Control.
Since the Chamber had gone, and she’d found her entire existence had been about control. Control that the shadows provided her when she needed them most - deadening the emotions that threatened to cripple her.

Too much control. 
She hadn’t realized that she’d been suffocating in her own darkness.

Finally, she takes a breath and there is a release.  Something stirs - something that’s been hidden away since the last time she’d stood at home in the Chamber. The true Chamber. The one with a heart and a soul - not the the magical bastardization of the land that had been the only true home she’d ever known. Perhaps it had taken an attempt to resurrect what was dead and buried for her to final cut the strings binding her to the past. But now she wore no shackles.  Not even those of her own making.

For so long she had run from the past. She’d frozen her heart; hidden her emotions away in a darkness so deep she wasn’t sure that she could recover them.

Until the darkness had come. And for the first time in a long time, she had felt something.
And she did not run from it.
She did not push it away.
She embraced what it was to feel something.

And it breathed life into her bones. 

The shadow of feeling flickered within. She’d never been an emotional creature before, nor would she be. But she’d always seen emotion as weakness. Too much, undoubtedly. But none at all? Just as crippling. 

Which makes something twist in her chest when she sees Kensley, knowing now that the solution that she’d offered him had not been a fair bargain. For others who asked her for help, she harbored no reservations. They were not him.  They did not matter.

But Kensley? She will always want him.
It is selfish. She always has been. And she has brought him little but pain. But she cannot let him go. Cannot stay away.

So she goes to him now.

“Did you ever imagine this is where we’d find ourselves all those years ago?” She asks as she draws near, her cool gaze immediately drawn to the frost that coats him.