#conruptela

The tightness in his chest last only a breathless moment.

He’s had dreams like this. Sometimes it’s Medivh, sometimes Llane. Sometimes it’s Callan. Sometimes it’s all of them, strolling across a courtyard in warm yellow sunshine, like they’ve never been gone.

       (He can never catch up to them.)

The dreams are always warm, nostalgic, even if they’re bittersweet. The reality is cold, horror rising in his veins at the implications, the possibilities. The upward hitch of his lips is trembling, fragile.

    “Old friend --”

The ghosts that resided here had not departed with the last Guardian. Khadgar had thought perhaps they would, when he’d finally returned. That the whispers, the lights that flickered at the corners of his vision, the cold drafts that flowed where no wind could ever be, that they would fade as would his grief. Eventually. Time, it was said, healed all wounds.

And time was, if nothing else, a closer companion to him now than most.

Perhaps they felt as he did-- that something here had been left unfinished. The awareness of it was a nearly tangible weight, shifting along his skin, stirring in the back of his mind, leaving him unsettled and restless, pacing the hallways that Medivh had for so long, and finding only dust and regret.

The library was some solace, and Khadgar spent many silent, productive hours there, reading and cataloging the tomes that in many cases were the last of their kinds in existence. It was there, one day, that he came across a book that once he had discovered with awe. A book that had spoken to him, murmured its secrets, spun him its tale of betrayal and loss between its ancient pages.

He had not, himself, returned it to its shelf.