Chapter 16:
Matthias Harlow
A Camp Near The Road To The Trava River, Angren
1253
She sat in silence a bit at my question. I honestly wondered what she would ask me first. I realize now, in this moment, that I have been far too careless when it came to hiding things from her. Not that it was ever my intent — hiding things, that is. There really wasn't that much to hide. Not even my gift, for all its implications, was really a big secret or a weakness.
It was just easier, I suppose, to keep quiet about it than to expose it.
She eventually started with something simpler, pulling at a loose thread she had clearly been tugging at for days.
"You speak the common tongue like a Toussaintois," she said. "You ride like one. You fight like one." She paused, turning the stick in her fingers. "You told me you've never been there. That you learned the language from a dead man, but from what I've heard and been able to piece together you could not have been on our sphere for more than a month."
I arched a brow at her, realizing what she was implying but waiting for her to ask it. "I am waiting for you to ask me a question, Syanna. It would be rather frustrating if you danced around it after all that."
She shot me a flat look across the fire. "Fine." She set the stick down. "How do you know so much about this world? Not just the roads or the customs. You knew the knights' names before I gave them. You knew what foglets were before we fought them. You knew what O'Dimm was the moment he walked through the door." She met my eyes directly. "You act like a man who has lived here for years. So how?"
The fire crackled between us. A log shifted, sending a brief shower of sparks upward into the dark.
Well. I suppose we're just going straight into it.
"That question actually has two different answers," I said. "I'll start with the more palatable one, for your sake."
She made a small gesture. Go on then. "To understand it properly you need to understand what kind of vampire I am first," I said. "Which is a more complicated subject than it sounds."
She settled back slightly. "You told me already, about how your not a higher vampire, the ones that came through the Conjunction."
"Right," I said. "Like I said before, the higher vampires, are a people. They were born, they grew, their nature is inherited and innate. They didn't become what they are, they simply are it, the same way you were simply born human."
I turned my hand over slowly in the firelight.
"What I am is different. My condition wasn't born into me. It was made. It spread from something else into me, rebuilt me from the inside out." I paused, searching for the right comparison.
She glanced at my hand, then back up. "You're repeating yourself Matthias, you've already told me this, that the higher vampires would not claim you."
"Let me finish, if you would, context is important for the point I am trying to make." I said. "I am answering your question as best as I am able."
She nodded at that.
"Now, the relevant part, you were rushing for," I said. "Vampires of my kind, the made ones rather than the born ones, sometimes develop what I can only really call a gift. One ability, distinct and particular to them, that sits apart from the general qualities of the transformation."
"General qualities?" she asked.
"The strength, the speed, the endurance, and forgive my vanity here, the beauty," I said. "Those are universal. Every one of my kind gets them. A gift however is different, it's individual and from what I can tell it seems to grow out of something that was already present in the person before they turned. Some quality they had or habit, or particular way of moving through the world." I watched her face. "The transformation finds that thing and amplifies it, weaponizes it."
She was quiet, listening properly now.
"A woman who spent her life anticipating the needs of people," I continued, "sensing what they needed before they ever said it out loud, she might find after turning that she can hear the surface of thoughts. A man who always kept himself armored against the world, who never let anything through, he might find he can throw that instinct outward. Put something solid between himself and harm."
"And yours?" she asks.
"When I absorb someone's blood," I said, "I take more than their life, I take their memories, their instincts and thoughts. The body's knowledge of itself." I flexed my hand slowly. "That's a different thing from what the mind knows, I've learned."
I looked up at her. "Louis de La Croix," she flinches at the name, I ignore it, "trained for two decades. He wasn't the finest swordsman in Toussaint but he was consistent. Disciplined, his swordsmanship is the kind of thing that lives in the wrist and the shoulder rather than the head."
"That reflex is yours now," she said slowly.
"When I move, speak think, part of what guides me is him," I said. "Yes, but not in the way your thinking, he isn't a voice screaming in the back of my head, telling m what to do, a persons actions, instincts, feelings and motives are built off of their experiences, their memories now imagine if you had another slew of experiences to slough through whenever you tried to make a decision."
