolution grows.
A bird with broken wings can’t fly, but they will always soar and answer the call of the wind, no matter what. She aims and she feels how the string in her bow tenses and her breathing synchronizes to her shots.
Maybe she will not see the blue sky, maybe she will not feel the warm sun, maybe she will not breathe in the wind of the city she loves.
Maybe she will not sleep in her arms again.
Not ever again.
But Lumine will be safe.
Mondstat will be safe.
They had been careless, they had wandered into something they should have stayed away from.
They have to keep them safe from what has been awakened.
Amber is happy to trade her all if it means what she loves remains.
Eula charges again, fighting by the cold, wicked light of strange magic and blue lamps that flicker in the night. Amber, behind her cover, fires again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
She fires until there are no arrows to shoot.
And there are enemies still to defeat.
Amber smiles.
She wouldn’t be a champion if she wasn’t ready to fight, right?
But, how she wishes Lumine were by her side.
Lumine finds them first.
She raises an arm and keeps the knights at bay as she takes in the sight before her and looks for the words her mind has let go of.
Lumine finds her first.
A last stand, the desperate fight of the group who made sure they were the only ones to succumb to an eternal night.
Still crouching, behind a boulder she must have used as cover, Amber rests. She could be sleeping.
Lumine wishes she is sleeping.
Amber wished she could sleep in her arms.
She should be sleeping. Amber should be sleeping after a tough fight, she should be getting ready for a day of scouting, for their lunch together out by Starsnatch Cliff. Amber should be laughing and smiling and talking and gliding.
Soaring.
Amber should be alive.
Lumine lowers her arm and gets closer, the world around goes with no sound, with no movement, everybody else, everything else she’s turning off as she takes weak steps to her. The morning sun is gentle and makes its way through the breach she’s forcefully opened with the power granted by the Geo archon. It paints colors in her skin and her torn clothes. It shows all the reds in her ribbon and the gold that’s now dirty with dust and soil.
Lumine falls to her knees, and she doesn’t hear the other knights calling for help, she doesn’t hear them calling for their fallen friends, she doesn’t hear them mourning the deaths of the ones they shared meals and nights with. Songs that will never be sung, wine that will never be tasted, words that will go silent carried by the wind.
She doesn’t hear any of that.
She can’t.
How could she? She’s mortally wounded and hasn’t realized.
In her arms, cold but beautiful, the brightest light that shone in the sky, the laugh to Lumine’s smiles, the silence to Lumine’s words, the warmth to Lumine’s nights, in her arms, Amber is gone.
She’s gone through a door not even the gods can breach and return from.
She’s gone and left behind the opportunity for them to fight on, she’s gone and left like the guardian she swore to be long ago.
Lumine doesn’t realize she’s crying, she doesn’t realize the warmth in Amber’s cheeks as she barely touches her with her fingertips are her tears that one by one fall.
Lumine doesn’t understand.
And maybe she never truly will.
For in her arms, wings broken and quiver with no arrows, Amber rests. Amber sleeps. Amber crosses the door.
And no song about this day will ever be enough to heal the damage that has transpired to them all.
Amber is gone, and in her wake, Lumine will understand that some wounds can never be scars.
Some wounds take away a part of ourselves that’s never to return.