He woke nose to canvas, outside the warm confines of blankets and pelts, thoroughly chilled, curled up so tightly around his stomach that his spine was nearly bowed in two, and the song ringing in his ears. If he left now, he could reach her, somewhere just south of Lothering, in just under a week.
This time she'd sung his name, told him he would need it no longer, that there would be nothing but this beautiful, all-consuming song, surging toward a glorious crescendo, a moment where all creation and destruction is expressed in a single chord. And she'd sung that it was inevitable. If not here and now, then it would happen one day, with another of her brothers, and he would be long dead by then. Why not make it happen, so he could for the first time truly live and then die in that moment of perfection? Why not really make a difference, not just on a pathetic mortal scale?
And she made too much sense for his liking. What did he owe any of these people? They'd rejected him for an accident of birth, feared him for monstrous powers, and now expected him to resolve all their petty squabbles and save them for only the barest scraps of halfhearted gratitude in return.
Rolling over he burrowed back under the covers, and in the faint light from the watch fire and a half moon watched the rise and fall of his lover's exposed chest, sleek and perfectly defined muscle softly highlighted, eyelids fluttering and lips drawn into a scowl in some unpleasant dream of his own.
Cadryn drew closer, pulled the blankets up properly over both of them against the cold night, wrapped himself around Zevran's body, ran his lips up the helix of Zevran's ear in a ghost of a kiss. The elf murmured sleepily, leaned into his touch, burrowing against a promise of shared warmth, and the scowl smoothed to neutrality. Cadryn scooted down under the blankets to lay his head against Zevran's chest, closed his eyes and settled down to sleep again.
Now that they were so very close, now that she knew who he was, this rhythm was the only thing louder than the song.