She stared at me for a moment.
"That's monstrous," she said.
"Well, that's not the word I would have used," I said with a bit of a grin, rubbing the back of my neck, "you're not wrong, it is freakish, I will admit."
She didn't flinch from it, and I appreciated that more than I probably should have. She met unpleasant truths without needing to perform a reaction to them. It was one of the better qualities she had, even if she'd have hated me for saying so.
"The bearing then," she said, already working through it methodically. "The language. The way you sit a horse."
"Louis is, was a nobleman, a Count, his manners had become habit," I said. "I inherited the habit."
"The knights' names."
"They were his friends. They had ridden together for weeks, celebrating the forming of a new knightly order. Every small irritation, every private opinion he'd formed. When I...attacked them I already knew which of them would swing first, which of them would beg, which could be reasoned with, though honestly I knew their names before killing Louis, and before you ask, it is tied to the second answer."
She nodded, eventually though with curiosity still burning in her eye. "The roads out of Caed Dhu," she said.
"Louis had ridden them."
"The customs in Dregsdon."
"Louis had passed through towns like it a dozen times."
"The foglets," she said.
I paused at that one. "Second answer." I said eventually.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then: "What were you before all this. The thing it found in you and turned to a gift."
I hadn't been expecting that question, though it was the obvious one, now that I thought about it.
"I wasn't lying in the tower when I said I was a musician," I said. "an aspiring one rather, the violin, as you've seen, but more broadly I absorbed things, pieces of music at first, technical skills with enough time. The way a sonnet was put together. The way a particular player held tension before releasing it. I listened to things and I kept them",
'An amalgamation of your betters, an impressive trick, but lacking in life' One of the faculty members at the Conservatory of Music had said during my audition. "I was always good at holding onto the songs and skills of other people, though never creating them." I continued on.
She looked at the fire for a moment.
"And now instead of music," she said quietly, "you hold onto people."
"Yes," I said. "That's exactly it." There was a small silence after that, it was almost comfortable, (them sitting here by the fire, youd almost thimk they were at a camping trip and not putting as much distance between them and the corpses as possible
"How many," she said.
"How many what?"
"People, voices amalgamations whatever it is you call them. How many are you holding onto."
"I refer to them as echoes for your information, and to answer you, a bear, my first victim, though that's mostly faded now. The foglets, three of them, they blur together a bit, and de La Croix, I avoided draining the other knights." I paused, then gestured to the trophy that I had unsaddles from Epine. "And a forktail, remind me to tell you the story later, I would now to pass the time but I do not think you'd care for it at the moment."
She counted silently. "Six. Nearly seven, and they're all just." She made a small gesture toward my head.
"Present to varying degrees," I said. "Louis most of all. The foglets surface when I hunt. The forktail is still settling." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Animals fade faster. Their knowledge is useful, but their memories are foreign enough that I'm able to easily differentiate and suppress, their...I don't know how to put it exactly, their selfhood is shallow. It doesn't linger the way a person's does."
"But people do," she said.
"People do," I said. "Yes."
She turned that over for a moment, tearing into the salted beef and flat bread. The fire had burned down another degree, the light pulling in tighter around us.
"Is this why you asked O'Dimm for a way to keep your mind?"
"Yes," I said.
She waited for me to elaborate.
"I already struggle with self control," I said. "That isn't a secret. You've seen it or sensed it even if subconsciously, on the road out of Caed Dhu, in Dregsdon, every time I have to breathe to speak I must remind myself to breathe through my mouth rather than my nose." I looked up at the almost full moon. "I manage it. But it costs something to manage. Every hour among people is a disaster waiting to happen."
She said nothing. Just nodded her head while chewing to show she was listening.
Hard to believe shes a princess looking at her now... I shook my head at the thought and continued on "Now add to that the fact that every person I feed from leaves something behind," I said. "Louis is — was — a sort of decent man, prejudice aside." She snorts at this, but I continue on, "Flawed, complicit in things he should have refused, but decent enough underneath it. His instincts don't work against mine. We coexist well enough."
