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Tissaia strode over the corridor and knocked on his wooden door under the same breath.
Stregobor opened it instantly, looming and alert, even his usual chiffon robe layered perfect and still. His whole being, though, was clearly befuddled. For a second, neither blinked.
“What a sheer luck we haven’t split paths a minute earlier, Rectoress”. Meeting her eyes boldly and smugly now, jeering at the last word Stregobor nevertheless stated with as much venom as there was on a rotting viper’s tail. Nervously.
“I came here to speak, Stregobor, not jest. Will you let me in at last?”. Tissaia’s eyes darted quickly to his shoulder and back, command stern. Frustrated, he noticed. Good. At least, she was as usual fierce if slightly rushed. Fast-contaminating and all-consuming, there shone desperation in the way she was evidently not-fidgeting: a display of rigidity only for his sight. For hers too, he idly thought. This shred of calm— cracking air in the eye of a waning Cidarisian windstorm or coastal rock finally crashing under the high tide on Hindarsfjall? Maybe rather an oak tree holding its last breath under the hands of ungrateful, thoughtless wood-cutters.
(A long time ago, before he left Kovir and grew his beard, before he had lost his hands, before he fashioned a staff from breathing branches— he protected those oaks, salved their wounds. Sowed, forests rich and abundant.)
With the hollow gnawing in his chest, he softly moved aside and gestured for her to enter.
The candles scattered across, many more of them reflected in the silver dragon-ornamented mirrors, were glowing like Ofiri embers turning the room into a finely-encrusted, lukewarm crypt. Tissaia dragged an askance look around only to find bookshelves full of clutter and the window tightly closed. The hour had already been indiscernible after the night fall. The flames in the fireplace have been extinguished not so long ago, and Tissaia wondered for the second time this evening whether Stregobor indeed wished to leave. Not to find her— Stregobor would never do such a thing, she could be sure.
(It has been a habit of theirs: Tissaia would be the first to step close, for Stregobor to make the rest of the way to meet her.)