He sat at his work table warring against the day's events. Ever since he found her drunk on a rooftop, his life had been turned upside down.
He did not know how to reconcile the foreign feeling growing in his gut, one he had not experienced for two hundred three years and twenty-seven days, the desire, no the need to protect. To prove to himself, to relieve the shame he felt as a male. To mitigate his failure.
And he had almost failed again. It took all his concentration to keep the lake frozen, to reforge the escape path. It would have been his failure if. . . He shook his head of those thoughts.
He winced as the shirt cuff brushed against his wrist, it was a pain he deserved. His shame was written from his face to his wrist. He did not know if it was ironic or foretelling that she had burned the last line of his declaration to the world. That he would need to tattoo the lines again because he had failed her, left an unfamiliar ache in his gut.
Gods be damned. This girl.
No one else. Because I am sick of it. Worth more dead.
No one else.
There was more to her reaction. Because I am sick of it. She would have been eight when her parents were assassinated in their bed. The rumors had always been that the entire royal family was slaughtered in their beds. Those that survived the initial slaughter were killed in the following days. Terrasen had held out for a few weeks, but eventually their army fell. The rumors said the princess died in the river during her attempt to escape, but in the taverns and lonely roads her people still whispered to the winds that their Queen would return. Aelin of the Wildfire.
Because I didn’t want you to die to save me.
He would never forget her proclamation that Aelin Galathynius was dead. When he looked into her eyes he believed her proclamation. How many had died to ensure their queen lived? What sacrifice was made? Of whom? What made her cringe every time she heard her name? How the rutty hell did she make it to Adarlan, to an assassins guild?
Reminding me again and again how rutting worthless and awful and cowardly I am.
Ten years, for ten years he flowed from form to form. His body survived. For ten years she survived, but maybe like him just her body. Maybe like him, she could never bring herself to end it. But unlike him, because if she ended it, their sacrifice would have been in vain.
I have no one left. No one.
And there it was, they were two souls, lost to an abyss of darkness, alone. So damn alone. But unlike him, an eight year old girl did not deserve the fate handed to her.
He did not hate her, he hated that she forced him to feel. He hated to see her dead eyes every day. He hated that the world turned against a little girl that dreamed to become a healer and instead she became a killer. He hated that no matter how hard he tried, her blood sang to him. He hated that she was likely his carranam and together they could change the world.
She has no hope left in her heart.
Hope. They needed hope.
Maybe, just maybe they could find a way out of the darkness together.