#dropofsunlightextras

You may have noticed, if you ever read this, that I did not try to set this letter on fire. Perhaps I should have. I am, after all, still pissed at you and lacking anything better to do. Still bedridden. It hasn't been all that long since my last letter, in truth.

Dante's been visiting us a lot, whenever he can spare the time. He's trying to catch everyone up on what we missed the last fifteen years. He's the only one who's been here the entire time. He never stopped writing reports, so those have been helping some when I can make out the words. Fifteen years and his writing still looks like chicken scratch. At least one thing's still the same.

He has children now. His oldest daughter is six years old. I haven't met her yet. It's hard to imagine Dante as a father when less than a week ago he was sixteen. He turned sixteen in the middle of a war and now he has a six year old daughter. And guess who the mother is? Miss Nana. I remember his cute little crush on her, I remember the way she could make him smile when the rest of us could barely get him to respond at all. They're a good match, aren't they?

She came to see us with Dante. She brought a basket of pastries like she used to bring to the barracks. She made some old favorites to welcome us home. She thought you were with us. She asked where you were.

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't utter a single word. All I could do was sit there, clutching the edge of my cot, eyes on the floor. She figured it out before anyone could explain. She apologized to our lady, and then she sat beside me and put her hand on mine and said nothing. She didn't need to.

So much has happened. Half the village moved away. Dante and Miss Nana are married with a family. All the little ones are grown up. Our little Levin is Lord of Phoenix Drop and can't walk on his own. Cadenza is Lord of Meteli. My father is dead.

For all I know, so are you. I turned back just before I went into the portal. It was only long enough for a glimpse, but I saw him run a sword through you. In your back and out your chest. Did you see me as I turned back? Was I the last thing you saw? I hope I was, if it was between me and him.

I haven't told our lady yet. I haven't told anyone. They still hope that we might be able to go back for you, or that we might be able to find some way to bring you home. I know what I saw, but there's some part of me that thinks you could have survived. If anyone could do it, you could.

I lit a candle for you. You don't know what that means. It's something we do along the Trail for lost souls. We make candles that don't burn out and when someone goes travelling we light one; Dante kept the ones he found in my bunk years ago. The flame is a part of the person the candle is for. It's supposed to guide them home, only going out when someone dies. Your candle is beside me right now. It's been burning bright since I first lit it. I want that to mean you're still alive, but for the first time in my life I'm wondering whether the candle knows. I hope it does. I want you to come home. I want to be there for you the way you were for me. The way you always have been.

My sister lit a candle for me. For fifteen years it has been burning. She wrote a letter to me when it went out. She spent half the flint she had to relight it, and cried over the page when it finally caught. Some lines are illegible, ink warped by wet spots. I haven't seen Seafarer's in writing in so long that I can't believe there was ever a time I struggled to write in anything else.

We spent countless nights transcribing my reports into something you could actually read. The night before you took the amulet from me, it was just like all those nights. Oddly enough, that night out of all the rest feels so far away. Maybe it's because of what almost happened between us that night that never did, maybe that makes it all feel a bit like a dream. Were you thinking of that night when you saw me last?

I don't know if I will ever be able to stop being angry with you. I still watch your candle burn until I fall asleep. I still miss you terribly.

Sincerely yours,

Your second-in-command, Sir Laurance Zvahl of Phoenix Drop

There was a time when I never ran out of things to say to you, but in your absence you have somehow finally found a way to render me speechless. More than once, I've found myself turning to where you always stand at my side. I turn to speak to you, and when I find myself alone the words die in my throat. I know that you are no longer here at my side, I know it, but still I turn to you.

I remember, all too keenly, that I am alone just a moment too late. And the awful part of it is that I am never truly alone— Constantly I am surrounded by familiar faces and well-meaning friends, constantly I am drawn into conversation and introduced to those whose lives I've missed, I am never actually, truly alone and yet, unfairly, without you here it all feels hollow.

I am supposed to be angry with you. It grows more and more difficult to be angry with every day that passes. Though not many days have passed, I know this already. I know that before long I will lose my grasp on this anger altogether.

I don't want to stop being angry with you. Is that a terrible thing to admit? I fear it might be. I don't have much else to hold onto, though. I don't know what I might do if I let the anger pass.

I dream of you. If you were here, you would chide me for such boldness, but you would flush so beautifully and touch my waist as you sent me away, and that is precisely why I have dreamt of you for so long and dream of you still. I have come to know the man beneath your helm better than any other I have ever known, and I miss him so dearly I feel as though there is a pit in my chest where his heart no longer beats against mine.

I dream of the night before the war's end. Of the two of us alone in what remained of your office. We pinned a tarp over the hole in the wall and moved a bookshelf in front of it before daring to light a hooded lantern. We kept our light low, and it painted your face in sloping shadows and statuesque bronze. We sat closer than we needed to, at the corner of the desk, knees brushing, heads bowed together. I watched line after line of dark ink fill the page as you transcribed what I described to you, and it was just the same as every other night we spent writing reports by candlelight, but there was something undeniably different about then. Perhaps it was our closeness. Perhaps it was that over the past many months, something had grown between us in fleeting moments of respite. Something warm we basked in. Something we never named aloud.

