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The first blow is this: fifteen years is all he has to give.
She takes it. She has spent most of her life looking to the past for meaning; it was not until she'd nearly lost clan and kin in the pursuit of history that she'd decided she would never put the indisputable glories of the past over the mutable uncertainties of the future—gaiety, grief, and all.
If fifteen years of life together is all they will have, then they will fill it with such love and joy as to be a life worthy of song and memory, a legacy to be passed down from hahren to da'len in Arlathvhens of innumerable ages to come. Children of elves who will never know suffering, never know anything but freedom, will sing of the Warden and his Lady, of how they had held up the world as it crumbled and braced each other from buckling under the weight of it.
She tells Davrin this one night as they hold each other close, and he laughs.
"I think they'll call the song 'The Rook and Her Warden', instead," he says. The rough pads of his fingers skate down the bare skin of her arm. "You've got to put the hero first."
She grins. "You're the monster hunter. I think the kids would rather learn about Warden Davrin, slayer of monsters and vanquisher of evil."
"Hmm," he hums, eyes going half lidded as he presses forward, pushing her onto her back. "Well, the tavern songs about us will definitely have some kind of vanquishing in them, I can tell you that."
"Dav—"
He kisses her, and it's all she can do to arch up against him, a moan slipping unbidden from her throat. Already his hands are sliding down her sides, slipping beneath her tunic to splay, warm and teasing, across her belly.
When he pins her with his weight, bearing her further into the mattress at the same time his tongue slips into her welcoming mouth, she thinks fifteen years of this isn't such a bad deal at all.
---
The second: she will have to live much longer without him more than either of them thought.
She had always known that Arlathan Forest had a strange, unstudied effect; learning how to adapt to its reality warping magic was part of becoming a Veil Jumper in the first place. She had known that she was changing to even survive in it, but this—that it was changing her, on such a fundamental level, and one that no one fully understood save for the most obvious effect: Veil Jumpers would live longer than average. Much, much longer.
It was one thing to learn that about herself; it was another thing entirely to have Davrin standing at her shoulder when she did. Davrin, with fifteen years left, give or take, a tragic exchange for the oath he'd sworn as a Warden. He'd been silent the whole way back to the Lighthouse, and she'd had little else to say, too. Bellara had filled the silence, theorizing and speculating and already thinking up experiments they could do.
"Oh! Do you think," Bellara says, turning back to her, eyes bright with the thrill of discovery, "that there's a way to transfer it?"
The uneasy creak of Davrin's armor behind her is the only thing that tells her he's even listening.
(She would gladly cut her life in half if it meant they'd live the entire remainder of it never going even a day without each other.)
Hanan feels the resistance in her cheeks when she offers a strained smile. Weakly: "If anyone could find it, it's you, Bells."
Later she finds Davrin in his room, seated on the floor with his back to the wall, elbows on his bent knees as he stares impassively at the landscape of the Fade. She drops down beside him, resting her head on his shoulder, and his arm immediately comes up around her, his thumb stroking absent-mindedly back and forth across the bare skin of her upper arm.
She doesn't say anything, and neither does he. What can they say? A Warden with less than two decades to live and a Veil Jumper with possibly ten times that to suffer alone, like the worst kind of cosmic joke from their rampaging would-be gods.
They stay like that for a long, long moment, and she tries to engrave this into the deepest part of her memory, tries to stow it safe where neither age nor time can touch it: the warm bulk of him beside her; the slow drag of his thumb on her arm; the soft sound of his breath, in and out, in and out.
"Davrin," she says finally, looking up after an age of heavy silence, and he only turns his head to press his lips to her brow. Even his kiss feels forlorn.
To her surprise, he asks, softly, "How're you holding up?"
"Me?"
"I've known about the Calling ever since I first became a Warden. I've made my peace with it. But I figured, yours—well. Can't be an easy thing to learn about yourself, even if it's not really a bad thing."
She shrugs, a half-hearted gesture, and turns her face away. Has the Fade always looked this bleak? "I—it's not so much the—" She grimaces, fumbling for words, until she says, simply: "It's a long time to live without you."
He kisses her temple, and she doesn't feel like crying, not really, because every possible feeling has seemingly vanished into the void of the empty years stretching out between his looming death and hers.
