It is difficult to watch, to see the way her emotions melt across Luster’s expressive features. As realization settles and recognition dawns. His name falls from her lips, and she knows her sister is remembering. Fitting the pieces together until the fissures begin to heal. There are gaps in the memories, but slowly she has begun to fill them in.
It takes conscious effort to remain still beneath the onslaught, beneath the questions and the ache she had not expected.
She releases a breath, unsure how to answer those questions. Even she does not have all the answers, and what she does know will offer Luster nothing but pain. There is never an easy way to shatter someone’s entire world. No kind way to explain one’s own culpability in it.
Perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t even tried. Eventually though, Luster would have found the truth. And in spite of everything Heartfire has done in her life, such deliberate cruelty had never been one. Kinder, then, to tear the bandage free now before it had time to fester and set.
“I do not know… everything,” she finally answers, couching the story with a warning of her own fallibility. “You were caught in a stray bit of magic, I believe. But it altered your…” she hesitates “both of your memories.” And other things too, it now appears, though she hadn’t known of the children before now.
The last part is the hardest, almost. To give her such false hope. “He is alive.”
i see your sins
and i want to set them free
