In faith, there is no man.

Being broken is a strangely abstract thing. In vague imaginings, those dreamy nightmares of her previous life, she imagined that being broken was accompanied by such a gust of crushing, reverberating anguish that it overwhelmed the senses, blotting out everything else.

Reality is different. She had anticipated sadness and anger—a fermenting, festering swell of anger—but the grief disarms her.

Grief does not work the way she thought it would. It seems to ebb and flow, building underneath that veneer of "fine," seeping through the cracks when the pressure mounts too high, and then falling in a void of numbness. Her limbs feel heavy long after the bones are set, and the vague pin-pricks of a headache lurk between her eyes. And her eyes, they feel heavy too, dragged down in a state of exhaustion that just doesn't quite seem real, doesn't quite feel tangible.

Nothing feels real anymore. That should be frightening—this should all be frightening—but then again, if it felt real she would have to cope with it being real.

She sits on her bed, watching porridge sludge off the spoon held between three stiff fingers.

This is real.

He's concerned that her food is only half-eaten. She can tell, but she can't seem to make her jaw move enough to get it all down. The porridge just sticks in her mouth, almost suffocatingly, and her arm feels like lead, hanging in the air.

He doesn't try to talk to her—it's what she likes best about him. It's why it has been so easy to stay, though somewhere in her she suspects she couldn't get herself to go even if she wanted to. He could ask a lot of questions. He's probably entitled to ask a lot of questions now, after all this time, but he doesn't.

It's strange, because on some level she would like him to talk at her. Not to her—not in a way that would require her to respond. Just at her, so she can hear a voice. It could be about cooking or gardening—something mundane that she could just focus on for a minute, something she could cling to, so she could start building herself back around this crumbling, fractured thing inside her, build herself back to normal, if only until the grief breaks over her again.

Just please, please don't make me answer.

Sometimes he leaves something to read, or a little puzzle to solve, and she can detach from what has happened. In those moments she begins to feel like herself again, maybe even starts to get a handle on this... this thing. But it's the little things that remind her. The flower placed on her dinner plate. The sunlight streaming through the blinds. The scar twitching on her chest.

He puts a book down on the bedside table this time. Medicinal Herbs and Gardening.

"I will be having dinner out on the veranda this evening," he tells her. "Please feel free to join me, if you want. The fresh air will do you some good."

He leaves after that, and she stares down at the title font on the book cover for a while, not really seeing it.

The air is cooler and lighter out here. It feels different going through her lungs, but a lot of things feel different in her body now. The sun, even in its dim setting light, feels harsh against her eyes and she turns her face away from it. The kiss of its warmth is nice though, almost comforting.

The rest of this place is as modest as her room. That distantly surprises her. In her experience, men of wealth and importance like to show it off. But the floors here are plain wood or concrete, the furnishings simple and basic. The only tip toward opulence is the grand architecture—the vaulted archways, the tall spaciousness of the rooms. But even this is minimal and worn, a relic of a bygone era.

The warmth and color come from the plants. Thick, curving vines grip along the outer walls, vivid blooms flower in all the crooks and cracks. The rows of tangled climbers clutch their wooden frames and hang lush, heavy with fruit. The vegetation creeps around everything, even in the trees leaning out over the overlook.

He's eating at a small table out on the patio, looking out at the canopy of trees below and the suns peeking behind them. He pushes golden slices of poached pear toward her as she sits, as well as a plate of crackers and a bowl of honeyed goat cheese and avocado. She can sense him watching her—discretely—as she eats. He's observing the slowness of her movements, the listlessness of her hands. She can't move her limbs fast enough to mask it. Thinking about it makes her fork stop, hovering tremulously between her fingers. She tastes the memories on the tip of her tongue, feels them prick in the corners of her eyes. She can't muster the energy to care what he sees.

"Is your sternum feeling better?" he asks. "You are in less pain?"

She nods, letting the fork clatter onto the table and slowly pawing a cracker across the surface of the dip.

"I broke my clavicle once, you know," he says after a moment, looking back out at the view. "For a stupid reason, of course. I made a bet with my best friend I could scale the wall of our school and grab the flag without getting caught or falling. Failed on both accounts. I was in detention for a month and a sling for two. It was the most miserable two months of my life. I couldn't do anything. My friend teased me mercilessly too."

He sighs, sitting back. He's pretending for her. She can see it in the casual pose, the nonchalant way he looks out over the trees, pretending in his little reminiscence so she can have a moment of privacy while still in his company.

"Instead of Skill practice, I had to go out into the gardens and work with the botanists. The first two weeks I thought I was going to die from boredom. But plants, they have a funny way of pulling you in. You set a simple seedling of a vine in a pot, blink, and suddenly it has crawled up its little lattice and onto the wall. That prickly, finicky thicket you have trimmed back and pulled weeds out of suddenly blooms bright, white little flowers, which lure in all the butterflies, who then start visiting all the other plants. When everything healed back up I scrambled back to my lessons, back to my friends and my brash, rebellious little life, but I never quite forgot those plants, and the simple pleasure of tending to them."

Ruben glances over at his garden, a small smile curling along his mouth. He scratches at a sideburn.

"It sounds peaceful," Allayria says, her voice sounding thick, heavy with the clumsy way her jaw moves in her mouth.

His eyes flit to her, but the blank expression hangs heavy on her face, immobile.

"It can be. If you like, I can show you some of the plants tomorrow morning. I have some vines that require a bit of trimming and watering. They can be fussy when it gets hot."

She thinks about it, about earth underneath her fingers and the suns against her neck. But she is so tired. No matter what she does, she is just so tired, and then that thought starts pressing tiny fractures in her: the thought that she can't see a way out from this haze, this exhaustion.

She pushes forward, struggling to nod her head, a large, dense object propped up by cartilage and a reedy spine.

A/N: A full view of the artwork, "Wrath," can be found on my deviantart account here: https://asimsluvr.deviantart.com/art/Wrath-193573624

I suppose in many ways it isn't a surprise that Allayria is still kicking it, though toward the end of writing Paragon I wondered if it wasn't a cheat to keep her alive. Don't get me wrong: it was always my intention, the acts carried out on the windy clifftops of Lethinor were always on the horizon as were the consequences outlined in this chapter, but I have never liked the idea of characters coming back from death as whole, relatively functional human beings. Death as a door that can be passed through this way and that feels trivial, as if the stakes have been halved, and punches have been pulled. Maybe it's why I've never gotten into comic books.

But Allayria is here, seemingly alive and of relatively sound mind. But that does not mean there aren't consequences or a deeper story to tell about how she got here and why she is here. And it certainly does not mean that she can come back through that door again.

There's also one more thing I want to touch upon in this A/N. I've had this chapter in my back pocket for almost a year now, a thing of grief written in a haze of grief, and for almost as long as it's been sitting there I've wondered about what to say about it and all the things that will follow.

For those who have found this chapter difficult for personal reasons, I want to take a moment to tell you that in many ways this book will be darker than the last, but that darkness is not constant or consuming. As a doomed character in my favorite film of all time said: "The night is darkest just before the dawn."

It's something I've taken comfort in, over the years, that and a line from my favorite book series:

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."