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She blinked, and blinked, and blinked. How much time had passed? How much did she lose to every blink? Days, years? Weeks, decades? She didn’t know. Time was a strange, strange thing, passing her by like a river coursing endlessly past a stone fruitlessly grasping at the water that left it behind. The seasons turned. She rose with the dawn to heal and protect and sank into shadowed reverie as the sun’s rays left her behind, again and again. The faces she met blurred into a featureless swathe of un-memory, voices melding into forgotten requests for a cleric’s aid, for the once-hero’s sword, for the presence of a living memory that remembered itself not at all. She did as she was bid, of course, for that was what she had promised she would do. She had promised to give her life and her strength to bring light into shadowed places, and she did it unfalteringly, even when there was a shadowed place carved bloody into her heart.
She remembered Sending stones, sometime in the endless pattern of her days, murmurs of a High Harper’s voice calling her to Baldur’s Gate to help fight some new threat or else to receive a message from friends lost far below in a fiery plane. Those had helped mark time, for a little while; Jaheira made a point of Sending at least once a year, even if nothing had changed around her. But then those, too, ceased to be. For a time, the Sending stone had rung with another’s voice, younger, blunter, yet so very like her mother’s, and then those, too, had ceased to be.
Mayflies, one generation and then another gone in a flicker with no trace left behind. She had discarded the stone that once reminded her of the past when it laid silent for a blink too many, weary of carrying its weight when it no longer rang with the sound of memories.
She let herself drift in the waters that passed her by. She understood, in time, that she could not stop them, could not hold onto them even for the slightest moment no matter how much she tried. It was easier not to notice that they swept past her so very quickly, easier not to remark on the changes in the river’s flow, the features that came and went too fast to last.
She did not know how long she spent that way.
She did not know how long she had yet to spend that way.
Time was, after all, eternal, and everything else was not.
She started from her thoughts as the sound of a heavy step on cracking twig echoed through the still morning air, turning, and-
“This is a very strange dream,” she said faintly, her voice unfamiliar (when had she last spoken aloud? She didn’t know that either). “Not that I’m not happy to remember a face. I just wasn’t expecting this to be the face I remembered.”
A quiet laugh rang in her ears. It was familiar, too, like the face that had made some forgotten corner of her mind itch with memory. She remembered hearing that laugh before, didn’t she?
“I wouldn’t expect you to, either,” said the dream-shade, the way the scars on its face crumpled with its smile identical to how her faint memories were shaped. “But, old friend, you are very much awake.”
She blinked, and felt an unfamiliar, uncomfortable tremble in her stomach when the memory did not vanish with her blink as they always did. Her being awake was a strange thing for a dream to tell her, though perhaps not as strange as it taking this form, of all the ones it could have chosen. Of all the ones she could have remembered, too. It was stranger still that she did remember it, after how long it had been. She didn’t know how many years it had been since she had bid that face farewell, watching another mayfly-friend walk on and on and away and away down the road that led from Baldur’s Gate.
Except, said another part of her, one she had hardly listened to for so long it ached to hear it, he wasn’t a mayfly, was he?
But, said the part of her that had settled its numb shroud over her heart, it had still been too long. He should have changed, grown old. Even if he was alive, still, after all these years – enough years for so much to be lost around her – he should not have been so unmarred by the passage of time, so very much the same as in those memories.
“Ah,” said the dream-shade, nodding as if she had something aloud. “You would expect me to look much more my age, is that it?”
“Well- yes,” she answered, bewildered. “If you were real, you’d be- I don’t know how long it’s been, but-”
“-Old enough, my friend, no need to remind me just how ancient I must seem,” said the dream-shade with a chuckle, and sounded so very real that she nearly staggered under the weight of memories suddenly brought to mind. “I made a choice, not so long after we parted ways. To endure, and continue. By the Oak Father’s blessings, I do so as I was when the choice was made. I wouldn’t be much of a guardian of nature if I could not fight for its sake, and what strength I had I kept for that purpose.”
She blinked again, and again wondered that he did not disappear. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What- what does that mean?”
“If a druid is skilled enough – attuned enough – they may choose to live a life sustained by nature’s power,” the dream-shade of a druid told her. “A longer life. For some, twice as long, for others, ten. I do not know which is the case for me, but I do know I am glad of it, if only for the time it granted me for our paths to cross again. I hope you will forgive a friend from many years ago for saying so, but you are hurting, and I would help, if I can.”
“I- I’m alright,” she made herself say, after a long and strained moment where two halves of her whole warred on whether she believed a word out of the strange dream’s mouth. Halsin’s mouth, she thought, and her head pounded with the idea that it might actually be him, a face she knew, a person she remembered. “Why would you do that? Condemn yourself to- to this loneliness for so much longer?”
“My work felt unfinished,” said Halsin with an easy shrug. Her mind rang with a jarring echo at the thought of his name, a name she hadn’t thought about in years, a name she had relegated to the deepest parts of her memories so that it could not dredge up the ones that hurt even more. He sounded unbothered by that same breadth of time, and she found she envied it. How could he stand so unaffected by so many years? Was that, too, some kind of druidic magic? “That was enough for me.”