"I'm sorry," is all he says.
She lays her head back down on his shoulder. His thumb is still brushing back and forth along her skin and she has a brief but incredibly vivid vision of feeling the ghost of his touch years and years later, when he's gone and she has only memories to comfort her.
"If there was a way to stop the Calling," she begins, carefully, "would you take it?"
After a pause, he says, equally careful: "It depends."
"On?"
He presses a kiss to the top of her head. "I wouldn't take it at your expense, Han."
"But what if it wasn't? What if it was just . . . another way?"
"It would still depend."
"On what?"
"Would I still be a Warden?" he murmurs against her head, and when she tips her face up to meet his gaze, his eyes are serious and sad. "The Calling—the Taint, it's part of us, part of being a Warden. And being a Warden is a promise, Han."
"So you wouldn't," she says.
"No," he sighs, resigned. "I wouldn't."
The soft cry and the single tear slips from her, unbidden.
"Oh, Han," he says, and she couldn't stop the rest of the tears from coming if she tried.
He twists, cupping her face in his hands as his thumbs wipe at her tears ineffectively. This close she can make out his freckles, just visible against the rich brown of his skin. When the time comes, will she remember his freckles? Will she remember each and every scar?
"Vhenan, emma lath, don't cry," he says. And then: "It's not that I don't love you, Han."
"I know."
"It's just . . ."
"I know. I understand. And I love you for it, I do, it's just—"
He sighs. "I know."
He leans his forehead heavily against hers as her sobs quiet down into numb resignation.
"Var melana sahlin sulahn'nehn," he says.
In between the dying hiccups of her grief, she manages: "Mala din'an halam mir nehn."
His face goes soft, and sadder still. "Suledin nadas, vhenan," he says, and tips her face down to kiss her forehead. "But for whatever time we have left, I'm yours."
She had chosen this love knowing that it would always be mingled with grief.
(And what choice does that leave her now, but to endure?)
---
The third and final, fatal blow:
Whatever time is left turns out to be not much time at all.
There is an Archdemon, and being a Warden is a promise.
"Ar lath ma," he says, an apology and a farewell all at once.
And she, unwilling, unprepared, is unable to even say it back. She doesn't even get to say goodbye.
When the dust of everything settles, when she fully becomes the lone hero in the song they'd said children would sing at Arlathvhen, she lays down her weapons and packs away his things. The Veilguard finds her room and his empty, everything put away in meticulous and distinctly final order. She takes nothing but Assan with her when she leaves.
(She begins, as she had promised, to endure.)
---
Years later, she meets Amell, who was once Warden-Commander. She has lines at the corners of her eyes that Davrin will never have. Her greying mabari sniffs curiously at Assan, now standing nearly three times the dog's height.
"I am sorry," Amell says, as they sit on the porch of a small house that overlooks the Waking Sea. "The cure—"
"He would not have taken it, even so," Hanan says. "He—being a Warden was a promise, he said."
Amell smiles, sad. "Then he was the best of us," she says. "But for me it was a promise that asked too much to be kept."
In war, victory. In peace, vigilance.
Somewhere inside the house she can hear Alistair—once a Warden, too—bustling in the kitchen. He and Amell had saved the world, once. Perhaps their Maker was kinder than her own false gods, to grant them their happiness in the ever after.
In death, sacrifice.
(But Davrin's whole life was a sacrifice, too. Their love, their future, as tainted by his certain end as the blood in his veins.)
She does not begrudge Amell her life, her choices. She does not begrudge Davrin for his, either.
(But what a pity, what an injustice, that her only choice is to endure.)
---
And years and years later still, she returns to the place where he fell and finds wildflowers fighting to reclaim the tainted ground. Assan comes up behind her, nearly twice her height, now; fully come into his own in the fifteen years since they'd both lost their living heart and anchor in this world.
(The fifteen years they should have had, but never did.)
Assan tips his head back and unleashes a mournful cry into the desolate landscape. When the echoes come back to her, so do the memories: his smile, bright as the sun; his laughter, alternatingly boisterous in battle or soft in secret, stolen moments. His steady shoulders. His strong yet gentle hands, rough fingers sliding softly across her skin.
His freckles.
She breathes in, ash and wildflowers on the wind, and endures.