"You must open yourself to the Light, Tria."
"Why? What has the Light done for me?"
"You know that answer far better than I do, my friend. Look to your heart, where your love and belief once stayed. I know the pain you have felt, but you must let it go. You must trust!"
Gentle hands pushed dark hair away from Triadae's eyes, but she didn't dare look up from her own hands that knitted and twisted together to hide the shaking that went into her very core. "I don't believe anymore, Hana. I could mend the deepest of wounds with my faith. I could bring people from the very brink of that last breath!" Her voice raised, pain and sorrow twisting into something closer to rage. "I should have been able to bring her back! I gave everything to the Light, I placed all my faith in the ideals. I believed... I believed!" Her voice cracked and she hid her shame in her palms, pressing her hands up against her face as her body shuddered.
"We are all tested, Tria. Sometimes, the tests are painful and too close, so that we will truly know the depths of our beings." The bed dipped as the blood knight sat down at Triadae's feet, her hands on the woman's shins. "You are not all-powerful, you cannot do the things that we hear in children's tales. How do you know it was her desire to return? You fought for your life, and she fought for hers. The Li - ..."
"The Light had nothing to do with the blow I landed! It had nothing to do with the way she laughed as I tried to save her, nothing to do with the way I felt myself grow angry that the wound was not sealing, and don't tell me it was because her body was long dead. It wasn't! I felt her heartbeat, Hana..." The plea returned, eyes made more vivid by the redness of crying turning on the blonde. "I pleaded with the Light, I begged it to give that heartbeat more time, more pulses... anything. She claimed she was dead, they all claimed she was dead, but I felt the life beneath my hands... I felt it..." Once more the voice cracked into sobs, and she flinched away from Hana's gentle touch, her posture becoming dismissive.
She didn't look up, didn't open her eyes, even as the younger blood knight stood from the bed and placed the table beside Triadae once more. The rich scent of hot tea filled the room, a ghostly echo to the warm presence of the woman. "I don't believe anymore, Hana..." Her tone had turned flat, finality present in it. There was no response for a long time, and she knew that the girl was searching for the best way to respond to her.
"What we turn our backs on appears again one day when we least expect it."
Soothing warmth was replaced by the warmth brought on by weight, the cold press of unknown material heated by a body and returned. The scent of tea, sweet and pungent, washed into that of sweat and fear, dirt and blood. Silence faded into that of steady breathing; one of slumber, another of patient and knowledgeable fear. Her eyes opened, and the vision of the past became a ghost in the fog that she could barely recall past the sight of ashen hair and torn leather. She dared not move, afraid to find that she had become trapped and that her last moments would be those spent slowly suffocating beside one who slept peacefully.
The warrior shut her eyes tightly, willing the mountain to crush them both quickly if she made a mistake, and reached a hand outward above herself. Skin touched nothing more than air, until her back arched and truly reached for stone above them, and found that the rocks above were knit firmly together, impossible to budge or fall atop them. Her breathing raced for a moment, a dry chuckle of fear dispersed into disbelief as she sat up and traced her fingers along the rocks, moving slowly for the sake of not falling over the other who was trapped with her.
Safe. The word rang in her mind as she found no place for the rock to fall inward and crush them, cocooning them both perfectly within. Her attention turned instead to the rogue who lay crumpled on the floor of the miniature cave, eyes adjusting to the darkness enough to see the easy rise and fall of her breast, and the few streaks of red where skin had been cut.
"We should be dead," she said to no one. Her body ached; not with the fire of inflicted pain, but with the dull twinge of energy expelled. It was a feeling that unnerved her more than their predicament, and she shoved it aside while slowly moving Ashadel into a more comfortable position. There were no signs of damage aside from those few scratches, but Triadae remembered the way the rogue had screamed and how the woman had frozen with terror in her eyes. A terror revisited, the dumb shock that came with watching a freak accident happen all over again.
"You fell." She stated it simply, sitting back on her heels to look over the woman. "I watched you jump, though. You seemed fine, which means that you fell in a way that you had no control."
"Avalanche." The rogue whispered the word drowsily, her head turning in the direction of the warrior's voice. "Made a wrong step, the mountain came down around me."
"You're lucky to be alive," Triadae propped a chin in her palm, inhaling deeply, almost a yawn.
Ashadel moved, seeming to test the space they were enclosed in just as Triadae had. The warrior watched her carefully, expecting her to double up in pain any moment. "I didn't live through it," the rogue admitted at last. "My lover found me, tried to push his rune magic into me to save me, and failed. I died after he managed to use a stone to take me home. I wasn't brought back by a priest or druid, shaman or paladin. It was a warlock, and only by the sacrifice of another."
