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You had only to look at her to see it — mouth set in a too-serious line, her thin wiry frame folded like a butterfly knife. The flick of wary eyes — has she noticed? — their irises the amber of some hunting bird. She is a paradox, the worried hunch of her shoulders belying her capacity for violence.
He knows better. She’s sharp-edged, deadly, silver and shadow in the moonlight: a mortal vessel worn thin by one too many brushes with the inevitable. Even in these quiet moments when his fingers itch to tuck that uneven curl of darkness behind her ear, he can never truly forget what she is. Not when he’s seen her kill.
“Xan?” Eyes intense, searching. Why should she fret so? Hardly worth it, his fate sealed as it is, but he reassures her: it is… fine. It is not, it will never be, but there is nothing to be done about it. “Fine” must suffice.
He does not look up from his spells, and if, the next day, there is an obscure pain in her manner, he pretends he does not see it. Why cling to delusions? he wonders. Why not? They’re all he has left.
It’s too late for him now. He’d long ago cast his lot with this hopeless crusade, and at some point she’d crept past the deep-dug fortifications that kept at bay all that he was too much the coward to confront. How fitting that she should slip beneath his skin, a cut so quick and sudden that he had not noticed till the bleeding started. Melodramatic? Certainly. But being enamored of death’s own daughter was sure to end in death. Whose? It crossed his mind that, so long as she survived, it was not the worst of trades.
…Seldarine. He was doomed.