It makes no sense; the refrain he thinks and she echoes with her questioning, trying uselessly to find a reason why. Eadwulf thinks back on that moment for the millionth time, tries to find some missed sign, some tell that would be key to understanding. Yet Bren seemed well; well enough that he should have been able to find his way back to them. Not kept at those people's side by any sort of magical effect, surely, and not so broken that his fragile mind could have been used to influence him away from them. No, he seemed... recovered, almost entirely, and yet he had not returned to them. He had willingly walked into Vergessen, knowing he would meet Ikithon, and chose to do that before returning to them. Before even trying to reach out.

Why hasn't he?

It had to be a choice. That is scarcely enough answer on its own, nonetheless. Why would Bren make that choice? They had done everything they could for him; loved him even when his brilliant mind was taken away and he could not come back to them. Hoped, despite the odds, that he would recover. Visited in that gods-forsaken place that they would not have been allowed to get him out of. Feared the fate that had befallen him when he disappeared, uncertain whether he had escaped or died or both. Maybe Bren feared getting locked up again, but he had to know they would not hand him over to the master if he reached out in secret. Maybe he feared they would not receive him with open arms, after the hurt he had caused that night in Blumenthal.

"I don't know," was the most honest reply he could give to her question; once, they had known each other inside and out. Now he couldn't make sense of Bren's choices. "He might. He knows we know he is back now; maybe that will be enough. He didn't try to talk to me, so I don't know — I still think he might reach out to you."

"Master Ikithon won't rest until he has Bren back. One way or another." And there is no doubt he would send them to do the job, not just because they knew Bren best, but because he enjoyed the games. The meeting had been no coincidence, nor would be the choice to have them hunt down their lover, whether they could persuade him to return or end this once and for all. Eadwulf turns away from the thought, a thumb running across the back of Astrid's hand, painfully strong grip still holding his own. "The old man has always failed to see what he had right here."

But he will be gone, hopefully, soon. For too long, they had been waiting for the right time; it has to be closer now. Perhaps his goddess had seen fit to bring the three of them together to end this; perhaps they would finally have the chance to get rid of the man who made them. Eadwulf does not say it; there is little point in trying to predict divine will, and he knows Astrid does not care for it. Instead, the silence lingers, heavy, before he breaks it once again.

Anger closed her hands into fists. " If he wanted to reach out to me he would have done so already. He's been gone too long not to have found a way to contact me and anything he would tell me he could relay to you as well. " Something dark gathered in her stomach, tasting like bile, BITTERNESS that threatened to move up and curl itself around her heart. The scar on her face began to itch. She tried to pay it no mind. " He has betrayed us, Wulf. " She took a deep breath, that ugly feeling still boiling in a pit in her stomach, seething, threatening to rise higher. She was shaking. " He betrayed us — " How could he? What had changed that he had seemingly abandoned them all? Their principles, their beliefs, their LOVE? How could he do this to them?

There was no other logical explanation, not that she could see it and if she did not know another explanation the chances were high there was none. They would have to entertain the idea that Bren had abandoned them, that they could no longer TRUST the man they had loved more than anything, that their time together no longer meant anything to him. " I am not sure he'd even ... remember that night entirely. He broke — who knows what his mind pieced together in the aftermath. " And maybe that was the most comforting possibility. Bren had not abandoned them because he had stopped loving them, no, maybe he simply was not in his right mind in the first place. A desperate attempt to fill the gaps, to explain what she did not want to accept. No, Eadwulf would have stated it if Bren was showing signs of an unsound mind, if he was still crazy as he had been when she had last visited him in Vergesson. She had pitied that man, the wreck he had been then. That Bren had nothing to do with the man Eadwulf had described to her now.

Still, she leans forward. Into Astrid's complimenting words to match the interest, a mirror of a type. "I certainly hope Fenris isn't entirely right about you, too." A Tevinter mage, he had warned her, was not to be trusted in any element. The way Mair saw it, though, is that Astrid was fleeing something too. Looking for her own way out of a place that was only marginally kinder to mages that did not carry the kind of power that would secure an entire family's position.