04-09-2023, 10:05 PM
these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—
He stops short at the sound, though he does not recognize the voice. And when he swings his gaze toward the source, he does not immediately recognize her either. So he merely pauses there, suspended animation, studying, trying to remember if there is something that he has forgotten.
(And he does remember.
In glimpses, he remembers, the twins. The way he had looked at Mazikeen and said, ‘so you’re happy, then.’ And how he had been relieved on some level and absolutely devastated on a more cellular level. Because he had not been able to save her, because he’d promised her that he’d tried, because all he’d wanted was to be useful to her and he’d failed.
He’d failed.
Not just his friend but all of them.
His friend, his mother, every one of them.)
He exhales.
He does not remember the child’s name, if he had ever known it. But he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that her mother is Mazikeen. Her father is Firion.
His own half-brother.
The one who’d saved her when Selaphiel had failed to.
He shifts his weight, prepared to flee. Because no good will come from this, he knows that. But it is the quiet of her voice that keeps him rooted there, the uncertainty in her gaze.
“Hello,” he says and he cannot address her by name because he’s not certain he’d ever known her name at all, but it is evident in the greeting alone that he recognizes her, that he knows who she is and all that she represents.
—I just bite my tongue a bit harder
@Valkyrie