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You do not know what, precisely, prompts it among all your banter. It must have been some seemingly innocuous, careless statement on your part. Distracted as you still are by the perfect rightness of the warm feel of precious Isobel in your arms; of a soft bed beneath you and soft skin against you and a soft chest gently rising and falling as she moves to kick away tangled covers, vaguely annoyed.
But the quirk of Isobel's brow and the turn of her lip are telling - you know she is about to make light of something that is truly troubling her, try to dismiss it and spin it into a jest. Faced with your earnestness and the deep, endless care you so gladly lavish upon her, her attempts at this have yet to succeed - you note this fact with a small rush of undeniable pride.
Still, she persists, and props herself up on one elbow while stretched out by your side, looking down at you and not quite meeting your eyes.
"Could the glorious Dame Aylin bear to be seen with a decrepit old woman hanging off her arm, some hundred years from now?" Isobel's tone remains as deliberately light as you would expect, even as she plays at dramatics, and she traces the crook of your elbow with her free hand. "Wouldn't she prefer to find herself an untarnished paramour to match?"
You scoff at the very idea, and pull her back down onto you to kiss her most thoroughly. Then, as she catches her breath, you try to smooth out the beginnings of a frown with a gentle brush of your lips on her forehead.
"I must insist, my love, that your doubts and fears are baseless," you murmur, and allow yourself a smile. "Dame Aylin is steadfast. Devotion is writ into her very nature."
You take the hand that still rests on your arm and raise it to your lips for a kiss instead. "It would be my greatest honour and privilege, dear Isobel, to be the one chosen to stay by your side through the years to come. If you allow it."
There is a somewhat grave solemnity to your words, but you simply do not know how else to express the way your chest feels both heavy and full with her. How the love she bestows upon you feels as divine as any of the gifts of your birthright. How picturing yourself with anyone other than her feels utterly impossible, even when the painful awareness of the inevitability of your parting rears its head.
You choose to hold her closer to you, instead.
"And if these doubts still plague you, well, I shall simply have to work harder to convince you."
"To convince me of what?"
"That each hour of your time you so graciously grant me is a gift that nothing in all the planes can match."
She stills at that, for a moment. Then she murmurs a simple, quiet: "Then they are yours."
You hum, and run your fingers through her hair. Recall with a rush of heat how soft it felt against your thighs. Isobel smirks knowingly, and you flush at how very easily she reads you.
"I must admit to a regret I harbour, however." It is your turn to lighten the mood, you decide, and continue with your ministrations as Isobel tilts her head to meet your caress.
"Oh?"
"I bemoan, sometimes, that I will not get to witness silvery strands of moonlight find their home upon your blessèd head as the days pass by - for here they already are."
This draws an incredulous but pleased chortle from Isobel, only slightly undignified, and with that treasured sound you count yourself victorious.
-
You keep her in your mind - the only place she is found, now. Her little gestures and habits and foibles; the mundane, extraordinary details of her. You'd happily become the most exquisitely learned, foremost expert in Isobel Thorm. What to do with all this knowledge, now?
You play it back and forth in your thoughts, sifting through precious snippets of her face and voice like fingers through running water. You cannot forget a single moment of her, nor would you ever want to.
This is how you keep her alive.
After you have wept over her, begged your Mother for her, and heard of how she was lost to you both. When you watch the fine marble carving close over her and let her father's broken wail rip through the matching wound in your own heart.
When you fly out to fight whatever evil you catch a whisper of, for there is little else for you now. When you charge into the Shadowfell on the wisp of a promise of a chance to save someone - you, divine, moon-guided paladin, who could not save the one person that meant the most. When you foolishly, oh so foolishly, believe the words of the man you thought you would come to call kin, one day.
When the blades sink in, when the arrow flies true but not true enough for a swift kill, and the bite of tight-lashed, unneeded, mundane restraints tears the skin from your flesh. When the necromancer comes to take what is not his, again and again and again. When it all slowly fades to silence and nothingness, in the depths of accursed Shar's domain.
Even then, there is still Isobel, the ghost of her, the outline of her, the beautiful, precious dream of her, summoned up before your eyes as you close them.
Every cursed moonless night in the Shadowfell, and every cursed mornless day.
