I own nothing.
He looked smaller in his bed, pale and wan, eyelids drawn shut like shutters, hair showing streaks of gray where it never had before. The palace healers and the priestesses told Elodie that her father would hopefully waken, eventually—they also told her that there was the chance that he would pass away in this sleep, this living death, and that did nothing to cheer her. Of course, there was little that did anything to cheer her, these days.
What did that foreign King even want with Lumen crystals, anyways? Why did he want my mother's crystal? And why did Daddy…
Maybe, Elodie decided, she should just count her blessings, and not wonder how her father could have survived that duel with the Shanjian king.
She knew how, anyways. Through some intuition, Elodie knew. When Joslyn fell, he held in his hand a mirror. From its size, Elodie would have thought it the sort of mirror a lady would keep in her dress pocket, but from first glance, it bore little resemblance to her own hand mirror. It was black as ink (black glass? Obsidian? Elodie could not say) and her reflection in its face was shadowed and hazy. The mirror was rimmed with silver—not backed, just rimmed. When Elodie held the mirror up to the light, runes etched into the silver glittered and winked in and out of existence.
Her father had spoken once of a cache of artifacts that Caloris kept under guard. Was this one of those?
Just another useless question.
He was quiet and still. He never tossed or turned in this deep sleep, this living death. Elodie wondered if this was the way her mother had looked when she was lying on her deathbed.
When Queen Fidelia was dying, Elodie was not allowed home to visit her. Her father hadn't wanted her to see her mother the way she was in her final days, and her mother wanted her to focus on her studies. "Don't worry about me, sweetheart. I'll be fine. Just do your best in school, and say hello to your friends for me."
Elodie wished she could have been there, in the end. Maybe she had been kept away in the hopes that she would be spared the grief of watching her mother die, but it left her with such questions, questions that no one had been willing to answer, and that she was still struggling to grasp at the edges of the answers. At least it wouldn't be the same way if her father died. At least she would be here.
-0-0-0-
He didn't die. He slept for weeks and weeks, but he did not die.
A week after Elodie was crowned Queen, her father woke for the first time since his duel with the Shanjian king.
He could not rise from his bed and he could not speak; he barely seemed aware of his surroundings at all. But as Elodie hovered at her father's bedside, her heart in her throat, her father's gaze settled upon her. Joslyn stared at her for a long, terrible moment, so long without seeming to recognize her that Elodie feared that he had been struck witless by the aftermath of the duel, that he would not know her, would know nothing of his life and would look upon her as a stranger.
Then, slowly, as though with great effort, he smiled at her. That smile revealed lines on his face that Elodie did not remember being there before; maybe it had simply been so long since she had last seen him smile that she had forgotten about them. But it was indeed the first time Elodie had seen her father smile in a long time, and she would not have to bury him alongside her mother, not yet, so whatever else she would have to face, she could handle. She smiled back at him, and told herself to forget the way she had wept when she had thought she would lose him, too.