One of my best friends fell in love with the relationship between poor tragic Tamlen and the Mahariel warden. This is for her.
"Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.
The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes."
-Gwendolyn Brooks, truth
They are born on the same day, two children with long fingers and downy thatches of blonde hair. He is delivered early in the morning, as the halla keepers lead their frost-colored animals to drink and the Keeper greets the dawn with arms outstretched. The sun is in the house of Elgar'nan, god of vengeance, and so he is christened a child of the All-Father. She is not born until the wine-colored stain of twilight filters through the treetops, and so she is a daughter of Mythal: the moon mother, wife of Elgar'nan.
It's an omen, says the clan. A blessing from the Father and the Mother. Two halves of a whole.
They grow together, two fruit from the same vine. She runs before she can walk, tottering between the camp's cook fires like a spinning top. He pushes himself onto his plump legs and follows. When he knocks his head against a tree trunk and loses a front tooth, growing gap-mouthed like an elder, she ties a string to her own tooth and yanks until it falls out. On his tenth birthday, his father gives him a yew bow, carved with intricate images of Andruil, goddess of the hunt. She steals it out of his tent before he has the chance to notch an arrow. Then she brings him a squirrel so he can claim it as his own.
During summers, the clan aravels rumble and clank to the edge of the Brecilian forest, where the Southron hills turn the straight line of the horizon to amber-colored curves. They escape the keen eyes of their mothers to track rabbits in the meadows and run foot races from the crest of one grassy swell to another. They never catch any of the scrawny hill rabbits. And when they race, they usually end up flopping into waiting beds of barley, daring each other to stare directly into the sun until the backs of their eyelids are threaded with orange.
They make up stories, lying there in the fields of gold. Stories where the hero, broad-shouldered and blonde, saves the clan from hundreds of marauding shemlen. Stories where the heroine, whose eyes glitter like stars in the reflection of her silver blade, is as noble as the halla and as cunning as a fox.
They are almost-not-children, but the world is still theirs, and it follows where they lead it.
When they are older, and she begins to realize the heady pull her golden coils of hair and the soft cloud of her lips have over him, she sits atop a hill like a queen of Arlathan. He kneels before her, his eyes bright as coals. Kill a bear and bring me its skin, she says, drunk on the power of her body. Find the heart of a sylvan tree and carve my name on it. Tear the Veil in two and fetch me a dream in each hand.
For you, lethallan, he says, and her soul jumps to her mouth as if straining to hear the lilt of his words, anything.
She learns that love is in the twitch of an eyelid, the cadence of a whisper, the soft vibrations of a bowstring held taut like hands searching for each other.
They turn sixteen and undergo the ritual of the vallaslin. The stories of the Dalish, swimming in their blood, are now written across their foreheads like tokens. They tell each other they won't flinch, and they don't, and then somehow they're something greater than what they once were. He chooses the symbol of Mythal. For her, he says. She picks Elgar'nan's and doesn't tell him why. His eyes tell her he knows anyway.
Sometimes, when the forest is dark-hazed and coming alive with night, she looks sideways at him and thinks their tattoos could be the negative images of one another, heavy with devotion as they are.
She gets older, and lonelier.
A country's future wasn't supposed to hang on me, she wants to say but doesn't.
Eventually, she can't stop the nightmares from coming.
The monster who haunts her dreams has rotting skin the color of slate and a few strands of wispy hair where a mane of blonde used to be. He speaks in rasps like a wolf. Always he rolls his head backward as if listening, enraptured, to some terrible song only he can hear.
Love is now in the plunge of a blade into darkspawn, and the blood it sprays against her salty skin, and the uncertain longing for a home that may not want her back.
One evening, when her turn comes for guard duty, she lets her head slump to her chest and falls into a fitful sleep. When she wakes at the noise of footsteps, the creature is there. She thinks desperately that maybe she is still dreaming, that she isn't guarding anything, that maybe she is only a somnambulist caught in her thoughts. But as he raises his arms to strike her, something changes in his eyes and he catches her wrists instead. She yanks her arms from his grasp, going for her dagger, but his voice stops her.
I never wanted to hurt you, lethallan, he says, voice pained. It told me to find you, the song in my head, he tells her. A snarl curls familiar lips. She can feel more than see the taint coursing through his veins, tormenting his body.
End it.
For a moment it feels as if she is drowning and her lungs are taking in mouthfuls of bitter water. The dagger trembles in her hands. Tamlen, she says, and her voice is unsteady.
End it.
His words scrape across her skin like the point of a knife.
Tell me you'll end it.
For a moment she lets her fingers stray to his face, touching the web of tattoos that still marks him as her vhenan, her heart. His gaze latches on to hers. In the depths of his tainted eyes, she imagines that she can see the wooded thickets where they once played when they were young, hands clasped, feet leaving faint impressions in the forest floor. Two halves of a whole. Indivisible.
Always loved you, he says.
Always will.
Now please let me go.
Her body shakes, a sapling in a gale, as she draws breath. Her lips struggle to form the words.
For you, lethallin, she says -
The dagger sings across his throat.
- anything.
His blood falls onto her skin as softly as August rains on the fields of gold, where the west wind blows and the sun in his jealous sky remembers them, a boy and girl, two long-fingered children spinning out their days in fields of barley.
Thanks for reading! As always, I'd love to hear your musings, angsts, loves, hates, whatever you'd like to share.
The lack of anything to denote dialogue is intentional - hopefully it worked!