I know… Cay’s reply, as well as the tears that had accompanied those simple words, resonated in Nyx’s mind again as the soft soles of his boots came into contact with the warped and splintering boards of the landing outside her door. He glanced back, filling his eyes with the heavy, weathered canvas that comprised the door of her apartment, stifled another sigh that threatened to escape his pursed lips, and turned his gaze skyward, perhaps hoping to find answers, there, for the questions to which her response and the accompanying tears had given rise…

Was I wrong to show you my heart, Cayrimsa, he wondered, wishing that there were still stars visible in the firmament to counter the shimmering of those that had fallen from her eyes.

 Does your knowing mean that you can accept it – even if I am everything you despise – or does it simply add to the pain and torment that your own elven blood stirs in your soul?

Despite the considerable skill Nyx had cultivated where reading and interpreting the truth that hid beneath the words and actions of others was concerned, he found that the truth behind Cay’s reactions was elusive at best. There had been anger in her eyes when she first staggered into wakefulness and found him hovering over her – that same anger and loathing had been thick in her words, too, when she had offered to ‘repay her debt’ and that anger had only seemed to swell when he had refused. The fire of that anger, though, had been quenched by the tears that, in that interminable span of time between his admission and her reply, had welled in her eyes. And when she had quickly changed the subject after daubing those tears away with the edge of her blanket, that anger seemed to have been replaced by an indefinable sadness and, as he glanced back at her before leaving her alone in her rooms, something more akin to confusion. Should I, perhaps, not have told you at all? I have known your torment for a long time, melamin… contributed to it, I am sure, in my own way, at times… but it was never my intention to do so with this.

…Behind him, beyond the canvas door, there now came the sounds of movement and the susurrations of whispered words which begged his attentions away from his own thoughts. He listened to those sounds for a moment and, following a curse that hissed softly from the other side of the doorway, reminded himself that he had come out here for more than a momentary respite from the torment he had visited on himself in finally professing his true feelings for her.

His gaze abandoned the starless sky above, lowered to peer through the narrow spaces between the planks at his feet, and narrowed slightly as he picked out the dark shape of Cayrimsa’s watcher still huddled beneath the steps. Nyx watched the watcher for a moment; gauged the man’s level of wakefulness by the way the shoulders rose and fell in harmony with his breathing… Not quite lost in slumber, yet, are you, the assassin smirked as he reached for the rickety railing that girded the landing, but it has been a long and quiet night and you are so very ready for a nap, yes? … When the watcher’s head dipped forward to rest on his knees, Nyx hauled himself over the railing to his left and dropped to the ground some two stories below, the sounds of activity within the lower level of the Vergal Sea Port masking the soft thud of his landing enough that Cay’s watcher failed to register it as out of place. Before the hawk could lift his head from his knees and force himself back to alertness, Nyx was on him and hand the man’s head, neck, and arms cinched into an intricate knot of limbs that quickly stole breath and blood from the brain. Dmitrova’s hawk struggled weakly for only an instant before lapsing fully into unconsciousness and, once he had done so, Nyx released the hold and eased the limp form to the ground.

“Vadim will not be happy that you fell asleep on your watch,” the mith’ganni smirked as he slipped from beneath the stairs and left the man to his dreamless slumber, “and let the witch elude you because of it, but breakfast for us will be more enjoyable without a chaperone, yes?” He took a moment to scan his surroundings, making sure that no other eyes watched before he climbed the stairs once again. Back at the top of those stairs, Nyx forced himself to wait while Cayrimsa went about preparing herself… even when a curse, just a bit louder than the last he had heard, floated through the air and was accompanied by the sound of shattering pottery…

“Karl is indisposed,” he murmured through the canvas door, “but I doubt he will remain so for long, Cay. We should go if you are ready…”

A pair of ancient silver eyes lifted from the span of deep, blue-violet fabric, pulled taut across the embroidery hoop that was held in one long-fingered hand, and turned to regard the flame that danced chaotically atop the candle that was lighting her work. A knowing smile spread across her lips as the flame flickered this way and that for a moment, trying to lick out in all directions at once, and then, whirled in around the wick before, finally, settling itself and resuming its gentle and purposeful swaying. Those argent eyes fell back to the hoop as she finished her latest stitch and secured the needle in the fabric where she would start her next. Resigning from the needle, her hand moved to gather up the rest of the cloth, which spilled like a midnight waterfall from the edges of the hoop and into her lap, and set the project aside before her gaze turned toward the far end of the room.