We breathed the same air. We held one another's gaze. Our hands brushed, simple touches lingering, and neither one of us pulled away. You stopped writing and set your fingers on mine. The touch of our bare skin as you traced slowly over the ridges of my knuckles was like a shock of lightning. You were without your gloves, without your helm, and though such a gesture would have been natural for anyone else I knew it wasn't so simple for you. Just that simple brush of touch was unspeakably intimate, far more so than if we were sharing a bed completely undressed pressed together from head to toe, and more addicting than any sip of rosewater.

Though the night itself feels terribly far away, I wake up believing it was only hours ago. I wake up thinking I'll turn my head and find you laying in the dark on the other side of the pallet, your vulnerable back trusted to me. Every time, it takes me far too long to realize my bed is cold, and far longer to remember why. Just when I wake up, I struggle to recall that I went to bed alone.

Then I see your candle burning at my bedside. It reminds me so of the low light we shared in your office that night. And it reminds me too of why I lit it in the first place.

In my dream, you lean in the rest of the way. You kiss me, chastely, and when you pull away, you rest your head against mine and cup my cheek. You search my eyes for something I can never name, and whatever it is makes you smile when you find it. That small smile of yours that's hardly more than an upturned slant to the corners of your lips, the one I hope every day to coax out of you, because to see it on your face is akin to watching the sunrise. You kiss me again with that smile on your lips, and this time you kiss me deeply, slowly, as though you are learning to savor the taste of me, of us intertwined, and it is exactly as I have imagine a thousand times over. Because it is nothing more than what I imagine, and I will never know anything more.

It's always you who leans in. It has to be. I waited too long. I'm waiting still.

This, I think I'm coming to realize, is why my anger has left me so quickly. Without it, without you, I'm so terribly, chillingly alone.

In my dream, you taste of home. Of something indescribable. And when I wake, I wonder if I will ever know the taste of home again. I don't even know if that’s what kissing you is even like, and now I will never know if I ever would have gotten the chance to learn.

This is not the kind of letter I would ever send to you. I wonder what might have come to pass between us if I sent you a letter like this before you were gone. It doesn't matter now. This letter doesn't matter. I'm going to burn it before anyone else can read it. Forgive me for never letting you read it.

Forgive me for not taking the lead just this once.

Always yours,

Sir Laurance

Vylad is the ultimate spy. He’s an expert at slipping through a crowd undetected, at finding perches and escape routes. His first instinct when raiding a place is to find all the maps and books that might compromise him or his allies and burn them. He’s a master archer who snipes from the shadow and flees before anyone that isn’t a Shadow Knight can even figure out which direction he’s in. In fact, he’s a master of evasive action, he’s been chased down at least three times in Season 1 and escaped without issue every time. He’s infiltrated any number of villages without anyone noticing. He could single handedly devastate entire armies by taking out a few key players.

Ooh, Zane. His tactics are all about morale and efficiency, he has things to do and if someone gets in his way he will demolish all they love and make them submit, but he’d do it from the shadows. He would burn the places of faith, burn the libraries, take a good hard look at whatever serves as a schoolhouse and once their morale is at rock bottom he’d give the enemy leader an ultimatum that makes it seem like Zane is going to try his best to convince the O’khasian forces to stand down. He makes himself seem like a savior, like he’s negotiating on his enemies’ behalf because he strives for peace. If he can’t manage that, he does the next best thing to protect his carefully cultivated persona; leave no survivor.

Garroth’s all about honor, but every so often when they’re plotting tactics he’ll suggest something absolutely brutal or make a comment about doing something like starving out their enemies or blocking their gates and setting the walls alight. He does it with such nonchalance, completely at ease while he points on the map where best to do it. He’ll say a warning is best made by setting an example, usually by gutting someone and hanging the corpse at the gate. That’s how O’khasis wages war, so that’s how Garroth learned to wage war. He doesn’t realize that what he’s said has super unsettled everyone else at the table until he looks up and finds someone staring at him like they don’t recognize him. Whenever he does this with Vylad in the planning session, Vylad will very readily agree with these tactics and that only unsettles their friends more.

Allow me to be plain with you, Sir. I'm angry at you. Pissed at you, really. Extraordinarily pissed, if you couldn't tell from the scorched edge of this letter you will likely never see. I'm not even sure why I'm still writing this seeing as I tried to burn it before I finished the first sentence. Perhaps only because it's something to do.

I was stabbed the day before the battle ended, do you remember? By a frost dagger. I would have appreciated the warning that the cold will run through your veins, perhaps from a man who used to wield one himself? You know how the cold afflicts me, you bastard. No matter, my blood is plenty warm with hurt now. Since you first bound it on the field, my stitches have been torn thrice. I collapsed the moment I stepped through the portal and had to be helped into town to see Donna.

