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Radagon's smile is gentle and warming, but something feels wrong about it. Rennala grins back, shaking white petals away from her head. His heavy hair spreads over his shoulders, a red braid meanders between his shoulder pads. His smile is beautiful, as always, with an unusual icy detachment, and Rennala somehow feels that it was not meant for her at all.
A gust of wind rips the flowers from the cherry tree and the little velvety petals whirl in the air, slowly dropping to the dark, cold ground covered with emerald drops of moss. The snowy white petals look like stars on the coal-black grassless ground, and Rennala, if she wanted, could try to read her fate in their motion.
Radagon still smiles absently, with a kind of inexplicable bitter chuckle, but she cannot smile back now, something that suddenly seems unbearably difficult. The golden rays of the Erdtree, shivering at the very edge of the horizon, play fire in the intricate tangle of fiery braids.
He is as beautiful as he was years ago, springs ago, when the trees in this garden were tiny sprouts. The time passed, once weak and delicate they grew in lush cherry trees that covered the alley in the murky shadows.
Radagon didn’t change at all.
Rennala sighted bitterly, breathing in the cold air that reeked of the poisonous, intoxicating scent of cherry blossoms.
Smiles, smiles, smiles... Disgustingly sweet and sugary, with a bitter tartness on the tongue. Smiles are enough for them; words have had no sense, no need, for a long time.
Radagon is silent, tilting his head to the side. That look, full of mocking sickly bitterness, is enough. She does not wait for an answer to her silent question, she doesn’t need stars to understand the truth. It’s bitter and sweet at the same time.
His hand suddenly grips her fingers, and Rennala shudders as the cold of his wedding ring burns her skin. But she clings to these fingers with a desperation previously unknown, as if trying to hold on, to stay perhaps a little longer; and Radagon touches these hairs absently, inhaling a scent.
One step to the left, and a new turn, her dress skirts blowing up, lilac flowers in her eyes and cherry blossoms on her lips, his fingers drenched in blood that is long gone. And again that same "long time ago," and again a shadow flashed across the face so familiar and dear to his heart.
But her lips do taste like a cherry, and his do taste like the painful bitterness of blood and tears. It always does, despite her attempts to rewrite his fate with sacred dew of the Moon.
Maybe his fate wasn’t always what it seemed, what was written in gold can’t be affected by silver.
The cherry blossoms are still blooming, dropping petals like tears.