34 - diary
One-Word Writing prompts (still accepting!)
Never before have I felt compelled to set my thoughts into writing, yet I now feel I must.
Sulahn's hands have forgotten how to hold a tool for writing, and the small, brittle piece of burned wood is not ideal for the task. The letters are misshapen and cramped on the shred of parchment, ugly and inadequate; how difficult it is to write without the Fade! The years of slavery - two decades, by human reckoning (her reckoning, now; the reckoning of a mortal creature subject to the inexorable flow of time) - have not numbed her to the loss of the world as she knew it. She finds cause to grieve at every turn, and here is another: how even the act of writing has become a dull, lifeless task.
Still.
I have escaped. We live now as fugitives, vagabonds: myself and those I have freed alongside me, many of those who once served with me before the fall of Arlathan and Elvhenan as we knew it.
Before the loss of Dirthamen, but she does not have the strength to write his name. That wound, too, has not grown numb. Perhaps it never will.
They look to me for guidance I do not have. I gather them to me like a mother hen sheltering chicks, but I cannot shield them from the wolf - or the Wolf, though of Fen'Harel, I hear nothing. I do not believe this to be only my own isolation from the news of the world: Fen'Harel has vanished as surely as the rest of the Evanuris, swallowed up by his own scheme. But he is not the greatest threat we face.
In the weak lantern light - they do not dare risk open flame, not so close to human settlements, not when they do not yet know the lay of the land - her hands are thin and weathered, their strength little more than a memory. Her face, too, is lined with the telltale signs of time's march, and her hair, once black as pitch, has grown gray and coarse.
We have stepped into the flow of time's river, and from it, we cannot resurface; we will drown in it, as never we did before. If there is a way to undo what has been done to our world, I fear I may not live to see it done. I fear...
She does not have the strength to write his name, but she closes her eyes and sees him again; him and Falon'Din, as they always were. As they still are, she prays, somewhere deep within the prison built to hold them.
...I fear I will not live to see them again.
