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Estinien paces away the night in his room at the Annex when he hears the knock on his door. He raises his head to call out, but the door begins to open without his command.
In the doorway stands Bartholomew. Face soft. Dressed in a plain white nightgown - its fine hem nearly strokes the floor. Within her eyes is a determination that is reaching its embers, yet the tolls of exhaustion pull weighty bags beneath those white lashes.
Estinien stops all movement.
She already looks like a ghost, and his pulse begins to race.
“Bartholomew?” he asks, though he has no reason to - he can fully believe that the pale mirage in front of him is real, that she has arrived for some reason in full body. “You alright?”
She says no words, but she does step into the room. Her hand leaves the door, and the yawning chasm of the dark corridor beyond peeks through. Still, Bartholomew approaches.
She seems so timid now, where before, she had been full of boldness without an ounce of fear. Yet now, she all but embodies a specter. Silence. Wide eyes. Soft – she is beginning to blur at her edges. She pauses before him, still meeting his eyes. The two of them are supposed to be the same height, but she seems so small now.
Estinien reaches a hand up and touches her shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asks again, but this time, the usual strength in his voice grows weak.
Still, no answer. She looks down at his hand. She closes her eyes. A deep breath in, and Bartholomew reaches her own hand up to clasp his. She pulls it from her shoulder, but does not release it. Instead, her other hand finds his opposite as well. She looks again, focused on the connection of their hands - raises their palms together as if they were to dance.
Her body shifts weight, the only clue that she is, indeed, still alive. Estinien can feel the most rare sensation of tears in his throat, but he stuffs them down, and he shifts as she does - until they are beginning a silent, tuneless sway within the vast space around them.
It already feels as though they are at the end of the world, and - well. Truth is, the morning would bring them to the farthest reach of the universe to face their foe.
If they fail, it is not just their lives or the lives of the ones they love at risk. It is the whole world that will pass.
Earlier in the evening, their group had discussed their plans for the coming battle. Perhaps a futile discussion - they had little to expect. Bartholomew retired early and left the room in solemn silence. Even the blind could read her mood, and in such a case, it was their blind sorceress that spoke when Bartholomew left.
“No matter what, she must come back alive.”
Nobody would’ve thought to disagree - and nobody had more to say. Not even Thancred, her husband - not even Estinien himself. He wouldn’t pretend to speak on behalf of her additional husband, but even the image of his best friend’s grief, the grief of her child, was enough to add to his own chill.
When they first met, Bartholomew was just a man, or so he’d thought. Estinien had been so caught in his own hell, fighting a war with no reason, where only grief and rage remained. That war had nearly killed him – his body possessed by the vengeful dragon seeking to destroy them all. He’d thought Bartholomew to be a compassionate fool (and he’s still right), but instead of slaying him for the safety of his people and all, Bartholomew saved him. He saved him not just from the dragon who possessed him, but also from his own feelings of despair. And when he finally mustered his thanks for his life, Bartholomew had simply smiled - as if he hadn’t risked his own to do anything when he could’ve and should’ve killed him outright.
Estinien knew from the first that the weight Bartholomew, this Warrior of Light, carried was too immense. He was the first to try and balance those scales. “Has it occurred to you that you may be sending him to his death?” he had asked more than once. Even still, it took others far too long to recognize such risks as well. All friends they claimed to be, but it had taken so long for them to see Bartholomew’s vulnerability. Even when his form changed, and she expressed herself in a new, feminine body, they still didn’t seem to understand.
No - she had to face her own possession, her deepest nightmare, for the coin to drop.
(He does not want to remember it. The screaming - the clutching, the pulling at her hair, the unending well of pain that it seemed she could find no bottom to. Their sorceress had to erect an arcane wall of silence to keep from alerting the rest of the camp, and even after holding her so tight, a single lapse of his grip in the night meant she tried to crawl out of their cabin into the blowing snows. To escape? To die? He did not know. Thancred had been the one to decide to sedate her, though seeing her swallow such poison left his own skin crawling. He would agree to the choices her husband made of her care, especially with the world still at risk - but he remembered the aftermath of his own possession. Leaving the nation he loved - sleepless nights - scrubbing his scars until the bleeding wells felt like his own again. He does not know where she found the strength to keep going so soon.)
Her hands grip at his so tightly, and Estinien fights to remain in the room with her, not to give over to his own memories. Her downcast eyes seem so focused on their silent ballroom dance. Her feet don’t even make a sound against the floor. No illusions or glamours remain to hide his vision of her. Broken horns, callouses on her fingertips - the deep scars grooved into her skin beneath her neckline, including the shearing that seems to emit light, the scar she will not confess what for. And it aches. The tears that insist on building into his throat push up into his nose, but besides a silent exhale, he does no more.
Their sorceress - Y’shtola, Bartholomew’s best friend by any measure - had only one thing to add before they adjourned for the night. A resolute declaration, unmistakable in gravity: “She will die for us if we let her.” And she’s right, he thinks as he watches the poor, porcelain tears begin to drip and shatter down Bartholomew’s cheeks. Everybody has treated her for so long as a messiah that she has begun to believe it. Worst still, she hears “messiah” and thinks “martyr”. He cannot help but think of her child, the one she saved from her own tribe, a tribe who would’ve killed the infant for their own fanaticism. The toddler’s big brown eyes - his white hair - his hands always grasping for his mother. Estinien fights not to grip harder at Bartholomew himself, but whether such a grip hurts or not, her hold changes in turn. She clutches at his hands.
Their dance slows and stops. A sob finally rattles her frame.
Estinien needs no words to understand. He draws her into his arms. He does not complain when she holds him so tightly that he feels he might break.
She will die for us if we let her.
The world might end in the morrow, he thinks - but if she dies for them, he cannot think any outcome would be worse.