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They had joked about laying down in a sort of stacking spoon chain, but in the hour after Dorian and Cyrus left, Imogen, Laudna, Ashton, and Chetney did all pile into the same large bed in the guest room Eshteross offered them. Only Imogen and Laudna were actually cuddling, but still. They stayed close. Fresh Cut Grass had parked themself, sentry-like, at the foot of the bed near where Chetney was curled up.
Fearne wasn't sleeping. Fearne was standing at the window, staring up at the break-of-dawn sky out over the top of the jungle canopy and wondering if she was looking in the right direction to be able to see the airship carrying her friend away from her before it disappeared into the distance.
There was a painful tightness in her chest and throat, like the one she got when she thought about her grandmother, except much sharper. It made her eyes sting.
A gentle hand reached up to take hers. "Do you see him?" Orym whispered. "The airship he's on?"
Fearne shook her head. She kept hold of Orym's hand as he leapt nimbly up onto the windowsill and steadied himself against her shoulder. He gazed out as well. Both of them were silent as the sun rose and the sky got brighter and brighter, and there was a groan of protest from Imogen as a beam of light struck the bed.
"I never saw the ship leave," Fearne said.
Orym gripped her shoulder tightly. "Me neither. Must be facing the wrong way." He hopped down and pulled the curtain, plunging the room into darkness once more.
"But what if we just missed it?" Fearne exclaimed.
"It's okay. We didn't, it's okay." In the dim light, she saw Orym blink hard a few times. "It probably left ages ago and we didn't see it, it's well past sunrise. Besides, it's not like we could have seen him ."
She had to concede that was true, but she cast a longing glance at the curtains again. "I'm sad," she announced.
Orym blinked again. "Me, too," he said hoarsely, and he looked towards their sleeping companions. "Step outside with me?"
Fearne followed him out into the hallway and closed the door partially behind them. She knelt down, folding her legs underneath her. Orym leaned up against the wall beside her. "He'll be fine, right?" she said. The pain in her throat was building. She couldn't bring herself to look at Orym's face, knowing that his expression would make it even harder.
"I think so." His voice shook. "I don't know if I will be," he confessed.
"Oh...me neither." Fearne's lip trembled. "I want him back."
Orym let out a little sound that might have been agreement and might have been a sob.
She grabbed his hand again.
"We're going to be fine," said Orym after a moment, sounding unconvinced himself. "And so is he. And he's going to go see Opal and Dariax again, probably. A-and he has the Sending Stone, so...we might even get to say hi to them sometimes."
"That's true!" Fearne tried to sound cheerful. "It will be nice to get an update from them."
"Mm-hmm. It'll be great. Dorian's going to be just fine."
There was another long pause. Fearne's vision felt a little blurry. "I'm still sad, though," she said.
“Gods, yeah. Yeah.” Orym sank down to sit on the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest.
Blinking away tears, Fearne watched as Orym’s face crumpled and he bowed his head. She put her arm out. “Stay close to me for a little while?” she asked softly.
He nodded, leaning into her side. Without a word, he pulled the Sending Stone out of his pocket and held it in his hands, just staring at it. It didn’t have the faint glow around it that it usually did–the magic was gone for the day already, since Fearne had used it just after Dorian had left.
Orym rested his forehead down against it. He pressed it into his skin with such force that there would probably be a red mark there when he raised his head. “We’ll see him again,” Orym said, in a small voice, full of doubt and fear that he was lying to himself. He looked up at Fearne. Sure enough, the stone had left a dark pink indent on his forehead, on the same spot that Dorian had dropped a kiss before leaving.
Fearne’s eyes filled with tears again, and they spilled over this time. She reached out and smoothed her fingers over the mark, pushing just the tiniest bit of healing magic through to make the slight bruise disappear. In turn, Orym reached up and started brushing away her tears even as his own began to fall. “Oh, just…come here,” she sniffled. She swept him up into a hug, pulling him to his feet so his head was at the right height to rest against her shoulder.
