Chapter 457: Why Didn’t You…?
"...I’ll never let you leave the Vale again..."
The words Nyrielle said, accompanied by the stern tone of her voice, washed over Ashlynn like a plunge from the hot tub directly into the ice and snow outside their shared dream. Her entire body trembled, and her emerald eyes quivered as she realized that when Nyrielle said the word ’never,’ she really, truly meant ’never.’ She wasn’t just prepared to hold Ashlynn back in the Vale of Mists for a few weeks or months, but for years and centuries if they couldn’t resolve this problem.
"What? Why?" Ashlynn said with a voice that held none of her usual confidence. The notion that Nyrielle might try to control her, that the powerful vampire might one day turn on her, had long ago faded from Ashlynn’s mind as the two drew closer together during their journey and even during their time apart.
But for Nyrielle to threaten to imprison her... It cut far deeper than even her lover might have realized. For more than twenty years, almost all of her life, Ashlynn had been a prisoner in a gilded cage, rarely allowed out of the Blackwell manor. While it would have been impossible for her parents to completely isolate her from the outside world, it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that she left her home fewer than a dozen times a year for most of her life, and even then, she was almost always tightly supervised.
Those rare occasions when she slipped out of the house late at night, taking Jocelynn up to the cliffs to watch the sun rise and the ships setting sail were her most precious tastes of freedom until Owain had begun to court her. But even then, the stiff, semi-formal, and always supervised outings she had with her former husband couldn’t compare to the taste of true freedom she’d gained after binding herself to Nyrielle.
In the six months since she’d dug herself out of a shallow grave and fell into life as both Nyrielle’s Seneschal and the Mother of Trees, Ashlynn had seen more wonders of the world than she’d ever imagined existed.
Whether it was the bustle and liveliness of High Fen City and it’s towering arena, or the natural beauty of the golden waterfall at dawn where the White River spilled off a cliff before becoming the waters of the Briar and the Crystal Lake, each new destination brought countless new experiences and wonders into Ashlynn’s ever expanding world.
Even the cold, frozen lands of the High Pass had their own moments of warmth and crystaline, icy beauty that gave her world texture and depth that it had never had before. But now, Nyrielle was talking about snatchign that away from her, trapping her once again within a tiny portion of the world, held within a gilded cage, because she had... had what? What was it she had done that would upset her lover so?
"Is this because of Hauke? Because I didn’t kill him when I had the chance?" Ashlynn asked, thinking back on their very first conversations about the High Pass when Nyrielle had warned her that she would need to be ruthless with the Frost Walkers if she was going to succeed here.
"That wasn’t really Hauke," Ashlynn said, clutching Nyrielle’s hand and hoping she would understand. "I told you, he was possessed by those ancestors and..."
"You think I don’t know your tender heart by now?" Nyrielle said, sliding the hand cupping Ashlynn’s face over to her full lips, placing a finger there to interrupt Ashlynn’s explanation before her hand slid lower, coming to rest high on Ashlynn’s chest, above the swell of her full breasts and where she could best feel her lover’s heartbeat.