She had not cried as she left the camp; she was spared that much shame, at least.
As the ice that flew past under her mount's paws steals the heat from unshielded flesh, so too did it sap her will, so that by the time she reached the sea she had been reduced to wracking sobs. She slid, rather than dismounting, to the ground, and lay there curled around herself, streaming hot tears into the soft fur of her hood.
She heard her mount whine and felt the beast nuzzle her, obviously disturbed by her distress, but she could not bring herself even to face this, the most loyal of those who had followed her, had believed in her. The mocking memory of her failure, her defeat, flooded her again, and she lost herself to the grief. Her mount eventually went silent, and a short while after she felt it curl up around her, evidently determined to wait out this storm, such as it was, with her. She felt a brief surge of love and gratitude, but this was quickly overwhelmed by despair and the sobs returned.
After a time, the sobs quieted and her eyes dried. The stabbing ache in her chest had been replaced with a sort of swollen numbness. Remembering her loss threatened to bring back the grief, but the numbness left her enough strength to push it back, and she did; she had always, always been a fighter.
Without the grief, she could clearly feel, or rather not feel, the places where she had been made less than whole. The places where her gifts had resided inside her soul were now quiet and unresponsive. They seemed all the more empty for the gift she had only just come into, the gift whose arrival was to have been a cause for great joy. She had had those other gifts for as long as she could remember, and their presence had announced her as a born leader, destined, as those who had come before her had, to dedicate her life to maintaining balance in the world. Just as she, with all the gifts of humankind, would be balanced in and of herself.
Armed with her natural tenacity and the strength of her body, she had flung herself onto the path lain out before her with an exuberance just short of outright glee. There had been setbacks – there always are – but she prided herself on her resilience, and enjoyed pitting herself against a challenge until she overcame it. As such, she had made quick progress in mastering her gifts, and had felt and been deemed ready to act in the larger world.
And she had. Thinking on her first days, and the blunders she had made, were enough even now to bring a small smile to her lips. The world was a wonderful, vast, and glorious place, irrepressibly loud and boisterous. Much, she had decided, like her.
But a wonderful place is not necessarily without its shadows, and a balancer is not born into every generation on a whim. So had it become incontrovertibly evident, to her and to others, that a force had emerged, centered on a man, that sought to disrupt the balance she was sworn to defend. Eyes still shining with the strength of her ideals, she had answered the call.
And she had lost. Not entirely, and not without striking a blow for her cause, but lose she did. For all her challenges, she had not been prepared for the toll it would take to wage war on another human being, and have war waged upon her in return. Even as she had lost the battle, however, the war was still being fought, and if her ideals gleamed less brightly in her eyes as she returned to it, then it had been replaced by a new-found determination in her soul. She had, after all, always been a fighter.
She and her allies had pressed the enemy hard, and when she found herself confronting their leader, she forced down her fear, for if he was the driving force behind the enemy's power, he was also the keystone through which they could be shattered. And after all, her predecessor had brought an empire to its knees before his voice had begun to drop. She, a woman almost full-grown, could hardly do less.
And so they had fought. His power had been overwhelming, easily matching hers, and in her fear and rage she had finally been able to call upon that last gift. With its power she had been able to turn the tide and claim victory, but she had not emerged unscathed. Before he fell, her foe had somehow managed to excise from her the gifts she had already mastered, leaving her with only the gift which was both her newest and the one that she was least suited to. Her enemy had enforced a terrible cost for her victory.
In essence, she had been crippled. The best healer in the world, a woman whose gift had developed into a knack for healing that had been renowned before she had even come of age, had travelled across the world to try and repair the damage, and she had failed. Not only did the loss of her gifts mean that she would never achieve the true balance that was the hallmark of her status, but they significantly decreased her own personal fighting ability, drastically reducing her ability to create balance externally, as well. For a young woman who had enjoyed strength and power, and its use, the change was devastating.
She came home to find both pity and disdain in the eyes of people she loved and respected. She looked into her future, saw herself growing old as a shadow of what she should have been. She saw her efforts tolerated with excessive courtesy as her people waited for her to die so that a successor, one who was not an invalid, could be born. It was from that image that she fled across the ice upon the great beast who had followed her since she had been a child, and it was that image that her soul, a fighter's soul, quailed against.
As she lay there, on the hard ice, she faced that image head on. In truth, she was not crippled. Her body was still strong and undamaged, and if she chose to don them, she felt her resilience and tenacity waiting to serve her as they always had. And if the gift she had was not the one she would have chosen, it was still a gift, and it too would serve her if she chose to utilize it. Perhaps struggling along with just the one gift would force her to consider more subtle ways than raw power to affect change. If she was ill-suited to its use, that was fine; she had always enjoyed a challenge.
It would be hard, she knew. She would be tempted at times to view herself as an invalid, to wallow in self-pity and doubt, and even when she didn't, others certainly would. But there can be no shadows without a light to cast them, and a balancer is not born into every generation on a whim. She had followed the path set before her so enthusiastically because she believed in it, believed in the need for balance. Even as diminished as she was, she had sworn to be one who acts to maintain that balance, and she could still fill that role. And she would. She had, after all, always, always been a fighter.