Blood Ties

The caravan went about the task of salvaging with muted, solemn purpose. They'd come together in solidarity when they laid the fallen to rest, but Morwyn could see on their faces that grief and pain continued to push them to the very brink of collapse. Her own body and soul ached just as much as she sorted through the wreckage of the wagons for any supplies that were in good enough shape to bother recovering. The others had shown her kindness and had turned her away from self-imposed exile, but she couldn't dispel the lingering guilt and doubt that clawed viciously at her mind as she rummaged through broken timber and torn canvas.

Every time she closed her weary eyes for a moment of rest, the faces of the dead haunted her. Gildara's fragile bravery morphed into fear, then pain, then the stark stillness of death. George, who had rushed to take her place when she'd been wounded and pulled back behind the line, snarled in righteous defiance as he lay atop the corpse of his teenage son. Too many others joined them, their dead eyes staring at her with passive judgment.

When the living caught her eye they gave her brief nods or whispers of thanks before returning to their tasks. It was disorienting to receive gratitude for her part in defending them from the threat that she had brought upon them, but as more time passed the pain of their words began to dull. Three words echoed through her consciousness with regularity as she agonized over the destruction before her, the same words she'd whispered to herself so many times in the darker moments of her family's banishment.

It isn't fair.

Morwyn had come to terms with the fact that she was destined to suffer for having the audacity to exist. It was unfathomable and enraging that the others also suffered on her behalf, no matter how willing they were to do so. The bastard that hunted her was no longer some looming, existential threat. Their latest machinations had crossed the line from dangerous curiosity to mortal enemy. As she heaved a large stone from inside a wagon that had been caught in the path of her landslide, she imagined smashing it down on the mage's head with grim satisfaction.

She hoped that whatever Rennock had done to them had hurt. Judging from the old wizard's condition upon his return their battle had been fierce. It was a pity he hadn't been able to disintegrate them.

“Are you alright? You look ready to skin someone alive.”

Morwyn flinched hard at the sudden voice, having been lost in her thoughts to the exclusion of nearly everything around her. She saw Yvonne, her face weary and drained, picking through the wreckage nearby. Morwyn looked down and realized she was standing upon a torn, dusty bolt of fabric and the shattered remnants of several bows. She'd been sorting through the sisters' wagon without even realizing it, the contents within ravaged by the landslide she'd caused. She took a few deep breaths and deliberately relaxed her face which had been screwed up tightly in anger.

“I'm fine,” Morwyn lied, then immediately thought better of it. “Scratch that. I'm not fine at all. This never should have happened.”

The elf beside her crouched down amongst the ruin of her belongings, picking up a shard of wood that had once belonged to one of her bows. She turned it over in her shaking hands for a moment before tossing it aside with a sigh, then ran a strip of torn fabric between her fingers. Clearing her throat awkwardly, Yvonne looked up to meet Morwyn's hesitant gaze.

“She was impressed with you, you know. You should've seen how excited she was to see you wearing those clothes after Whitewater Crossing. Particularly that cloak and pin. They were her pride and joy.”

At a complete loss as to how to respond to such a statement, Morwyn rubbed the shimmering fabric of her cloak between her sore fingers. There were ragged holes and tears in most of her clothing, though somehow the cloak had come through the battle unmolested. She let the fabric fall from her hand and knelt down once more to dig through the rubble.

It was bleak busywork to occupy her hands while she struggled to find any words that might console the elf. None made themselves apparent and the two women sorted through the wreckage in awkward silence for a time. They collected the steel heads from the numerous broken arrows, though there was little else of use besides the occasional tool or bit of clothing that hadn't been ravaged by the landslide. When they had recovered what they could from the demolished wagon, Yvonne stepped back from the meager pile of belongings and let out a long sigh as she stared at a beautiful silver necklace with a broken chain and crushed pendant. She slipped it into her pocket and smoothed back her dark hair, then looked over to Morwyn with a furrowed brow.

