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Chapter 19
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2022-03-28 00:14:39Alcina wakes first.
This time, she awakens with the immediate and keen awareness of precisely where she is. That is not her own bed, but the one she'd just shared with Lord Brendan.
Lord Brendan, who is evidently still asleep when Alcina looks to her right.
Alcina can't help but to stare.
In sleep, the lord's features seem impossibly young - with none of the heavy presence that bears on him like an ever-present weight when the lord is awake.
It's something about his eyes, Alcina thinks; those dark, fathomless depths that speak of years much, much beyond the lord's age of twenty-five.
And there's a fascination here, too, of being permitted to observe such a feared man up close like being allowed into a tiger's den when the ferocious tiger is declawed in its slumber.
"If you leaned in any closer, one would think it is my person people should worry about, rather than yours,"
Lord Breandan's low, rough timber - pitched mo
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Brendan's never slept so well in the twenty-five years he's been alive, as he does now.Brendan had learned early on that being able to control something did not mean the same thing as being immune to those same terrors. Born with theGiftof being permitted to command all those wraiths, terrors, and horrors that haunt the minds of men, made him suffer the same every day.Most nights, ever since he'd personified his Gift as a young child, he'd found his dreamless sleep plagued by the same terrible things that he can command unto others.As he'd explained to Alcina, these shadows cannot kill him the way he can kill others with them.But it does not change the fact that he nearly dreads sleep with the anticipation of an endless, all-consuming despair each night.Even if the terrors don't visit him every night, the nights when he is given the brief reprieve, he spends trembling in fear, teeth grit and back ramrod straight, bracin
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Alcina wakes up in the morning alone, as she has grown used to in the nights since she'd begun to sleep in Brendan's bed. The lord, it would seem, is an incredibly early riser. She finds out from Mary that it is because Lord Brendan has swordsmanship practice with Commander Lincoln most mornings. As it is, the piece of information sparks the beginnings of an idea in her mind. She can't stop remembering what it had felt like to be so utterly helpless. When all she'd found herself able to do, was clutch desperately at the horse's reigns that had carried her away from Brendan, where he stood fending off the bandits on his own. How even when she'd returned, she'd found herself at their attackers' terrifying mercy (or lack thereof), with nothing to defend herself with. Alcina had never been permitted the opportunity to take up the sword as her elder brother had. A runt like her, after all, could not be permitted anywhere near the ba
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Except, Alcina doesn't quite let the matter rest.The following day, with much effort, she manages to rise early enough to follow Brendan to his practice match with Lincoln.She reaches the courtyard just in time to see Brendan narrowly avoid being skewered by the sharp end of Lincoln's sword and can't help the quiet squeak that flits from her lips at the near-miss.Brendan's eyes snap to her, having just noticed her presence.Lincoln seizes the opportunity to slam the butt end of his sword into Brendan's side, sending him clattering to the floor."Brendan!"Alcina doesn't think she's ever run so fast in her life as when she flits to Brendan's crumpled side, worry pounding in her chest. "Are you alright?"Brendan, where he's sitting on the ground in the middle of sending a particularly scathing look in Lincoln's direction, turns his incredulous gaze to Alcina next.Alcina, who's gingerly grasping his arm and trying unhelpfully
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The human mind, it is said, works by creating associations between experiences, memories, objects, and ideas.Despite all signs to the contrary, Brendan would seem to be a human.For how else could he explain the way his mind seems to have - without his permission - bridged an association between Alcina and the benediction of reprieve from his nightly terrors?Undoubtedly, the way that Brendan finds his gaze and his attention drawn to Alcina like the subconscious weight of a gravitational pull.It can only be explained by the mysterious abnormalities of how the human mind works.She is unlike anything Brendan has ever laid eyes upon before.She is not immune to the fears that plague all men. Still, unlike any man Brendan has known before, she seems impervious to the kind of paralysis that confounds all men in the face of their fears.The comparison of the pretty, delicate features contrasts with the surprising strength of tempered ste
