Arc 3: Chapter 24: Fidei
An older memory.
I stood in a shaded avenue. Birds sang in trees gently glowing with their own inner light along the edges of the path. They shone well as the greater moon rose, as though drinking in its glow. I moved through them, my Alder cape whispering along the stones behind me.
I came to a moonlit pool, and studied my own reflection in it.
I’d grown my hair longer since coming to Tiir Ilyasven, tying it back to keep my face clear. It still shocked me, its hue — while the change in my eyes was more dramatic, I’d expected it. I hadn’t expected my ruddy hair to turn to gilt copper, or my voice to take on an uncanny resonance.
It’s been nearly a year. When will you get used to it?
I wore the beautiful armor the Seydiihad given me, made of impossibly shaped plates of mirror-bright steel, motifs of gold and green vines wrought into each contour, the pauldrons shaped like beetle wings. I wore my new Sidhe dagger on one hip and my sword on the other, refashioned with a finer hilt, its nicks and scars undone by the city’s smiths.
I still remembered where each had been, when I ran my thumb over the guard.
“I didn’t take you for a narcissist, my lord.”
I glanced back, seeing the now familiar sight of black-and-white cloth as a figure ghosted from behind a tree. She’d used its light to mask her presence, rather than the shadow an ordinary tree would cast.
Clever. I’d have to try that sometime.
The nun adjusted her habit as she stepped up to my side. Beneath the black veil and cream-white wimple, her pale face looked remote as the moon above, not so much as a stray strand of hair escaping. Gray-green eyes studied our paired reflections, as though wondering what I found so interesting about them.