I exhaled slowly.
"But I will not always have the luxury of only feeding from chivalrous knights." I said. "There will be people I have no choice about. Cruel people. Broken people. People who spent their entire lives being moved by things I do not want living in my head, I've been thinking about this during my sleepless nights, would it be more moral to kill only bad men, even if it could turn me in to a monster, or feed on only decent ones, committing monstorous acts, to keep me from becoming one? " I met her eyes, letting the question sit for a moment
"Imagine carrying someone like Crespi," I said quietly. "A hunger for violence that isn't mine, arguing for things I would never choose." I shook my head. "I already have enough noise in here that I can't always trace a thought back to its source. The last thing I need is to complicate it further with the wrong people screaming."
She had stopped chewing.
She was watching me with the careful, unreadable attention she kept in reserve for things that had caught her properly.
"You're afraid," she said almost in shock that I would be afraid of anything, "that you'll stop being you."
The words were plain. Unsentimental. Not a question, more like a thing she was confirming the shape of out loud.
"I'm afraid," I said, "that I already am less me than I was a month ago, I wasn't something with an iron will or uncompromising morals, but I've already made choices that I know I would find monstrous and selfish, and the rate of change isn't slowing down."
She didn't offer comfort. I hadn't expected her to and wouldn't have wanted it, she just sat in silence, taking in the information, after a while she said, "There's something you're not telling me. About your curse. The transmittable part."
I kept my face still.
"You said it spread into you," she continued. "The way a disease spreads. That implies a direction. A source."
I had genuinely underestimated her, I realized, not her intelligence, I had never underestimated that, but her tact and patience, I thought she'd approach this topic much later on, or perhaps she wanted the truth while I was in a giving mood.
"It does," I said, eventually.
"So it can spread further," she said. "From you."
I held her gaze. "Under very specific circumstances," I said. "That I have no intention of allowing, and that require a degree of deliberateness on my part that I am not able or willing to exercise, drop it."
She freezes a bit at the coldness in my tone, realizing she overstepped, but she soldiered on after a few moments of tense silence "There's still the second answer. To how you know this world."
"There is," I acquiesced.
She looked up at me. "I'm still waiting."
I sighed at that, thinking of how to broach the topic in a way that was understandable and believable. I stood, walking over to the violin case I had laid carefully beside my luggage, picked it up, and made my way back to my previous perch. She watched me do all of this with an impatient expression on her face.
I set the case across my knees and was quiet for a moment, turning the words over. There was no clean way into this. Every angle I had considered on the road felt either too large or too small for the thing it was trying to describe.
"Before I explain," I said, "I want you to think about something. A memory, specifically."
She raised a brow. "What memory."
"The Land of a Thousand Fables," I said.
The change in her face was immediate, something shifted behind her eyes, a sudden interior stillness, the way a person goes quiet when something unexpected happens. "How do you know about that?" she asked. Her voice had dropped a register.
"The same way I know everything else," I said. "Which is what I'm about to explain. But first, do you remember it?"
It wasn't a question that needed answering, the answer was already written in the set of her jaw.
"Of course I remember it," she said, after a moment. Quieter than before. Something unguarded had slipped into her tone before she could stop it. "Artorius built it for us. For Anna and I, when we were very small. Before things were...before."
She stopped herself there. I didn't push. I let the silence hold the rest of it.
"It wasn't real," she continued, eventually. Her eyes had dropped to the coals. "It looked real. You could touch things, smell things. The fruit on the trees tasted like fruit. The water felt cold. The creatures moved and breathed and responded to you." She paused. "But it was constructed. Every stone, every path, every face. Artorius built it out of illusion magic, laid it over a real space, and made it somewhere you could walk through someone else's imagination as though it were the world."
She looked up at me. There was a long beat of silence, as I opened the case and carefully plucked the violin from within it.
"In my world," I said quietly, as I set the near empty case down to my side, the bow still within it, "there were craftsmen who did something like that. Not with magic but with other things, tools and techniques you have no words for and neither do I, not in a language that would mean anything to you."
I lifted the violin to my chin.