"I'm not sure which I find more questionable; a resurrection by dark magic, or the fact you refer to a dead man as your lover." Triadae tipped back, landing heavily on her rear and folding her legs in front of her.
"There's some things that we do when we have no choice. I was a whore, once. More than that, I was a slave. The kind that was tormented with the idea of freedom and loyalty. I could have been free, but my tormentor knew how to draw me in. He played off of my guilt, and it was a long time before I knew that I could be given a choice on what I did. I didn't have that choice at first," the rogue moved to sit up and mirror Triadae's position while she spoke. "I was used to being pulled into alleys and buildings, used to the incessant pawing and quick moments of boring lust. I met many who learned of what I endured and wished to help, and it was because of them that I even began to fight back.
But one wasn't so obvious about it. There was something about him that brought me peace, and the way he touched me possessively while restraining himself was... intriguing. He didn't want me while I was the property of another, he felt that it was... too much like borrowing. He didn't want to borrow. I fell in love with him, and I still am in love with him. He wanders, and I wander... and sometimes we don't see each other for a very long time, but there is no one else who has my heart like he does. If he's a dead man, then I'm a princess."
Triadae watched the woman quietly, noting the way her voice became quieter near the end. When it seemed the rogue had nothing left to offer, she swallowed her pride and spoke plainly. "I was in love with a man, once. He was awkward, and talked too much when he should have been quiet, but he was my best friend." She wasn't surprised to find that her own voice had dropped while the painful confession made it's way out of her. "We practically grew up together, and at some point, my love became something like a girlish crush in my eyes. I abandoned it, without ever telling him, and he and I grew up but never really apart.
"I can name every moment he was there, and all of those that he wasn't. When he went through the portal with the mad prince, I let him go for good. I grew up in the span of a few months, shedding my duties and taking up the mantle of something else. When he returned, I was engaged to another man. I can still remember the way my throat clenched around itself, like I had swallowed a glass of sand and it wasn't going down. The way I saw the light in his eyes, that bright joy of a friend reunited, dim into a quiet sorrow... I had grown apart from my old self so much that I had forgotten what it looked like when a hope was left to die.
"I saw that look a lot while I was engaged. When my arms were around the man I loved – and I truly did love the man I was engaged to – or when I spoke about him. As happy as I was to have my best friend back, I never once thought that I was trampling on his feelings. I had actually become so very blind to them." She gave a quiet laugh, and shook her head slowly. "It wasn't like he wasn't surrounded by women all the time. The man had only to extend a hand, and he had a cluster of women around him as easily as a bee to a flower. I teased him about it, sometimes. How he could have anyone he wanted, and yet he never chose any of them for longer than a night."
"He was waiting."
"Yes, he was. I didn't know it until I finally crushed his hope for good. I never did get married; my sister put an end to that rather abruptly. He stayed by my side, helped me through my pain and sadness, and even helped me build the wall up around myself that I started making with bricks as big as the Great Sea. Anything to make me comfortable, he did. When I thought he was getting too close again, when I thought his hopes were rising to a point they shouldn't, I told him straight out that it would never be possible.
"It... hurt. Like someone was twisting my heart and pulling it out of my chest; I barely managed to walk away from him before I broke down. All that time I had where I could have told him, all that time I had spent denying it, and the pain in his eyes that I saw only confirmed what I had done to him, and to myself." She rubbed the fingers of one hand, steadying her voice. "I wasn't just blind to his affection for me. I was blind to the fact that I loved him still."
"You could take it back. There's still time to be honest..."
"Not this time." She spoke with that same flat tone, that same hint of finality that she had sworn off everything else that had mattered to her over and over during her life. "He's moved on, and I am glad for it. I don't like the one he is with, but I believe that is only the hurt speaking. I'd likely find the most unspoiled and kind woman to be completely unfit for him, just out of bitter contempt. That nagging little voice that tells me that there will never be anyone who can love him like I did. Like I do."
Her fingers danced along her forehead, twisting red hair around before releasing it and sighing again. "I want to tell him, sometimes. Just to have him break down and yell at me. Just to hear him laugh, even if it would be mocking. Anything but the way he just... looks through me. Yet, I'd die for him if he asked me to. I would be willing to give my everything."
She fell silent, and it remained that way for a long time while the rogue left her to her thoughts. It had been so easy to spill everything when she was sure that this would be the end for her. "What an end," she breathed, leaning back against the wall.
"Get some sleep, Red." Ashadel's voice was distant, spoken through a fog, and it was only then that the warrior realized that the blonde had gotten closer and was touching her bare skin with her bare hands. Something crackled between their skin, something that felt like dust, and Triadae slumped against the wall bodily, her eyes closing even as she whispered with a staggered breath.
"Why?"