Chapter 601: Room For Two (Part One)
When Nyrielle opened the heavy, iron-bound door to her bed chambers, she carried Ashlynn across the threshold as though she was carrying a newlywed bride, refusing to set her down until they’d reached the center of the opulent space.
On the far wall, a fire crackled merrily in the hearth, filling the air with the faint scent of cedar woodsmoke that accompanied a warmth that was rare this far beneath the ground. Previously, on the occasions that Ashlynn visited Nyrielle’s bed chambers, the flames in the hearth had only burned long enough to take some of the chill from the air. A few hours of a burning fire could only do so much to push back the chill that seeped from the stones themselves after all.
Now, however, the entire chamber felt warm and inviting, as if the fire had been kept burning for several days until the stone walls of the chamber themselves were no longer cold to the touch.
The changes in the room went far beyond the simple hearth however. While Nyrielle’s large, four poster bed still dominated the center of the room with its dark curtains and spills of delicate lace that trimmed the soft, satin bedspread, a new feature in the room immediately commanded Ashlynn’s full attention.
"Nryi, you," Ashlynn whispered softly, unable to take her eyes from the sight of the wall that faced the foot of the bed.
"I painted it for you," Nyrielle said as she set Ashlynn down gently on her feet. "I did my best to capture every detail you showed me in your dream," she said. "I, I hope that you don’t mind," she said quietly as she felt the echo of Ashlynn’s heartbeat within her chest begin to race.
"Mind?" Ashlynn said numbly as she took two hesitant steps toward the painting before she even realized she’d moved. "How could I mind something like... something like this?"
After Nyrielle’s conversation with Zedya about what she could do to make her bed chambers more welcoming for her lover, Nyrielle had gone far beyond looking for ways to add hints of life and growing things to her cold, dark chambers.
Her room already held one of her largest paintings of the ancient fortress and the city around it in the days of her youth, before the Lothians had put it to the torch. It also held one of Zedya’s best tapestries depicting the Vale of Mists as her progeny saw it, a place of vast trees shrouded in layers of silvery fog that promised safety and refuge for everyone who had been burned by the greed and ambitions of human rulers.