The strings were slightly flat from the cold. The fine tuner on the E string responded to a small adjustment of my fingers, the note climbing toward pitch with a thin, searching whine before settling. I turned the peg for the A string a fraction, bowed it softly, listened. Close enough.
"They built worlds," I continued, drawing the bow lightly across the strings while I spoke, not playing anything in particular, just running scales slowly, feeling the instrument reacquaint itself with the air. "Constructed them entirely. History, geography, people, politics, monsters."
The G string was the most out. I stopped, corrected it, the low note resonating through the body of the instrument and into my collarbone where I held it. Across the fire Syanna had gone very still, watching my hands as much as my face.
"And then they made it possible to walk through them," I said. "To make choices inside them. To follow roads and fight creatures and speak to people who felt, for all intents and purposes, like they were real."
I drew a slow, full bow across all four strings together, just to feel the resonance of the thing, the way the warm maple held the sound before releasing it into the night air.
She stared at me. I could see it in her face, she was getting at what I was hinting at. The shape of it assembling itself behind her eyes whether she wanted it to or not.
I let the last chord fade into the dark before I said it.
"One of those worlds," I said, "was this one."
She gasped, it was small, involuntary and quickly swallowed, but I heard it clearly and I could tell by the way her expression tightened immediately afterward that she knew I had. Her hand had moved to the edge of her cloak without her seeming to notice, fingers curling into the fabric.
She stared at me. I held her gaze and said nothing, letting it sit, letting her turn it over at whatever speed she needed.
Her eyes moved across my face slowly, the way they did when she was looking for something specific. A tell, a crack, the small involuntary signals that separated truth from performance. I had watched her do it to Milton in the clearing, to to O'Dimm across the tavern, though that particular effort had not lasted long and to...Tomas at their dinner table,
Shake it off, don't think about it, what's done is done.
She was doing it to me now.
I kept my honest and let her look.
The violin rested under my chin, the bow loose in my fingers. The fire had burned low enough that the light between us was amber and unsteady, throwing long shadows across the hollow. Somewhere beyond the birch trees the wind moved through the grass with a sound like distant water.
"You're serious, you actually believe that this world is some game." she said at last disbelieve clear in her voice.
I could understand where it stemmed from, her disbelief. I had just told her her entire world was a video game, though the way I worded it might cause some misunderstandings in regards to my view on the world and the people in it.
"I am serious, and I am sure you can tell I am not lying to you," I said. "But I am not saying this world is an illusion, Syanna. Don't misunderstand me. I am not saying I think you are an illusion or a figment of my imagination. You are real and this world is too. I have no doubts about that, and you shouldn't either."
She looked at me for another long moment. Then she looked away toward the darkness past the treeline, jaw working, eyebrows creased, and I genuinely could not tell what was happening behind her eyes. Whether she believed me. Whether she thought I was insane. Whether the two possibilities were fighting each other to a standstill.
"That's not possible," she said. The words came out less certain than I suspected she had intended them to.
"I would have agreed with you," I said, "approximately a month ago."
She looked back at me sharply.
I lifted the bow and drew it softly across the D string, a single long note that rose and faded into the dark before I continued. "I understand how it sounds," I said. "I spent three days in a cave convincing myself I had lost my mind before I accepted the impossible, and another week coming to terms with my new reality. You are welcome to take as long as you need."
"It began as books," I continued, drawing the bow idly across the strings as I spoke, not quite playing, just keeping my hands occupied. "Written by a single man over decades. The Continent, the kingdoms, the Conjunction, the witchers, all of it built from his imagination and put down on paper. People in my world read those books for generations." I paused, adjusting the bow pressure slightly, the sound thinning to a whisper before I brought it back. "Then craftsmen took what he had written and built it into something you could inhabit. Something closer to what Artorius made than to any book. You didn't read about the roads, you walked them. You didn't read about the monsters, you fought them."
I met her eyes.
"I spent a considerable portion of my life inside that construction," I said. "I knew where the roads forked. I knew which creatures hunted which territories. I knew the names and faces and histories of people who, as far as I had ever understood, did not exist." I exhaled. "And then I woke up in a cave in Caed Dhu. And they did."
