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Lilith’s trembling fingertips brushed lightly across the aged piece of parchment she’d kept folded in the inner pocket of her uniform since her third year as a cadet. The version of Asher that stared back at her through the thirty-four-year-old watercolour was happy and healthy, his coppery hair blazing like dragon-fire beneath the long forgotten sunset he’d proposed beneath.
It’d been the perfect day, even Aimsir had said so. After finding out she’d enjoyed painting before entering Basgiath, Asher had gone out of his way to gift her a small set of watercolour paints for her birthday. She’d argued that it’d been a frivolous childhood hobby, of course. And of course he’d rolled his eyes and told her to stop pretending that war was the only thing she was good for. “You cannot hope to find peace by avoiding life, Lili, and there is more to it than simply chasing after death on the back of a dragon,” had been his exact words. She’d groaned at the nickname and he’d smirked, knowing she secretly liked it, and knowing damn well she wouldn’t have tolerated it from anyone else— even then reputation had preceded her.
They’d indulged in a bottle of wine he’d won in a game of cards against a fellow scribe and, having forgotten the glassware, they’d drank straight from the bottle itself until they were half drunk and she’d somehow agreed that it’d be a grand use of their precious free time to paint portraits of each other on the scrap bits of parchment he carried around in his pockets. By the time that bottle had been drained they’d both been covered in paint and their futures had seemed unlimited, like the entire world had been theirs for the taking. It hadn’t mattered that she hadn’t been what anyone else would’ve called ladylike, nor had it mattered that Asher had not been what her squad mates considered masculine. Together they were something else and together they’d discovered that there were so many different ways to be happy.
They’d walked hand-in-hand for hours through the woods and he’d talked her ear off about the medicinal and poisonous properties of almost every plant they’d passed by. She’d listened intently, of course, as she always had. Retaining every word of his overly-excited lessons might’ve been close to impossible for her twenty-three-year-old self to manage but the sound of his voice alone had been enough to make the stress of her third year melt away. He could have read the dictionary aloud to her for all she had cared… just hearing him talk had grounded her like nothing else ever had.
Unshed tears stung at the corners of her eyes, that ancient day and all that had unfolded since weighing so heavily on her heart she feared she would not be able to bear it. She still got up at dawn each day, as she had when she’d painted the image in her hand. Back then there had been such a sense of possibility. They’d been twenty-three and secretly engaged, entirely devoted to one another, and thrilled to be breaking the rules right under their superior’s noses. She remembered thinking to herself that it had been the beginning of happiness, that Asher’s proposal was where it would start. And of course she’d thought there would always be more— what twenty-three year old would believe otherwise?
How young she’d been.
How foolish.
It had never occurred to her it hadn’t been the beginning of anything. It was happiness. It had been the moment, right then. Right there.
And that moment had slipped away.
“Forgive me, my love,” she whispered, her eyes burning with tears that she refused to let fall.
She would not cry today.
The sky to the north darkened and the terrain surrounding the college turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. The temperature indoors dropped to match that outside as the most insufferable mix of rage, fear, guilt and helplessness warred within. The storm front towered above and she knew the wind would simultaneously be a cool relief on the sweating faces of candidates walking the parapet and a hinderance.
“Calm yourself, General,” Aimsir rumbled inside her head. “You do the girl no favours by allowing the weather to rage like this.”
“I do her no favours regardless,” she replied weakly. “She will never forgive me for this— neither of them will.”
“That is not for you to decide,” he replied evenly. “One day, however, they will understand. That much is certain.”
“That much is what keeps me up at night,” she fired back. “You know as well as I do that both Mira and Violet will charge head first into this fight the moment they find out that gods damned book of fables was all true. I can live with their hatred and their anger at having been lied to but I cannot continue to live if their inability to control their emotions and think rationally winds up getting them killed.”
Aimsir’s silence was deafening as the thunder crashed with enough force to rattle the glass panes of the windows. She slumped bleary-eyed in the chair behind her desk and looked outside despite the fact she couldn’t actually see the parapet. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.
“Don’t even think about pointing out my hypocrisy,” she grumbled. “I am well aware of it.”
“I wasn’t going to—“
“We’ve been bonded for more than three decades, Aimsir. You and I both know you’ve got several things to say.”
“I was simply going to point out how laughable it is that people think you emotionless,” he sighed. “If you’re not careful you’ll freeze to death behind that fancy desk of yours.”
