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[rehandle]

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[nightsung]

[ Please softens her, despite how endlessly brittle she feels, these days. ]

All right. I won’t push.

I asked him if he ever sees us leaving here. He told me you’re both dead.

But he told me lots of things. The way he does, now.

[rehandle]

I'm not dead.

[ He clarifies, and that in itself is too revealing, this another moment he should choose to be silent, no obligation to spill all his secrets. But she's asked, and he has answers, and this way they are answers Tony doesn't need to find amongst the fistfuls of bread he's surrounded by, masquerading as crumbs. ]

I was. I was dust. Then I wasn't.

[nightsung]

[ Shadowheart thinks she understands what’s between the lines; but that understanding is only the crest of a much larger creature beneath the water’s surface, the full measure of it still hidden in the deep. ]

And Tony?

[rehandle]

He's not dust.

[ Just dead. ]

[nightsung]

Stephen.

[ Not a conversation they should have this way, maybe, words on a screen conveying so little of her feelings in this moment—constricted by the scar on her heart, yes, but still felt. ]

What happened to you?

And to him?

[rehandle]

War.

[ It's the only word that gives form to the vast and horrible shape of it. The story is too long to make easy. This, necessary obfuscation that it is, is at least still true. ]

On a scale it's hard to really comprehend.

He knows, but he won't look. I want to give him that for as long as it lasts.

[nightsung]

I’m sorry.

[ Another word that isn’t enough to express the thought of losing them both to dust, to something vast and violent and cruel. ]

We used to take people’s memories from them, at the Cloister. To ease the pain. I believed in that, once.

But sometimes you’d find them lost on the streets of Baldur’s Gate, trying to find their way to a home they’d forgotten. Trying to map something their bones still knew but their mind couldn’t grasp.

I see that in him. I feel that in myself, with my memories that are still lost to the mirror.

I used to think oblivion was a blessing. I wonder, now, if it’s anything but.