Chapter 653: Reuniting With Eluned [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 653: Reuniting With Eluned [II / Bonus Chapter]

The meadow smelled of Lady Eluned... there were so many beautiful scents wafting out that overwhelmed her senses however...

Ther’Abella didn’t speak.

Her knees were sunk into the damp loam, her shins grinding against the runic border where the boundary array met the grass.

Blood still dripped from the corner of her lip looking thin and pinkish from the ribs Thor’s boot had broken, and it spattered the white clover in slow drops.

Her fingers were clawed into the soil so hard that dirt had packed under her split nails and she stared up.

The green robes didn’t billow in some great terrible gale the way a goddess’s robes were supposed to, instead they just hung there.

It was made of unbleached jade silk, soft at the hem where it touched the moss and dusted with white flour around the left pocket.

’A phantom,’ she thought, cold and brittle as winter glass. ’The desert finally broke something in my head, and this is what it made out of the pieces...’

Her breath hitched.

A dry ugly sound scraped the back of her throat, and then the tears came...

"Mmm... Mm... Mmm... I’m sorry..."

Eluned looked down at her.

The small crease between the Goddess’s brows smoothed out a the distant calm that had always made the elves tread softly around her seemed to melt off her face a layer at a time, like frost under noon sun.

...And she remembered.

She remembered lying pinned in the sap-dark beneath Ellvi’s boots, with the roots drinking her light, while seven small flames went out one after another in the great loom of the Tree.

Kaelith’s heavy heart had burst open, the twins’ breath going to salt and the archers’ fingers freezing on their strings while Moriel was last.

She had counted all seven in the dark however one thread hadn’t snapped.

It had stretched thin and kept humming like a wounded note drifting farther and farther out into the lawless wastes until Eluned lost it in the dark.

’So many memories of the past...’

She remembered the training yard in the grey hour before dawn, the clang of practice scimitars, Captain Kaelith pacing the line with a mug of tea she never finished and one skinny squire in the back rank who always arrived late, always had resin on her sleeves, and always saluted a half-second too fast...

It was too cute.

Eluned had watched them from the library window every morning for three centuries without once letting them see her do it.

’You survived,’ she thought, and small gold flecks in her jade eyes flared and trembled. ’The smallest one... The one who never managed to keep her sleeves clean during the resin harvest...’

She set the baking dish down on the flat stone of the boundary marker then she walked forward with her barefoot sounding silent on the clover as she knelt in front of the kneeling elf with her robes spreading around them both like a pool of living moss.

The smell of star-lotus and warm honey washed over Ther’Abella, so thick and so real that the silver constellations on her cheekbones began to prickle with heat.

Eluned raised her right hand.

The palm was pale and floury at the heel as she laid it on the crown of Ther’Abella’s head and curled her fingers into silver hair that hadn’t seen a brush in a long time.

"Welcome," she said, in that clear sweet voice that had once made the willow boughs lean down just to hear it. "Welcome home, Ther’Abella... Welcome to Blessed Land..."

A shudder ran down the elf’s spine.

Her hands came up out of the mud, shaking so badly that her knuckles clacked together like wooden dice.

She reached for Eluned’s waist and stopped with her arms hovering an inch from the jade silk.

Four hundred years in the desert hadn’t changed her very old habits...

The old law still held her by the throat as no one, not even a knight of the Viridian Guard, touched the hem of the World Tree’s daughter without permission.

Eluned didn’t wait for the protocol.

She leaned in, wrapped both arms around Ther’Abella’s neck, and pulled that broad armored frame down into her lap.

"You may," she whispered in her ear.

SNAP!

Whatever iron rod had held Ther’Abella upright through four hundred years of slaughter, through the stink of butcher’s stalls and the mockery of caravan masters, simply broke...

She buried her face in the curve of Eluned’s neck.

Her arms locked around the Goddess’s back hard enough to crush the ribs of an unawakened man, and she wept with her whole body with great gasping sobs that tore out of her like broken glass.

Blood, road dust and salt soaked into the jade silk but she didn’t care and Eluned didn’t either. They were just happy to see the other was alive.

"My Lady," she choked. "My Lady, my Lady, you’re... you’re..."

"Hush." Eluned stroked her silver hair, her nails scratching lightly at the scalp the exact way she used to calm the young tree-cats when summer gales shook the high nests. "I’m here... It’s over... No one is hunting you through the boughs anymore..."

"I killed them."

It came out muffled and cracked against her shoulder sounding ugly and small.

She could still feel the weight of it in her wrists, Moriel’s breath on her face, Kaelith’s hand closing over hers on the axe haft and trying, with the last of her will, to point it the right way.

"Kaelith... Caelia... Evandra... they had the rot in their eyes... They were fighting it... They asked me to do it... I put the blade through Moriel’s sternum and I held on until she stopped breathing... I couldn’t reach the sanctum... I couldn’t reach you... I was too slow, and I was too weak, and—"

"I know."

A single clear drop slid off Eluned’s lower lash, ran down her porcelain cheek, and landed on the tip of Ther’Abella’s ear.

"I felt each of them go... They didn’t die in hatred, little one, they died looking toward the sun. It wasn’t your hand that did that. It was my sister’s spell, and whatever she twisted in them, they were still fighting her at the end. You carried their weight a very long way but you don’t have to carry it by yourself anymore."