-
Freedom, from the trembling hand of one who was reared to be your mortal enemy.
And doubt. You've known nothing but this horrid, empty place for so very long. What has become of your beloved's home - the home that would, perhaps, have one day been yours? What of the land you were sent, honour-sworn, to protect?
Then, a moment of chilling fear as the veil lifts and the weight drops, as air and shadows both rush out of you: will your Mother reply, now? Or have you truly been forgotten?
As you fall to hands and knees, as weak as a newborn foal, the lack of cruel, grasping bonds upon you is a heady, nigh-disorienting rush.
And then you breathe, and regain yourself, piece by piece. Armour, helm, blade, wings. You. Your own.
All pieces but one.
-
There are no words for the depth of disgust and the burn of the fury that grips you when you see what he has done. No violation of body or soul he or his lackeys have visited upon you in a hundred years is as vile as this - a violation of she who is your heart.
"Isobel, help me prepare for our guests," the corpse-father speaks. The undead general at the head of a horde of bones, determined to either tear down or corrupt everything he once used to steadfastly, honestly champion, for all that you never quite saw eye to eye.
"Yes, papa," she dutifully replies. Every perfectly obedient syllable spoken in that cherished voice is like a knife in your belly.
It is her, but it is also so agonisingly not her. It is her smile on her face, stretching her soft, dimpled cheeks, crinkling her charming nose. It is all you have spent a century dreaming of, clinging to.
Perhaps this is why it is so easy to see every bit of it that is wrong.
"Isobel?" You call to her as you alight on the platform, freed from chains yet again, stepping forward to where she stands proudly at her father's side. You extend a hand towards her. "My love, I--"
There is no trace of Isobel in the eerie glow of the glare she turns your way, snatching all the breath from your lungs.
"Back in your cage," she sneers, then dismisses you with nary a look, her attention drawn to whatever battle is beginning below you. A numb, dead feeling unfolds in your chest at that; one that even a century in the heart of the Shadowfell had not managed to put there.
You call down your Mother's - your own - moonlight, and step forward as it ensconces you, easy, familiar, welcome and welcoming after a century of absence - but deadly all the same to any foe that would dare approach.
It has never hurt Isobel before. Your Isobel, silver-bathed, glorious, radiant, moon-blessed.
This is not Isobel.
-
The High Harper confides in you, later, after planning and strategising is done for the night, as a solemn silence takes over the mostly empty halls you once knew. After she overhears or ekes out of whatever dusty corner of Moonrise that you and Isobel knew each other.
This is when you find out the monster raised her not once, but twice.
"She saved us from the shadows. Protected us, worked herself to the bone for perfect strangers, only because she believed it was the right thing to do."
Ah - there she is, your Isobel. A beacon in any darkness. Not one to tolerate suffering in her midst when it was in her power to ease it. Not one to allow injustice to perpetuate if it was possible to stop it. Not one to hesitate when it came to giving of herself. To think she had been here, more than a perverted facsimile, and more than a beautiful, ephemeral dream--
To think, if things had taken the smallest of turns down a different path, you could have been granted a miracle.
Jaheira shakes her head and continues, in your silence. "I failed to protect her. A traitor, in our midst - I was blind. I failed, utterly. And she and my Harpers paid the price for my incompetence."
You feel a strange, twisting anticipation of a fury that does not come. For you find no fault with High Harper Jaheira, no. The man who is to blame for this is dead thrice over, and the ignoble, contemptible remnants of him still coat your boot. You have had your bloody vengeance, and your beloved can have the rest that, it seems, had been denied her.
"For what it's worth, I am sorry. Faerûn lost a bright light with her. A rare, precious treasure nowadays. I will be grateful to her for as long as I live - however little I might have left in me."
Jaheira keeps her distance, even when trying to offer comfort. You appreciate this deeply.
"I thought her dead," you say at long last, throat working against unwelcome tightness. "I mourned her a hundred years ago, and I have mourned her every day since. Now, it seems, it is mine to do so again." You feel your mouth twist, but you cannot tell what shape it wishes to take. Steadfast, you remember. Devotion. "For as long as I live."
Every cursed moonless night in the Shadowfell, and every day that dawns upon you after, forever.