She rolled her eyes, noticing for the first time that the temperature in her office had in fact dipped low enough for her to see her breath in front of her face. Nausea coiled deep in her stomach as she tucked the precious picture of Asher back into her pocket. She couldn’t look at his face any longer— he would never have forgiven her for this. For sending Violet to the parapet. For being so wrapped up in her own grief she’d barely been able to stand looking at her when all she saw was him. None of it.
“Now would you mind telling me why you are drinking sherry in the middle of the afternoon?” He quipped. “You despise sherry.”
“Because I finished the scotch.” She huffed, casting a glance towards the half empty glass of sherry that was sat on her desk. Taking her night cap in the middle of the day was new low, even for her.
“Sgaeyl’s rider has her in his line of sight,” Aimsir said. “She’ll begin the walk in a moment.”
Raindrops battered against the windows with such force they sounded almost like hail. In the distance the sound of loud, incoherent, animalistic, screaming carried on the wind and she knew what it meant. Another young life ended too soon. Another mother’s child, dead.
It was such a horrible experience to helplessly listen to someone die from the comfort of her office. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time she’d had to do so. In truth, she was getting very tired of it. She hated how many people had to die, so the war could push on. What hurt most was that they did not even die at the hands of the enemy. They were killed for no good reason.
But Violet would survive, she told herself. Just as she had survived everything else in her life.
She’d never be the same… but she’d be alive. That was what mattered.
“Mira gave her riding boots because I knew she’d never accept them from me,” she stated, more for her own sake than anything else, before she drained the remainder of her glass. “They’ll keep her steady.”
Aimsir was silent for a long moment. “Sgaeyl informs me she is… only wearing one sensible boot, General. Her rider is somewhat perplexed by it.”
“She— WHAT?”
“She… appears to have traded one of her boots with one of another candidate,” he said, his own confusion and worry evident in his every word.
Thunder boomed. “She is going to get herself killed! I ensure she has every tool she needs to survive and she— FUCK!” She slammed both of her hands down on her desk. “It shouldn’t even have to be said that you keep both of your damn boots on! What is she thinking?”
“Lilith,” Aimsir scolded, the sound of her name making her still before her temper could rise any further. He rarely ever said her name in its entirety. “You are not helping matters.”
“Aimsir—“
“You need to calm down or your inability to control yourself will be the thing that makes her fall,” he snapped. “It was your decision to send her to the parapet. She is already at a disadvantage, the last thing she needs is her mother’s anger making the journey more difficult.”
“She’s not at a disadvantage.” It was an awful lie. She’d seen how she’d struggled with her pack. “She is perfectly capable of crossing.”
Aimsir only sighed in response, knowing that there was nothing he could say to make anything any better.
Violet was kind. Too kind. A rider could not afford to be kind in the quadrant— especially if that rider was a Sorrengail. She would have to learn how thin the line between kindness and weakness truly was. How laughable that concept was— it was something she and Asher had never agreed on. He had believed a person should measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. That it was easy to get tired of wit and intellect; everybody was their own little display of genius if you looked hard enough. It was a belief she’d respected him for, even if she could never bring herself to subscribe to it as he did. Most people were idiots as far as she was concerned and even the smartest of them could scarcely be trusted to look out for anything beyond their own interests.
She just hoped there was enough of her in Violet for her to find the will to be ruthless when life demanded it of her. And demand it of her, it would. In the quadrant is was kill and live, for if you left even a single enemy alive you ensured your own death. She could no longer afford to be like Asher— to think like a scribe. To resort to kindness and reason. Her life now depended on her becoming something else entirely.
She fiddled mindlessly with the edge of her jacket, barely restraining the urge to indulge in the childhood stress-relieving habit of picking the skin around her fingernails until she saw blood. It always seemed to re-enter her mind whenever anything went wrong with Violet. Whenever she let herself wonder what might have happened if she'd taken medical advice during her pregnancy and rested instead of putting herself in a position to get struck down by that that damned fever. If she’d taken maternity leave as she had done with Brennan and Mira instead of trying to further her career and thinking she could do it all. Her hubris was the cause of everything… of all of Violet’s pain… and the guilt had been eating her alive since the moment she’d recovered her strength whilst her baby had remained sick.