“I had expected you a bit earlier, Steppe Son,” Taellyn smiled into the shadows that draped those depths as she rose gracefully from her chair, “I was beginning to think that you weren’t coming at all…”  She glided toward a dresser, retrieved a kerchief from one of its drawers and a pitcher of water that sat on its top, then soaking the square of cotton in the water, turned towards where she knew Nyx was waiting; “…but, I see that you have been working, which explains away your tardiness, I suppose…”

“Tardiness?” The mith’ganni’s eyes flickered into her view, now, catching the light from the candle across the room and reflecting it back at her from the penumbra near the staircase.

“Mhmm,” she nodded, extending the damp kerchief into the shadows where he stood, “As I said, I expected you earlier, therefore, you are late. Now, wipe that coal from your face, hang your cloak on the peg, there, and come in so we can talk. The hour is late and I should like to get some rest ere I open the shop in the morning.”

“Forgive me for upsetting your schedule, crone,” Nyx quipped, taking the cloth from her and using it to wipe the charcoal and weapon-black painted skull from his features before slipping out of his cloak and hanging it where the elder elf had indicated.

“The forgiveness is in the fee, boy,” Taellyn smirked in reply, waving a hand as she returned to her chair and took up the hoop again, “I am charging you for the reading, of course, and adding another three coppers for being late.”

“Bound and determined to bleed me dry, aren’t you, Dreamweaver,” the mith’ganni chuckled as he padded across the floor and settled onto a bench near where the elder wood-elf sat.

“Perhaps I am, Steppe Son,” Taellyn smiled, her eyes twinkling as they flicked in his direction and then returned  to her needlework, “It isn’t as if you spend much of what you earn elsewhere, though, is it?”

The assassin, using a clean corner of the charcoal and oil smirched rag, now, to scrub drying blood and dirt from his hands.

Taellyn pulled another half dozen stitches, paused and studied the narrow, blood-red point of the star she was creating, and then looked in Nyx’s direction, again; “So, you slept, then?”

“Uma,” he nodded faintly, feigning interest in rubbing a spot of blood from a fingernail, “amin kaime… vithel kaimele…”

“So you said,” the seamstress smiled, her fingers working the needle once more, “Are you going to tell me about these dreams, then, or am I simply to guess at what you might have seen? I’ll have to add another fee if I am to read your mind as well as try and interpret whatever it has boiled up…”

“Pach, woman,” Nyx scowled, his eyes lifting to squint at her in the face of her chiding, “I am coming to that! As old as you are, I would expect you to have learned some patience over the years.”

“Time is money, Steppe Son. Is that not what you have told me in the past?”

He offered a sardonic smirk and a shake of his head. “I suppose it is,” he conceded, finally, setting the rag aside and letting the indignant expression to melt from his features.

“Eithel san’?” she prodded, not lifting her eyes from her needlework, now.

“It began with the stars,” Nyx murmured after moment spent contemplating exactly how to start the retelling, “I was on the docks, watching the sky…”

Taellyn chuckled softly. “It began before the stars, Steppe Son,” she said, “but I understand…”

He fixed her with a look that melded perplexity and annoyance almost seamlessly; “Mani?”

“Kai,” Taellyn grinned, taking her fingers from the needle just long enough to brush a long braid back over her shoulder and to subtly wave her interruption from the air. “Amin hiraetha,” she added as her eyes and fingers returned to her embroidery, “Vora.”

