AN: This was inspired by cassandrapentagay's "Kiss Me Again", which made me feel many things. In which Tamlen is gay, rather than straight.
"For the Love of a Dalish Hunter"
I.
He kissed him in a cool forest glen. A soft breeze disturbed the leaves and the flesh on Tamlen's bare arms.
He said it never happened.
But he had been so enthralled so enchanted by the way Tamlen moved as he leapt gracefully over fallen log and danced around the rocks as he talked. He always talked. It was noon, and he wasn't concerned about the game. "It will wander onto our arrows eventually." He said dismissively when Friyr queried about his moving mouth. Tamlen's skin highlighted with buttery golden hues where the light from above fell over it.
His heart yearned, and his heart pulled for something he could not condone. He could feel it deep within himself as naturally as though it were the movements of his muscles or the particulars of the way each scar curved into his skin. He wanted because he was. He was- Thedas had no name for Friyr - who looked at other boys and wanted - even though he knew the feeling the same way a deer knew it was a deer, or that he knew the hard lines citylife had etched into him were his veins and that was where his blood flowed, or an elf knew he was Dalish and didn't belong in the hard concrete structures that held Friyr's life blood, the way that Tamlen knew he was Dalish because the forest had grown strong lines that defined each muscle and let his blood flow freely
- the way that Friyr knew his arms wanted Tamlen.
It was purely physical, but it wasn't. Friyr loved the dip in Tamlen's waist to his sturdy hips and the curve of his neck, the gentle innocence of his lips, the lean power of his arms and the definition of each muscle that the forest had put into his body. He ached for it, but there was more.
The physical craving was a weary one that he had faced in the sudden angles of a human knight's womanly waist protected by gleaming armor that cascaded chainmail down her wide hips as his hands held her there and their palms promised her love if she didn't give him iron, the lean long necked curve of an assassin's arched brow and smirk as Friyr whispered rough needy words of sweaty regretlessness over hot skin, the heavy arms of brown skinned men that niched in the dip of his back, pale skinned full lipped whores that smiled red and painted.
Tamlen's body was freedom, and freedom, although physically etched into his skin, was not a physical sensation; it was in the pounding of his maddened heart not put there by fear, coy words, or unslaked desire, but just by Tamlen. For Tamlen. Not because he saw an elf that was young, beautiful, or an outpouring of wild abandon. But because Tamlen was young, beautiful, and an outpouring of wild abandon. He did not lust, and he was not looking to be fixed. He just wanted naturally as one does.
A stream rushed by, and Tamlen's feet paused, hindered by it. His mouth kept moving. Friyr was not listening. Friyr always listened. No one could listen to Tamlen as much as Friyr. But he didn't listen now. He listened to the sound of the stream, the rushing in his ears, the yearning in each stutter of his breath as Tamlen furrowed his brow and asked if he was alright. He listened to the concrete in his veins breaking as he reached for Tamlen's belting and drug him forward to kiss his evermoving everflowing mouth against his solid quiet one.
Tamlen's sound of surprise was as bright as a bell peal in the calm mundanity of the forest going on around them. His mouth was so soft. Round. Bright. Unhardened and unclaimed by the forest that had shaped the rest of his body into a man. Tamlen quivered in his arms, like something gentle had broken as Friyr's lips sealed over his. Like the tenuous shiver of the bow string when it let loose its first arrow.
Tamlen could feel his eyes open and round as coin as Friyr's hands pressed their palms curiously into his waist and as the City Elf's lips sank into his own. Soft lips, inexperienced lips - Tamlen was only fifteen - that Friyr guided and smoothed the tip of his tongue over, like a child hesitantly reaching for something they were afraid might break. He sank into Tamlen the way a smooth stone sank into a stream. Suddenly. But gently as the water stole it beneath its surface.
Something delicately wavered in Friyr too, and he wondered what it was.
He pulled away because this was a Dalish hunter, and he had given up his sacred right to have another. A human would mean exile. Another elf would taint Dalish blood because through his city alienage veins flowed the union of elf and human. A man with no womb would rob the Dalish of the children he could plant in a woman, the same way he'd robbed their young Dalish hunter of a kiss.
But as his lips left Tamlen's floundering ones he saw his round coin eyes were half closed in pleasure. Friyr's heart beat once out of rhythm and a thumb raked over a line of vallaslin under Tamlen's skin, and he joined their lips again, like two magnets drawn together. Then he pulled away. Each root the whorled skin of his palms and fingertips had set down in leather he unplanted until the space between them turned from satisfaction to longing again.