The silence that followed was very different from the ones before it.
She wasn't processing it the way someone processes an abstraction. More the way someone processes a thing they have an actual relationship with, turning it in their hands, finding the edges of it, checking where it matched something they already knew.
"Like the Fablesphere," she said at last.
"Almost like the Fablesphere," I stressed. "I was on the outside of it, looking in. And then, for reasons I still don't entirely understand, I am now inside it." I lowered the bow for a moment. "I know this is a lot to wrap your head around. If it makes it easier to swallow, think of it along the terms of an oneiromancer using the prophetic dreams they have as a basis to write stories for people."
I said it in an attempt to ease things over, though admittedly that could honestly be what happened. If I could wake up here, what was to say the man who wrote these books was not a prophetic dreamer who mistook his visions for ideas.
She was quiet for a very long time.
An owl called somewhere in the dark, perched on a branch not twenty feet away by the sound of it. The coals gave a soft settling sigh.
"Artorius made that place for us," she said eventually, her voice somewhere far away. "He said it was a gift from our father, a world entirely ours. Somewhere the world couldn't reach." A pause, short and flat. "Though of course they kept the book in Anna's room."
The way she said it, the particular flatness of it, told me everything about how that had ended. How the place that was supposed to be entirely theirs had likely become one more thing divided between them. One more thing that stopped feeling like it belonged to her.
I didn't press on that.
"You were in the construct," I said instead, gently. "Or a version of what you could become, rather. That's how I knew your name before you told me. I recognized you from the story."
She absorbed that without speaking.
"I let you keep Rhenawedd," I added, "because it seemed unkind to take it from you in that moment. Not because I was collecting information to use against you, though I'll admit I was curious what story you would spin."
She said nothing. Her eyes were no longer on me, they were vacant, fixed somewhere beyond the treeline, somewhere I couldn't follow. I couldn't tell if she was still turning over my revelation or if her mind had wandered somewhere else entirely, back to Beauclair perhaps.
Maybe it would have been better to let her be, but the silence had taken on a quality I didn't like, too still, inward, the kind that could curdle if left alone long enough. I settled the violin under my chin and thought for a moment about what to play.
Maybe the mood was getting to me, but I had just the song in mind, one I had learned later than most of my repertoire. I drew the bow across the strings softly enough that the first notes barely carried past the edge of the firelight. Divenire, a collection of tracks composed and entirely performed by Ludovico Einaudi, directly translated it meant roughly to become, to transform, to move toward something not yet arrived at.
It had been written for a piano and a full orchestra playing together, which made it a strange and slightly presumptuous thing to attempt alone on a single violin in the dark, stripped of all that accompaniment it became more intimate than it was ever meant to be, less grand and more honest, just the opening phrase at first, slow and simple, each note placing itself carefully before the next one followed, the melody building on itself gradually the way light came up rather than arrived, warmth accumulating without urgency.
I wasn't performing, just playing, I had always thought that suited it better.
[SPOILER="The road towards forgiveness"][URL unfurl="true" media="youtube:CXUNfM1oNzM"]https://youtu.be/CXUNfM1oNzM[/URL][/SPOILER]
I drew the bow across the strings softly enough that the first notes barely carried past the edge of the firelight. Just the opening figure, a simple repeating phrase in the upper register, each cycle turning gently back on itself before stepping forward again. It didn't build toward anything. It didn't ask anything of the listener. It simply moved, the way breathing moved, the way the coals shifted and resettled without drama.
From the corner of my eye I watched her without making a show of watching. The vacancy hadn't left her face yet but it had loosened slightly, the hard inward quality of it softening at the edges. Her fingers had uncurled from the cloak. Her eyes had come down from wherever they had been and found the fire again.
I kept the bow light. Kept the pressure even. Let the melody turn through its cycle once more, unhurried, each phrase dissolving into the night air before the next one began. The owl had gone quiet on its branch.
