Andarin: The Mountains: Fenris;

“You would give up your sacred rights for a brat you barely know?"

"Yes, I would."

"You would give up your throne for him? He who has caused you such misery, such humiliation?"

"Yes, I would."

She became aware of the things around her all at once. The air, the earth, the sounds. Nonchalantly, Skylar called a white rose from the ground, her trademark thing, really. She stared at it for a while, before making it wither and watching the whiteness fade to brown, then suddenly reviving it.

Skylar had changed. Yes, she was different. She wasn’t a girl anymore. Not for now. She was a young woman. No longer would innocence bless her every move, however her looks defied her and remained forever childlike. She Knows. She knows pain, she knows failure, she knows love. And she wasn’t afraid to admit either.

There is a whisper, and perhaps it is her mother calling out her approval. Perhaps it is something different. She smiles, a memory, faint, but a memory nonetheless. Hawthorne, a pale dappled beauty. The mother that she was so akin to.

But then another whisper, and she feels a chill run across her body. She knows it too. The voice of Hunter returned. And she had been gone so long, the young Skylar did not know to call her Queen. It had been so long.

She smiles, sadly, because she could not truly say that she had been fine. That everything was as it should be. She knows again that it couldn’t always be. “I….I broke a promise.” she sighed. “A promise to my father.”

But her thoughts were voiced too easily, and she knows that it was not what Fenris had meant. “I miss him.” she muses. “Do you think he will ever come home?”

In more than one way, Fenris was so much older than she. However much growing she had done.

APPRENTICE

**SKYLAR**

"You have spilled your own blood rather than the blood of an innocent. That was the final task and the most important."

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