"What did you-?"
"-I didn't."
"But you-"
"Did I?"
"..."
"I told you to get that fever looked at. Lest you tell us there's more bears in camp during the night."
"But you…" he accepted the fever dream but touched his lips anyway.
II.
The second time he kissed him Tamlen looked at Friyr and saw through him.
"Sharp eyes Haren! Well, are you coming?" Tamlen asked as he pulled the shoulder pads of his armor off. Halla neighed in the distance and the voices of the clan drifted up to the hill and began to dissipate in the open air around them along with the smell of meat roasting.
Friyr felt his chest turn to stone. An inconsequential statement. But he hated it. Suddenly he was no longer Friyr.
The stench of the sewers that Fridurich had been surprised to learn wasn't the natural smell of air. His small body between his master's huge thighs and swallowing hungrily. Hands holding his mouth open, and his eyes lidding as his heart beat wildly. "Friyr-" his master's old voice moaned cloyingly. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Sitting in a cold empty room in a straw stuffed bed alone in the Anderfels. A tall man came in and held him kindly, fatherly. "You belong here, Fridurich." He shied away from the arms and ran. He sat on the edge of the craigy cliff alone. He held a flesh crescent in his hands. It was soft to the touch. Feathey. His ear bled. He would never reach the Maker.
The Chant of Light rattled through his soul, and he rolled his eyes, but it did not quell the ringing of awe in his heart. He was invisible in the Ferelden Chantry walls. Silently he lit the candles for prayer and slipped coins from the donation box. The stone floor he slept on was cold with draft. Chantry boy. He could feel his ribs expanding against his sallow skin as he taste of hot bakery bread filled his mouth as he devoured a loaf on the spot he'd stood to buy it on with the Maker's money. Bless Andraste he cackled in the recesses of his mind. The Chantry provided for what its meager wages could not. "Thief!"
"My name's Friyr." He knew he was beautiful. It was a curse, but he let them take his body, and he took from them his fair share. When they took more, he stole their hearts, so if their coin wasn't worth the damage, their soul would pay for the rest.
Eat. Consume. Horrible wetness ran down his pretty elven lips. Blood. Guts. "Look what you humans have brought upon yourselves." It was a snarl of words. An ugly amalgamation of an elf and a human and a twisted heart that could only result out of that union. Look what you've done to me, Father, he thought as he shoved the meat down his throat, like an animal. Vomit and bitterness streaked the ground.
"You have a place here should you want it." Stoic. A nod to the Keeper. A quiver slung over his back. Mercenary. A small elf child looked at the stone faced teenager and starred. "Is that a Flat Ear?" "Tamlen!" a short woman screeched. She picked him up and scolded her child silently. She was shorter than him. Friyr was already growing into a man. He was fifteen. He could no longer pretend to be an elf. His ears grew flatter and his shoulders broader. Tamlen was stupid he decided. "You're so young to be a killer for hire." His eyes looked up to the Keeper. They were black, distant, but in pain. "We are what we choose to be. I feel this is what I have to do." The Keeper nodded. "Dareth shiral, Da'len."
Pain of the vallaslin was sharp and flooded his life into ethereal relief, but it wasn't the worst pain. "Peace. Your path is the way of Sylaise." "A hearth tender?" "No, Da'len. Peace."
Tamlen. Tamlen Sitting next to him and talking. Talking. Always talking. He didn't like him then not the way he did now. Young. Not terribly younger than Friyr but young enough to make him feel old. "You're kind of like an older brother I guess." His face wrinkled as he shifted his position next to him on the aravel step. "Except not." Friyr hadn't been looking when his face had pinked. Tamlen never thought about the feeling again.
Woods. Damp. Lonely. A hood over his head held crystalline droplets of condensation before his eyes and hid his face. The magic of the Brecilian tendriled into his soul and lit his eyes as he looked up into the sky which more than he was and would ever be. His hood fell back. The whispers of the Beyond murmured against his memories until he couldn't distinguish waking from dreaming. A soft gasp.
The tense of a bow string. Tamlen's cursing. He was by his side everyday. His gaze had turned fond.
Yearning. It had grown. Tamlen's lips, his breath, his waist solid beneath Friyr's palms. A soft gentle kiss. A fever dream.