By the time I drew the final phrase out and let it fade to nothing she was still looking at the fire but she was present in it now, sitting in the actual moment rather than somewhere behind it. Her shoulders had come down. Her breathing had evened out. I set the bow across my knee and sat quietly.
By the time I drew the final phrase out and let it fade to nothing she was still looking at the fire but she was present in it now, sitting in the actual moment rather than somewhere behind it. Her shoulders had come down. Her breathing had evened out. I set the bow across my knee and sat quietly.
She didn't say anything about my impromptu performance and I didn't say anything about the redness of her eyes.
I thought she'd pull further into herself after that, close the conversation down the way she usually did when something had gotten closer than she intended to let it. But she surprised me.
"What was I like," she asked quietly, her eyes still on the coals. "In the stories. And how did my story end."
Two questions dressed as one. I noticed that.
I turned the bow over slowly in my fingers, thinking about how to answer honestly without handing her a verdict on herself before she had earned the right to contest it.
"You were not the main character," I said first, because that felt important to establish. "The stories followed someone else. You existed at the edges of them, glimpsed mostly through the effect you had on other people rather than through your own eyes." I paused. "That made it difficult to know you, truly. What I had was an outline. The shape of you rather than the substance."
She said nothing. Listening.
"The outline was not flattering in places, in fact some of the things she did were very selfish and lead to the death of a lot of people" I said. "I won't pretend otherwise. The version of you in those stories had been alone for a very long time and it had made her sharp in ways that cut indiscriminately, not that it made the choices she made excusable, she was cunning, fiercely so, and she used it the way people use the only weapon they have left." I looked at her profile in the firelight, the clean line of her jaw, the careful stillness she wore even now. "She was also capable of forgiveness, toward the very people who she felt betrayed her."
A small silence. "And the ending?" she asked, still quiet and still not looking at me.
"There wasn't one," I said. "Not a single fixed one. The construct I knew presented several possible outcomes depending on the choices made by the people around you. Different roads depending on different decisions."
She was quiet for a moment. Then, "That sounds like a very careful way of saying something."
"It is," I admitted.
Her jaw tightened faintly. "Then say it plainly."
I looked at her profile a moment longer before answering. "Some outcomes were bad," I said. "Some were worse. One was something I would call merciful, though it cost a great deal to reach." I kept my voice even. "The difference between them had nothing to do with fate or prophecy or the curse of the Black Sun. It came down to whether one person chose to understand you rather than judge you. Whether they cared enough to look past what you had become and find the reason for it."
She said nothing. The fire shifted, throwing a brief pale light across her face before settling back.
"And in that one," she said carefully, still not looking at me, "did they. Find the reason."
"Yes," I said. "They did."
Another silence, longer this time.
I could see her working through it without looking at me, the way she processed things she didn't want to be seen processing, quietly, internally, giving nothing away until she had decided what it meant.
"You're still holding something back," she said.
I said nothing.
"The bad endings," she said. "You named them without describing them." She turned to look at me then, directly, her eyes steady in the firelight. "I am not asking you to spare me. I am asking you to tell me what you know."
I held her gaze for a moment.
"In one of them you don't survive," I said. Simply, without softening it, because she would have heard the softening and resented it. "In another you do, but the cost of it follows you in a way that doesn't leave."
She absorbed that. Her expression didn't change but something behind it shifted, settled, the way a person looks when they have confirmed something they had already half prepared themselves for.
"And the third," she said.
"The third requires you to forgive your sister," I said. "Truly and without reservation, and make amends." I paused. "That ending exists. It is reachable. But it doesn't arrive on its own."
She turned to look at me then, and the stillness she had been holding cracked open just enough to let the heat through.
"Forgive her," she repeated. The words came out flat and sharp at once, the way steel sounds when it is struck. "You want me to forgive the girl who let them drag me out of my home in chains. Who stood in that room and said nothing while they stripped me of my name and my title and handed me over to men who spent six weeks reminding me with their fists exactly how little I was worth to anyone."
She shook her head, a short bitter motion.
