There is no way for Linnea to know the gravity of this moment as her mother comes to press a kiss to her brow, no way to understand the weight Leliana must still carry upon her shoulders at the sight of a daughter returned from the afterlife. She is too content to feel anything but the smile on her dark lips as she lifts her face to catch moms kisses, too busy being loved to understand yet what she has lost.
“Hi mom.” She says, and she tries again to stand, but there are roots and vines and things all around her that hold her so safe against the ground. She cannot see those things though, can only feel the resistance of a body that seems like it does not want to listen. “I feel,” but she pauses because she cannot name what this feeling is, because there is no word big enough to encompass all these things. Tired, heavy, lost, hazy. Like she is wearing something over her skin and she still needs to learn the weight of it. “I feel different.” She says instead, picking the word because it will be enough to convey the growing unease in her chest.
“I feel,” then she frowns, and there is new worry in those pink tourmaline eyes, a fear that tries to clutch at a heart that no longer exists, at lungs that are buried in a body lost to war. She gasps, and somehow fear finds its way inside her chest to bury like sick and rot in the dark grey bark. “Mom, where is Nikolaus?” His name is a key that unlocks a flood within her, and suddenly there are tears rolling down cheeks that he would never be able to recognize. But she can seem him, see everyone in those last moments as denial withers beneath his weight in her chest and she is suddenly free from the way it had blinded her.
War and screaming and so much fire. Nikolaus and the portals and the absolute peace she had felt in her heart when she saw that he would be safe. It is the only memory she has of death, that quiet acceptance. That belief that it would be okay because he would be okay. It is a memory that protects her from the more graphic truth of what had come next and how unprepared she had been for what death by fire would feel like. Even now, even in memory, he keeps her safe.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