"I'm not old."
"And I'm not a child."
They both looked insulted. The heat behind their words hung in the air with their gazes. They stayed quiet for a few moments.
"Friyr-" Friyr looked up at Tamlen. "I see the way you look at me."
Friyr's eyebrows arched in perplexion, while his stomach began to churn.
They stared at each other, and he felt he could see pain in Tamlen's gaze. Not his pain. Not the pain that should never have burdened someone as young as Friyr, but the pain of someone of Tamlen's eighteen years looking at the beautiful girl he desired married off to another hunter. It'd been years since Friyr had kissed him. But Tamlen stepped toward his best friend.
Tall for an elf. Elegant. Full of lean muscle and a confident stride and the caution of a hunter assessing the situation. For once Friyr didn't see haughty freedom or the innocence of Tamlen's youth. But someone who had experienced life as it should have been, in the way that Friyr hadn't. Someone who saw the hesitant animal in Friyr and his prejudices, his condescending bravado, the weight that every rogue seemed to carry and was saying Friyr was full of shit the way a warrior would in forthrighteousness, honesty, and an earnest concern for someone they cared for. His eyes said - just because you were the fatalistic mercenary at fifteen and I was the hunter being kissed for the first time doesn't make you wiser than me. It doesn't make me less of a man. I am worthy of you - His eyes said so much. Tamlen, in that instant of truth, saw him the same way the Beyond had seen him, and that scared him.
"And what way is that?" Friyr asked coyly and looked at him the way his fifteen year old self had looked at the Keeper. His fingers caught Tamlen's chin and fluttered along his jaw. He had never stopped wanting, and he did not lie about it now. He was tired of his dance - flickering eyes and words held behind clenched teeth- a stolen kiss in the noon light of a clearing...the memory of soft lips. A different kind of heat blossomed between them as they just looked and breathed in a space clear of deceptions. Want filled the space. A want not of the flesh but of the feeling that hushed between butterflies' wings in the stomach.
Tamlen's hands stroked hesitantly along the length of Friyr's forearms as he stepped closer.
"Na vhenan'ara."
"And this is what your heart desires?"
Tamlen's bright mouth that turned up to answer never received the chance to speak.
Friyr took the kiss with a firmness that froze Tamlen. His breath gasped gently against Friyr's lips as he was kissed hungrily. He took what he'd starved for and savored it, like the taste of warm bread clutched in his hands so long ago.
Tamlen ran his hands up Friyr's spine as though searching for something. The rogue shuddered, and the warrior pulled them flush until neither could breathe without breathing the last breath the other had exhaled. Friyr's head twisted slightly, and Tamlen yielded.
Taste. A sudden explosion of taste filled Friyr's mouth as Tamlen's lips closed around his mouth breathlessly. Soft skin, herbal freshness, sweetness of bear meat, and a flavor that had Friyr curling his fingers into Tamlen's jaw and waist for want of more. A gentle air pocket formed between their open mouths and Friyr's tongue curled around Tameln's. Friyr pulled away only to kiss Tamlen again and clutch his short hair as the wind blew a sharp chilly gust that curled the men into each other's arms.
A gentle spark of electricity buzzed between their bodies, and Friyr tasted desire on Tamlen's breath. A strange foreign longing blossomed for Tamlen that Friyr knew well, but he'never known it like this: Mouth, tongue, flavor, scent. It was there. It crackled between them, and he felt Tamlen's struggle to understand it. Friyr's tongue rebroached the borders of Tamlen's lips, and the rogue listened to the warriors soft moan at the pleasurable sensation. But something transcended the feeling of physical lust the way that his longing for Tamlen had transcended the superficial so long ago. And now Tamlen was here in Friyr's arms.
"Festis bei umo canavarum," he murmured in his mother tongue as he felt nimble fingers pull the leather tie from his hair. It brushed the sides of his jaw in wild waves that interlinked playfully with each other.
Tamlen stroked through the sweaty chestnut locks and asked "What does that mean?"
"You will be the death of me." Friyr furthered the space between their mouths. "Let's go back to camp."
They walked back together silently. Their eyes fixed ahead and a tumble with the confusion of what had just happened. He touched Tamlen wordlessly when they reached where they would part ways, and a shared feeling of needing the other's company spread from Friyr's touch to Tamlen's skin. Their eyes were soft as they looked at one another for the first time in camp, and they knew they needed to see each other soon.
