The Heartwood this will never end

ash settles low as the last of the daylight stretches thin, the scent sharp and acrid. the sun is a pale shadow on the horizon, and the waning light it does give off flickers oddly over the autumn foliage. 

leaves crunch underfoot as the wraith pauses, crown tilting back as she surveys the blurred horizon. it is as if some great god had stolen earth from the land below and smeared it across the skyline, obscuring the sharp edges of the mountains that rise in the distance. she means to move parallel to them, understanding that the source of the disruption lays somewhere beyond them and knowing enough to avoid it, for now. 

tongue passes over her lips, maw dry and touched with a bitterness she supposes stems from the ash. she has no name for it, but she does not both with the unknowable; not when hunger is her unforgiving companion.

Specter of old life, old love;
she must cast out her sorrows, yes—
her wolves must not know her tears;
they must not know how

phayanāro had drowned in the waters

y  e  s      t h e y      h a d      t a k e n     h i m

just as
she had.

 

She is tearless; she has wept soft, ancient things;
only a preternatural feat 
— Courtfall; epiphanied! —
may move her fawn-thin bones;
the lips of all that is gone   ( cubless )  
and forever gone   ( mateless )
lain upon her stilted figure; mortality, anchoring.

Quiet;
a quiet sorrowing;
before she must hosh daun and away to her Weald,
all her wolves; all her workings; to never again wander;
for the end of Aurëwen must be this eve.

Through dimming, she drifts;
and there is some rooted semblance of knowing that here is where she had gathered her dæmon but
he wings now with herbalist, beholden to the briar'd heart;
Andraste wonders, lowly, what the fracturing of the world must look like to a dove.

there comes a woman; moving as though she is not entirely present here, now. eirwyn is sure that if she merely stood here, the woman would pass her by like a specter, unseeing. she is, at first, inclined to let her. they would pass by one another like ships in the night, as so many others do.

perhaps it is only to see if her mind remains tied to the earth, or if the drifting woman is already, in a sense, long gone. "hail," she greets, stepping pointedly into the woman's path. a quick glance takes in the scars, her lovely features, but also that something distinct is missing from the stranger. "hunt with me, stranger?" she does not care for what the woman may be missing or lost; only to sate their third, silent companion, or in the very least pry what information she may from her.

The skies had rent the past apart from her;
why not the final strike be the passing of one from an old life?

She must ghost past gunmetal figure;
white as cold wax, and must wander about the this proposal like a silent phantasm;
a the poor pale maid in an old ballad; near to now fade away until she is nothing more than greyed bodement to the living.

Yet—
she might find the will to continue through the wolves of her Weald; the furtive, frank lover which lived;
find it, too, in the voice of this argent figure full of gall,
for she must she must she must.

Cloudthick sights remain bleary; remain aimless upon the blanchard's fine façade. Shorn lips part in a weak wisp:
"Yes,"  for she must she must she must
continue. Continue for the silly invitation, the silly hunt; an ease to the hunger she'd since forgotten ghosted with her. 

"I am Andraste."
She must continue.
It is the core of Courtfall.

She must.