selaphiel
Este had said she thought nothing was eternal but this feels so much bigger. It feels endless, all-consuming, though he does not yet have a name for what it is. It is not the same suffering, but something else entirely. A darkness that splinters outward from the center of his chest (has he learned yet that there is something strange about the heart? Something not-quite-right about the way it beats? Does he remember when it changed?).
It is an itching restlessness. The feeling that something might go catastrophically wrong at any moment. Because he has watched from some great distance all the ways his friend has changed over time. But he had promised her some time ago that he would not leave her and he hasn’t. She had given her life for him and he understands that he owes her his.
There are so many things he does not understand, Selaphiel. Because, though he has grown into his body and lost whatever physical things identified him as a child, he is still so young. He remembers still the conversation they’d had about the now-king in the days before he had come to Hyaline, how she had been tasked with killing him and how it had occurred to him suddenly that he would kill her first. And he had and here he is now.
But it is not for him to understand, he thinks. So, he stays in the shadows and he will stay there until she calls on him. He will stay in case she should ever need him.
He catches sight of her one sun-dappled afternoon, though, and he remembers the way they had taken together. And perhaps it is because of this memory that he emerges from the place where he has hidden himself away from the light. Or maybe it is something else.
But his heart seizes, bucking against its ribbed cage when he approaches, and his eyes burn with a memory that does not belong to him. “Maze,” he says, quiet, nostalgic.
I just bite my tongue a bit harder