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Under the subtly growing attentions of Lord Brendan, Alcina blooms like a sunflower in the sun.She's never had someone treat her like something special, after all.Sure, there had been her brothers. But given their place in her life - as her older brothers, obligated under their relation to love her. Though, she supposes her parents never seemed to feel that same obligation.It had been difficult for her to find any legitimacy in their proclamations of her worth.A child's first and foremost ideation of her worth, after all, stems primarily from her parents; and then from her peer group.Alcina had lost the affections of the former when she turned ten with no Gift to speak of.Alcina rapidly lost her peer group when the former decided that she was to be hidden away in the hopes that out of sight, out of mind would apply to the significant mark of failure on their House.Having, suddenly, the kind of hypothetical gaze that Lord Brenda
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Brendan, who has undoubtedly noticed Alcina’s presence flitting behind him, keeps his eyes trained on the newcomers.“Must you always arrive in such an abrupt manner?” he sighs, and something about the tone relaxes some of the anxiety that had been building in Alcina’s chest.Alpha Percy’s pale lips quirk into a sharp smirk. The Alpha’s face remains as impassive as ever, though his eyes - bright and curious andkeen, like an eagle who’s spotted a bird of prey - remain fixed, for some reason, on Alcina.Alcina feels as though she’s been pinned to the floor she stands by the cat-eyed stare leveled upon her.She shifts, unconsciously, just an inch closer to Brendan. He brings a hand to curl around her hip, a weight that feels comfortingly likesafety.Like an assurance.The Alpha’s eyes, piercing, zoom in on the minute shift.“There is an urgent manner.”A
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“It is alright,” Darla says, with the kind of snappy openness that accompanies an uncharacteristic honesty for someone of their class.“I am a lot to digest’, or so Brendan says.”Brendan.Alcina wonders, not for the first time, if the semblance of normalcy and familiarity she’d been allowing herself to imagine in her head had simply been that: an imagination.Being suddenly confronted with all the bounds of a life she had no knowledge of reminds Alcina with sharp and bitter acrimony of just how little she knows about the lord.“Have you,” Alcina begins, hesitantly - but unable to help herself. “Have you known Brendan long?”Darla stares at her curiously.In Darla’s piercing and sharp gaze, curiosity feels more like being broken down and dissembled than merely inquired after.Alcina fidgets.“Brendan,” Darla drawls as though testing out the nam
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She only knows a stark and ugly honesty that her brother Nordin has constantly sighed would be her undoing one day.Nordin hadn't been wrong.Brendan is silent.So I am simply yet another burdensome thing to be set aside, out of sight.Alcina is sotiredof being set aside.Somewhere, in between Brendan looking at her with a gravity underpinning his gaze, as though Alcina were something particularly remarkable, and Brendan, allowing Alcina to cling to him, Alcina had forgotten what it felt like."Why am I not permitted to know?" It sounds childish and sullen, even to Alcina's own ears, but she feels so-choked up.The words come tumbling out without her control. "Would it really be so burdensome if I were allowed to-"Brendan's brow furrows harshly. "Because you do not need to know."Alcina physically jerks back as though stung. The bewilderment in Brendan's gaze grows more pronounced, as though he c
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Alcina watches wordlessly as the Gifted medic heals Brendan’s palm. She stares intently at the white glow emanating from the woman’s hand, as she hovers it over Brendan’s burned palm. Slowly, the reddish hue of the burn recedes, until Brendan’s palm has returned to its normal state.Alcina wishes she could have been born with a Gift like hers, something that would allow her to chase away the bruises and ailments and scars on Brendan’s skin; not something that would hurt him. Human nature, she realizes, is greedy beyond all belief. How many years had she yearned for a Gift, any Gift, she remembers wishing desperately in these very halls? And now that she has been graced with one, she yearns for something more, still.With a respectful bow, the healer excuses herself, leaving just the two of them in the otherwise empty room. Alcina doesn’t move from her perch, sitting ramrod straight in her chair. Stares at Brendan’s hand, every fiber of her being longing to reach out for it so that
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“No.”Alcina fumbles with the straps currently adorning Perseus’s broad back the contraption that, she claims, is meant to strap a person in. Brendan stares at it with an unmoving expression.Alcina pouts.Brendan remains firm. “You do realize,” he drawls. “That I am, technically, still in recovery, yes?”Alcina winces.“I don’t know about you, but I’m rather certain that falling hundreds of feet to my death is not what the healers advised for a speedy recovery-”Alcina whines at him. Stomps her foot, even, in a way that Brendan resolutely does not find at all endearing.“You won’t fall,” she says. “I have been practicing very hard this entire week, at flying with Perseus!”Brendan raises a solemn brow. “You mean to say that this is a newly acquired skill that you are attempting to pass off on me, then?”Alcina flushes. “Brendan,” she wheedles. Brendan briefly spares a moment of appreciation, anew, for the two older brothers who have raised this petulant little thing, all these years