Though she may be a wondrously talented medic, Donna is no healer or witch. There's only so much she could do and so she's ordered I remain on bedrest until I've healed to her liking. I'm loathe to bring that woman's wrath down on myself, hence why I am now writing pointless letters to men stranded in different realms. She has four children now, Donna; Yip, twin boys Lello and Rollo, and a girl named Luca. She's only a babe, Luca, still in her swaddling, but the twins must be nearly ten. I tell you this because it's been fifteen years. We've been gone fifteen years. You may still be gone years and years.

Levin is grown now. Lord, even. He resembles you very much, all keen blue eyes and wisps of blond curls falling in his face, but his mannerisms are alike his mothers'. He has a faint trace of your accent in his words, too. He did not recognize me. I'm told he was too young when we left to remember us properly, though Malachi supposedly does. He's a trader these days, out at sea with Logan when we arrived home. Levin didn't speak with me long, as busy all day as our lady is—was. He did tell me he'd been excited to meet us both, that his brother and Uncle Dante had told him stories of us as he'd grown, and he'd known that if we were anything at all like how they'd described then we were good men he'd rather get to know.

Dante's grown old. I last saw him hours ago, and now he is head guard rather than the slight boy fresh from the academy we knew him as. The dark circles under his eyes make me worry he hasn't had a proper rest in years, and he's thin in a way I wish I didn't recognize. Do you remember the night he snuck away to handle the O'khasian archers? You might not. I've found even so soon after to my eyes the days and nights blend together at times. I remember the great tears rolling down his face when you and I removed the arrow and picked the remains from his face. That night left a scar on either cheek, rough ones shaped like starbursts or comets. The shape far-off lights make in the night when you squint just right. He felt so small in the cradle of my arms then. He's of a height with me now, standing eye to eye.

We missed their entire lives in the Matron's realm. Gone in a blink. Our boys, our brother, our friends, they have all moved past us. Irony of irony, they've sent us off into the Matron's embrace already, Sir Garroth Ro'Meave. Buried us and moved on.

Because of your actions, we have missed the whole of their lives, the lives we could have shared with them. Should have. All for what? For a man you hadn't seen in at least a decade, one you no longer knew at all?

Everything has changed because of what you did, you ass. I should tell you I will never forgive this deed of yours. And yet I miss you already.

Sincerely yours,

Your second-in-command, Sir Laurance Zvahl of Phoenix Drop.

Garroth: knows way too much about poisoning and faking your death and a concerning number of ways to sacrifice your own life instead of let the enemy keep you captive

Laurance: knows a frankly concerning amount about the pirate life for the previous head guard and possible heir to Lordship of a village and a few too many information-gathering methods

Dante: would literally rather die than betray someone's trust but keeps a whole lot of secrets for someone so loyal and also becomes a hardcore survivalist the minute he steps out into the wild as though always expecting to need to live on the run

Dale: dude loves his wife and kids and wants to be an accountant to spend more time with them

Personally, I like to go with beheading, but there’s no guillotine in my version of fantasy land! That means they have to do it by hand, old-school. Gene is made to kneel, hands bound, head down, and someone stands over him with a freshly sharpened sword. It’s probably a guard, one of his own men, maybe even one who regrets having to do this. If he’s lucky, the angle will be just right and the first strike will sever his spinal cord.

Oh, but Gene wouldn’t go quietly, would he? He’s been betrayed by his own brother, his own soldier is being made to kill him, he’s furious, he’s fighting against the guards forcefully escorting him through the streets. He’s acting like an angry animal, spitting and snarling and struggling. Swearing bloody vengeance on his twelve year old brother, blaming him for everything, looking into his horrified face in the front row of Gene’s execution and calling him a little fucking monster with all the venom he has to spare.

The image of having to be held down while you’re killed. Of fighting so hard that three grown men have to hold you down, pin you face-first against the dirt with all their weight pressing down on you. Your executioner is a kid you trained, one who looked up at you with admiration just a few days ago, and now his hands shake around the hilt of the sword that will kill you. He says he’s sorry; he says a prayer for your soul. You say a few vile curses in return.

You’re still struggling, bucking up against the men holding you down with all your strength, when the sword comes down the first time. The angle is bad, the man—the boy—holding the blade hesitated, and the strike was nowhere near heavy enough to kill you. The executioner lifts the blade to try again, and as it tears from your neck you scream like you never have before, gurgling and bloody and maybe terrified, if you had any energy not feeding the fire of your rage left to be terrified. 

The second strike doesn’t kill you either, but it makes your hands and feet go numb, and this is part is what scares you. Your strings have been cut. If they left you to bleed, you’d be dead in minutes, but the way the blood loss makes you so woozy and tired and weak doesn’t scare you half as much as not being able to feel your body, as going limp and pliant through no will of your own. They don’t need three men to hold you down anymore, just one hand tangled in your hair to keep you face pressed to the dirt, gasping into the pool of blood gathering around your mouth. All you can do is scream and curse and cry. 

The third strike comes down. You scream and scream and—

The man who greets you in the darkness of death, a shadow of the greatest traitor in your history books, opens his arms to you and promises your vengeance, if you’ll stand at his side. Vengeance on your Lord, on his daughter, and on your brother most of all, with a power you’ve never before felt running through your veins. He promises that none will ever kill you again, and the scar twisted around your neck, eating through your throat, will be the last.