All of them! Jk, jk, but dang was it hard to choose, so many good ones 👀.
Let's say, 20 - Silrah
Fair warning: I legitimately have no idea what the fuck happened here, and I'm still not sure if I like the result, but I promised myself I'd do these as writing exercises and not linger on them, so ... here's this, whatever it actually is, and I'm sorry. 😅
20. things you said that i wasn’t meant to hear
“It should have been me.”
Granite bites into long fingers, presses cold and sharp and unforgiving against a callused palm. I should be bleeding is a hazy thought, distant against an agony that has never quite dulled.
“You should be standing here, and me in the ground instead. They needed you. They don’t —” Need me, and though the thought is bitten back it does not make it any less true. The children they shaped but never claimed are grown, have moved ahead, moved on, mended the world they had broken in the blindness of their own youth. It feels as if only she stands here still, rooted, chained to a past she cannot let go, all of her meagre wisdom spent, all of her energy leached into the earth that has claimed so much that she never dared reach for.
She is bleeding. The wound inside will never heal, and she does not want it to. Not when it is all she has left.
The trees above her whisper, oak and birch and ash, leaves shivering in the breeze. If she closes her eyes she can imagine his voice mingling with their sounds, his presence a ghost in this place that had been the only home they had ever been theirs, prison and sanctuary all at once. It is her imagination — how can it not be, when she still holds one end of a broken tether — but that does not stop her from turning her face upwards, searching for something she knows she will not find.
He had been up one of those trees when they first met, a lanky shape in Specialist blacks clambering between branches, but she knows better than to expect him there now. It has been years since either of them had time for such things — if, in truth, she ever had.
I should have made time. Another admission she swallows down, releasing the stone as she steps back. The greens bleed into each other, fade into the grey of the sky, blunting, blurring even as she tries to blink away the moisture welling in her eyes. I should have told you to let me go, to be free — that I wasn’t worth this. That I needed you. That this isn’t enough.
And yet —
(“Ms. Dowling would have known what to do.”
“Farah isn’t here. We have to figure it out ourselves”)
But she had been. She’d heard — both what he said and what he meant. And she’d tried to protest, tried to push a denial across the shattered remnants of what had once been an unshakeable connection, but that had been an older magic, ancient and implacable, born of the stones and soil of this place and the blood he’d spilled to call her back, and it would not be thwarted. A life for a life, but what kind of a life had he won for her, when half of her self was gone?
(“Forgive me,” he had whispered, and the confession had been the first inhalation her restored lungs made. Her first exhalation, when she realised what had happened, had been a scream.)
“It should have been me,” she says again, rough and hollow, as her hands fall lax at her sides.
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The wedding was a simple affair, neither of them one for much fuss, especially at this stage in their lives. Still, Farah had fretted over the details with some help from Bloom and Terra (she really needed to get more female friends who weren't her daughter and her niece one of these days...), wanting everything to be perfect. Nothing ever seemed to run smoothly for them, but she prayed that for this one single day that it would.
Thankfully, the gods were kind.
Bloom insisted that Farah simply had to walk down the aisle (which was really just a long carpet laid out on the training field that had been cleared for the occasion) to the wedding march, and as she stood there waiting for her cue, she regretted agreeing to it. She shifted from one white heel clad foot to the other, grip tightening on the bouquet that Terra had arranged herself. Ben teased that the flowers would be crushed by the time she had made it to the altar before offering her his arm as the music started.
Farah felt her breath hitch in her throat when she saw Saul waiting at the other end. He stared at her for a moment, and then he smiled. That soft, reverent smile that had only ever been reserved for her. She could not help but smile back.
She had opted for a knee-length white sheath dress with bell sleeves and a lace overlay and forgone a veil, a single gardenia tucked into her coiffure instead. For this she was grateful as Ben escorted her down the aisle, given she didn't have to worry about tripping on veil nor the hem of her dress and could keep her eyes trained on her specialist.
Neither of their eyes left the other's throughout the ceremony itself. Not when reciting their vows and sliding the rings onto each other's hands, nor when their joined hands were wrapped in cords to signify the binding of their souls.
When all was done, Farah beamed up at Saul-her specialist, her best friend, her husband-as he tenderly cupped her face pulled her into a kiss, to the utter delight of those gathered. Yet she didn't hear the hooping and hollering, all of it fading into the background as their lips met with the promise of forever.
"You hunt well, my lady."
Farah turned from the stag she had just felled with her crossbow to see Lord Silva watching her from some feet away. She had ventured off from the rest of the royal hunting party-dangerous, perhaps, but she had been in hot pursuit. Evidently, she had been followed.
Letting her bow drop to her side, she raised an eyebrow. "You sound surprised, my lord. Were you of the assumption that a woman cannot hunt as well as a man?"
He chuckled at that, and for some inexplicable reason the sound caused a flood of warmth in her belly. "Mayhaps not an ordinary woman," Saul allowed with a grin, "but you have proven yourself far from that, Lady Farah." He shifted a little in his saddle. "It is no wonder that the King has set his sights on you."
Farah's jaw tightened as she dropped her gaze, moving towards where she had hastily tied up her mare when she went after the stag on foot. The hunt had been a good distraction from her impending marriage, and now it was forced to the forefront of her mind again.
"I never intended to catch His Majesty's attention," she remarked quietly as she set one foot in one of the stirrups and vaulted herself into the saddle. Her guardian, Duchess Rosalind, whose care she had been entrusted to when her parents died some years before, however, had been more than pleased with the development.
It was the lord's turn to raise an eyebrow. "You do not wish to be queen?"
"He has killed two of his previous queens, has he not?" The words were out of Farah's mouth before she could regret them. "Why should I be eager to put my neck on the block?"
She dared to glance at Lord Silva again, and, to her surprise, she found a look of sympathy. "I would not wish it on my own sister," he replied bluntly, matching her honesty for honesty.
"Then your sister is more fortunate than I," Farah returned curtly, nudging her horse and heading back in the direction of the rest of the party. As she rode, she felt Saul's keen blue eyes boring into her back, and tried to ignore the pleasant shiver that went down her spine.
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Your gift has finally properly arrived, ten thousand apologies for not being able to keep my promise of posting on time!
I had a lot of fun coming up with my asks this year, I really tried to channel my inner Jane Austen (and apparently their annoying but helpful cousin), though I would’ve loved to ask you so much more. But alas, sometimes life happens. I hope you enjoyed reading the ones I got to send anyway, and that they provided you with some distraction in this current weird world we're living in. They were for me, at least, as was working on your gift.
Anyway, I hope I did a good job fulfilling your request, so without further ado I present to you some Silrah Angst. Enjoy!
“One single night of combing through ancient texts and thirty-year old research isn’t enough to find a cure.”
“It will be,” Farah bristles. “It has to be.”
Neither of them have been the same since Farah’s return to the land of the living. A secret discovered should bring them back together, but instead they break apart as their trauma’s collide and Farah’s time starts running out.
