As usual, all speech in italics is in the Old Tongue
Interlude VII - The 'Modern' World is a Lonely Place III
Taija didn't really know how the calendar these days matched up with the one she was familiar with. She didn't even know what day it would be under her own calendar if you counted forward from the day she was displaced. She'd spent too many days unconscious to have much idea and it wasn't like anyone else had much of a clue.
So she had to make her best guess. Tel's birthday had been in early November and she seemed to be firmly into autumn here, so she just chose a day and decided that was his birthday.
She was never devout or superstitious, but some things were important.
Taija chose a moment when she wasn't being pestered, when she could make a discrete exit from Falme.
Opening a gateway she stepped through to high-mountains. It was cold, freezing in fact, but she didn't really notice. Tel had loved the mountains, long hikes through them together had been... She sniffed hard and rubbed at her eyes.
Drawing on saidar Taija channeled water to clear a space in the snow on the ground before bending her web, drawing it up and into a little shelter of compressed snow and ice, creating a little alcove that protected from the biting wind. Another web, of earth this time, smoothed out the bare rock inside the shelter before she used the web to draw a shape straight into that rock, a circle with seven lines through it - the seven spoked Wheel that drove the Pattern.
She took a moment to survey her work before deciding she was satisfied with it. Then she took a candle out from the pocket of her coat. Reaching down, she carefully placed it in the middle of the wheel, where the spokes came together, and lit it with a tiny web of fire. Another moment and she knelt down on the cold stone. Her hands were trembling, but not from the cold and she forced them into stillness. She needed to be in control of herself for this.
Taija stared into the candle for a few seconds and then said the traditional, simple words spoken at the end of every funeral, her voice trembling as she struggled to get them out.
"Go peacefully into the night Tel Janin Aellinsar. May the light of the Creator bless your soul and may you soon be reborn to live again. You were loved and you will be remembered."
There was no one else there to repeat the last words as was traditional, to remember him with her. She was the only one left.
Taija knelt there, cold seeping into her for she didn't know how long, just looking into the flickering light of the candle without really seeing it. Eventually she spoke.
"I miss you Tel, I miss you so much. Everything is wrong here and I just don't know what I'm doing. I had so much more to say to you so much more to do with you…"
She trailed off, silent for a while, her body shaking with stifled sobs.
"I'm trying to live on. I know that's what you'd have wanted, but I don't know if I can do it. I love you and I can't stand it here without you. Everything I see reminds me of you or what we've lost, what was done to our world these people are living in the ruins of our dreams." Her voice cracked as she spoke, but she needed to say this to him he was the only one who'd understand.
"I worry that I'm making everything worse and sometimes they just make me so angry. I just want to burn it all down. I know I can't. I know these people need me, however ignorant, wrong, offensive they are… I know I need to go on, that I can't just leave them to their fate, but I hate it. I hate it so much."
"I know, an aes sedai never gives up," a weak smile washed over her face at an old, inside joke, quickly extinguished, "but it's so hard. I need you and all I can think about is how you must have died, alone in the War or from the madness. I might have been able to save you, but I wasn't there."
She hesitated. "I wish I'd died too." Her last words were a whisper.
Eventually Taija looked away from the candle and said it one more time, the formality of the words feeling wrong somehow. "Tel Janin Aellinsor, You were loved and you will be remembered."
She hesitated a moment longer then, shivering with the cold she hadn't noticed until then, she got up and spun a gateway back to Falme.
With Taija gone there was only a small flame left, flickering on top of the seven spoked wheel in memory of the man she loved.