"The princess has arrived!"
"She's back!!"
"Princess Elena has returned!!"
"The princess has come home."
Cries, shouts, and whispers of joy alike float through the fading summer's air. She's been gone for about a year now; gone off to train and study different kinds of diplomacy around the continents. I heard when she'd actually left for the Southern Continent and when she'd returned to Adarlan for the Winter. I knew when she left again at the end of spring for Wendlyn. And now she's back.
People of Orynth, young and old, wealthy and not, rush out to the main street leading to the castle to meet her. A growing crowd gathers around her Asterion Mare and the circle of guards around her that accompanied her and the other noble son - Almuru - back. One of the said guards stands apart from the rest; I'd know him anywhere.
Fenrys Moonbeam, member of the royal court sits atop a pearly white horse close to Elena, but it's not his golden hair or dominating fae powering that catches my attention and snags something in my gut, but the way that he's looking at Elena.
A look of pure pride and admiration, a look of long promised happiness finally come, a look of triumph. I wouldn't know that look. I've never seen it in the mirror. I knew happiness, and I let it go.
Almost regretfully, I follow his gaze and find Elena in the crowd. She's never hard to spot.
Her golden hair hangs loose down to the center of her chest save for the front-side strands pulled back by green ribbons and tied at the back in a pretty knot. She wears a dark red-purple dress that splits at the skirt where matching pants meet to accommodate riding, with a light cape of black fabric like woven shade around her shoulders.
She looks beautiful. She always did. But it hits me harder than I thought, and I have to fight to remain balanced.
Elena tugs off her leather riding gloves, stuffs them into her saddle bag and dismounts into the crowd. Taking their hands, greeting them back, talking with them, laughing with them, she greets her people with the most piercing smile upon her lips.
It kills me.
She believed the worst in me, she left overnight - vanished - and disappeared entirely from my grasp. Now she has come home, her home, she has come back, but she has not come back to me.
I can no longer stand it, and push up from my position on the roof of a nearby building. To the best of my abilities, I make my way to the other edge and hop down onto the balcony where I can go down the stairs and out onto the street behind where I walk in the opposite direction that the crowds are headed.
If I was fae, agility and strength would come naturally. How many times did Elena and I race? How many times did I win? How many times did she let me win? How many times did she hide away the fae side of her?
My foot catches on an uneven stone in the street and I have to make several awkward steps not to fall, but I stop anyway and stare down at the street as my eyes blur over and salt stings my eyes.
Then I am running. Away, away from here, away from her, away from everything, I run away.
I had to see her. I tell myself as my feet carry me as fast as I can from the city and to the mountains beyond. I had to see her again. To know that she was real at all. I just had to see that she was okay.
YOU ARE READING
Starlight of a Moonbeam
Fanfiction~ Fenrys fan fic ~ After the Great War and the end of Kingdom of Ash, the life of the white wolf continues, leading to unexpected twists and turns he could have never suspected in his immortal life... "There was a pull, a call, a link. To home, to h...