Friyr caught the watching eyes of the woman who had taken it upon herself to adopt and love and mother him as a teeneager. He knew she saw. He knew she knew. She looked perplexed. He looked away.
III.
The last time he kissed Tamlen was strange. A strong column of sunlight slanted, like an ancient ruined column across the underbrush. Ivy and rich blossoming stalks were crushed underneath its weight. Friyr's body curled away from where it where it struck his face and instead turned inwards against the fabric of his sleeping roll. Damp, fresh. The clearing was perfumed with dew His eyes cracked open and gleamed an intense brown under the dull heaviness of the sun. He rolled forward, then instinctively halted on the bed of sheets. Tamlen was gone.
Friyr's eyes fully opened at this realization. His senses quirked anticipatorily, but he found nothing but Tamlen's scent. Sharp, made his lips part. His tongue drifted out to run over the grittiness morning had sanded over his teeth. He swallowed the smell. He could feel the thudding in his chest in the way that only one presence could cause. A moan hummed from his lips as his shoulders set then softened.
Bleary eyes scanned the thicket of trees in their clearing attentively. No Tamlen - just the unnatural beating of his heart.
Friyr lifted himself onto one arm, then the other, then stood and intook an uneasy breath. The fresh air streamed into his mind and thrust the cobwebs aside. He swayed a little in the sunny shaft of light from above then forced his sleep sickened body to pick up camp. Tamlen was in the fabric of their sheets, a footprint in the dew, crushed ivy and a broken shrub. Friyr's brow knotted when he saw the trampled foliage. Was he hurt? No. Friyr's stance relaxed.
"Follow me" said the intentionally clumsy trail of a light footed elf.
Friyr skipped over stone and dry dirt with heavier feet and a lighter heart than usual. It was a game between the two. Rare but not unheard of. Tamlen enjoyed the pursuit. It made his blood run hot.
Glimpses of spaces between the trees seemed to whisper what memories they'd seen transpire. Thrill, rush, tongue. It was the pattern.
Friyr followed his lover, willing to engage and longing for the presence he'd missed when he'd woken up. But he preferred to tarry than to run and hunt until he tackled his quarry. The woods were effervescent and reserved all at once, as though the green filtered sunlight had a secret to tell, and the trees closed in as warmth in the air does to bared skin. But a tremulous warning cry seemed to lance the air as though something nasty were making the Brecilian draw quavering breath - something the forest was only barely aware of in its peaceful happiness. A finger down one's spine at the wrong moment of peacefulness.
The cry of "Tamlen!" crashed through the pleasant hum of life song and tore away madly through the trunk of the trees wildeyed and seeking the person who was to answer the call.
A finger down his spine, and Friyr was yelling in his memories too, and Tamlen - who had been tracing his bare skin - was jumping. "Did I do something?" Poised above him, tensed into a crouch, alarm. "I have- a very sensitive back," Friyr had mumbled. He had still been arched and jittery, trying to get rid of the touch. His tunic had been off, and his stomach was against the cool stalks of grass. Tamlen's hands ran down Friyr's naked sides. A smirk on the beautifully shaped hunter's lips. "As do I." "No, you don't understand." "Oh? And what is that that I don't understand?" His clearing. Their clearing. The crackling of flames and night birds punctuated the comfortable silence.
"I know when someone's behind me."
In the forest of the present, away from his daydreams, Friyr was alone, but fingers that weren't there ran up his spine. He didn't need to turn to feel the sudden breath on his neck or the wetness of it to know it came from between bared teeth - a skeleton's smile. He turned around.
"You get bored already?"
"Tamlen." Friyr's pupils had constricted into tight holes, and Tamlen's face shaped into a frown. "Is something wrong?" "Something doesn't feel right." "You're right," Tamlen said as he looked impressed with Friyr's uncanny intuition. Tamlen's face is still so soft in years, Friyr marvels. "There are shems in the forest." "That's all-?" "-You take left; I go right!" He leaned in and pressed his mouth chastely against Friyr's for a period of time that winked out of existence as it began. "Wait!"
There's a sonorous woop that's light like a rabbit and dashes off before Tamlen's even kicking up dried leaves. Friyr is left with the whelling urge to scream and so many questions. The forest whispers dark inconsoling answers.
