Yseulte stood at the edge of the world, watching the sea for a long time.
She closed her eyes, enjoying the light of her last sunrise in World's Edge washing over her numb body. The frozen wind stirred her flaxen hair and cupped her fair face with cool hands that tasted salty and cold, but just as quickly as the tide comes crashing in, the fleeting touch was gone, receding back out to the sea. She felt the hush of silence all around her, drifting on her conscious like the snow that kissed her shoulders and cheeks in a gentle embrace. The eerie hush of stillness and the gentle lull of the sea embraced her like a lost sister, and it was a tranquil, still silence that gently wrapped around her weary body and soothed her conflicted heart.
Though the dawn was cold and pale, the wane sunlight seemed to cup her face gently in a gesture of warmth. This calm sense of quietness that made Yseulte feel secure and hidden away from the rest of the world. Well, Itzal might be comfortable in this bone-chilling cold and snow, but Yseulte was not. She was a wild desert flower, conceived and born of fire itself onto sands scorched and burned beneath the sun's hostile gaze, raised with the dry desert wind in her hair and the shifting earth and scorpions beneath her hooves. Even the seasons were different here in Helovia—this Frostfall was an alien concept to Yseulte (only last year had she experienced snow for the first time), and her lithe desert body was ill adapted to such a frigid environment. She was thinner than she ought to be, and cold all the time; an aching cold that made her crippled hind leg throb and kept her awake late into the shadows of night. She would miss the Dragonheart's fires, although she would never admit it, not even to herself.
But she did not visit the fires, as Itzal wished to do. The flames fascinated the little cub, but she wanted to watch the gray sea one last time. Sullen and bitter, the white tiger cub crept beneath the shrine and flopped to the ground, gnawing on an old bone he'd dug up somewhere.
It was peaceful here at the edge of the sea, and once, standing on this very ledge nearly a year ago, Yseulte had wished more than anything that she might belong here and had dared hope that she had found her refuge in this kingdom by the sea, a sweet sanctuary that kept the darkness that plagued her soul at bay. And it had, for a time. She discovered friendship in the most unlikely of places, in Torasin, her summer-eyed friend, and in Lace, her gentle mentor with the sad, distant gaze, as if he had lived a thousand previous lives and none of them happy. She even dreamed dreams of creation and purpose rather than darkness and destruction, and learned from a valiant, fearless queen and her kind, compassionate king.
She would miss them, she realized.
The wounds of Torasin's death still ran deep, raw, and red in her heart; leaving behind her first family in Helovia only salted those wounds further.
She had never truly been part of the Qian, however. She pretended, mostly, but in reality, Yseulte felt very much like an outsider. A sham, pretending to be something she was not. She belonged in the world of thieves, and murderers, of backstabbers and liars. She didn't deserve belong to this...this honorable family. The word was foreign to her in a way that made her heart ache strangely. It had been doing that a lot lately. She wished the heart wasn't such a weak, vulnerable organ that felt so much.
As much as she pretended, the Qian were not her kin.
They were not her desert sisters.
And yet, she owed them so much. Mirage, Thor, Lace, Torasin.
And I repay them by leaving...
(( obviously this is before the darkness and the disappearance of the gods <3 ))
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