It takes only three hours into the night before the restlessness thudding through her breast overwhelms her desire for company; like a shaking fist snuffing out the fire’s wick against its palm. Both careful of her tender wounds, yet impulsive nonetheless, the former Blood Knight presses the heel of one bandaged hand against Bricini’s shoulder - and pushes.

She watches carefully as those glowing eyes pull open in the darkness, noting the fashion in which the other was faking her groggy tiredness. ‘Patiently’, Thanidiel allows that oh-so inconvenienced sigh to break through the Dawnmender’s lips, then cuts her off. Her words come in a slash of teeth - contrasting with the low quiet of their conversation earlier.

“What, Th–”

“Get the fuck off of me. I want a smoke.”

“...That’s too bad, I’m comfortable right here. Might even turn the lights back on and get back to reading now that you’ve woken me up.”

The Duskward emphasises such as she props herself up just a bit; her vision glancing down to the now-crumpled magazine spread along Thanidiel’s stomache, crushed when the doctor had grown bored and drowsy an hour’s half earlier. The light from the streets outside just barely catch the glossy surface.

“Hold on, let me clarify; that wasn’t a request. Get the fuck off of me, or I’ll shove you off–”

“No. No, you wouldn’t. Because you’re burned to shit. Because you could still very well tear up your wounds and bleed out. Because you wouldn’t dare to make yet even more work for your dearest mender - right, Than?”

“If you think I’m beyond killing myself and ruining your apartment furniture to make a point; you’re dead wrong.”

Bricini’s face takes on a flat, peevish, quality with her ears pinning just slightly back.

“And if you think I’m beyond finishing you off to rid myself of such a melodramatic headache; you’re dead wrong.”

“Get off.”

“I’m tired.”

“The bed is over there. It’s high time we moved from your shitty couch anyway.”

“It’s not shitty, you backcoun–”

The soldier heaves a deep sigh from her chest. The fatigue wears away any and all pretense of their harsh play. It shakes the air like something discordant, like a stone crashing along a blade’s edge and taking away whole slivers. The once-Blood Knight observes the ever-brief pause it summons before the Mender, as always, rolls over it with a tight, lopsided, grin.

“...well, you, and my couch, have been a good substitute for the bed. Regardless! Fine. I’ll be off, have fun brooding about your lost purpose or whatever is up your ass tonight.”

Bricini lingers, leaning forward to press her lips to the corner of the Lightward’s mouth. Thanidiel has a hard time deciphering if it were to stir another ember of annoyance with a continued presence or a genuine urge of affection. Perhaps it is both.

For once, it is unreturned. A gloom unlike any gloom that the elf has experienced in many years hangs over her. It buzzes in her blood, her muscles, her thoughts: it is like a black miasma settling over everything. She has it not in her to respond. The warmth she had possessed, just earlier this night, drained the whole of the well, leaving it droughted. There is no more stirring urge for the Duskward. The other finally slides off and saunters for sleep. Thanidiel, for some minutes, struggles to raise herself.

It is not the injuries: the quiet, constant, agony where acidic ichor seeped into her flesh. It is the heaviness. Every throb of blood that courses through her body contains malaise. She could suffocate in its weight. She only moves when her restless frustration boils back to the surface in the way hot magma erupts from the shiver of the suddenly snapping earth underneath.

From there, Thanidiel moves with as much of her frenetic energy as her wounds would rightfully allow. She slips over a long-sleeved shirt, something she had left here weeks ago over the back of a chair, over the bandages that enwrap her. A silent note is written down to take stock of what is her’s in the items strewn about the apartment. She spends too long on her boots - something mastered in its swiftness now made fumbling, interspersed with seconds of pause and weary, pained, breath. She exits. Or–

Or–

…

Bricini’s tabard hangs over the door knob. The red-black shine of the Blood Star glints. Something spills, then. It roars, it gushes, it rushes all along her. Frigid and biting, the way the ocean fills shattered hulls. It is reminiscent to the way her wounds burst and bled when she was putting herself into that fucking ceremonial armour for that farce - how it trickled and stuck into every crevice.

She reaches out with more force than she had ought to, feeling the scabwork on her arm pull painfully. The heavy commendation slams down with the fabric trailing behind it, cracking sharply against the ground underneath.