"No," a word that means nothing, and Friyr's not sure why he's said it, but he goes to the right. And he is running. There are tangible screams in the distance that belong to the humans that Tamlen's scared up, like quails from the rushes.
Fear. Friyr feels their fear for if there's one thing to fear it's Tamlen's hate. And hate swallowed him like bog did men hiding in the mires. Terror. Friyr feels terror but not terror that belongs to him. He sees Tamlen ahead from the natural rise of the land he stands on. But what he sees is not what they see.
The humans don't see Friyr's full faced boy with straw hair reedily gasping for breath in mortal exertion with a faint smile under brilliant grey eyes. They see a face elongated by beautiful dangerous ears and obfuscated by swirling ink and hair cut choppy and short, revealing sun damage, the long drawn breaths of a successful predator stopped dead in front of their hunt, stone faced, piercing eyes. Beauty and horror married to beget awareness of the mortal coil.
"No? We will see about that; won't we?" Friyr heard as he skidded to a short and silent halt on the overhang. Instead of watching, his feet carried him to Tamlen as though to protect him. The air was heavy with something neither the humans nor Tamlen could feel: fate.
"You're just in time; I found these humans lurking in the bushes. Bandits, no doubt."
Friyr's eyes slid to the elf that spoke, and he could see the cock of that elf's head and the set of his shoulders. Friyr loved him and hated him for it. His heart twinged. He wouldn't see Tamlen with human blood dripping from his lips. Straw hair, full-faced, grey eyes. He looked at his lover longer than he should have, and Tamlen's eyes flickered with confusion and friendly acknowledgement. Friyr looked away and focused his gaze impassively at the humans over his arrow's shaft.
"We aren't bandits; I swear! Please don't hurt us!"
He felt nothing for the man's contorted face. If there was to be blood dripping and dead flesh, let it be because of him. He had learned that lesson. He had absolved it with himself, if not to the crime that was humanity. But that was not something Tamlen should have to absolve for himself.
"You shemlen are pathetic." he covered Tamlen's steps but remained passive as his partner spoke. "It's hard to believe you ever drove us from our homeland."
'W-we've never done nothing to you Dalish. We didn't even know this forest was yours!" a second bearded man stuttered as though the circling elves had demanded that he speak.
"This forest isn't ours fool. You've stumbled too close to our camp. You shems are like vermin- We can't trust you not to make mischief," Tamlen's words drooled out of his mouth with contempt, as did the loving playfulness when he addressed Friyr next, "What do you say, lethallan? What should we do with them?" he asked. He'd seen Friyr's lack of intention to shoot in the very way he moved.
"Kill them- what do I care? The others will never know," he said contrarywise to his own wisdom and desire to protect Tamlen. Wisdom, he knew, would not bring change to Tamlen's countenance, only resentment. Besides, Friyr didn't care, and they had had a talk about Friyr's tendency to hypocrisy when it came to trying to shelter Tamlen. They fought rarely, but when they did Tamlen's pigheadedness could accidentally draw emotional blood. Friyr could only acquiesce until Tamlen pushed too far. The humans would force the Dalish to move despite whether they were treated with mercy or violence here, and he cared little for the Keeper's disappointment in himself and his constant struggle to keep to Sylaise's path. And yet, was it not a quiet wisdom and peace that stayed his hand from killing and from meddling in Tamlen's own headstrong path? Some lessons begged to be learned through experience even if he wished they not have to be learned at all.
"I like the sound of that." Fiyr held back an indignant snort, if only to stop focusing on the rising pit of unease in his stomach. "Anything to say in your defense, shems?"
"L-look...We didn't come here to be trouble. We just found a cave," began the first man with sweaty scraggled brown hair that clung to his stubbled sunken cheeks,
"-Yes! A cave," cried out the third. His pudgy baby cheeks flapped in excitation behind the anger and fear in his eyes, "With ruins like I've never seen! We thought there might be, uh…"
Oh, it was then that Friyr knew that he'd lost his lover. He didn't lose him the way one did when charm and mystery swirled behind Tamlen's eyes, for Dirthamen's child he was, but the way one did when an arrow pierced their heart. The way that he knew no matter what he did, it would always be the opposite action that would have saved Tamlen's life. An inevitability that Tamlen - smart, curious, and alive in a way that was really living and not just being - would die. They said that Falon'Din could not stand to be apart from his brother for long, and Friyr had had him for several eternities, each one captured as an individual memory in every kiss.