It was a very Halsin answer, she realized. The seal she’d put on her memories thinned, wisps of thoughts rising to the surface of her mind. He had so readily put everything aside for others’ sakes, she remembered, for a century at the Emerald Grove, again as he followed them to Baldur’s Gate, a third time as he gathered wagons of those left orphaned or dispossessed by the Absolute to care for them all in turn. She could believe that he would choose what he described, of all the people she had met. All the aching loneliness of watching mayflies be born and die again and again would not keep him from what he saw as his duty to the world’s balance.
“I’m not sure I know how to believe you’re real,” she admitted aloud. Her voice was very quiet. “I don’t know if I can let myself hope you are. Everything else comes and goes so very fast.”
“I’ll stand upon this world’s soil for quite a while yet, Oak Father willing,” said Halsin, and took three steps forward. She watched him do it, considering if she should take three steps back, and deciding she wouldn’t. She did not want her foolish hope to be proven wrong again, did not want another scar upon her lonely heart, but- her breath whistled sharply in her throat at the touch of his hand upon her arm. Real. Solid. Alive and real and-
“You- you are real?” she questioned, caught in a raging storm of fright and fragile, fragile hope. She hesitated again, blinked again, tried to dispel the illusion it had to be with all her might-
“I am,” Halsin agreed, and ever-so-gently pulled her into a hug.
He was warm. Almost stiflingly so, a wall of living, breathing heat. The ice she had carefully nurtured shattered in her chest, melted in a single second under the onslaught of a person, a memory, alive.
“You’re real,” she said into his chest, the words stuttering between frantic, gasping inhales. “I remember- I remember you, and you’re- you’re still here.”
“Yes,” said Halsin. “I am.”
She almost couldn’t make herself believe it. “I don’t know how to remember,” she said eventually. “I don’t- I forgot, Halsin. There- there wasn’t enough time.”
“No, there wasn’t. Not for you, and not for Gale,” said Halsin, and the name felt like a lance of shadowed ice piercing through her heart. She sagged, her strength gone, and only by Halsin’s strength did not fall boneless to the ground.
“No,” she managed to whisper. “No. We had no time at all.”
“I had hoped there would be time for you both,” Halsin said, shaking his head. She fought to inhale enough, to bring her dimming sight back from the brink; her heart hammered in her chest as if it would burst as Halsin said, “Time for your heart to settle and memories to became real, solid things. You were so very young. Few elves have even the opportunity to love a human so deeply, let alone at such a young age as you did. This, perhaps, is why we keep our young so guarded from the world beyond.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I was- I was ninety-three, Halsin. I was a grown elf, not a child.”
“Grown, yes, but still settling into your bones, your soul, and one I would guess was young in its entirety,” said Halsin. “An elf’s memory is a fickle, shifting thing, for we are all descendants of a fickle, shifting plane. The ability of an elf to recall details some hundred years later is not one that comes to us early; it comes with time, with practice. With lives lived and forgotten and, in time, remembered. You could not have had that, then. That is why I hoped there would be time yet for it to grow in you, for you to find things by which to remember your love. Would that it had been so.”
She was struck by the empathy in his voice, by the strange, awful, relieving thought that maybe – just maybe – it was not her fault she- “I don’t remember his face,” she admitted in a rush, the words like poison pouring from her mouth. “I don’t- I don’t remember his face, or- or his voice- I just- I know he was there, Halsin, in my memories, but it hurts so very much to seek him in the void. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t- I let myself bury the pieces I could remember. It hurt too much to know how little they were.”
“I ought to have thought to check in on you, I think,” said Halsin after a moment. “No, don’t make excuses for me. I should have realized you would need something – someone, rather – that stayed constant, when the ground beneath your feet had so suddenly vanished. I let myself think only of the children, and of leaving Baldur’s Gate. For that, I am sorry. A better friend would have stayed, or returned, at least, and found you there.”
“You really are the same as you were then,” she said suddenly in the silence that followed. Halsin looked at her in question, his eyebrows raised, and she shook her head in turn. “You still blame yourself for everything.”
A startled laugh. “I suppose I do,” said Halsin. “All things are balanced, in the end. My purpose and my strength is in seeking to aid the world entire; my weakness in feeling all the world’s failures for my own. But that is who I am, and the life I chose. Now, though- let us rest for a little while. I have an idea I should like to try.”
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“I was more than old enough, then, for the memories to stay,” said Halsin. “I made sure I would keep them. It isn’t every day one is rescued from a goblin prison by a horned human warlock, a tiefling on fire, a wizard and a high elven cleric, after all. The journey I shared in such company was a precious one, and the memories of the friendships forged along its path even more so. So – here, my friend. For you, and for your memories.”
