When The Wind

by Elgarain

Dís had already lost a home and half a family before the ill-fated Quest. She survived. She had lived without security, safety, comfort, allies. She survived. She had been left behind like every fear of a lifetime, and she waited. She survived. And when the rest of her family didn't, she learned what hope truly meant.

When the wind roars so hard the stars seem to gutter, when the cold sits waiting for a rosy-faced, full-bellied victim to open the door on a darkened room, when the sound of others -the others she doesn't want to be hearing- is driven away before the flogging of the wind and the shrieks and bangs as flying objects collapse to their knees, Dis comes alive again.

It is whispered she has become a ghost; as far as she is concerned, the fight is to avoid not becoming one.

Promises that didn't die with them keep her, somehow, barely, from following.

A falling star fades before her eyes and Dis passes a thinned, cracking palm across dry cheeks. It is her youngest's always childishly rounded jaw she follows in her mind, his vow come back to me that always meant love with more than the moment.

She raises her gaze to the strongest light above her and thinks of her eldest, his bright eyes laughing back unafraid. Pressing fingers that only tremble a little to her lips, she half kisses, half salutes him. Stay with your brother, his life principal that taught him life continues past our individual trials.

The wind buffets her and she digs her boots in again, wrapping both arms over flapping sleeves and drawing close the oldest memories, her own brothers, together at last. Different like cold-forged and hot, but both lived by the same private law. Duty, capitalised; to them both proper noun and verb to rule all life.

Cloud snarls Dis's bright star, and with steadying hands she reached for her unbound hair, the lone braid under her temple that means simply Beloved. "Carry on," she whispers for her One, like he had every cold and fearful night before she walked alone.

Because she could tear by the roots every last braid of love, as some might say life had already attempted, but their meanings survive. Their existence meant something, even if after all it wasn't what it seemed. Their existence has marked her, and she won't carry shame because of that.

This is her fight, against carrying on too far, not against wasting away in heartbreak like lesser mortals. A translucent vessel of memory still pouring out hope.

The wind tugs at her, destroying the peace and the past of the flattened grass around her.

Beneath the piles of cloud above a glinting star still waits.

Dis stands.