Haven

Osthryn does not know when she fell asleep. The sleep was deep, but not restoring, and filled with dreams. The dreams themselves were confusing, a jumble of emotions and thoughts. Osthryn is convinced the last one is the worst.

As usual, it began with her falling helplessly through the air, the ground waiting to meet her below. This time, however, the dream shifted mid-way. Silovar catches her, and she falls light and safe in his waiting arms. This welcome twist did not last long before it was corrupted by the sudden rainfall of silver powder from above. Osthryn could only watch in horror as Silovar dissolved in front of her, and she was left to fall again. Forever. Into the abyss.

She gasps as she wakes, gripping the blankets beneath her like a vice. She is not consciously crying, but she feels the telltale sticky residue of the tears that stained her cheeks in her sleep.

A body shifts under the blankets next to her, and all at once she realises where she is. Silovar is turned onto his side, watching her with deep concern. She sits up, and rubs her eyes, pressing the palms of her hands against them.

"Did I scream?" She asks despondently, pulling her knees to her chest and burying her face. "No," Silovar assures her. "But you did beg me not to die. Several times." Osthryn cringes, "That is almost worse. I am sorry."

"It's bad that you thought I would die, yes, but I am really glad you don't want me dead," Silovar teases.

Osthryn uncurls herself, wiping her eyes. She looks down at Silovar, noticing that he is comfortably turned on his side. "It seems you have gotten some more movement back."

Silovar grins and pushes himself upright, crossing his legs under the blankets with emphasis as if to make a point, "Most, if not all." A sense of triumph stretches a small smile over Osthryn's lips, "So all you had to do was, in fact, rest."

"Somewhat, but not completely," Silovar answers, throwing the blankets off himself. The black robe from the meeting was replaced with a loose-fitting tunic and trousers. He had changed his clothes.

Osthryn looks down with realisation at the creased silk of her overskirts, and twists against the discomfiting tightness of her bodice. Her hand reaches to her head, and she gives a small sigh of relief when she feels that the pins still desperately holding her braid in its halo were not pushed too far out of place during the night.

Silovar continues, "I waited for you to fall asleep, and then I decided to try what I see you do when you use your healing magic. It is an interesting way that you use magic, by the way. It is almost as if you rely on explicitly instructing it to restore something to what you know its original state should have been."

Silovar stands, and pulls the blankets straight. "I just took the intention you showed me and let the nerves decide how to repair themselves."

Osthryn stares at him, "Barring that, which I would love to ask you more about later, how much did  you sleep?"

Silovar sits back down on the bed, crossing his legs under him. "Better than you did, from what I can tell." Osthryn rubs her eyes again, the need to wash her tear-streaked face tugging at her mind. She can admit that she is still groggy, but that is to be expected. It is not as if she is unused to nightmares. "I think I slept well enough given the circumstances."

Silovar sighs, looking at his hands folded in his lap. He looks up at Osthryn again. "Osthryn, you are so powerful, but you are filled with fear. It stifles you, it shrinks you."

Osthryn picks up the edge of her skirt hem, playing with the texture of the wrinkled silk, "There are many things that conspire to shrink me. I fight them constantly. If I did not, I would not be here. I would not have needed to flee Bettramon. I would have been a quiet village apothecary, mysteriously disappearing into a different face and to a different village as each generation passes. I would have shrunk the Dragon so small that I could no longer call myself one."

She looks Silovar in the eyes as she speaks. "I apologise if my fear is unbecoming to you, but it has not left me for four hundred years. It never will -- no matter how far I am from Bettramon. No matter how far South I wander," Osthryn gestures at Silovar, "it seems that the winds of home follow me. So I let it be. I live alongside it. I put it in its place, and I do my best."

"Why do you say the winds of home follow you, Osthryn?"

Osthryn shakes her head, "Look at yourself, Silovar. You leap off cliffs, you fly low and free over the city. You tell me how humans can do nothing and will do nothing to you. You show me the havens your people built for their immortality, you bring me where you insist we are safe. And you are poisoned. You stop breathing. You cannot move for a day, and it is the grace of the winds or the gods or whatever you ascribe that we were able to counteract the silver in the first place. From my perspective, Mountainkeep is no different to Bettramon. The people pray to the Dragons, they teach their children rhymes of how the Dragons keep watch over them in the night. And still..."

She pauses, looking past Silovar at the mantle, where the pendant lay the day before. "And still, in an instant, they turn. Like bloodthirsty scavengers," she hisses.

Silovar watches her, a darkness undercutting his expression.

"You do not believe that."

"I don't?" Osthryn frowns.

Silovar continues, "If you truly believed that, you would have removed yourself forever from living among them. You would never have healed the child, and you would have become the devil the people of Bettramon say we are. You fear them because you place them too high, and you make yourself too small."

Osthryn shakes her head, rubbing her wrists, "Silovar, you have not felt..."

"It does you no good to give such power to what you felt," Silovar interjects impatiently, "I do not doubt that the pain was real, and that it was repeated enough, and your elders were evil enough, to teach you to believe the lies about who you really are. But you stand face-to-face with the truth. What did you do when I fell last night? When I stopped breathing?"

"I made you breathe again."

"How?"

"I willed it so."

"You did. In a room full of these 'scavengers', you let your magic free. That does not sound like Bettramon has followed you. It sounds like you told your fear to obey you, and it did."

Osthryn runs her hand down her cheek, looking up at the canopy. The shapes she struggled to make out the night before appear as carved roses and acorns. Her mind fixates on the details, looking to ground her mounting annoyance at Silovar's insistence on misunderstanding her.

"Silovar, you tell me to make them small. You tell me that the healing magic I publicly used, out of place with myself, is proof I need not fear them. Yet you would have died. They dropped powder, glitter, in your wine that you chose to drink, and you almost died."

"And if I did die, I would have been resurrected. You too, Osthryn. You cannot die. We are immortal."

Osthryn opens her mouth to berate him for this unfounded confidence, but stops. Something clicks into place. The havens. The magical barrier that is supposed to capture the energy the Dragons expel when they awake from death. Her people's very real fear of death despite the "immortality" Silovar speaks of, and the hushed whispers of the Necromancers that the bards link to the "winged devils".

"Silovar, I am serious about this, what would have happened if you died there?"

"...Osthryn, I don't think you are hearing me."

"Silovar, I hear you clearly. Boring logistics. Step by step. You are in this court, you would know the procedure. What would have happened had you died in that room?"

"The guards would have summoned a court healer, preferably one already present, who would declare my death. My body would be taken to the dungeons, where a priestess, which could also serve as the court healer, would conduct a soul-cleansing ritual. My body would lie in state for a few days, and then, depending on my station, I would be buried in a district ceremony or the masoleum."

"At what point would you resurrect, in this scenario?" Osthryn asks. Silovar shrugs, "Dragons can resurrect on their own, but only if they are around sufficient ambient magic. Having another Dragon around helps, which is why the havens were made in the first place."

"Is it possible, do you think, for a human Necromancer to trigger a ressurrection?"

Silovar frowns, "Only if they are powerful enough. And the suns have waned so far that the human mages' command of magic has weakened considerably. You would likely require several acting all at once."

"Do wyverns resurrect?" Osthryn asks. Silovar nods noncomittally. "They can be resurrected, but they are not immortal. They are not fully fae."

"But they do have inherent magical energy, like ours to a degree. Do they also expel this energy when they are brought back?"

Silovar leaps off the bed, shrugging his thick coat over his shoulders and snatching up the enchanted stone with which to summon Tomas. He turns to Osthryn.

"There is someone that owes us many answers, someone I want you to meet."