Arrow Lake abbatia

He likely knew she sensed him from the stiffening of her tiny form—nose to the brush, searching—as if she could make him disappear if she didn’t bother him with even a glance. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me, was perhaps the pinnacle of immaturity, but no one would ever accuse Meadow of being a prime candidate of proper etiquette.

A flick of her ear as his words scoured over her—refusing to even look to him now. The man who placed Akashingo upon a throne—who demanded trust and respect from Epoch and its inhabitants without offering an olive branch in return. She did not know him at all—and somehow he had broken something in her one night by a lake—somewhere along the stolen moments they met to know one another, she had bared her soul to a man who had lost his wife—echoing her own mourning of always being left behind. He hadn’t fought for her, at the news of Reyson—and it would have been a lie to say she was disappointed.

But could she have faulted him that? She had taken it as rejection—but never once had she truly given him reason to think them other than friends.

Whirlwind romances did not exist outside of fairytales, and Solpallur had been only the first taste of this realization. Germanicus, another—and now, she, too, the way she kept herself at arms length with Reyson.

She rummaged at the brush with more insistence, a quake in her, refusing the emotion to well up further. She could hear his footfalls retreat—she could not make sense of his words. There was so much she wanted to say—to ask. Instead, she found what she needed, and with a flare of victory, began to pluck angrily at the herbs, pulling them to her—as measly as the supply was. That itching burn lingering beneath—a simmer of a dam about to break—and she idly wondered if it was actually her sanity that was about to collapse with it.

Finally, her gaze alight, she rounded on him, small—and yet as tall as she could make herself—dappled silver coat glinting in the faint light as dawn continued its creeping wake. “Don’t worry, Imperator,” she offered, her voice tight, despite his retreating form. “I don’t hate you. Maybe, when whatever any of this is is over, we can even be friends again.”