“Fucking hells, Than! Wh–”

The thud of the door locking into its frame muffles the rest of the other’s indignant husk. Thanidiel pauses then, and she tells herself it is more to breathe, that she found herself suffocated within that room like any fire when it is contained; certainly it is not the agony of protesting muscle.

She lurches against the nearby wall, staring out into the hallway. As usual - she senses Renalyas. The ward remains, then. In the shadows of the building, the Mark of the Inquisition is something felt than seen. It hangs over the air in a curious sense of alarm, like the eyes of predators glinting in and out of the darkness. Or perhaps its presence is much more incorporal and unfelt to the world, and the woman, who was once Hand to the dark organisation, is merely attuned to a familiar energy.

Thanidiel allows herself more moments of rest to think on that: that it remains. That Renalyas’ services have remained open to her old companion. She knows, truly, that it stems from the unspoken fondness held by the Inquisitor. Still, the thought itches that this is another way of keeping tabs from now on. The hound’s collar, so caked in Blood, had been snapped clean from her throat and replaced with a slithering noose, the woman feels.

Such a thought only doles out more weariness to press onto the Lightward’s shoulders. She pats at her trousers. She forgot to take her cigar tin on the way out. Fuck. She cants her head just a bit, to fix the bad eye back towards the apartment. The door is all a fuzzy, dark, blur against the white of the wall around it. She should have taken her eyepatch, too. The once-Knight is unsure if she will return later tonight, or at all.

...she doesn’t want to disturb Bricini’s night anymore than she already ha–

No, Bri doesn’t fucking care.

She’s projecting.

She cares. Uselessly. Unnecessarily.

She’s placing more weight, than ought to be put, into the earlier requests that her partner had murmured against her skin.

If she had done this, to have rejected their presence, to–...

Or–...

With–...

Bri isn’t V–...

Or R– ...

Or C–….

…

Bri isn’t… any of them.

…

Thanidiel will come back.

She just needs a walk to clear her head. She makes her way out of the complex and onto the City’s streets. She walks.

WHERE WALKS PURPOSE THERE IS A DEARTH.

Thanidiel is alone.

Not in the apartment; not in the City’s lights. She is alone somewhere dark, in the belly of this plagued city, the air pressing in and frigid with cold and sharp.

The chill numbs; she barely understands the compulsion that sends a hand outward towards a browline, dragging her to her knees.

Before her, an elf forsaken; the dead eyes of the Sin’dorei seem bright in the darkness.

There is the sense of acute, infinite loneliness; this disquiet goes on forever.

The dark is endless.

There is no more purpose in this elf.

All these things are dead.

The hand simply seals what has already been done.

The sickly sweet of rotted flesh is something that permeates more than a handful of the many nooks and crannies of the Murder Row. Little surprise thrums in Thanidiel’s breast; a mixture of warning and lack of care towards this District in particular makes it common place, for what would take an hour’s half to wipe away in the rest of the Capitol, to take much longer. With recent affairs, it is logical that this remnant of the Riot remains days after.

Such fact does not make it easier to push down the tidal waves of aggravation rolling in her gut. It does not ebb the ache tightening the muscles of her ribcage. It does not quell the sweltering disillusionment choking in the base of her throat.

Astute as always, Thanidiel had begun to conceptualise and learn well of the Capitol since her first winters: of its wickedness, of its depravity, of its disease, of its farce. She has always known. And she had always tolerated it like hound and prey-property of those above. She can no longer be so blindly obedient.

Where this had changed, she had struggled to pinpoint in earlier days. The work did not change. The duties she had sensed behind the appointment to the Watch: none of it was new. She knew. She knew the moment that Lightfury and Mace had approached her, that their goal was to awash the streets of Silvermoon in blood. She had razed estates, families, villages, provinces. What was a City’s culling, to several lifetimes over of dutiful reaving? Yet, it still caused grief to shake through her.

The night Elanya died was the first time Thanidiel had ever, truthfully, regretted her silence. She saw it, then. She saw it in Truefeather and Dawnstalker’s ignorance. She saw it in the Archon’s shock. She saw it in Autumnsong’s sorrow. She saw it in Lightfury’s hand, blazing with the Light as blood and melted flesh surged along his digits in outpour.

She had permitted it.

All of what had occurred.

She had permitted it as she has always permitted it; glancing the other way, allowing the story to be rewritten. Letting the shadows crawl and envelop what was truly there. She let the labels fall where they would from the Magisterium’s hands, wreathing what she had been.