Ther’Abella’s fingers twisted in the jade silk.

"Every morning," she said into Eluned’s collar. "I saluted the horizon. Every morning, four hundred years... I didn’t know who I was saluting anymore. I just... I couldn’t stop. Good morning, Lady... Nobody ever answered..."

Something in Eluned’s face cracked wide open.

"I couldn’t hear you," she whispered. "I would have answered every single one. I would have answered before you finished."

She pressed her cheek against the top of the silver head. "Say it again."

A wet broken laugh followed.

"Good morning, My Lady."

"Good morning, Ther’Abella."

They stayed like that as Eluned rocked her slowly, and the grass around them, without being asked, began to sprout small yellow buttercups in a ring.

"There’s a lotus," Ther’Abella said quietly. "Every year, on my birthday... I never thanked you my Lady."

"You didn’t have to." Eluned’s voice shook. "It was the one day of the year I could be sure that somebody was happy because of something I did... I wanted to leave you one every year of those four hundred so I’m sorry I couldn’t."

From the edge of the knoll came a loud wet sniff.

Thor had turned her back and was staring very hard at the horizon, scrubbing at her face with her bronze forearm.

"Dust," she announced to nobody in particular. "Terrible dust in this meadow."

What would Aki say if she saw her crying...?

Ten paces back, Princess Aki stood frozen on the lawn with her fingers knotted into the white linen of her tunic.

Her sapphire eyes went back and forth between the silver-haired giant sobbing in the grass and the flour-dusted Goddess holding her like a child.

She’d been raised in the royal pavilions of Rhyx City, where grief was a rehearsed affair but this looked like two halves of a continent drifting back together after the flood... if that made sense.

"Thor," she whispered out of the side of her mouth.

Her voice wobbled. "What happened to them?"

Thor stood with her arms crossed and Mjolnir’s strap dangling from her wrist with her thumb absently tracing the split in her lower lip where the elf’s forehead had landed.

The grin was gone as her blue eyes were narrow and cold as fjord ice, fixed on the scars crossing Ther’Abella’s back.

"You don’t really need to know..."

Aki swallowed and she nodded once.

The sobbing in the grass slowly thinned out into wet, ragged hiccups.

Ther’Abella pulled back with her hands lingering on Eluned’s forearms like she was afraid the Goddess would turn to dandelion seeds if she let go.

She dragged the heel of her palm across her eyes and smeared grit and tears into one long streak.

Eluned didn’t answer right away.

She laid her palm flat against the elf’s broken ribs, and a soft green glow bloomed under her fingers.

Thin vines uncurled from her sleeve, small as thread, and slid beneath the torn cuirass to knit the cracked bone one careful stitch at a time.

"Hngh..."

Ther’Abella hissed then went still.

The ache she had carried for four centuries eased by a degree and she realized that she had forgotten what it felt like to be touched by something that meant her no harm.

"There," Eluned murmured, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her pointed ear. "That’s the ribs... The rest will take a few days and a lot of soup..."

"My Lady, I don’t need—"

"Hush."

"How?" she rasped. Her blue eyes searched every line of Eluned’s face. "My Lady, Ellvi dragged you into the roots. I watched the heartwood close over you... How are you kneeling in a field with flour on your cheek?"

Eluned gave her a small crooked smile and brushed a clump of dirt off the elf’s brow.

"It’s not a dream... I was sealed inside the marrow for a very long time... There was only the dark, the taste of bitter sap, and the slow grinding sound of my sister turning the branches into war-forges. I thought it would simply end there until the soil forgot my name."

Her eyes tipped toward the huge runic circle behind them with the Anchor Gate that tied this meadow to the main realm of Blessed Land.

"A while ago, a lord from the outer world brought me through the gray mist... He became my Lord."

A long breath shuddered out of Ther’Abella.

"And I am his Hero... you see, I joined his Territory."

"I see..."

Everything in her chest woke all at once as her shoulders squared.

The lilac starlight under her skin flickered and her voice dropped into the clipped tone of a commander drawing up an assault.

"Then we have a path... My Lady, even if the summoning contract has dimmed your core, we can use this territory as a staging bastion... Ellvi’s hold on the high boughs is shallow as she doesn’t have your feel for the world. If we rally the exiled clans of the outer rings, cut the supply aqueducts on the western terraces, and go up through the root-tunnels where the ward-anchors are thinnest, we can drag her off that throne! We can take her apart limb by limb, take back your mantle, and cleanse Yggdrasil of the rot!"

She leaned forward with her eyes wide and burning with four centuries of fire.

"We’ll make her pay for every drop of gold she drew out of your chest... Ten thousand leagues of ash, My Lady. I swear it..."

Tap!

A small cool hand settled on her left pauldron.

"Stop, Ther’Abella."

Ther’Abella froze.

It wasn’t said in anger as there was no divine weight in it, if Eluned was angry then a booming gale would have followed to flatten the grass. I

"My Lady...?" Her mind stumbled over the silence. "Why? She betrayed you... She butchered the Guard... She branded you a murderer in every public square in the realm so why would we let that go?"