To live only to suffer as Violet had — only to feel the injury of daily life repeated and unending — she couldn’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be her. She’d never had the courage to tell her as much, but from the first time she’d witnessed her defy Asher and climb to the very top of a tree; despite her condition; despite the fact she dislocated a knee on the way down and had to be taken to the healers, it had always seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, to be treated like she was made of glass. Asher had been so overly protective he had called it wishful thinking. Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? He had asked her. Wasn't it much more probable that if one were like Violet one would suffer if allowed to run free?
If she’d just put Violet first she’d have none of this worry now. She’d have ran across the parapet like every Sorrengail before her and there wouldn’t have been a shadow of doubt in her mind that she’d thrive in the quadrant. It was impossible not to imagine that other future, that long lost future, as three healthy children would have meant Brennan would have developed a more powerful signet that might have saved him, instead of a lifetime of hearing his baby sister screaming in pain giving him the gift of mending (a fine signet on its own but not all that useful when a rider came face-to-face with Malek); a surviving husband whose heart would’ve had no reason to grieve; a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond; a closer relationship with her girls without her guilt at having let them down colouring their every moment.
If only she could have entered that other world. She could have had a life as rich and beautiful as she thought she would’ve had when she was twenty-three.
Or then again maybe not, the General told herself. This was who she was. The ruthless General Sorrengail who’d sent her sick daughter to the Rider’s Quadrant, the coward who’d stood by whilst 107 innocent children watched their parents burn— a once decent woman who’d become everything she’d once sworn she never would, a widow, a bereaved mother whose two surviving children could barely stand her, and whose only real friend in the world was her dragon.
Still, there was this sense of missed opportunity, the portrait resting above her heart, tucked away in her pocket seeming like it weight a thousand pounds. Maybe there was nothing, ever, that could equal the memory of having been young and stupidly naive with someone. Maybe it was as simple as that. Asher was the person she loved at her most optimistic moment, before they’d really understood their place in the war torn world they’d been born into. They had stood beside each other through every trial and tribulation until death tore them apart.
The decision to send Violet to the quadrant was as much a betrayal of him as the dedication to Dunne had been to her. She hadn’t truly understood it or forgiven it until being forced to derail Violet’s life once again in order to keep her alive. In order to give her a fighting chance. She just wished she could tell Asher how sorry she was for holding onto that anger for so long…. she understood now. Kindness and cruelty were often hidden behind the same mask.
She did what she could to try to reel in the storm but it wouldn’t stop. It didn’t matter that she had decades of mastery over her signet. It. Wouldn’t. Stop.
She felt too sick with guilt and grief. Too out of control as she stared out the window and silently hated the noise and the streaks of rain, and the crackling tension in the air, but most of all she hated what it must have been making her daughter feel. How it must’ve added insult to injury that her mother — a General who she thought completely infallible — wouldn’t give her just the slightest bit of relief. Violet would never believe it was not for lack of trying. No one who’d ever set eyes upon her outside of the privacy of her office would recognise her hunched over in her seat, her hands tightened into fists, and all of her normally razor sharp attention focused on merely continuing to breathe.
Aimsir was quiet to begin with, save for the occasional command to breathe deeper. Slower. To think of anything other than Violet. Eventually he settled on explaining how much he’d always admired her thunderstorms. Not many did outside of battle. They were loud and unpredictable… deadly. Dragons, though, merely saw the proof of nature's power over man whenever a storm occurred… whereas whenever she controlled it or caused a storm to brew where there should’ve been clear skies all he saw was her power over nature. It was the sheer energy of the light and sound and rain that pounded around him that he enjoyed. It made him feel alive.
“Cadet Sorrengail has entered the quadrant,” he eventually announced, ending his endless musing on the weather.
The breath she’d been holding escaped and the storm all but completely stopped. “Good. That’s… that’s good.”
“The Riorson boy will keep her alive until she bonds or I will scorch the ground he stands.”
“He will teach her to keep herself alive,” she corrected him, her hands still trembling as she went about organising the paperwork she intended to work through that day. “She has to earn her dragon the same way all riders do. She’ll have to learn how to pull her own weight. To adapt her routines around her condition and make things work for herself.”
“Sgaeyl informs me she held a knife against a male candidate’s unmentionables whilst on the edge of the parapet.” The dragon chuckled darkly. “She may be more like you than we give her credit for.”
She blinked. “She— I— Excuse me?”
