Soteria

[Thalia]

She absorbed his answer quietly, his solemnity nudging the realisation she had been about to speak out to drift on gentler tides. It was something of the loneliness that struck her hardest; not in what he said, but how he said it. The chord of it chimed somewhere deep. “There are different kinds of freedom. You answered the call. It was an ending,” she murmured. It was neither meant as assurance or comfort, only agreement. Sometimes the detritus of the past must be cleared before new things could grow in the space, but often that razing was a painful thing. It was his identity she perceived Tristan to wrestle with, not the finality of true death or even the reasons it had been necessary. His future must right now seem more rootless than it had before.

And he was afraid.

Water still rolled against the planes of her face. Tears tracked too now, trailing warmth amongst icy droplets. They were not for the dead troll. She could not rightly say what caused them, only that the emotion flooded vast and incomprehensible in her chest, and she was rarely circumspect with her feelings. “Oh, Vánagandr.” Her brow knit soft, but whatever she had been going to say next never left her lips.

The large wolf stoked wariness where lake monsters and trolls did not. It was not fear of his teeth that stilled her, but fear of his rejection. Nimeda did not enjoy the sense of being disliked, nor how it reminded her of the weight of past sins. She was guileless with her emotions, felt everything fully, but Tristan made her vulnerable in ways she did not really understand. 

She shifted a little where she sat, drawing in tighter like a flower closing up its petals. Her hand pressed over her own chest, hiding the symbol there from the wolf’s view. 

Then Tristan swallowed the heart, and was gone.

The wolf howled long and mournful afterwards, though no kin answered the call in the silence of Ice Land. Nimeda’s knees drew up to her chin, skin prickling with the sound. “I did not hurt him,” she said into the vacuum that followed. Her face pressed into the fold of her arms. A snarl roared. Hot breath seared her arms. And then she woke.