"I walked for weeks, Matthias. In chains! On bleeding feet! I slept on the ground while they ate beside the fire and laughed about it! Vladimir Crespi put a horsewhip across my back until I stopped being able to scream and not one of them, not one! said a word to stop it." Her voice had not risen but it had hardened, each word deliberate, each one placed like a stone. "And you sit there and tell me the price of survival is forgiving the person whose silence made all of it possible."
"I'm not telling you it's easy," I said.
"It's not a matter of easy!" she snapped. "It's a matter of deserving! She does not deserve it! She has never deserved it! Any of it! She was the one person in the world I believed loved me and she stood there and chose herself and called it nothing." Her jaw was tight, her hands curled in her lap. "There is no version of any world in which I owe her forgiveness."
I let the silence sit for a moment before I answered.
"You're right," I said. She blinked, caught off guard by that.
"She doesn't deserve it," I said. "Forgiveness rarely has anything to do with what the other person deserves. If it did it would just be called justice and it would be a great deal simpler." I looked at the coals. "What was done to you was real, the pain of it is real. I am not asking you to pretend otherwise or to decide that none of it mattered." I paused, choosing the next words carefully. "But there is a difference between what she deserves and what you deserve, and you deserve to put it down eventually. Not for her sake. For yours."
She said nothing, jaw still tight, eyes on the fire.
"Right now it is a fresh wound," I said. "Everything you feel about it is exactly as large as it ought to be given how recently it was inflicted. I am not asking you to feel differently about it today, or tomorrow, or anytime soon." I exhaled slowly. "But wounds become scars, that is not a betrayal of how much they hurt, it is simply what time does to pain when you let it. The scar will always be there. You will always know what caused it. But one day it will not be the first thing you feel when you wake up in the morning, and that day, if you are willing to reach for it, is where that ending lives."
She was quiet for a long time after that, the fire had burned down to almost nothing now, and I wasn't in the mood too tear apart some trees for firewood, so I just decided to leave them as a low bed of coals throwing a dim red glow across the hollow and the birch trees stood pale and still at the edges of the dark.
Whatever she was thinking she kept it to herself, and I did not press her for it. "Get some sleep," I said eventually. "Long road tomorrow."
She didn't argue, instead she rose, brushing the dirt from her cloak, and made her way to her tent without a word. At the entrance she paused, one hand on the canvas, and turned back to look at me over her shoulder.
"Will you play something," she asks so low that no human would have heard it.
"Yes," I said simply. She nodded once and ducked inside. The canvas fell closed behind her.
I settled the violin under my chin and drew the bow across the strings softly, just the opening of Divenire, barely carrying past the last of the firelight. I kept my ears open to the dark beyond the camp, tracking the small familiar sounds of the night, the insects, the distant water, the horses breathing slow and steady at the edge of the hollow.
Whatever was left unsaid between us I let the night have the rest of it. The music rose and fell and eventually faded, and the camp went quiet, and the coals breathed their last dim pulse before going dark.
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Authors Note: That's it for chapter 16, mostly a talky one I know, but Syanna had been patient enough with the half answers and it was time to clear the air before we move forward. The hardest part was explaining where Matthias's knowledge comes from in a way that made sense to someone who has never seen a screen in her life. The Fablesphere connection came to me fairly late and I was genuinely annoyed at myself for not thinking of it sooner, it's so obvious in hindsight. Syanna grew up with a constructed world she could walk through, I didn't need to explain the concept from scratch, I just needed to point at something she already understood.
Next chapter we're on the road to Maribor, things start moving again, I promise something gets hit and massive shout out to my first ever commissioner, the commission is a Ben 10 Invincible Isekai with some really interesting AU changes that I think are going to make it something special, genuinely did not expect it and it means a lot.
I also set up a Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/maydae010401/posts) and a Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/maydae010401/posts), Ko-fi is for commissions or general support, Patreon is for advanced chapters, though right now only Frozen Blood is ahead. I'll be spending the next week building a backlog for Chrome and Flame and finishing up the commission so bear with me on update frequency. All support is appreciated more than I can say.
And as always like and review if you enjoyed it, criticisms welcome, the comment section is not just for compliments.