“It was apparently quite the spectacle.“
“Good for her.” She couldn’t have suppressed her own laughter if she’d tried. Her own conscription day had ended with her putting another candidate in a headlock before dragging him to the edge of the parapet and throwing him off after he’d had the audacity to try to trip her. Perhaps there was still a poetic beauty in the world after all, though it was harsher than she had expected it to be when she was young. “She’s alive,” she continued, “and that’s what matters. Keep me updated and pass on my regards to Sgaeyl. I am aware she was not thrilled when I cashed in my favour with her rider and her cooperation has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. And if Teine is still in range inform Mira of her sister’s victory… but leave out the ball holding. She’s liable to fly right back to yell at me again if she hears that.”
Aimsir hummed and after a moment replied, “You’ll have to use your imagination when it comes to Mira’s response. I lack the self-righteous indignation to convey the curse words with the gusto they deserve.”
She snorted. “Fair enough.”
“Sgaeyl still does not understand why you did not have me stationed near the parapet to keep an eye on things and, frankly, the intricacies of the human mother-daughter relationship remains so far beyond the realms of my understanding that I do not even know where to begin explaining your reasoning.”
She sighed. “If she saw you then she’d know I was watching her.”
“The horror. A mother watching her hatchling. However would your fellow humans cope?” Though she couldn’t see him she just knew he was rolling his eyes. “Perhaps seeing me would’ve provided her some comfort… and perhaps it would’ve ended the line of thinking that you’ve sent her there to die.”
“Melgren would also know I was watching— he is watching her, too.” She barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She hated the bastard. He was a miserable, obnoxious, tight-fisted buffoon who distrusted her because of how she’d disagreed with his handling of Fen Riorson’s rebellion, because she had always been a stronger rider than he was, a better tactician, and because they both knew him having the larger dragon was the only reason he was her superior. “There are two ways to destroy a person, Aimsir: kill them or ruin their reputation. Me being seen to coddle her in any way would be the latter and the target on her back is big enough as is.”
“Codagh is not as fond of him as he once was,” Aimsir responded carefully. “They keep up appearances but Tairn has mentioned their disagreements more than once. Do with that information what you will.”
She drummed her fingernails against her desk, mentally filing that tidbit away for later. “Tairn? You said he all but stopped talking after Naolin…”
“Yes but that… changed… somewhat recently,” he said slowly.
“Somewhat recently?”
“Two summers ago.”
Her brow furrowed. “What changed? Will he consider bonding again?”
Aimsir sighed. “Don’t ask me questions I cannot answer, General. All you need to know is that when Tairn decides to bond again, no one will know of it in advanced. A soul worthy of his bond is a rare thing indeed… if he had any sort of inclination that such a rider had entered the quadrant no one but Sgaeyl and An— That is to say, only his mate would know it.”
“You were about to say someone else’s name. Who else would he confide in, Aimsir?” She took a steadying breath, her mind already spinning circles. A dragon worthy of Tairn’s time would be a powerful mount… a mount that would certainly be capable of keeping her child safe in battle. Even thinking such a thing made her scoff, she really was reaching all sorts of moral abysses and it wasn’t even midday yet.
“I will not dignify this line of thinking with a response. You shouldn't ask questions when you know at heart you'd prefer not to hear the answers,” he breathed. “Though your imagination still has as much an impressive a reach as it did decades ago.”
“Or my desperation has an impressive scope.”
“As I told you when Brennan and Mira were in the quadrant: I cannot point anyone in their direction. Not even subtly. The reasons we choose our riders lie beyond human comprehension, the Sorrengail name is not enough to impress us.” He paused and then added, “All I will tell you — and I am not even supposed to tell you this much — is that Violet is already known to The Empyrean and being a Sorrengail has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons why.”
She blinked. “The Empyrean has knowledge of my daughter?”
“Yes,” Aimsir said, his tone making it clear he would elaborate no further. As frustrating as it was she knew he’d already pushed the Empyrean’s boundaries on what he was allowed to talk about. She would push him no further. “Regardless of the general consensus,” he continued, “I am still of the opinion that explaining to her that you do not want her dead without going as far as to divulge the entire truth behind your reasoning for sending her to the quadrant would’ve been prudent. The brooding shadow man noticed the sadness in her eyes at the edge of the parapet and the Aetos boy was appalled to see her, according to Cath. He immediately drew the same conclusion—“
“I didn’t care for the opinions of twenty-something-year-old children when I was one. Why would I care now?”
