title: the hunt continues when: post the tinkerer where: rome, Audelë, more trigger warnings: usual stuff
Agony.
Tamlen’s death had been painful, the drainage that followed a rip on their plan. But Tamlen had come back to them against all odds, and the relief had been overwhelming.
Inan hadn’t.
His death feels like being unraveled, like losing a part of herself that she assumed would always be there. The second heartbeat behind her chest is gone, the thread of devotion and steely determination rotting away as death came to take her warder’s hand. Somewhere, a drow is being born. In Rome, Robin’s warder dies, an unfinished melody, a hunt cut short.
She hadn’t even been able to convince him to call her by her name.
Lain’s death had hurt, the growing care she had felt for the lycan, a sharp stab to her chest, but she had not loved the wolf. Not quite, not yet, and now never for he is gone, and she knows that even if Death was the one to collect what was due, she had played a part in that game. It is a tragedy, a story unfinished.
It was not love.
Inan was her warder, she had welcomed him in and invited him into her soul. Loving him was not unlike loving a part of herself. She had kept that emotion at bay, well aware that she had done nothing to earn anything from him but his loyalty, suppressing it to prevent any more awkwardness between the two. Inan’s story with Fen’harel is well known, and she would not push through his boundaries after that betrayal.
Would not have.
But in the end, it did not matter.
Her warder is dead, decay spreading through Rome as Thanatos collects his due, and all Robin can do within the Titan is sink her thoughts with her fellow Chancellors and fall upon the song of destruction they are weaving until they cannot do so any longer.
The Titan falls, and with the fall, their end is marked.
There is no opportunity to fight, no magic to summon, no song capable of stopping the Great Old Ones as they fall upon them like predators upon their prey.
The next fifteen years are spent in the ground, all thought lost beneath the agony of the song of decay and rot, of the end and the beginning.
The darkness is a familiar call, the pain an old comfort, akin to the ritual that had seen her confirmed into her role as Fall Chancellor. A legacy of the Dusk Elves that they once were, the ritual recalled costumes of old, and it is now the only reason Robin does not lose her mind to the slow movement of rot, slowly spreading through her body but keeping her alive to keep their nutrients. It’s a song of fungi, beautiful on its ugliness, on its destruction. She doesn’t lose herself to it, doesn’t break down and lose hope, but it comes close. Were it not for the familiarity of the torture, she might have.
She doesn’t.
She awakens to the astral bombs falling and to freedom that tastes as sickly sweet as the rot that had settled on the back of her throat over the last decade. There is no hesitation when she joins the other Chancellors into a song and they come together to become the Titan once more.
For one last time in this timeline.
Robin dies in the battlefield, only to awaken in a Rome that has not yet been Forsaken.
The battle is set aside, more pressing matters coming into the forefront as they find themselves changed. The Chancellors’ retreat, the war pushed back and with it their destruction of Rome, far more important things to do than to deal with the mortals that destroyed them and saved them alike. The world changed one more time, and Robin changed with it, working with the four other chancellors to create Audelë, a new home, alike the Courts that sheltered them for so long, but something new altogether in the same breath. As the dust settles, she finds Inan, brings him forth into a hug despite his arguments against it and laughs before letting go, polite distance that he is so fond of falling upon the two once more.
Peace fell upon their kind once more, a deal with the dark elves set in place. And the Courts? The Courts protected once more.
It’s not enough.
It will never be enough, but her people deserve the rest. Dusk has fallen upon them, and with it comes a new world they need to learn for themselves. Ignoring it all in reckless rage would be foolish, and the tricksters that hide in the shade are anything but that.
They will wait, they will watch, and they will be ready.
The hunt is eternal, and so are they.
