He sets out to find her around when Alphinaud reports in via linkpearl from Kholusia, noting that she’d come to see him first before going to attend to some business up the Ladder that she wouldn’t speak of—and while he did make a point of telling Alphinaud that wasn’t what the channel was for, he’d quickly thrown his things together and strapped his armor on. Ryne is with Gaia on a week-long “training mission” that (prior to their departure, at any rate) involved an awful lot of discussion about the local specialities of Fanow, and so with an oddly bereft feeling tugging at the edge of his heart, Thancred departs the amaro launch for Kholusia alone.

Something that, in the end, may have ended up being for the better. Kholusia has memories for Ryne. Few of them are good.

And Aldera has memories of Kholusia that are not her own.

The villagers of Wright, most of whom weren’t at the Ladder, are a mite suspicious of him at first, and protective of the Warrior of Darkness, but a run-in with Granson—in town for supplies, and if there is anything else, he will not speak of it—quickly disabuses them of the notion that a white-clad sinner might have ill intentions for the one cloaked in the very night she returned to them.

“Damndest thing,” Granson says, casual, even as his eyes burn into Thancred with some deeper meaning. He’s fought alongside him before, but they don’t know each other well enough for whatever it is he’s trying to tell him. “She’s been wandering the coast—up and down, like she’s looking for something. Last I checked on her, she hadn’t found it. Wouldn’t tell me what it was. I’ve a hunch, though. She helped me put the shade of one of the Warriors of Light to rest. But the job wasn’t finished—not for her. The stories say their leader hailed from Kholusia, just like their healer. You’d know what she’d do with that better than I would.”

Thancred watches in the dying light of the afternoon—watches fields of young barley, watches the eyes watching him, watches the sky sputter and gasp out the last of its allotted color for the day in riotous shades of orange and red. He considers.

There is still so much about her that no one knows.

“Thank you,” Thancred says finally, inclining his head. “I’ll... keep that in mind.”

Granson smiles, thin-lipped, and gives him a two-fingered wave. He walks off in the direction of the lichyard, a bouquet in hand.

For a mercy she is—against all the odds suggested by previous calculations—not terribly far away. He follows the path out of Wright down westward to the sea, treading carefully across packed dirt and cracked pavement alike. For all that the world has started to recover with the aetheric balance tilted away from the Light, so much of Kholusia still looks as if it ended when the Flood came, ruins and wreckage still strewn across the land and its patchy, pale yellow-green grass. Eulmore towers above everything else.

It still looks depressingly garish.

The waves lap at his boots. The sun sets. The air begins to cool.

“Thancred?”

Aldera.

He half-turns, giving her a small smile and crinkling his eyes for added effect. Her hair is wind-blown and messy, a traveler’s dark cloak pulled close about her shoulders, and beneath that the bulky armor of a dark knight completes the picture of a lonely wanderer. The thought leads him to meet her halfway. He inclines his head in silent assent when she tilts hers in hesitating question—the right choice, because the wistful look on her face shatters as a smile replaces it, and Aldera embraces him with a happy sigh.

She smells of grass, primarily, with a hint of sweat somewhere beneath it. He wouldn’t ask for anything else.

“Hello, darling,” he says, allowing himself a moment to return her touch. Then a moment longer, because she looks up at him, and his breath catches at the gentle warmth in her eyes.

Pale gold, royal levin. The last embers of the sun make each color molten.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she tells him, one careful hand stretching upward to brush his hair out of his face. “Has something happened?”

He only shakes his head. “In part, Alphinaud was concerned.”

“And...” she says slowly, sensing the unfinished statement on the tip of his tongue. Her brow creases with her confusion.

Thancred regards her with a heaviness in his chest, not entirely sure as to the origins of his somber mood, but sure of himself all the same. “I wanted to see you.”

“Oh,” Aldera says. Blinks rapidly. Shy hope shines in her eyes. “That’s... you really—?”

It stings, though he knows she doesn’t mean it to. “Yes. Hard to believe?”

“Only because I know Kholusia isn’t your favorite place,” she answers after a moment of honest consideration. “And you’ve been so exhausted, recently. Though more fool me, thinking you’d rest. I’m sorry to make you come all this way.”