Vaelira has never once, in the entire time I've known her, asked permission to enter the World Fragment. I used to find this presumptuous. I have since come to understand it as the closest thing to a compliment she's constitutionally capable of giving — a kind of trust so total it doesn't bother dressing itself up as a request.
She came down the slope the way she does everything, which is to say as though gravity were a suggestion she was choosing, generously, to go along with today. Her hair — that deep, sky-before-dawn indigo that fades to near-silver at the ends, like something time itself had bled the color out of — was loose around her shoulders, and her robes, dark and threaded through with those faint moving lines of pale gold, looked, as they always do, as though she'd slept in them for a century before bothering to put them on. Knowing her, that may not be far from the truth.
She didn't ask what we were discussing. She rarely does; it isn't that she lacks curiosity, only that she's decided, somewhere in the vast unbothered center of herself, that most conversations will get to the point eventually without her needing to hurry them along. She simply walked the rest of the way down the slope, dropped to the grass beside me with the boneless, unceremonious grace of something that has never once worried about being watched, and settled her head against my chest, one arm thrown loosely over my ribs, as though she'd been invited — which, in the only sense that mattered to her, she had.
"You're heavier than you look," I said.
"I'm doing it on purpose. It's called commitment." Her eyes were already closed. "Don't stop on my account. I heard the name. I intend to sleep through the boring parts and wake up for the ones that matter."
"You say that every time."
"And I'm always right about which parts matter. It's a gift." She yawned — an entirely unnecessary gesture, since she doesn't need the air any more than I need the breath, but one she performs anyway, out of what I can only assume is pure aesthetic commitment to the bit. "Carry on. Pretend I'm not here. I find it helps people relax."
Ilyrisse's hand had never left my hair. If anything, Vaelira's arrival seemed to settle something in her rather than disturb it — I felt the small release of tension in her fingers, the kind that comes when a room that was starting to feel too full of one particular silence suddenly has enough warmth in it to spread the weight around. She looked down at Vaelira with an expression I've come to recognize as specific to her and almost no one else: fond, faintly exasperated, entirely without the wariness she still, even now, extends automatically to strangers.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
"You didn't knock," Ilyrisse said.
"There's no door. I checked, extensively, the first several dozen times I came here. It remains the most poorly designed private sanctuary I've ever encountered, and I include several literal fortresses I have personally helped besiege in that assessment."
"It has a door," I said. "You've simply decided it doesn't apply to you."
"That's the same thing as not having one, from where I'm lying." She burrowed slightly further into my side, the picture of a creature entirely satisfied with the arrangement of the universe around her, at least for the current fraction of it she was occupying. "Now. Vesalia. I want the whole thing, properly told, none of your usual editing where you leave out the parts that make you look foolish. I like those parts. They're my favorites."
"You know her?"
"I know of her," Vaelira said, and there was something underneath the sleepy drawl now, something a shade more careful. "Different thing entirely. Her world was old when mine was young, and gods talk, when they think no one's listening closely enough to remember what they said. I heard her name mentioned, once or twice, a very long time ago, always in the tone people use for things they'd rather not examine too closely." One golden eye opened, briefly, fixing on me with an attention that had nothing sleepy left in it at all. "So. Tell it properly. I have opinions about her world, and I intend to interrupt if you get any of them wrong."
I looked up, past both of them, at the tree that has no name and the sky that never finishes falling, and felt the old, familiar ache settle into its place — the specific weight of a memory that has never once gotten lighter no matter how many times I've carried it out into the light.
"It starts," I said, "on the day I met her. Which is also, more or less, the day she died the second time — though I didn't understand that until much later, and neither did she."
Ilyrisse's hand resumed its slow, patient reading of my hair. Vaelira's breathing had already begun to slow beside me, not quite asleep yet, but close, the particular half-drowse she uses when she wants to listen without admitting she's listening.
"Go on," Ilyrisse said, very softly.
So I did.