He reaches for her, arms unfolding like the wings of an owl; vast, the endless trail of his robes, velvety soft, and silent, silent, silent. The crush of feathers against skin, the hollow bones. A blink and the image is gone, sensation gone, only the God, and His hand touching her cheek. An echo, a beginning.
❝ I am Here, ❞ he says, the press of his palm real against her cheek. Something tangible, something known. Something felt before. ❝ You reached for Me, though you did not know it. You reached, and it came to me in the Dreaming. You acted in faith, Da’Ghilan. And you felt it most. ❞
And was not the summoning of the Old God’s soul a thing of singular purpose? Was not her reluctant agreement a thing made in hope, in belief? That it would work. That they needed it to work.
Falon’Din had never truly left her; He Sees through His mark, knows the lives of a hundred-thousand caught in the roots of His tree, the heart of them all. Their blood. Come, he might have said. Let me look at you. But he knows she is a thorny thing, brambled and knotted with the countless tangles of the hurts of mortal life. He will not coddle her. He will not tame this wild thing.
He will show her the path to loving Him once more.
She flinches- it is so rare that any touch her, these days- or at least any with hands, when it is not in violence, when it is not in rage. She is the creature of the wars she has fought, and they are endless. And there is the almost-horror of the touch for a moment, that is nothing no living two-legger could recreate, no matter how strong their imagination, no matter how powerful their inclinations. But then it ends- he is simply touching her face, and Litriu-
She allows it, swallowing tightly. She does not pull away. She remembers something similar, when she was but little- though it’s through a haze. A dream again, like this, but so long ago that certain things have muddled through time- though he has not, and nor has the intensity of that voice, of those eyes. Her own eyes, that strange heather-grey lift, and look at him- look at him like none else would dare, in any age, it feels- but for perhaps his own kin.
Litriu is trying to see him, to remember, to feel. And she does not quail from him, not here. Not now. “- Why?” comes the question, then. “I was a slip of a wild thing, back then- I was nothing to you, wasn’t I? And now perhaps more-” the world has forced her to be more, she is so angry- she is so TIRED. “But why yet still?” She remembers his words- remembers- remembers a strange loneliness in him, and a power like nothing else she had ever seen.
And the little beast knows in this moment he does see her, does hear her. She can all but feel it- but why, why, why. She swore to him, so young, even now holds to it. His name had only ever been the one to resonate with her, and perhaps- there is something to that. And death has never taken her, despite the hundreds upon hundreds of times that it should. She should not be alive. She knows this. The things she has survived, no mortal has had much business surviving, and not once, not even twice but thrice she has burned and bled and warred and screamed for the sake of everyone but her own damned self.
“What-” what does he want? What is the point? She does not know what to ask, how to ask.
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