“You’ve grown soft, Avaya’thyn,”
He said, passing slowly behind her. His tone wasn’t cruel, it was worse than that. Cold, clinical like a surgeon inspecting a wound. Bootsteps crunched through the dirt behind her, meant, like he was mapping her pulse by the sound of her breathing. A slow, deliberate circle, then another. The air turned thick, not with any sort of magic, but memory. Or maybe, something that still knew her name before she learned to sharpen it.
“You flinch now,” he murmured behind her ear, close enough to feel the breath pass through platinum strands. “You weigh your choices, you grieve the cost. Once, you didn’t blink to take a life.”
Her hands folded across her lap tightened. Not out of fear, not entirely. But restraint, the ache of being known too well.
“And what of you,” The Spymistress asked, low. “Do you still kill without blinking?”
“Yes, and I don’t mourn either.”
He came into view finally, firelight cutting across half his face, the rest blanketed in shadow. Eyes like old wounds, mouth like a sentence. He looked at her the way a soldier looks at the ruins of a city he once called home, then razed it again if it got in his way.
“I wonder,” he said, voice dropping soft, almost curious. “If I carved you open…would I find the same thing I used to? Or just smoke and softness where your fury used to live?”
She met his gaze finally, unflinching. “Try it,” she said, “See what you find.”
He stilled, just for a moment. Then leaned in, voice quiet enough to be mistaken as something gentle.
“I already did.”
He let the silence hang there, just long enough to feel like it was mercy, before he tore it away.
“And what I’ve found? Wasn’t fury. Wasn’t fire. Wasn’t even you.”
Then he turned his back to her, slowy.
“You’re not a monster anymore, Avaya’thyn. You’re just….forgotton.”
Then a pause.
“So fix it.”
