A River Enchanted

I am but a verse inspired by your chorus, and I will follow you until the end, when the isle takes my bones and my name is nothing more than a remembrance on a headstone, next to yours.

I once thought home was simply a place. Four walls to hold you at night while you slept. But I was wrong. It’s people. It’s being with the ones that you love, and maybe even the ones that you hate.

There is no failure in love. And I have loved without measure.

But alas, hearts are meant to be broken, aren’t they, bard?” “If they must break,” Jack said, “then they break and remake themselves into stronger vessels.

I tried to turn myself into stone. To not feel anything. But now I realize it is better to live, to feel and have a clean break than be half-dead and cold, cracked from resentment.

I want to change. But my bones are old, my heart is selfish, my spirit is weary. I look at me and I look at you, and I see two different dream. I am death. And you, Sidra…” He reached out to touch her face, softly, as if she might vanish beneath his fingers. “You are life.” She closed her eyes beneath his caress. When his hand eased away, she looked at him and whispered, “Does that mean we cannot exist as one?” He had been waiting for her to ask this. He had yearned to answer her in the orchard, when she had made it evident that they were vastly contrasting souls. “No,” Torin said. “It means that without you, I am nothing.

A weed is just a plant out of place, her grandmother had once said to her. Treat them kindly, even if they are a nuisance, for they can make a faithful ally amongst the spirits.

I will comfort you in sadness; I will lift your head and be your strength when you are weak. I will sing with you when you are joyful. I will abide beside you and honor you for a year and a day, and thereafter should the spirits bless us.

This place was dark and quiet with dreams.

If we must drown, let us do so entwined.

Our hands can steal, or they can give. They can harm, or they can comfort. They can wound and kill, or they can heal and save. Which will you choose for your hands Torin?

I tell myself I should remain guarded against you, even as we are fastened together. And yet another side of me believes that you and I could make something of this arrangement. That you and I are complements, that we are made to clash and sharpen each other like iron. That you and I will stay bound together by that which is nameless and runs deeper than vows, until the very end, when the isle takes my bones into the ground and my name is nothing but memory carved into a headstone.

But he would come if she needed him. All she had to do was stand in her garden and speak his name into the wind, and he would come when the whisper on the breeze found him. When he recognized her voice within it, whether the wind blew from the north, the south, the east, or the west. Sometimes it took hours for him to arrive, but he always faithfully answered.

How can I heal him when I haven’t healed myself?

The days may be dark,” Sidra said. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel joy.

You know what I am,” he said in a flat voice. “A bard?” “A bastard. I have no father, no proud lineage, no lands. I have nothing to offer you, Adaira.” “There is much you can offer me,” she countered, heady from the mere thought of his music. Spirits below, he had no idea the power he wielded. “And those things you mention don’t matter to me.” “But they matter to me,” Jack said, with a fist over his heart. “People will be appalled when they realize you want to marry me. That you chose me. Out of all the men in the east, I am the most unworthy.” “Let them,” Adaira said. “Let them be appalled, let them talk. Let them say whatever they want, it will soon fade, I promise you. And when it fades…it will be you and me and the truth. And that is all that matters in the end.

Adaira raised her hand and laid it against the arch of his cheek, and he knew she was beginning to see him as he saw her. The threads that tied them together. “My father was the Keeper of the Aithwood. It was he who brought you into the east, where he knew you would be safe and loved,” said Jack. It was liberating to speak those forbidden words aloud. The weight slipped from his chest like a stone, and he shivered to feel the space it left behind, waiting to be filled. “From your life came mine. I would not exist if you had been born in the east. I am but a verse inspired by your chorus, and I will follow you until the end, when the isle takes my bones and my name is nothing more than a remembrance on a headstone, next to yours.

Her faith was still some strange, broken mirror in her chest, the pieces sharp and jagged, reflecting years of her life out of order.

There is no failure in love, and I have loved without measure. In this, I am complete.

It feels strange,” she whispered. “To not know which side I belong to.” “You belong to both,” he replied. “You are the east as you are the west. You are mine as I am yours.

They drank to their wounds, their regrets, and their hopes, to the past, to how the choices each had made had unknowingly brought them back together.

for sometimes love was like dust in the eyes, a hindrance when it came to seeing truth.

She stumbled to her feet. The world spun for a moment—melting stars and a vermillion sunrise and the flap of a bird’s wings.

The spirits felt his attention shift from them to her. The woman with hair like moonlight, the woman made of sharp beauty.

I wanted, more than anything, to belong somewhere.

From your life came mine. I would not exist if you had been born in the east. I am but a verse inspired by your chorus, and I will follow you until the end, when the isle takes my bones and my name is nothing more than a remembrance on a headstone next to yours.

I am seized by the desire to find a way to step back in time, to choose differently. If I could only speak to my younger self…oh, the things I would say to her.