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The Spectral Breath

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Chapter Sixteen: Heartbreak

Her eyes fell downcast on her mortal friend, Jaras of the Sahlin Dalish, with an eerie, long-lasting woe.

His suffering had been her fault. Since the day she had crossed the forgotten hillsides of a fallen faith, stumbling into a century so far from what she knew that it caused her panic to trebble, multiply. When she had swept into his people's swamps with her lost, damaged mind; to when he had found her, broken, near-death in a bed of river-water, with her ankles slightly gnawed on by Brecillian beatles.

Since she had first gazed upon his shady silhouette against the morning sunlight, she had known his downfall would be hers and hers alone to blame. Lahris Elgar'shiral just never truly knew how much of his mortal life she would claim, until it was nearly too late.

Draped in a thousand bandages, left to softly flounder in sheets drenched with sweat, as well as being encompassed in shady orange light by a dazzling hearth with her hand palely across his brow, all she could do was wait for his breathing to become dulcet, and for his eyes to open. Though he had not woken in two days.

The Fade claimed him. It did so many. It claimed the last of her people in a suspended, full-cycled memory that she relived constantly when she slept. It claimed desires for an apostate she rather wished buried, despite his yearning as an otherworldly traveller to experience them. It claimed the minds of her fellow Dalish, asleep as they were, and most importantly, it claimed the very horrors she wished to wipe from his memories.

Even asleep he twitched, involitarily. Nightmares creased his brows, scrunched his nose, curled his lips into the imperfect display of utter dread. He was reliving the very event he survived. She knew it. And yet, the Fade would not let him go.

"To see the horrors that I have seen," she whispered, when a tear slipped down her rosy cheek. Lahris wiped it away with a sleeve, and stuttered, "You fought so bravely, so foolishly. Why? Why didn't you run?!"

For a stuttered heartbeat, she thought she saw his lips upturn. Because that's what family does, da'mi, he would say. You're clan. The Keeper himself would kane me rotten if I never kept death from your bony hide.

"Even on the verge of death you make me smile. As the bloody fool you are Jaras, you make me smile."

Her hand stilled over one of his whilst their fingers remained locked. Lahris blinked away the last of her tears and drew herself upright, steeling her emotions to a cutting edge. "Which is why you must forget."

"And are you sure this is the course you wish?" the Sahlin Keeper's voice thrummed across the darkness of his tent, while he quietly closed the doorway with his staff, to finally bend to her knelt height. "Memories, yes, memories are indeed important. Where would we be without memory? Some cause hurt, some cause joy. Some grow into something altogether meaningful. Do you truly wish to deny this lad this gift, this journey of understanding?"

"There is no other way, hahren," she muttered, having felt his wrinkled hand over her shoulder.

He patted her softly, then withdrew, cupping his kane's undulating crystal. "I fear I no longer deserve that title, child. From what I hear, you have taken a new mentor. The shemlen clever-man. He holds sway over your heart."

Lahris quietly licked her lips, and withdrew her hand from her friend's forehead. "He is brave. He's aided many duties for no penance."

"Yet you value him. You respect him."

"I... believe he means me no harm."

Keeper Anthron arched a bristley silver brow. "You were governed by the wisest council my dear Var'sulahn. Elders far more wise than I. I read somewhere, oh many years ago, that my ancestors believed much in the faith of spirit rather than just pure logic. Reason was just as blind as the heart."

A snicker of mischief crossed him, causing his whiskered lips to rise and cheeks to turn a rediculous shade of plum. "Though when it comes to nagging wives, that's another matter entirely."

Lahris chuckled and slowly shook her head. "Perhaps your nagging wife, hahren, but I am fortunate enough to be spouseless."

"For now, child. For now." A silence encompassed them, until the Keeper continued. "Would your dear apostate approve of your choice?"

"What do you mean?"

"Precisely what I say. If he was here judging the morality of your actions, would he approve of our tempering with young Jaras' mind, hmm? He seems a confused soul, your clever-man. I have seen the way he watches the younglings play by our fires. He stares distantly into those fires. I fear our children's shadows spin tales for him. That is, not happy ones. There is an illness to him. Depression? Fear of what is to come? Perhaps loathing. He is definitively a tortured spirit, though even I would doubt he would agree to this meddling of our young Jaras' mind."

"Solas has his troubles," she murmured. "I might not be able to help him, but I can Jaras. He is so ill and it is my doing. If I could bring him some solace, some peace, perhaps that would heal is recovery. Your spell can do that."

"And stave the guilt from your conscience?" Incredibility caused a curious confusion to distort the Keeper's face, then pale in realisation. "Ah, I see now, Var'sulahn. I see you. I see that you are a selfish, disobedient child."

The elvhen girl froze. She sharply jerked her chin his way, eyes wide in astonishment. "Selfish? Disobedient?"

