Benign

Ten years was a long time to be Bound to one person, but he had always thought it made them stronger. They moved seamlessly, anticipating thought and word, sensing danger a mile apart. They no longer needed to speak to know what the other needed, magic and power flowing as seamlessly as though they were one person. They were the best.

He’d missed it.

It must have been slow at first, the faintest crack in her facade… but it had grown, until it became like shattered bone sliding together. At least, those were the words she put to it.

“You’re leaving.” He could not bring himself to make it a question and she did not take it as such. He imagined that a woman in her position should look small, meek, broken… but Eomoire had never been any of those things, and she was not now. She just looked… resolute. Tired, maybe.

“Not completely.”

“You requested the Severing.”

She looked away from him then, eyes fixing on a point on the floor, memory stirring with a past she had never told him about. A day ago, he had not thought such a thing possible; he had believed they knew everything about the other.

Truth was an unforgiving tutor. She had lied. For years, she had lied.

“Will you be okay?” he asked, deceptively light as he lowered himself to sit beside her. She turned even further away from him. It was an effort to keep a straight face, the motion tearing a part of his life away as the Severing would the Bond.

“With time, maybe. I did much of this damage myself. I buried my scars for too many years, Leth, thinking that cancerous growth benign. I deceived you as well as myself, and now I must pay this debt. My regret is that I’ve injured you with my selfishness.” A part of him wanted to agree with her: the wounded, human part. The part that was Koruma knew the Severing was her only option, that it was his duty to stand by her decision.

The Bond was a burden as much as it was a gift: an agreement between two powerful forces, Koruma and Ellia Lorai. Lorai alone were a force of nature, mystics who could summon hurricanes and gentle earthquakes with a thought, but the abilities they wielded were chaotic, changing and warping as easily as the weather they inflenced. Without an anchor, Lorai destroyed themselves. Koruma were the ballast and the shield, teaching control and tempering the Lorai with a psychological manipulation branded ‘Taming’. Unfortunately, the Bond was so intimate that many Lorai chose to shift through Koruma so that they would never form a close enough relationship to further fragment the already precarious control over their gifts. Emotions were dangerous to the Lorai.  

He should have seen it.

Ten years, and he had missed the decay of the Ellia Lorai left in his care. “Do not think on anything but your own recovery.”

She smiled at him then, a wistful quirk of the lips, dark hair framing her face in the early evening light. A hand rose against his better judgement and touched her cheek with gentle fingers.

“May you never be Tamed.”

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~ by eeratka on February 6, 2011.