Aimsir growled in frustration. “Your stubbornness is an endless nuisance. Are humans not supposed to become more reasonable as they age?”
“Bullshit. My stubbornness has kept us both alive on more than one occasion and you know it.”
She cast another withering glance out the window. It was no secret she hadn’t exactly been there for Violet. Leadership knew it. The other cadets knew it. Even the dragons knew it now too, apparently. What no one but Aimsir seemed to understand was how fiercely she loved her or how far she’d go to keep her alive. She’d even fought with Asher about it more than once, about her inability to connect with her youngest the way she’d connected to Brennan or even Mira— though that relationship had also never been smooth sailing.
Maybe it was her guilt, her own self hatred, that always got in the way.
Or maybe it was because in all she’d seen and all she’d done… there was still nothing she’d come across that was quite as undoing as a daughter.
“It’s well and truly out of your hands now,” Aimsir sighed. “What’s done is done. She’ll stand on her own or…”
“The only way out of the fire is through the fire.”
The silence was heavy between them. “I just hope you do not live to regret this decision. She could have been reasoned with if you’d allowed her to enter the scribes.”
“No. She couldn’t have been.” She let out a slow, steadying breath. “Information is more dangerous than any weapon we possess and the moment she finds out the truth about all Navarre is hiding, about what her dad knew, or if she gets even the slightest inclination that his death wasn’t entirely natural— Aimsir, you know what they’d do to her. What they’d do to all of us. She has to have some means of keeping herself alive when she inevitably finds out the truth and bonding a dragon, developing some sort of signet to help her, is the only way for her to do that.” She took another deep breath. “I know you’re worried about me regretting this but what does it mean to regret when you have no choice? You do whatever it is you can bear. And there it is... sending her to the scribes was sending her to death. I chose to keep my child alive.”
“You shouldn’t have done it the way you did,” he said. “It should have been the child’s choice to make. You should not have forced her hand. You demand too much from her.”
“Come off it,” she sighed. “I allowed Asher to keep her in that library, to coddle her, because I was under the impression he’d still be here. That he’d be there in the archives to protect and guide her but it’s only us now. I have not demanded anything she is not fully capable of giving— she may not believe herself a rider but I do. I always have. There is fire in her and in time everyone else will see it too. I know it.”
“Inwardly you have been arguing with yourself non stop, reflecting that it has never ended well when you do something morally questionable for the right reasons,” he continued. Despite all his skills, shutting up was one she doubted he’d ever master. “You know I’d die for you. I’ve come near it often enough. All I mean is that you will now have to live with the possibility of her death each day and because of who she is, because of who you are—“
“I know who I am,” she snapped. “I know what I’ve done— and from the moment they told me how sick she was I have lived with the possibility of her death. It’s nothing new.”
“Do you?” Aimsir questioned, as undeterred as ever by her irritation. “Do you know who you are? Really? Because it seems to me, General, that since losing your mate no one has the slightest idea of who you are anymore. Of what you stand for. Least of all you.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Every time she closed her eyes all she saw were infantry soldiers on the ground far below them, carrying fallen comrades, limping on makeshift crutches, or crawling through the dirt, dragging broken limbs behind them. She’d been in so many battles she could no longer tell which was which. But she knew them, the soldiers— their torsos full of scars. Their eyes hollowed. Their faces that had joked, thanked, grimaced as she covered them from the sky before flying onward to face the real threats they couldn’t even begin to dream of. Most of them didn’t even know what they were really fighting for… how could they know? How could they even begin to wonder if they were being lied to when she and her fellow generals had seen to it that the truth was so well concealed?
For years she’d told herself it was for the best; that everything she’d ever done was for her children… but now she didn’t know. She had once believed that were always going to be rebels and radicals. Those who lived on the fringes of society. She’d been angered whenever she’d thought about what they contributed to the society itself. Through her younger eyes they had seemed to reap its rewards without experiencing its costs. She had been raised to believe that loyal, hardworking citizens who pushed aside their own selfish desires for the good of the whole were the backbone of the world. To ask what would happen if everyone decided to run off and live freely without thought or care for order? The answer she’d always arrived at in her twenties and thirties was that civilisation would crumble. That there was a joy in duty and a security in knowing one's place... it had seemed like the only way.