“I don't blame you for what happened,” the elf murmured, fidgeting nervously with the handle of a knife on her belt. Morwyn tensed but managed to keep herself from instinctively stepping back. “I wanted to hate you for letting her go for the arrows instead of me. Part of me still wants to, but that isn't fair to you. I saw how hard you fought for us, and I know how hard it must be to... to keep going. I'm not sure how I'll manage it myself. Gildara and I have hardly spent a moment apart since we were born, and now I'm don't know what to do...”

Morwyn started to raise her arm to lay a comforting hand on Yvonne's shoulder as the elf wiped her eyes, but let it fall woodenly back to her side. Several well-intended replies flashed through her mind but all of them felt hollow and flat in the face of such loss. She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, bowing her head as a fresh pang of sorrow tore through her, then murmured the only thing she could muster that didn't seem like a worthless condolence.

“I'm sorry that she's gone, more than I can truly put to words. Her sacrifice gave the rest of us a fighting chance. Those of us that remain owe her, and you, our lives.”

Yvonne swallowed hard and gave her a terse nod of uneasy acceptance. She gestured weakly to the destruction around them and her shoulders sagged in defeat.

“I had no idea just how chaotic it would be, stumbling from one disaster to the next, the screams and noise and smells... how do you do it? How can people like you and Argoth and the others dedicate your lives to violence? I thought I had what it takes, but now I'm not sure. I'm terrified, flinching at every little noise and gust of wind. When I close my eyes it's like I'm still in the thick of it...”

Morwyn anxiously recalled the giddy euphoria she felt when unleashing her magic against the goblins, how satisfying it had been to hack them to bloody pieces. A shudder ran down her spine. For her entire life she'd felt a twinge of remorse for killing, however justified. Even something as simple as killing a hare for dinner had often made her pause with the gravity of ending a life. It sickened her how much she had inexplicably enjoyed the bloodshed of the previous night. It felt so wrong, yet at the same time a dark shadow on the fringes of her consciousness still reveled in it.

Something buried deep within her had awoken during the battle, and she wanted nothing more than to seal it away forever. The frost had been as eager as ever to be unleashed but something else entirely had found a vile joy at dealing out death, and she wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

“You never really get used to it,” she said flatly, pushing her grim thoughts aside as best she could and hesitantly meeting Yvonne's gaze. “I don't know about the others, but... I try to compartmentalize, I suppose, to separate myself from it. To protect who I am from the things that I have to do. It isn't always easy, or even possible... and to be honest with you, most of the time I'm scared to death. Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's being so scared you can hardly think and still finding the will to carry on.”

Yvonne frowned as she considered Morwyn's words then retrieved the meager bundle of salvage they'd wrapped in a torn piece of the wagon's canvas. She stumbled for a moment, favoring an injury to one of her legs, then straightened up with a wince.

“I'm not sure if I have the strength to do that, but I'll try. For her, for our dream... Otherwise all this suffering will have been pointless.”

Before Morwyn could respond, Yvonne limped away without another word and left her in a sudden and profound silence. She couldn't decide if she were grateful for the reprieve or devastated at being unable to comfort the grieving elf. She stood there for a long moment, watching the others go about their grim work as she tried to puzzle out if the safe haven promised at the end of their journey was worth the devastation it required to get there.

A subtle pulse of calming energy emanated briefly from within her, soothing the ache in her heart as well as the stiffness in her muscles. She'd felt the sensation several times before though never as clearly, and she now recognized the signature of her patron goddess. It seemed the Moonmother hadn't forgotten her, though the bloom of comfort was short-lived.

It took her a moment to trudge back from the precipice of despair, but when she finally regained control of her emotions Morwyn meandered her way toward Hazel's wagon. It appeared to have made it through the battle relatively unscathed save for the few arrows that had punched holes in the canvas or stuck fast in the wood. There she found a frazzled healer cursing under her breath as she and a rather harried looking Eronir attempted to brew some foul smelling concoction on a cauldron bubbling over a small fire. It was fueled by fragments of a destroyed wagon, a casualty of the rampage of the rhino mole.