"Treasure?" The quick unimpressed drawl fell like a scythe because behind the scathing, he knew Tamlen was a hypocrite. "So you're more akin to thieves than actual bandits."
Friyr felt sick, and he could feel the forest waiting for what it had been waiting for all morning. It was not greedy or cruel, just anticipatory and paused. Perhaps it was a little afraid too, as Friyr was, but if it was in its old wooden trunks, it was not something that Friyr could understand because of how much more it knew and how much time had warped its perceptions into things that someone so short lived could not understand. Sometimes Friyr could feel these things, and while he did not doubt that the forest's moods resonated through his bones, he also understood that it could warp the way he thought. The feeling of Tamlen's death - as quickly as it had hit him and dragged him underneath, like black choking water - left. There was nothing in its place but rattling hollowness and unease that nothing was what it seemed.
"Ha! I'd like to see these ruins," Friyr's voice grated dryly and monotonously with sleep, stress, and defensive wit.
"So would I. I've never heard of ruins in these parts," Tamlen said in a way, that Friyr was thankful for, that wasn't eager.
"But! I-" spoke up the third again with clear reservations about stepping too close to the elves' drawn bows, "I have proof! Here…" he held out a chunk of black stone underneath Tamlen's nose with steady cuts of language into it, flowing around the edge as though it had belonged to a wall bordered with poetic script, "We found this just inside the entrance."
"This stone has carvings…" Tamlen mumbled, then "Is this elvish? Written elvish?"
"There's- There's more in the ruins! We didn't get very far in though..." the man nodded feverishly as he spoke.
"Why not?" Gods help Friyr he couldn't feel excited at the prospect of written elvish because of the way the forest was tendriling inside of him and filling him up.
"There was a demon! It was huge, with black eyes! Thank the Maker we were able to out-run it!"
Tamlen scoffed quietly over the edge of his shoulder, and Friyr understood why. Humans thought that everything in the Brecilian was a demon, even if it wasn't. They hadn't been kind to the Dalish in their stories in that regard either.
"A demon? Where is this cave?"
"Just off to the west I think." The whole group nodded in unison, "And there's a cave in the rock face and a huge hole inside."
"Well," Tamlen began thoughtfully, "Do you trust them? Shall we let them go?"
Friyr sighed. "Kill one. The others will make sure no one else comes."
It didn't matter what their course of action was anymore. He wondered if it scared the humans, his casual bored indifference to something so infinitely precious and finite for them. He had been such about his own life as well once: indifferent to how it was destroyed. He saw his indifference as fair in a way, in that regard at least. Being indifferent to someone else's life rather than having to be hypervigilant of how little he cared for his own, he acknowledged as a cruel luxury that he was sometimes willing to afford. Had Tamlen been more receptive to his wisdom to leave blood unspilled then he might have afforded a little regard for them, but he knew Tamlen wouldn't, and he wouldn't force him to learn a lesson he wouldn't understand.
He kissed him instead. When the pudgy human was dead and they had left the clearing, he kissed him rapturously at the yawn of a magic thick cave. He knew positive reenforcement was bad, but it wasn't for having killed. "I'm not coming into the cave,: he murmured just a second before his mouth pressed gently against Tamlen's, and he could feel that lengthening in Tamlen's spine that said he enjoyed it. It was goodbye. Friyr tipped Tamlen's head back by tugging on his hair and remembered what he had missed this morning.
IV.
"The Dalish hunter fears nothing Friyr. You're coming into the cave." His lips were still smiling.
IV.
If you had asked Friyr later what he felt, he would have said: a warm sunny day, a fever dream, a slight kiss of rain, the solemness that accompanies every secret worth keeping, the feeling of knowing you're in love on a blustery spring day, the feeling of waking up too early with your lover gone, unease, the endlessness of a moment that slips by contained in its own pocket of time - a moment that isn't really a moment in itself but many moments all following each other into sub-sections and half-faded memories that you categorize by the tempo of your heart beats and characterized by the future soft and warm between your palms and the solidity of knowing what lies ahead lies with Tamlen. In a word:" happiness" because your feelings are in the moment and incomplete even though you know what lies ahead for you both is a future together for as long as you both may live."
V.
If you asked Friyr later what he felt when he killed Tamlen, he would say: "You would have me mar something that deserves to be treated with love and absurd poetry with the visceral?"