Grief does not change you, it reveals you

There was a moment, as everstretching as eternity and as short as a whisper of the wind, when Mikael thought she would not come. The snow was melting, dissolved into the ground and perhaps her affections for him had done the same. He had left her, to find the truth and the answers and the truth had been that he had already found it. He had found everything he needed right where he was but he had dismissed it, thinking that the truth lay out there but it was a lie. The only truth he had found, where the things he had left behind.

Then she rounded across the hill, pale in the light and it was if he had breathed for the first time in months. He had not realised the depths of his own emotion but she was oh so beautiful in that moment. She was paler perhaps, with scars to add to her life and definitely different in bearing but her eyes had not changed an iota, not at all.

Her stare was wide, her gaze troubled and confused and angry and shocked and everything in between and she was there, tangibly there. "Tempest...."