Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter fourteen. bruised fruit
Fallon put the gloves on the next day and soon they welded to her hands as second skin. She shook her brother's palm, Orikas grasping tentative, unable to hide the flinch. When he withdrew, his skin smarted like bruised fruit, not nearly as ghastly as what Dalaia bore, and further still from a cure.
"That'll do for now," Orikas said.
"If you really think so." Bore forth her sullen reply, lest he think her grateful, which she was.
Leather could keep her at bay but the shadows grew long with the hours. Fallon could feel them coughing dark smoke into her lungs, and in the scorch of an unblinking sun, she flickered, faint from dawn 'til dusk, left to drink the pressing eve. She could hold her own foreboding at bay but not that of the others, for even Astarion kept his distance on the road, though he hugged the shaded fringe out of habit, Fallon following in his wake.
She should count her blessings, she couldn't forget what he was to her: a means to an end. A blessing it did not feel though, she hungered for company, any company, though most acutely Fallon yearned for an audience that would do more than simply tolerate. Complex as her quandary was, she had softened enough not to begrudge her friends, seeing past the veil of purposeful distance. They were frightened, for themselves and for her, not only for consequences dealt but of her looming uncertain future. More than once she had caught Marth's trembled prayers in the dead of night, kept awake despite her goading sleep. If she couldn't have what she wanted in the waking hours, then she would get it from the apparition of her mother, but not a single night bore fruit.
What did not escape her was the voice; soft against her ear's membrane, opaque enough at times to wash her own thoughts clean. The ringing coil should have scared Fallon, and though at times it did, she fast became accustomed to its dark lush intonation, for while it oft sighed with enmity, so too did it sing her praise.
All this and more became transcribed in her journal but Fallon found conversation with herself lacking. Her forward driven hand, firm enough to make the ink bleed pages into one another, ended most sentences in frustrated question marks with subtext underlined: who am I, why am I here, what's to happen next?
By good fortune they passed a stranger, as their supplies had laboured like the ground beneath their soles, on his way from down the mountains who advised them of a tavern not far up the path. Her brother thanked the man before Marth careened against him, offered a quick apology, then when they had made decent headway, produced a shine of coin from his furled hand.
