A/N: As hard on me emotionally as "Desert Sage" was, this chapter, "Marsh Violets" was even harder. Then again, my stories The Demon Sends His Messengers and Sorrow and Doubt made me cry a lot as I wrote them too, probably for the same reason. Chronologically, this chapter takes place two-and-a-half years after the Tipa caravan's visit to Leuda and five or six months before the events of the two aforementioned Conall Curach-centered tearjerkers.
Marsh Violets
Spring crept slowly over a world covered in poisonous miasma, like the slow lightening of the sky just before the sun rose. With it came a bounty of color that breathed life into the desolate world: the gorse trees of the Alfitarian highlands wore bright golden petals, and the willows over the Fummish plains carried flowers of palest pink. Crocuses and daffodils blossomed all over the miasma-clouded world, and magnolia blooms abounded on trees in Tipa and just to its north. Soon these gave way to tulips and dandelions, clover blossoms and lacy white wild blooms.
But none of those inspired bittersweet reminiscence like the marsh violets that bloomed in the dank of Conall Curach.
De Nam gulped down the contents of his water-cup, forcing his body not to rebel at the taint of miasma only through tremendous strength of will. He had been drinking the marsh-water for two months now in an effort to acclimate himself to the miasma in the air, and the effort had thus far done little more than give him two months of constant pain. He knew that he was decidedly paler and thinner than when he first arrived in the marsh, and when the native monster-life occasionally wounded him in battle, his wounds took thrice as long to heal as before.
When he made his way west of camp in the afternoon to hunt small game for an evening meal, he discovered, to his dismay, that another hell-plant had taken root in the grassy field next to the creek. A quick Fire spell and several racket-strikes dispatched the overgrown miasma-borne weed easily enough, but De Nam could not so easily defeat his own irritation. Hell-plants liked cold better than warmth—why were they still so prevalent in this part of the marsh despite the fact that it was much closer to summer now than when he first came to Conall Curach seven months ago?
For the past several days, De Nam bristled with anger whenever he had to fight a hell-plant, especially when those weeds invaded the places where the marsh violets now bloomed. He wasn't entirely sure of the reason why he had suddenly become so protective of those unusually-shaped little wildflowers, but maybe it was because they reminded him of the love from which his research mission, and her duty as a crystal caravanner, divided him.
He had been studying magic in the Yuke citadel of Shella when he met Anaïs Nin, the lone Selkie aboard the motley Tipa caravan. The caravanners had just collected a drop of myrrh from the tree at Veo Lu Sluice near midwinter when an impending snowstorm forced them to make haste toward Shella before the sun set, and Anaïs Nin, dirt-stained from battle, could not bear waiting to bathe until she and the rest of the caravan were at an inn. Instead, she made her way toward a secluded bather's cove of which the locals had spoken, located on the eastern edge of the island, taking a Fire magicite with her to warm the water. De Nam's Shella cottage lay just a short distance away from the cove, and he, on his way home from the grocer, had bumped into Anaïs Nin just as she emerged from the cove cleaned-up and dressed in fresh traveling clothes.
During the time that the Tipa caravan had bunked into Shella for the winter, De Nam and Anaïs Nin had grown quite close to one another. He told of his research into the nature of miasma and his ambition either to rid the world of miasma or to find a way for the four races to adapt to it; she told stories of the Tipa caravan's myrrh-gathering adventures; both discussed their lives before his coming to Shella and her joining the caravan. When the time came for Tipa's caravan to depart from Shella, both Selkies regretted that Anaïs Nin's duty as a caravanner obliged them to part ways, but De Nam promised to write to her, and to every letter he wrote, she replied in kind.
Maybe Anaïs Nin didn't believe in love at first sight as De Nam did, but it was clear from her letters that she missed his company and longed for the day that the two would reunite. He missed her, too, and now, more than ever, he had to rely on his memories of her to buoy him in this painful time.
Now that the marsh violets bloomed in Conall Curach, De Nam found that these little flowers did, in fact, remind him of Anaïs Nin. Their shape was like no other blossom of any season, just as no maiden, even another Selkie, was like his beloved Anaïs Nin. The petals of pale purple felt just like her skin, smooth except for the hands callused from years of fighting with a racket, and were the exact same color as her silky shoulder-length lavender hair. He supposed that if he could smell the flowers, their fragrance, too, would remind him of her scent. As it was, however, either the violets of Conall Curach had no scent to speak of (unlike the violets that bloomed on both sides of the Jegon River), or this deadened sense of smell was just one of the many ways in which the miasma, and his effort to adapt, was damaging his health.
But even memories of Anaïs Nin had stopped having the invigorating effect that they once had—De Nam no longer felt his heart lighten when he remembered her smile, her melodious voice, the sparkle in her silver eyes like sunlight on the sea. He no longer felt himself grow warm when he remembered the way she would snuggle close to him beside the fire, or when he imagined her smooth skin rippling beneath his loving touch. He would once dream almost nightly of her smiling warmly at him, whispering sweet endearments as she caressed him in ways that both soothed and inflamed. Now, however, his dreams were mostly nightmares, some of them even more painful than his waking loneliness.
There, out in the forsaken land known to the Selkies as the marsh of dead dreams, only the marsh-violets that bloomed in spring saw the tears of a young man who sometimes found himself questioning whether or not he was even alive anymore.