Neverwinter Forest on a black throne reigns upright

“Cypress?”

“Noch? Noch, I’m sorry — please don’t leave me this time — I do love you, Noch, I do — ”

The haggard raven whirled, an eager whine stirring in his throat, and for a moment his sinister mien was lit from within with a desperate, clawing sort of hope. His lantern yellow eyes glittered feverishly, and there was something boyish and eager in the way his limbs went fawn-fragile and his tail whirred like a broken helicopter rotor. There was anticipatory joy in the softening angles of his lean musculature, but it was blotted out and distorted by anxiousness, breeding incongruence in the marrow of his bones.

“Rian?” he croaked hoarsely, his visage seeming to crumple with disappointment. It hurt — he’d wanted so badly to see grayscale fur and turquoise eyes — and he didn’t have the wherewithal to stow it. “I’m sorry,” he gasped out. “I — when you called me, I thought maybe — I thought Rannoch — ”

Abruptly the last remaining Frostfur realized that he owed Rian — and the rest of his cousins, and his aunt — an even greater apology for avoiding them so ardently. Cypress hadn’t fled the Teekons as Rannoch had, but in a way, what he was doing was even worse. Miserably, “Mama’d be so disappointed in me,” he muttered to himself, lifting his voice to speak more clearly to the boy he would forever revere as a hunter of unparalleled skill: “I’m sorry to you and Aunt Kaskara, and Szabala, Eimear, and Dublin.”

Swallowing hard, “I’m sorry for staying away,” Cypress murmured tightly, and realized it was true.