“We’ll see him again!” insisted Orym. “We–” He interrupted himself with a sob.
She buried her face in his hair. “We will. But we’re going to be sad now,” she said. “I think we just have to be sad now.”
He didn’t argue. “Okay,” he mumbled into her sleeve. “I-it’s been a long day.”
When they’d woken up that morning and left Dorian to sleep in since he’d spent the last evening fretting and tossing and turning with anxiety that kept him awake for hours, they hadn’t known it would be the last time for who-knows-how-long that they would be able to all sleep in the same bed like that. Fearne didn’t have the greatest grasp on the passage of time as it was, but it felt like weeks since then.
Months ago, deep in the jungles of the Rifenmist Peninsula, the shadow of herself from the alternate timeline where she had put on the Circlet had reminded her that all of her friends would leave her. It was a consequence of being a faun, of course, and befriending people from the Material Plane without the long lives of those with Fey ancestry like elves and gnomes.
But that wasn’t what she meant. Not really. Fearne had known it then, and she knew it now. “It will hurt more,” Circlet-Fearne had said, and it did. First it was Fy’ra Rai leaving to find her sister. Then Opal decided to strike up a life in Byroden, returning to Byroden to recover from the ordeal with the Circlet and try to figure out what was happening with Ted, and Dariax…he’d been so torn when the Voice of the Tempest asked Orym to go to Marquet. But in the end, they couldn’t let Opal be alone, and so Dariax, too, had left. And now Dorian.
Fearne gathered Orym closer to her, pressing her fingers into his back almost possessively. He wrapped his arms around her middle just as tightly.
Some days, Fearne wanted nothing more than to drag all of the people she loved back to the Feywild with her, weave their spirits into the fabric of that world and keep them with her forever. Some days, she almost convinced herself that they would let her.
Orym stopped shuddering with sobs after a while. A steady flow of tears continued to pour down Fearne’s cheeks, but she was silent.
“Been a long day,” Orym repeated, sounding exhausted and weak. “Fearnie?”
“Sleep?” she whispered.
“If we can.”
“He’ll be so far away when we wake up.”
Orym made a pained noise in the back of his throat. “Fearne…”
She clutched him tighter again.
“I’m here,” he murmured. He ran his hand down through her hair, and she recognized the slight ruffle of wind and bloom of scent that meant he was leaving a trail of flowers behind. “We need to sleep. Staying close. We’re not going anywhere, but we need to rest.”
“But I don’t think I want to let go of you right now,” she mumbled.
Orym’s hand found hers, lacing their fingers together. “Wouldn’t let you if you tried.”
She forced herself to calm down. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, let’s sleep.”
He took a step back slowly, keeping hold of her hand. He tugged at her arm gently. “C’mon.” With his free hand, he wiped at his eyes, which were red and puffy and damp. Fearne was sure she didn’t look much better. “C’mon, back inside. On the floor if that’s okay? There’s plenty of pillows we can snag, and…the bed’s a little crowded. I need some space from everyone else.” When she nodded, Orym gave her another tug. She stood up shakily.
Fearne followed him back into the bedroom, grabbing one of the spare pillows on the bed (as well as one that wasn’t so spare, but Ashton didn’t wake up, so she figured it was fine). They practically collapsed together on the rug in the corner by the window, never once letting go of each other.
There was a moment of hesitation as Orym tried to figure out where to lay down when he didn’t have Dorian to toss his legs over. Fearne saw the look of uncertainty in his eyes and just pulled him back into her arms and laid down against the pillows with him. His breathing evened out after a minute. “Sleep well,” he whispered.
She pressed a fierce kiss to the top of his head. “I love you,” she whispered back.
He let out a choked sob-laugh. “Love love.”
Nothing had ever seemed quite so loud as the silence that followed in place of Dorian’s usual murmured closing “Love.”