When I followed my mistress to the desert, I thought I had gone mad. What was I thinking, to go so far south into lands unknown, at the behest of a woman I was speechlessly in love with?
I didn’t even know if she knew I loved her, or if she loved me back.
For my own sanity, I assumed she didn’t. Better to love at a distance than hope for tiny kindnesses to mean something more.
The desert was to kind. Great insects swarmed through small, stinking tunnels, but they hoarded magic like a dragon and so into the tunnels we went, fighting through the slime, through poison and terrible pincers and worse stings. Plagued by clouds to almost-invisible gnats that carried curse-poison in their bites.
But we needed the artifacts they buried in their hives, and so we dared what no other might.
My mistress is a master of ice magic, always limed in frost even under the punishing desert sun, but she isn’t a bad hand with fire either. A fact which saved us time and time again when the clouds of gnats came for is.
We passed bones as we delved deeper into the desert, following the scent of prophesy that my mistress swore she could feel pulling at her heart. Some were adventurers. Many were the poor souls who got careless and died in the punishing sands.
What could I do but follow, my bow ready to guard her back when the insects gave way to beast-folk, clever and angry and ready to defend their territory.
We tried to avoid them as we could, but too often they sought us out, ready to chase us off with thrown spears and lobbed bags of toxic powder. I almost lost my mistress to one that struck her before she could shield us. She shook and coughed in my arms even as I scrambled for the portal-scroll she kept on her belt. It would get us back to town, I knew, if I could get it to work.
By the time the portal opened, she was terribly pale and gasping for breath that wouldn’t come.
By the time we stumbled through, she small in my arms and me shouting for the alchemist, she was barely conscious.
For three days, I wondered if she would live, and sat vigil at her side.
When I woke on the fourth day, neck aching from the hard wooden chair beside her bed, she was awake and watching me, a tiny smile on her lips.
“My Annor,” she said with a small smile. As always, my name sounds of honor when she says it. She raised a hand to me. I took it, ever at her whim. Her hand was cold, her nails perfect ovals of glittering crystal and tipped in frosty blue. I warmed it between my own and her smile grew ever so slightly. She pulled until I sat on the bed beside her. “My faithful Annor. Have you been here this whole time?”
“I couldn’t leave you,” I told her, shy and uncomfortable. I was not the same as the delicate desert women who watched her with longing eyes, maybe for her power, but more for her beauty which was striking even without knowing who she is. I am not the kind of woman that women like her fall in love with. But I love her nonetheless, and I will love her until I die. “Every time I tried to sleep, I dreamed you would stop breathing and be gone when I woke.”
“It is my fate, my Annor,” she told me then, running her magic-scarred fingers over the hard calluses that mark my own. “The prophesy haunts me. My destiny is wrote already.”
“I am not going to let you die.”
“You may not have a choice.”
“There is always a choice.”
I so rarely challenged her that my fierceness took her by surprise. She watched me, snow-blue eyes knowing and frost crystals in her hair like roses.
“I hope you will not regret choosing to walk beside me,” she says at last, as the room turned red and gold from the sinking sun. “My destiny is written in ancient runs on older stone, but you, my Annor, you are not held by this prophesy, and your life is your own.”
“My life is yours,” I tell her, the words ripped from me against my will. Her lips part with surprise, but I push on, always too brave for my own good. “I made my choice when I first saw you smile.”
“My Annor,” she murmurs, and releases my hand. Before I can mourn the loss, she cups my cheek instead. Her eyes are sad, so heartbreakingly sad, and I drown in them. “Did no one ever tell you not leave your heart before a hero’s path? I dare not step aside to cherish it.”
“Many people, many times,” I tell her as she combs her fingers through my fear-mussed hair, leaving trails of cool wet where her frost melts on my warmth. “But while it beats, it is yours, nonetheless.”
“Are you sure?” she asks me, voice like the whisper of snow on a silent night, deathly cold, but so wondrously fragile that I fear to say a word and risk losing her. “My Annor, this road will be a terrible one. There will be more vigils, and more pain. There will be death, and things that are worse than death.”
“I will follow you into Hell,” I promise her, and bring her cold hand to my lips. “And if the demons try to take you from me, I will fill them with arrows until they give you back.”
She smiles, a sad, lonely smile, and strokes her fingertip over my lips, frost fading away against my skin.
“I am not hero enough to refuse you,” she tells me at last, and my heart lifts. “I only hope that loving me will not be your end. This world would be poorer without you to light the way.”
Fro the first moment she saw her, Annor knew she would love her sorceress forever.
