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thepilgrimofwar · 4 years

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Whiskey & Rye

“You’re like an actual fucking ghost,” Zarannis muttered as she appeared behind Lirelle- Who, since she did not sleep, wandered the halls of Emberheart manor endlessly in darkness. “How many House Guards have you already scared half to death?”

“Five, by Judereth’s count,” she replies matter of factly. Though she had shed her traveling cloak, the rest of her attire was still dark, chosen to make use of the shadows and hollows in the southern forests she had stalked for a time. “You reek of alcohol, bad enough that I can smell it.”

“Can you?” The girl said, folding her arms and shrugging. “Well, I’m on the prowl for more. You’re free to join me- Unless you don’t-” Zarannis gestured up and down at the priestess. “Drink, anymore.” The girl from Wintergale had spent the last day with whatever whiskey she managed to ferry away after the funeral that day. Graciously, she had shared some with the Ranger Captain in the guest rooms, and spent the rest of it without a thought to contend with. She was drunk enough that even Stenden hadn’t asked for her help, given she was not in a state to make promises or vows that may get her killed. So, the worries in her heart from the implications of all this… Lordly nonsense, was a problem for tomorrow’s Zarannis. So she thought.

“Do they even know where half their stores of alcohol have gone?” Lirelle shook her head at the offer. “There is no point in me drinking. But if you’re asking for company, I’ll join you.”

Zarannis gestured wildly for her to follow her on her quest to the stores in the back. She pretended to know where she was going. Logic dictated that they were somewhere downstairs, near the kitchen, likely somewhere cold like a cellar- only that the Emberhearts did not have a cellar.

“So. How’s… Death?” She said sheepishly as she wandered her way through the manor by candlelight.

“Unnatural.”

“Of course,” she mumbles. “But seeing that you made it to the other side and then came back… I figured you’d be the best person to ask about what waits for all of us on the other side?”

“That depends on what you believe.”

Zarannis paused in her step. “Right…” she held the end of her word for a second longer than she needed to. “So if I believed that I wanted to be reincarnated and do my life over again, that’d happen?”

“Possibly. There are rules there, Old rules. If that is the path that you wish for, there is some patron or some way to achieve it.”

“Good to know,” she says as she makes it to a dead end filled with crates on the first floor. Cocking her head, she follows the wall. There had to be a door soon that’d take her to the kitchen or the pantry. “Beats getting my soul sucked up to feed some sort of Troll deathgod,” she mumbles dryly as she finally makes it out to the moonlit courtyard.

Passing by House Guards on patrol, she finds her way towards the storerooms, and her eyes light up at the sight of barrels. But frowned again when she smelled variations of olive oil.

“I’m just wondering where the Kestrels all ended up. On the other side I mean. Or the Tal’dorei who followed me. If they all got what they wanted in the end- if they sold their souls to do it- or if they just… Dissipated into the void.”

Lirelle wasn’t sure if she should tell her that there wasn’t some treasure at the end of her hunt, some secret cellar full of alcohol secreted away at some corner of the house. Between her and Vaelrin, they had probably finished most of what was in the estate. “If they wished to, they did.”

Zarannis bowed her head. There was some peace in that at least. “If that’s true, then hopefully it’s all been worth it,” she said as she went deeper into the store rooms into the back where the grain was stacked. “I’m still deciding if it was. I lost everything I cared about in that war and all it did was usher in an uneasy peace and an age of banditry and Warlords.”

Lirelle regarded the drunk woman as she searched. All the decisions she had made in the war were easily made, and she would have made each and every one again a thousand times over. “Peace is peace. Bandits and warlords are easily put to the sword. We won, and that’s all that matters.”

“What good is peace when you’ve no one to share it with?” Zarannis poked through the storeroom and when she was satisfied, headed back out and tried the opposite side of the manor. Her mannerisms darkened. “Do you think Lady Thelryn got what she wanted?”

Lirelle could still remember Azriah’s face, the way the shadows danced in her eyes. It had rolled off her like a current, and she had felt the magic granted to herself stir in the confines of her will. “She got exactly what she wanted, which is why she gave in.”

“Do you think-” Zarannis stopped. “I did the right thing?” The girl looked back at her friend, “I followed orders. We all did. We won the war. Yes, I know. But was any of it right?” The weight of the war seemed to catch up with her now. The hold that whiskey had over her was starting to fade. “I acted without question- Ever the good soldier- Ever the stoic general- But there are things I should’ve put a stop to and didn’t. People I should’ve listened to. And perhaps, just left Everleigh to the whims of our Grand Arcanist, we’d still have her with us.”

“We were always in the right. They brought the war to us, they chose to endanger our civilians. Every action we took to bring an end to it was right. We would have won whether she had taken the Dame or not, such things are irrelevant.”

The ex-ranger shook her head. “I doubt that such things are irrelevant. You speak of winning as if it were the highest order of things, but what would you have sacrificed to win if you had had to? Dawnveil? Your family? Would it still be worth it then?”

Lirelle just stares at the drunk woman. Perhaps she was too far gone to even have this conversation. “You don’t seem to understand. I would have died a thousand times to keep them safe. You win for them. So they never see the things that you do. That is the entire point.”

Zarannis tipped her head downwards in the candle light, and shadows pooled round her eyes. “Everyone I won it for died in that war. You are lucky, that the ones closest to your heart never had to see the same things you had to. I didn’t have that luxury.” She looked up at the ghost before her. “So perhaps it may have been worth it for you. Dawnveil is safe. Your loved ones alive and well. Everything you fought for still stands at the end of the day. But for me- The Kestrels are dead, our lodge is burned- Tal’dorei who followed me are buried- and the Sunguard no longer exists. Everything that I fought for no longer exists.”

“Never bring something you aren’t willing to lose when you go to war.” She said it like it was the simplest thing in the world, and to her, it was. More than half of her life had been spent on one battlefield or another, this harshest of realities learned early on.

“I didn’t bring them with me. The ones I weren’t willing to lose had come of their own accord- and I cannot make their choices for them.” The girl shook her head, turning back towards the darkness, stepping forward into the unknown in the hopes of finding something to dull her senses once more. “They were beside me, around me- they were the war.”

“Then why ruin yourself over the choices made by others?” Her voice rang out in the quiet.

“I guess,” she said softly, as she finally found herself a crate of unopened whiskey. “That’s something you may never understand.”

“Perhaps I won't, but answer me this. If they meant that much to you, why didn’t you die for them?”

“Because I loved my country, more than I loved myself,” she turns back to Lirelle, then at the crate she now cradled in her arms. She gazed at the way the bottles reflected the candle light. “But now? I’m not so sure.”

@retributionpriest @azriah

#Epilogue #Funerals #Aftermath #Zarannis

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