"All your life you have fought for only one person. Yourself. So many have died to keep you alive, child. So many souls driven to the edge of the beyond, all to defend you. You simply cannot carry another death on your conscience, so you seek to remove it by any force."

"I- elder, no! That's not right! I have done everything to keep people alive. I try to stay away because I know Falon'Din follows me. I-I would never-"

"Seek to dismiss all from your conscience?"

"No! I... it was never about my conscience. If I had the opportunity to dispell my memories, I would in a heartbeat. The heartbreak, betrayal, killings, they sicken me even now. I dream at night and see so many faces staring back. I fear sleeping, Keeper! I fear everything. If I could end it all now I would, if to have some sembelance of normality. That is all I ask. If I could keep Jaras safe, keep him the way he was without this experience, yes I may feel better, but he will never have to live with paranoia or fear! He will be...a-at peace."

The Keeper's hand came to rest on her shoulder, though she shied away from it like his very touch would twist her into a writhering state of depression. Even Despair hissed in her mind, MURDERER!

She fled to the end of the tent - flew into a quiet nook of shadow far from his guilt-ridden stare. From the shadows a shy violet whipped between them: a swirling, intricate pattern of symbols and strokes, one that to an artist may have seemed... beautiful.

"So many things have happened to me, Keeper. Too... too many things," she whispered, tilting her arm like an ocean current, whilst the patterns on her skin glinted across the floor. "I followed Dirthamen to find an escape. For a time I... I had it, only for it to slip away."

Unlike the many times in her past where hatred boiled upon seeing the very poison etched in vines onto her person, for once she felt a twisted sense of comfort in its pulsing glow, as if there was a new meaning to it. One embodying pity. I may have suffered, yet not alone. Never alone.

Realisation was a strange occurance that never truly had a timeframe in its dawning. To some, it may have taken mere moments. To others, a few hours. To Lahris, it was a slow-growing rebirth. Her skin no longer crawled at the sight of black veins drawn violet. Her chest no longer filled with dread or disgust. There was also no fear. Not truly.

She was tied to a spirit, one that had attempted in vain to provide peace in her final moments on Thedas. Where she could still thrive to a degree, it could not. It was more of a prisoner than she, for she could still experience life with some amount of normality. Her spirit could not. It lay encased in a shard of solid, ethereal glass. There were no whens or ifs in when it came to its freedom. There never would be one.

And in that pity, in that sorrow and resentment for her naivity, she had to wonder, were they the results of selfishness? Or were they the bouts of understanding finally thrust upon her in a time of lonely disquiet? Would pitying her friend and wishing his fears away be selfish?

Keeper Athron coaxed her out with a hand and gently guided her back onto the cot containing her wounded friend. Lahris slumped into the fur blankets, and watched her teacher with an undivided observance.

"I never meant what I said, my dear Var'sulahn. All I meant was for you to open your eyes. What are you doing, child, except chasing memories? You are reinacting only what young Jaras would do once his experiences are wiped away. He will fight to know the truth, and the only path that will lead to is a life lost in search, as well as a peace that will eventually leave him. He hasn't got the fortune of an eternity to search, child, unlike you. He only has one life. This life. Let his soul heal his wounds. Do not be a saint, but a healer."

"Ar lath ma lethallin, hahren," she sobbed, laying her face in her lap. There she rocked against the cot, seeming the very child she had so long renounced in the wake of a long inherited duty, caused by her father.

It had been so long since she was able to cry real tears, to feel real emotion. So long that she had forgotten how to be the child she once was to her father; so long that she barely remembered the comfort of another's embrace filled with a fatherly warmth. She was only three hundred years of age when her life twisted into the horror that it was. Equivalent, in Dalish age, to a mindset of eighteen years.

Her shoulders sank into course woollen fabric, soon enwrapped in long, flowing cuffs. Her fingers clung onto leather lapels, scoring holes and grains until a nail snapped. Her nose dug deep into his long, white hair, where she remained, nuzzling his shoulder and shaking into his chest.

"There, there, Var'sulahn," he whispered, choking on the last syllable of her name. He parted her hair and rocked to the crackling of their hearth-fire, allowing the night to take them away from that place. From any place. From misery, and pain. "There, there."

Lahris Elgar'shiral cried until no more tears could be wept. Her eyes may have burned and her cheeks may have remained as red as bruised, swollen cherries, yet no Dalish sought an answer to her state when she departed from the Keeper's tent in early morning sunlight. Instead, upon her sight they remained firm-lipped and merely watched as she left the great arched gates of their home to fall deeply into the depths of the Brecillian, not to be heard from again until her friend woke three days later.

By then it was too late.

~~o~~

"Ir lath ma lethallin..." ~ Yet I love him.