920
Endergaln
The matter of Esmund was starting to irritate Sav.
Esmund Clockwright. Air genasi. At the center of the mysteries around the breaking of the world. At the heart of the solution to it, they felt sure.
Born in an idyllic kingdom where he grew up with all of his needs provided for, alongside lifelong friends who, even now, after he had (allegedly) broken the world, would defend his good name. His curiosity and magic encouraged to flourish, not hunted and suppressed. With parents who loved and supported him, who’d risked their own lives for his when he was only a babe. One of whom, beyond even the end of the world, now threw herself into the search for him with all of her tiny being.
Perched at a viewpoint loftier than theirs, traveling through multiple timelines, seeing so many more pieces to the ongoing puzzles. His name on the lips of everyone they cared about. Esmund said— When Esmund— What did Esmund—
It was stupid, they knew. Entirely unjust, unfair, unkind, and worst of all, illogical. Whatever knowledge he was uncovering now, he was suffering tenfold in the discovery of it, paying multiple lifetimes against their one to oppose the problems facing them all now. Everything he had provided them had only been a help. He had had no control over the circumstances of his upbringing or his other lives, and they would never trade the existence of their own mother for Gwin, however brief their mum’s life had been. And how much harder would it be, how much more of a shock, to grow up thinking the world was fair and people kind, only to lose it all in less than a year?
Nevertheless, that did nothing to ease the constriction in her chest when Gwin spoke lovingly of moments in his childhood, or the roil of her stomach every time Peach seemed surprised at some other lacking aspect of Sav’s upbringing. Her breath hitched whenever some visit of his happened and another cryptic sheaf of information dropped in her lap, some solution she hadn’t yet thought of but now had handed to her, never mind that much of it was things that she would think of (but now would never get the opportunity to).
She was radiantly, abhorrently jealous of him. And she wished with an ache beyond worlds to talk to him, unrushed, unworried, to share minds, to shake him until everything he knew fell out, until all the love he’d absorbed over a lifetime spilled over her starveling heart, to devour the life she could have had but for an accident of birthplace.
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S14 E31 - Every Way, Every Time
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