huldine’s writings

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“I can’t help but wonder why you have that, though.” Her chin juts to the vial now corked beside her leg. His fingers continue their massage behind her ears, lolling down to her nape where the straps of her plate rubbed relentless red marks into her skin for the past three battles. Bandits hardly call time just for you to readjust your pauldrons, though.  “Am I reduced only to carrying potions and salves for your wounds?” and she can hear the teasing smile in his voice, curling his words. She lets out a flat hum. “Hardly explains the hair oil, love.” There wasn’t supposed to be that bitter edge of her jealousy marring her words. It has been, she’s learned, a pestering vice that all too often colors her vision. Even when she knows it’s ridiculous, there it emerges, like a tired and tempted dragon from its den. She’s only lucky that Solas himself can see through such a lowly vice. A placating kiss is pressed to her nape, where he’s split the sides of her hair across her shoulders. “It has only ever been for myself, vhenan. Though now only for you.” His fingers comb through her hair much easier now and he lets it fall in waves down her back, toying with some errant curls that tease her ears. It sends a racketing shiver down her spine, and he catches the movement, huffing gentle laughter as his other hand now slips beneath her tunic, massaging more of the knots which dot her spine. Evelyn’s eyes close, and at those small circles he now presses into the muscles of her hip, lets out a pleased groan. Until she jolts forward with a sudden squawk– nearly falling off the stump. “You had hair?!"

Tucked away for centuries between two garden stones, this honeyed spirit has captured the essence of its long rest: warm sunlight, dandelions, and the unmistakable laughter of bees, busy within their bursting hives. Share with a fine friend and fear not– for there’s no true sting. 

They're all here– even the injured have hobbled from the healer's tent, soaking in the rare glimpse of warm, gifted sunshine.

The entire garden thrums with bodies and hums with their weaving of words, their laughter, and the weight of all their burdens flashing in memories, when some are half-remembered, and others still painfully raw. 

Cole himself is one of them, now. 

Supposedly.

He lingers at the edge of the wall where sunlight streams in slanted beams from worn, weathered cracks in the stone. Here it's warm and his toes–strange things, pale and wriggly–press curiously into the dewy grass. Between his fingers, a green stem loses white feathers to the wind.

He's known this somewhere before, he knows. Somewhere deep within.

Something taken.

Then it is a bright summer's day shimmering on a sea of ripe, golden wheat and swaying– waving in the wind and shushing like a cradling mother. His own calloused feet flex now into tilled earth and he squints, one pale hand raised against vast, endless sky and a flat farmland horizon. One of the hogs, Thistle, most likely, though he doesn't know how, grunts in the field below eating windfall apples and overripe sloe.

It is the perfect day.

Bunny catches up beside him, panting and bellowing laughter with a gap-toothed smile. Her little hands beat at his arm, and he sways playfully, if only to see how her chest puffs pridefully, as if she were not such a little thing. 

There is no weight of other's memories and crushing, ceaseless thinking. 

All he sees then is the wild shock of Bunny's hair like sun-bleached hay, sticking out from all sides of her head. He knows the feeling of it, soft and fine, between his fingers. Somehow he even knows the motions of braiding it and tying a ribbon, just how she likes.

The ribbon is red, and it brings him suddenly out– pushed into a small cabinet with aching hands and lungs, stained red with blood. Even in the darkness he could see its shine, staining beneath his quick-bitten fingernails. She has stopped crying hours ago, lying perfectly still in his arms, cold as the night outside, and yet he still cannot open that cabinet door.

Not when the entire house creaks like Father's angry steps, groaning like the vengeful monsters in his least favorite bedtime stories.

The shadows of that cabinet begin to shift, then, forming into monsters that press against him, larger and larger until he begins to disappear beneath them, forgotten in the all-consuming shadows...

And suddenly he is back in the gardens, with Evelyn there kneeling beside him– a careful hand on his shoulder. Friendly.

Friends.

More than friends: grasping fingers where they're needed, desperate, lips and tongues gliding aimless through the night. Words and whispered prayers only he can hear... He loves it, almost as much as he loves her. 

Her journey was too long.

"I missed you," he says.

"An echo of the sea swells from afar when this letter unfurls. The memory of some beast howls in the distance, terrible and pained.

It was in the bitter tempest of the Storm Coast where I learned that I could not live without you, my heart. 

Neither the epics nor idylls of Ostwick could convey the limpness of your hand, bloodless and pale in the flooded grasses, nor in the sheen of your helmet, gleaming bright where a great dent had been. 

Here was our Herald, our Hope– but in that moment, above all, my finest companion. 

That Reaver smoldered dead beside you, consumed by corruption and far, far too quiet for the humming in his veins. That I was not the first to see him, to strike him down before he ever had the chance to strike you, haunts me still.

One cleave, I realized, is all it takes for Life to tear you from mine. Where a sea's worth of blood ran in rivers past your pauldrons, soaking into soil so that I envied even the earth, foolishly, for holding you then. No sense, nor dignity, could stop me from sinking to my knees in that red spill– digging into reservoirs of power lain untouched for centuries.

Whatever was left of me, I poured desperately into you.

That our companions at the time had no knowledge of the source of such power was my luck alone.

Yet even if they had, no threat of their suspicion could have stayed my hand. For the first time did I feel the true weight of your blood between my fingers, a strange shock to a millennia-old healer, who had once seen you as nothing more than another speck of time racing past: a temporary, if not amusing, fancy.

Now you were real.

Again you woke, as you had done countless times before, battered and unbroken, bleary-eyed and entirely alive. That is when my own Life flooded my body, filling my lungs like the salt spray stinging our eyes, burning behind my chest.

There would be no millennia for the slow build of careful touches, I realized, and no eternity to stay carefully within your orbit if only, simply, to watch. 

Whatever I had lost in that dreaded moment came back suddenly, with a foolhardy desire to catch you like an ember from smoke, so that even if you faded in my hands, at least you had faded, and at least I had held you. I had seen that crueler alternative, of never having held you at all, and could not survive it.

Selfishly.

But now I am the blood-soaked soil, though not from any embattled foe nor violent end, but instead that slow, inevitable fade of your wondrous ember within my hands. It is the tragedy of mortals, of the shem'len, such quick-footed folk, to die as a firework and live just as bright.