Her hands shook as she took the small, carved sculpture from his hands. Some distant part of her brain had the capacity to recognize the talent of its making, the years and years – centuries – of practice it must have taken to grow skilled enough to capture a likeness so eerily lifelike in whittled wood. The thought was far away, however, dwarfed by the raging maelstrom of every emotion she hadn’t felt in her time-drowned blankness. She knew the face at once, so familiar it seared itself into her brain where it had been missing, features appearing in memories of purple and giving life to a wizard’s shade. She knew in an instant how the fragile curls Halsin had carved felt beneath her fingers, knew in a heartbeat how the softly creased eyes etched into pale wood had been able to smile with the light of a thousand stars.
“I- I don’t-” she struggled to say, a burning stone lodged in her throat blocking every word as her sight blurred with tears. “It’s- thank you. Thank you, thank you. I can- I can almost see him, now. This is- this is the best thing anyone’s ever given me.”
“You deserve a great deal more than a clumsy sculpture,” said Halsin, “But it is a start in your healing, I think, and that is enough for now. Come, sit. There is no rush to be anywhere. Sit, and remember.”
She let herself crumple to the ground beside the druid, her hands still clasped around the precious bust of her wizard-love. It was made of some block of wood, no doubt scavenged by a druid who would not cut a living tree for such a purpose, and yet – it was worth more to her than anything made of gold or precious jewels. It was memory, real and solid beneath her fingers, whole and true and unmarred by the bite of time’s river that had worn everything else away. She traced her thumb over the smooth plane of a cheek, touched the pad of her thumb to the bridge of a nose, and sucked in a whistling gasp as the memories emerged from a dark, formless sea. She remembered, suddenly, the rasping of his beard beneath her hands, the sound of his laugh when their noses had bumped together a touch too hard and sent them both reeling.
“Thank you,” she managed to say again. “For remembering- for remembering when I couldn’t.”
“You remembered plenty, I think,” said Halsin gently. “That you sought to detach yourself from memory so wholly says as much. Was it long after the brain fell that you left the city?”
“A few months,” she answered. Her voice was dull. The memories of those days were grey, lost in a fugue-like state of disbelief and grief she recoiled from in the vast emptiness of her mind. “Not very long. I didn’t- it didn’t seem real, at first. I… I did what I was supposed to do. There was so much hurt, so much pain. I was needed. So I just- I spent my days focusing on them, on the people who were injured and unwell and needed a cleric’s strength and magic. It… For a little while, I pretended it was only temporary. I pretended- I made myself believe he was doing something else, that he was just somewhere around the corner. It made the days go by a little easier.”
Halsin’s hand was on her shoulder. Warm. Real. Grounding. “What made you leave, in the end?”
“I visited Mystra’s shrine almost every night, while I was pretending,” she said hoarsely. “I wanted- I asked her to send him back to me. I prayed, and then I prayed for Corellon’s forgiveness for praying to another god. He did not spurn me for it, which was maybe more than I deserved, but- but Mystra didn’t care for my prayers. I knew she wouldn’t, not after what she asked Gale to do, not after how she left him to die twice over. But I- I couldn’t help but kneel at her stone feet and beg and beg and beg for her to hear me. I gave her just about everything I had, every coin and every trinket.”
She swallowed, trying to find the strength to keep speaking. Halsin waited patiently, as he always had, and she shook her head. “When I started earning money, I gave her all of that, too. I thought maybe if I gave her enough, she might listen to me. I gave her everything I could, Halsin. I ate almost nothing, I slept on the street- I put every coin I earned in her offering bowl, and it still wasn’t enough. I- I wasn’t enough. And- and one day, when I was so weak from hunger I couldn’t stand back up after kneeling at Mystra’s altar, the priest at the Tabernacle asked me why I kept giving what I did not have to spare, and I realized- I realized there was no point. No treasure I could ever give to Mystra would change her mind. Nothing- nothing I did would bring him back. I couldn’t pretend anymore. Everything was dark and cold and grey, and I just… I couldn’t stand it. Being in the city, where people knew my name, because I wasn’t- I was surrounded by people, and I was still so very alone.”
“You’re not alone, my friend,” said Halsin. “Of this, you may be certain. You are not alone. Not anymore.”
“Thank you,” she said again, because she hadn’t the words to express how grateful she was for his presence, for something familiar, for something as unchanging as she, the first time she had been able to stand on solid ground in what must have been centuries. “For- for finding me.”
Halsin smiled. “I never give up on finding my old friends again, no matter how long it takes me.”
And she believed that with her entire being. Halsin was as steady as an ancient oak, determined and unchanging in his ways. Once, she remembered wondering at it, wondering at the depths of devotion he held for a childhood friend lost for a century. She had thought it an exception, his duty to nature reinforcing the need to free the trapped spirit of the land. Now, she thought, she understood that it was simply Halsin’s way. He bound himself to friends and faces and memories with a fierce permanence, even though he knew – he had always known, unlike her – that he would lose them in time. She swallowed. He must believe that it was worth it all, in the end, even if she couldn’t quite see how. But-
-But maybe she could trust his wisdom, once again.
And as she was urged to slip into a reverie more peaceful and restful than she had felt since she had blinked her life away, she realised she would, and closed her eyes knowing she would remember this day again.