Such permissiveness had brought sickness to her like bad air and bad grain, she realises now. A sickness that had always been there, like a plague wrought beneath scarring; flaring up like an ache on winter nights, then falling into dormancy with only a remnant feeling of what was there. The former Blood Knight feels as though this sickness had reached its apex, that something had rotted for too long in those old wounds, that it had burst through her blood.

That something had died.

Something, that had allowed the wolf to be masqueraded as a hound. The sword to be passed off for the kitchen’s knife. The Blood Knight Order is no Protector to Quel’Thalas. Neither was the Blood Watch. The City learned keenly of their truer roles as Headsmen. Killers. Butcherers.

She was not freed by her resignations. There is no redeeming qualities to be said on the matter, on her. She let Elanya die. She knew the woman would never leave the cells below the Hall of Blood alive the moment that little Phoenix flew from the Sunfury Spire, catching the eye of her and Lightfury that night.

The People lauded her as a hero for stepping away from the madness of it, and every warm smile and nod and ‘Lady Highdawn’ sunk into her heart like pins. There was nothing brave to it. Nothing heroic nor noble.

She walked away.

As she always does.

As she always has.

She just… didn’t want to do it herself. Personally.

What does passivity make of anyone, but as a useless bystander?

The letter from Captain Sunstorm came in just this morning, to the Infirmary itself where she had been. The word of the Archon Truefeather and his Uncle supplemented her extensive record of service. She had been accepted. Once her wounds had healed - it was off to basic all over again for her.

Thanidiel is more than unsure of how much she deserves such a thing. To distort reality once more. To allow the story to be retold. To continue to be retold. She is no defender, no hero. Nothing that constitutes a proper member of the Phoenix Guard.

So what is she?

…

...perhaps, the question is in the answer, as Ithanar might put it if she had asked him.

The Dragonsworn urged her to embrace this opportunity of rebirth; that all things burn and begin new. That the natural order relies in the deathly metamorphose of life from one form to the next. She would never admit it to the woman, but those words stuck to her breast and to her mind for days afterwards. Apparently, they still do.

Dawnstalker told her to find her own way, free of any of the bonds or shackles that have enwrapped her. Perhaps there was something envious there, in the perceived opportunity to do as such. He has never been one to see the nooses trail around the necks of others, so obscuring the shadows are.

Or, perhaps, she has never been one to notice when the restraints have all fallen away, so well she had once been trained.

The words of the Oracle revisit her, images swirling to the fore of her mind once more. The cavern. Ithanar, with the humour always at his lips. Bricini, wreathed in warmth. Varric, split apart. Cayvia, on her knees. Elanya, consorted in a scream. The Phoenix, dying. The hydra-beast; all things that sunder Quel’Thalas. The blood. The blood hanging from the exposed points of Varric’s ribs. The blood dripping from the blade through Cayvia’s body. The blood of the Phoenix. The blood coating the streets. The blood seeping from her bandages. The blood rolling in a fat, trickling, stream from Elleynah’s raw eye socket.  

“You bear chances now that none have yet seen; you, Breaker of Wheels. What was fate was overturned, violent in its death and birth. You are devoid of purpose, and must build. You must stand for this, with this choice made. You are interlocked into change.  Do not let the blindness of others blind you. Do not let the coldness you feel rot your feelings for what you once defended. Where you stand, change will come. Embrace, deny; it shall be. Be wise where you lay loyalty.”

So what is she?

…

Nothing. Empty. Lost. Devoid.

…

New.

Something to rebuild.

Truth rings to the bone on that: that Thanidiel Highdawn, as it stands, is nothing that constitutes a true member of the Phoenix Guard. She is no true defender. She is no true hero.

And what she was, detracts even further from the matter. The Lightward was the dark murmurs that would vacate entire streets when her banner hailed the sky, that would silence and darken homes when her footsteps would push towards residences. Over a century later, and still, she had heard the whispers of her moniker of Terror amongst the Order.

But there is room to change. The Wheel has been broken.

Embrace, deny; it shall be.

The sword had been driven through the Phoenix, and Thanidiel would see it reborn.

She would step into the new dawn shining before her.

The once-Knight takes in one last breath of the chilling night air. She, with as much quietness as she can muster, steps back into the apartment.

( Appearances - @jessipalooza @stormandozone Mentions - @rivendork @captainswingbeard @azriah @trained-trainwreck @felthier @erilihn)