“A century?” She echoes his statement with the smallest of smiles, one that is still edged with sorrow because he is acting so strangely and she feels it must be her fault. “Is that how long it’s been since the first time you tried to flirt with me?” She teases gently, a useless attempt to bring him back around, but there is an underlying heaviness to what she says. A century and so many lifetimes ago, when she was fresh and new to Beqanna and the valley, when her life orbited around Dhumin and there was little anyone could do to pull her from him. He had left and taken her gravity with him, was still keeping it locked away in the afterlife or wherever he had gone once the gates opened, and it’s hardly any surprise that she drifts the way that she does.
She has split herself into too many pieces, has tried to take parts of everyone else to put herself back together, and when they move on or she stops looking for them she is left half-stitched and just as aimless as before.
She wonders, though, why Ashhal cannot seem to see that he is someone that at one point had more pull than anyone.
That for a century she has found him or let him find her, that she has never refused him and has tried to build something out of what seemed to be nothing.
She takes a step back when he stands, her eyes no longer impassive but now watching him with all the unspoken things she cannot fathom into words. The last of his words still seem to echo, and it’s not so much what he is saying but the tone of his voice and the almost tangible anger that has her so confused. She is quiet for a long moment, simply watching him, before she breaks the heavy silence with the softness of her voice, “I asked you to stay in Nerine because I didn’t want you to leave.” Her gaze lowers towards the ground, her face hidden behind a tangled mess of forelock and the glow of her halo. “All you had to do was stay, and things could have been entirely different.”