But she was older now. Wiser. She understood that there tended to be far more similarities between opposing sides of any given battle than most people ever really stopped to consider. Now another one of her children would be faced with the same horrors she’d seen, and would spend her life haunted by the same nightmares as the war went on and on without an end in sight. A generation of young people would ruined once again, left coated by blood and split bone. Because of her. Because of what she’d stood for. Because of her own bullheaded naivety.
“I stand for my daughters,” she said after a moment. “That is what mothers do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other. They fight for each other. I do so for my daughters.”
“And if they learn the truth and decide to stand with the rebellion you already know is building?”
“Must you point out my lack of control over my children every time I—“
“Someone has to hold you accountable, General,” he interjected. Hold her accountable, he certainly did. He hadn’t shut up about her abysmal handling of her parental duties since the moment Brennan was born. “So let us not pretend I am calling your parenting into question. You know what I am asking.”
“I know my daughters, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. I already know whose side they are on, even though they themselves don’t yet know it. And I am on their side, always.” She sighed, squeezing the bridge of her nose in an attempt to stave off her third stress-induced migraine of the week. Perhaps for the first time in her life she truly felt like a woman in her fifties who’d been at war since reaching the age of majority. She was, above all else, tired; she wanted more than anything to return to happier days. To travel back in time to when her children were small, to take her family, and run. To get on Aimsir’s back and fly away from everything when they still had the chance. The world, this world, felt stunned and stunted, and she wanted to be far away from everything. After a moment she continued to speak, “Whether or not it’ll ever be safe for me to openly stand by their side in battle against the dark wielders… I don’t know. I may always be of more use to them here on the inside— if I succeed in keeping my distance from Violet leadership wont have any reason to suspect I’m not entirely loyal.”
“As I told you when you were young, the more people learn of your skill, the more they will wish for you to fight their wars. You are a General now— perhaps the strongest one involved in this war — and your reputation precedes you.” He paused and then pushed, “The time will come when everyone must openly choose a side. Even you. What will you choose?”
“I don’t know,” she said again.
“That is an answer for now. It will not be good enough later— will your children ever believe you stand with them if you do not show them you do?”
“No-one's going to forgive me. Not for any of it,” she replied. “I’m not seeking their belief in me or their forgiveness, or even their love. I just want to keep them alive, Aimsir, and by my life or by my death I will do so.”
Despite herself, she pulled that worn old portrait out of her pocket one more time. She just had to see his face. Had to remember that there had once been more to life than the sense of foreboding that came with knowing there was something terrible awaiting just beyond one’s grasp. That the nightmares that never faded upon waking, that hovered over her at odd moments had once been nothing more than simple bad dreams. For years she’d felt as though she had lived on the brink of something that never arrived and all she had wanted was to either have it or be free of it… but now she felt edging ever closer and all she wanted was for it to stop.
“Mourning the loss of a loved one is both fitting and honourable, but to dwell unnecessarily on that loss is to give the past too much power over the present, Lilith,” Aimsir soothed, all of his earlier fire replaced by the tenderness only two souls bound as tightly as a dragon and their rider could ever share. “You have to let him go.”
“I can’t,” she sniffled.
“You must,” he urged. “It’s time to give us all peace— your pain is my pain. We cannot go on like this.”
“I don’t know how.” A single tear she could not have held back if she’d tried trickled down her cheek, her eyes never leaving Asher’s wine-drunk smile. “I don’t know if I have what it takes to see this through without him.”
“You are stronger and more capable than you give yourself credit for… but do you not see how dangerous this is? This constant living in the past?”
“It’s no more dangerous than living in the present and realising nothing’s changed despite the fact everything different.”
And at that several other tears followed; for Asher, for Brennan, for the constant anxiety Mira would suffer whilst Violet was in the quadrant… and for Violet herself…. whom she’d failed more than anyone.
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, she thought to herself once again, shaking her head at how naive she’d been and how more than thirty years later she was still shocked by the fact it’d been happiness; that the entire experience lay in a sunny day and walk in the woods. The anticipation of a bottle of wine and a set of watercolour paints. The wine was by now forgotten; wine had been long overshadowed by scotch. What lived undimmed in her mind more than three decades later was a lifelong question asked at dusk on a patch of sun-warmed grass, and the walk back to Basgiath as dragons danced in the darkening sky. There was still that singular perfection, and it was perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise infinity.
Now she knew: That it was the moment, right then. There had been no other. There would be no other.
Not in this lifetime.
~ fin.