Julrien Valebright

He’d written him again that day. Letters, stretching out into the Void, in dark ink and untidy scrawl. Crumpled up and cast into the sea; it was as close as they would ever get.

Like fireflies, on the coast of Eversong, caught between his hands. Dim light flickering between his fingers...there was nothing there when he looked inside. A spectre of himself, of what they were. And he was a long way away from nights like that.

The weeks had passed in highs and lows, tidal pulls all his own. Finally he found himself splayed out on unwashed sheets, staring into shadows whose language he didn’t know.

Lore, of course, was born knowing. It was as his mother tongue.

All that time… and maybe it was only a blip in his entire life, a...

“I don’t know if I could survive another war like that.”

He was rambling, a trait that rarely reared its head, given his tendency to go quiet in times of great distress. Actions over words, the bigger the better to satisfy his pain or fear. But there was no outside danger where he was; seated in the middle of their lush, tangled greenery, only the limits of his own mind and body could pose a threat.

Twin tendrils, working in tandem. Find their centre.

But there was a method to this mindless chatter, one he’d been committing to memory from day one. In this case, the quiet questions and half-there answers served the to temper the severity of his internal efforts with a bit of outside distraction. For with this kind of work, as...

The house wore the soft, dark colours and glimmering starlight lamps of nightfall by the time they’d returned, creating a hushed familiarity that suited the young Knight’s frayed spirit just fine. Face to face with Sana’s broken silence, flanked by Lore’s calm acceptance and Julrien’s anything-but, a quiet evening had taken a different turn. They’d eventually fled like fugitives from the raw remorse of it all, into the comparative ease of their own space where they had little need of words to take care of one another. For Julrien himself, who had fallen apart.

He’d leaned on Lore far more than he might have wished through it all, though of course he’d been met with every ounce of the seer’s unwavering strength in...

“He’s forgotten where he came from; he’s forgotten this. But he does not need to remember to belong.” 

Julrien lay awake again in the midnight darkness of their room, surrounded by silence save for Lore’s breathing. It comforted him, as always, to know that his lover seemed, at least for this moment, peaceful enough- no small miracle given everything that had happened, and with a lifetime of difficulty in dreams, besides. It had long since been a favourite habit of the young Knight’s to simply watch and listen whenever his other half was deep in sleep. It could be pitch dark and he would still know the sound of it anywhere. 

Yet that idyllic quiet alongside those soft sleeping-sounds had changed for him. Night after...