Prelude to a Paladin
Two years ago
The turn of the world brought dawn sooner than she wanted. Hushed wind kissed the eternal leaves of Eversong, filtered through verdant boughs and brushed an admonishing farewell against the weathered cheek of the paladin. She was alone, framed between the blushing dawn and the retreating night, atop a solitary rise that overlooked the Elrendar.
Contemplative silence hung about her like an old, well-worn and much-loved blanket. It was a familiar silence, wrought of cold memory and weary thoughts. She wrapped herself in it, clung to it like a child in the quiet cold.
Life is more than the sum of its parts, my love.
Her father’s voice echoed from beyond the grave, risen in her memory. Cool, soothing bass tones tinged with familiar comfort. Prematurely grey hair. The scent of smoke. A lopsided smile, gold-capped and gap-toothed. Perpetually stubbly face with skin like old leather.
Zimraphel filled her lungs with sweet air and pushed it back out again. Her father’s ghost let go its temporary hold on her soul, slipping away as the river of her mind meandered in tune with the one below.
I refuse to regret the only life I’ve had.
The last words of her sister, her idol, her protector, her antagonist. The woman Zimraphel had once considered the most world-wise, the most grounded; a murderer, a mother, a wife, a traitor, a thrice-damned bitch. Izosia had been lost, like everyone else, but she always painted a different picture for her little sister. Blonde hair the color of moonlight, obscuring eyes that burned with addiction. Black leather and their father’s beloved blades at home on her hips. Jocular, wry, brutally broken by the weight of her many mistakes. Selfish. Coward. Gone.
Sisterly idolatry slipped away, crushed under the burden of rising bitterness. Zimraphel let those feelings go with a practiced mastery and began the trek that would take her back to the ivory and wine cobbled streets, away from this golden forest and silver river so steeped in the mists of memory.
You will always measure up to my love, Zim.
She paused beneath a tree covered in flowering morning glories, their vines twisted over each other a melee of life. She reached up to pluck one blossom, violet fading into cream. It was a momentary pause, a reflection for the ebon-haired woman who had had so little role her life until the end. Without her, she would not be alive; without her, she would not have survived the devastation that had once threatened this brilliant place.
Her mother, a paladin more devout than she would ever be, might have seen this forest in a different light: familiar, peaceful, comforting in its solid reality, not for the shadows of what it had once been. Here, in the present, in the dawn-limned beauty, was a place for mourning as well as solace. Zimraphel let the flower fall through open fingers, offering up a prayer for the souls of her family in the stillness of the glade.
A soft sense of peace began to scrub out the bitterness that came before the dawn.
Planar leaves of grass parted company and swayed in the wake of her passing. Steel-clad, numbed to the world, her feet gathered morning dew with each step. Two weeks home, she mused.
Her thoughts turned to the events of those two weeks; botched jobs, arguments with idiot mercenaries, meeting old comrades, crippling nostalgia, insomnia, and a general… listlessness. She was a soldier, wasn’t she? Did she not serve the Light, in her own way?
Who does a soldier fight in her own home? What faith does a paladin defend if not her own?
Golden light cast a haze in the misty air. Zimraphel’s amber eyes wandered left, right, with the vigilance of her identity. She didn’t see the rising spires of the city until she had all but left the crowded trunks and boughs behind. By the time the she had crossed the ornate threshold of the gates she had abandoned all melancholic thoughts. She was home. Unhurt. Alone.
But home.