Winter
Thinariel flees.
She cannot breathe past the deluge of anger, and confusion, and heartbreak, and she rides. Away from the Elrendar, away from her, and she’s gone deaf to the pounding hoofbeats below her or the hellish tones of Kherevax’s labored breath. She commands the black steed to go as fast as possible, and the focus needed to stay astride is the only clarity she has.
The landscape passes her by in dizzying blur, and she does not have the wherewithal to place the creeks and hills they ride over. She is overwhelmed. Her eyes sting and a vice winds around her chest so fiercely that by the time she drops to the ground at her campsite, she feels fragile. She is fragile.
No. No no no no no no no no. No.
The crunch of snow beneath her boots or the distant scent of camp smoke feel numbed. Nothing to her, just a bleak sense and immediacy before her vision blurs and it all sinks in. Sanarissa is gone. It was all gone all gone, she was selfish she was foolish she was a fool to think
it could be
okay.
She feels cold for the first time in this winter. It lances through her, visceral and jagged, a hand to her mouth to stifle a wracking sob, and she nearly crumples beneath.. beneath what? The burden? It does not settle heavy on her shoulders, it robs her of her will, saps the strength from her limbs, until part of her is fragile and then cracked and then crumbling. She does not let herself falter, fall to the ground, until she staggers into the safety of her tent.
I loved you. How could you?
Love? Is that what you thought it was? A fairy tale?
She finds the letter stacked upon a box, under some piece of nothing. She fumbles, breath baited, and the words on the page would mean something more to her if they were not seen in a haze. In her state it is nothing and nothing.
She turns and rips her claws through the air in sudden rage, and the inferno that burns the front half of her tent sparks into being half a second before she has willed it. She is so raw and confused, the ground shattered beneath her and she is falling, falling. But she can’t. She can’t be weak. She can’t be weak. She can’t be weak. She can’t be like
this.