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She wakes with a start to unfamiliar environs.
This is not her ceiling—not the canopy of canvas hung over the bed in her cliffside waystop; not the stone facade that rises above Mor Dhona, giving a name to the likeliest place for her to lay her head. This is certainly not the gilt-tracery mosaic of some Amaurot apartment.
It’s warm.
She hears the rise and fall of breathing far too steady to be her own, and Shasi slowly turns her head.
The spill of his blonde hair is lank and damp from the shower—bells must have passed since then, and in Thanalan the desert air would have wrung them both out long since, but … she strains to listen past Eros’s breathing, and yes; there is the distant rush of waves.
La Noscea, then. With him—neither should be a surprise. How often had she returned to Limsa Lominsa simply for him? Her head hurts and her throat is dry. His arms are heavy, still wound around her.
One touches the small of her back, fingers splayed loosely over the branching, fern-like scar, twin to the one on her front.
His other hand is between her legs, thick fingers not quite reaching inside her. Shasi shifts her weight and finds herself sore; his fingertips spark that sensation anew.
Not a surprise that she’d come here. An inevitability. She had found him dancing for money, stole him away for a drink, and turned his head by refraining to follow up with the usual proposition. In return he had poured out a measure of trust; had laid before her a banquet of secrets and suffering, speaking of things too long unspoken. This she was used to.
Then Eros van Aventis—no, Eros yae Galvus—had asked her to unburden herself before him in turn.
This was strange.
So too the fact that she had fallen asleep in this rented bed—she had meant to linger only so long as it took him to fall asleep, but perhaps she had succumbed first. It will take some doing to extricate herself from his grasp, and yet she must. With war-callused hands she grasps his wrists, marveling at the black and red whorls of ink that decorate his skin. Slowly—ever so slowly—she unwinds them from about her.
He stirs, and she freezes, ears trained forward to catch any hitch in his breathing. Her attention lingers upon his face; the fringe of his pale lashes hides those golden eyes, and with his face slack in sleep the resemblance to his kin is more obvious than ever. Awake, he is rather too animated—not given to Zenos’s apathetic anomie nor Varis’s dour mien, the relative he most resembles, she finds, is his grandsire Solus.
But Eros’s smiles are more expressive than wry, and that dimple in his cheek is not of the Galvus canon. Something of his mother’s, she supposes.
He does not rouse as she lays his arms loosely atop his chest. Shasi finds the room far colder once she’s slipped from the bed; she gathers her discarded clothing, clutching it to herself. There comes the oddest impulse to stay—after all, he had invited her to, less with words than deeds when he had turned on its face the chronometer meant to keep the time she was allotted with him. No less so when they had washed in the wake of their coupling and he had not handed her those garments she now holds against her body, but tugged her back into the bed that still smelled of them both. But she had been lucky to wake silent once and would not be so again. His face is so peaceful in repose, she thinks. She will not be the one to steal the ease from that countenance.
If she does not go now, she will never make it out. Shasi creeps across the floor, and quiet as she can, puts a door between them, standing naked in the silent halls of the bawdyhouse that—however impossibly—hosts a prodigal prince of the Empire. The sky is pre-dawn grey outside the distant windows, and she hastens to dress, confident now that the sound of her footfalls should not give her away.
Knowing not what she flees, X’shasi Kilntreader steals away into the last of the night.