Chapter 519: The Life We Could Have
Drifting in darkness, the two floating amethyst flames took shape, becoming a pair of brilliantly glowing eyes in the darkness before bathing the world of infinite shadow in a soft lavender light.
The world illuminated by the strange light was still dark, appearing as a mist-shrouded forest in the depths of night. Sturdy cedar trees stood like sentinels made of shadow, their branches blocking out the pale moonlight from above. In one direction, however, the lavender light was brighter, revealing a small clearing and a strange cottage built next to the base of a towering cliff at the forest’s edge.
The cottage looked like it had been constructed in a human style, with a sharply slanted roof and a large stone chimney on one side, but the proportions of the house were clearly designed for much taller occupants than any humans Lennart had ever met.
A wide, covered patio wrapped around the cottage, offering space for several visitors to take their ease on simple wooden benches, but in this strange world, only a single person occupied the patio.
Lennart’s breath caught in his chest as he glimpsed Zedya’s delicate figure, rocking in a simple wooden chair with a set of long knitting needles held in her hand. The blanket she was knitting looked soft and comfortable, sized for an infant or small child, and a faint smile hung on her face as her hands moved methodically from one stitch to the next.
But it wasn’t the blanket that filled her gleaming amethyst eyes with joy, rather, it was the actions of the clearing’s other occupants that held all of her attention.
"Come at me together," a strong, confident-looking Lennart said as he tapped his chest with a pair of dulled fighting gauntlets. "Two people to bind and one to deliver a killing blow," he coached the young men before him. There were three young men on their feet, one from the Horned Clan, one from the Clan of the Great Claw, and one human, all dressed in padded training gear and holding blunted weapons while seven other youths sat on the grass nearby, waiting their turn for a lesson.
"This is the life we’ll have?" Lennart asked, turning to look at the amethyst flames in the shape of eyes, floating beside him as he stood among the trees. "Teaching young men to be soldiers?"
"I said that I couldn’t give you children," Zedya’s voice said softly. "But if you want to pass down your skills, then we can take in young ones for teaching. As many as you’d like," she said before the vision of the clearing shifted slightly and a second building, built as a small barracks or student’s dormitory, appeared next to the cottage. "You could train the very best and the most talented, or those who have lost their own mothers and fathers to tragedies we couldn’t prevent..."