“No, no, no! That's a basilisk eye, not eye of newt. Trust me when I say you do not want to get them confused.”

Eronir glanced up at Morwyn's approach and relief flashed across his strained features. He gingerly set down a vial containing a strange, reptilian eye suspended in a clear liquid, brushed his hands on his trousers, and stood from where he'd been crouching. He cast a worried look down at the cauldron and his nose wrinkled in poorly disguised disgust.

“Excellent timing. I think Hazel here was about to separate me from my fingers.”

“Oh, go polish your spear, you big lump,” Hazel replied, though there was a note of tired affection in her voice. “Thank you for trying to help, though.”

“What are you brewing?” Morwyn asked. Her mood had lightened incrementally at their banter and she was eager for a distraction. Hazel poured the contents of a different vial into the simmering solution and Morwyn watched on with morbid fascination as the eye of newt turned opaque and sank beneath the bubbling golden liquid.

“Healing potions,” Eronir huffed as he stretched his back. “Or so she says. Could be some deadly poison for all I know.”

Hazel gave the elf a disapproving glance before adding a handful of dried leaves to the cauldron. The smell of the brewing potion immediately turned from foul to fragrant and Morwyn recognized the distinct aroma of the healing potions which she'd grown intimately and unfortunately familiar with over the years.

“If I didn't keep a sharp eye on you it would have been,” Hazel reprimanded him. “It'd be quite a nasty shock to drink what you thought was a healing potion and end up petrified instead.”

Eronir rolled his eyes and gave a long-suffering sigh.

“Alright, alright. I get the message. Morwyn, please take over before I get us all turned to stone. I'm going to find Yvonne. How is she?”

Morwyn bit her lip and mulled over her response for a moment before responding.

“She's... trying. On top of losing Gildara, she's definitely got battle-shock. I don't blame her. Gods, I've never seen such ferocious fighting myself... but maybe you can help her more than I could. I didn't quite know what to say, I just hope I didn't make it worse.”

Eronir's face fell and he glanced quickly around for the other elf in dismay. When he spotted her standing over the iron tomb that held her sister, one hand over her mouth as her shoulders shook, his concerned frown softened with sorrow.

“Should I go to her, or give her time to grieve? I'm not sure what she needs from me at the moment.”

“I think she needs a shoulder to lean on,” Morwyn said hesitantly, sharing a look with Hazel who nodded in agreement. “Even if you don't say anything, I'm sure she'll appreciate your presence. You knew them both for much longer than I did.”

Eronir bit his thumb as he mulled over her words, then murmured his thanks before striding toward his grieving partner. Hazel, who had busied herself with tending to her concoction, looked up to Morwyn when the elf had put some distance between them.

“I hate that I'm growing numb to this mess,” she said quietly, gesturing vaguely in all directions as Morwyn sat on a heavy chest beside her. “I know how I should feel about it, how I did feel not long ago, but I'm so overwhelmed that I can hardly feel a thing at the moment. It's just so much all at once that it feels like my heart has shut off in order to keep from breaking.”

“You'll have to teach me how to do that sometime,” Morwyn muttered as she tucked an errant curl of hair behind Hazel's ear and took over stirring the cauldron. “I can never seem to shut it off. I can push it down and hide it, but I feel it all the same.”

Hazel set a wooden tray with a rack of a dozen empty vials on the ground beside the fire, slipped on a pair of thick woven mitts, and pulled the cauldron from the fire to cool. She stood up, slowly took of the mitts, and laid them on the crate where she'd been sitting. Morwyn briefly met her gaze as Hazel moved closer and leaned against her side. They both stared at the steam rising from the cauldron for a long moment.

