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chapter sixteen. a blazing pyre
The slumber she fell into was shallow as the indent of fine words carved in soft metal.
Light and shade met in dance, their tender wisp of gossamer intermingling with the flutter of her lashes, true unconsciousness escaping her, Fallon caught in stasis between the tavern room and the interior of her skull. Eventually exhaustion weighed all that buoyed her, and she plummeted into freefall, into memory. The stone archway, the smell of threatened rain, a mass of bodies packed like sardines in a vendor's market stall.
Fallon knelt at the steeple of charity, her young palms dirt wrought and clutched to the heavens. Even in dream, hunger stung corporeal. Fallon shuddered against the cold, against herself, in recollection not faded but viscous and pungent: dalliance with survival's desperation held enduring.
Just as happened in the past, Fallon felt a silhouette adorn her, and with it a waft. Lilac, bitter herbs and autumn's brisk suggestion. Head upturned, she met the eyes of her mother, soft beneath a cloak of gloom. Cosmel was as still and serene as when Fallon had set upon her last, yet she detected a shift: her mother's supple cheek hollowed to enunciate the bones below her eye, her jaw's flat ridge. Like ash flakes billowed, a cloud whispered at her temples, hair and shadow bleeding into one. An undertone of grey tinted maternal flesh.
From her pocket, Cosmel produced a hand of coin, gold as a rich man's coffers, gold as the brocade of Virric's doublet. She hovered above her daughter's outstretched hands.
"Who are you?" Fallon's voice was youth stricken and unworldly, so soft one could mistake it in the stiff breeze.
"I am your mother," Cosmel replied, "have you forgotten me so quickly?"
The coin dropped frigid against her skin. Fallon curled her hands though no heat leeched the metal within. There was unnatural weight to it, as though she held something thrice its size. Distantly she heard the opening chords of rainfall, splattering fat against cobbled stone. Fallon searched for a bloom in her heart, of gratitude felt no swell in Cosmel's dark gaze. Only the weight of doubt conspired between her shoulders.
"I could never forget you, I feel you everywhere. I used to think the trees swayed with your step. Now I'm sure they do. The voice in my head, it's you, isn't it." Fallon said, as if to convince herself. "You've come back to aid me."
There was the smallest spasm of displeasure across her mother's nose, though whether it was sadness or something else, Fallon couldn't tell. She did not reply, descending into a crouch, cloak billowing, flush with movement. Fallon balked but was met with cold palms against her shoulders.