“I'm glad you didn't leave us. You scared the wits out of me with that little speech.”

Morwyn leaned her head against Hazel's shoulder and sagged with exhaustion.

“I'm sorry, Hazel. I panicked. I'm just so tired of the ones I love getting hurt because of me.”

Hazel smoothed down the mess of Morwyn's hair and chuckled softly under her breath. Bleary eyed, Morwyn lifted her head and turned to look at the halfling in confusion. A slight twinkle had returned to her emerald eyes that fought through the weariness evident on her face.

“Did I say something funny?”

Hazel kissed Morwyn softly on the forehead and pulled her head back down to rest on her shoulder. One of her small hands gently stroked Morwyn's cheek, the contact lulling her into a daze once more as her eyes closed and her mind finally began to slow.

“No, dear. I just never imagined that I'd get my first declaration of love on a bloody battlefield.”

Morwyn's brow drew together, though her eyes remained closed as she sought the meaning of the halfling's words. When she realized what she meant, heat rose to Morwyn's cheeks and her pulse began to rise.

“Oh... I didn't... well, I mean...”

“Shut up,” Hazel teased her gently. “Just let me say that I love you too.”

It had been forty-six years since she'd last heard those words from anyone besides her family, and even then it had been during a bitter parting of ways that had haunted her ever since. Faced with them again after so long, in such a state, in such a place, Morwyn expected to feel panic, to pull back with fear, to shrink inside herself and reject them outright. Instead, the affection that had been quietly building within her swelled, its petals spreading wide as it filled her to the brim. The grief and loss and anger and fear were still present and palpable, but they were pushed aside in its wake.

Scattered scenes of their time together meandered through Morwyn's mind as she kept her eyes firmly closed and struggled to regulate her breathing, each more vivid and visceral than the last. They'd shared so much in the short time since their lives were inexorably intertwined. Laughter and fear, openness and doubt, knowledge and uncertainty, affection and distress. Yet through it all, and despite her own reservations, Hazel had been her rock in the storm. She was as brave as Argoth, as steady as Eronir, as rambunctious as Trux, as wise as Rennock... and as kind as her long lost family.

“Are you still with me?”

The halfling's soft remark interrupted Morwyn's musing and brought a twitch of a smile to her face. She let out a muted groan as she sat up straight, cracked her neck, and let her strained eyes flutter open. Morwyn turned to Hazel took her face gently in her hands, rested their foreheads together, and breathed in the pleasant herbal scent that still lingered in the other woman's hair over the smell of blood and sweat and smoke.

“Of course I am,” Morwyn whispered, her pulse steady for once. “Let me do this properly. Hazel Willowbend, I love you. Gods, I do. I couldn't do this without you.”

Hazel rested her hands atop Morwyn's wrists and they held their tender embrace for a long moment, simply existing in each other's presence and forgetting the rest of the world around them. Eventually the halfling took her hands and held them to her chest and she met Morwyn's gaze from mere inches away. A smile played at the corner of her mouth and some of her usual mirth returned to Hazel's bearing, though sorrow still lingered behind her eyes.

“Much better. Very well, I accept. Now today is not only the worst day of my life, but also the best day of my life. What a confusing mess we're living in, huh?”

Morwyn chuckled, which was more of a rapid exhale through the nose than true laughter. She brushed her lips against Hazel's then pulled her in close.

“It's the worst-best day of your life so far,” she murmured, nuzzling into the halfling's neck. “Plenty more of those to come, I'm sure. Trouble follows me, and that's no metaphor. You've seen it firsthand.”

“And I'll meet it bravely by your side,” Hazel said with exaggerated bravado, then kissed Morwyn's cheek before extricating herself from their embrace. Morwyn was loath to let her go but noted the sincere look in Hazel's eyes. “I mean that, truly. But before trouble comes for us again, help me fill these vials. The potion has cooled enough to pour and we've still got a lot more work on our hands.”