“As I was saying,” Nyx continued, somewhat uneasily, after blinking at the woman for a second and pushing an errant lock of his mane back over his own shoulder, “I was on the docks, stargazing. All of the constellations in the sky were also in the water… like it was not water, at all, but another sky, yes?... so there were twins of them all… But there was one, and that one alone, that appeared three times; once in the sky, another in the water, and the last, beside me, carved into the dock…”

“Beside you?”

“Yes.”

“Not at your feet, Steppe Son? Beside you?”

“Well,” Nyx’s brow furrowed as he tried to imagine why she had challenged that particular bit of syntax, “it was a constellation that I had carved into the decking, and I was standing on the dock, but… yes… beside me… not at my feet… not the way you said it.”

“Very well,” she nodded, still not looking up from her tailoring, “Go on.”

“…As the dream went on, I noticed that some stars grew dimmer and lost their twins. Then dawn broke and all of the stars… except for the ones beside me… gave way to the sun…”

The retelling of the dream had taken longer than Nyx had imagined it would have. Taellyn had regularly interrupted his narration to ask odd questions and those questions had caused him to recall details of the dream that he had not though important enough to voice at first. So it was that when all was said and done, he had recounted every minute detail of the reverie to the old Dreamweaver and, in doing so, felt as if he had just dreamt it again and, when he at last finished the retelling, he felt as if he had just awakened from it again, too.

This second awakening is no less disconcerting than the first, either, the Twilight elf griped inwardly when Taellyn chose to fall into silence, apparently becoming lost in her needlework, for a long while. After all of your interruptions, I thought you would have been more anxious to tell me I have gone mad or worse.

“Re naa saivanima,” she smiled broadly just before he lost patience with waiting for her to say something or even bother to look in his direction.

“What?!” Nyx looked completely befuddled, now, “What are you talking about?”

“Your constellation, Nyx,” Taellyn laughed, tying a knot in the thread after finishing a final stitch, “She is very beautiful, isn’t she?”

“My constellation? I…” the mith’ganni blinked, uncertain as to what the woman was getting at and dumbstruck that she had called him by his name. Taellyn hadn’t called Nyx by his name since before either of them had come to Drasnia… “…I do not understand what…”

The elder elf, still giggling softly and her eyes sparkling with a warm, knowing light, shook her head and snapped the needle from the thread. “Sometimes, Nyx Shyndyn, I honestly believe you might be as dumb as you are dangerous,” she sighed, turning the hoop so that he could see the results of her stitching. The constellation from his dream… the only one that had stayed constant throughout the duration of the vision… just as he had described it to her was beautifully worked in fine threads of colors and varied as were the colors of the actual stars they represented. “Your constellation. Your partner. Your Etellenya.”

Nyx’s eyes went wide, the moon-yellow orbs melting to molten gold as he recognized the sigil for what it was, and he couldn’t keep his mouth from falling open in awe as he marveled at the accuracy and intricacy of the needlework. Almost without him having willed it to happen, he leaned forward and stretched out his hand to touch the embroidered pattern of stars. Then, when his fingertips came to rest on the graceful arc of the star-trail, his brow furrowed again and he tore his gaze away and found Taellyn’s silver eyes… she had already been working on this before he had even arrived… was working an image from his mind into shadowy-purple cloth before he had even described it to her. Had she somehow known his dream before he had shared it?

“Do not look so surprised, Steppe Son,” she smiled at him, “Despite the apparent complexities that your mind refuses to set aside, it’s not at all that complicated, is it? I knew the answer to your dream when you came into the shop this afternoon and, while I dearly loved listening to you do so – I haven’t heard that kind of feeling in your voice since you won Lyssa’s hand and rode all the way to Min’shar to tell me about it – I didn’t even have to hear you speak it to know…”

The rather sheepish smile that had begun to creep across Nyx’s lips faded a bit at the mention of Lyssa, and the almost warm, pinkish flush that had bloomed on his sharp cheeks flared to an angrier hue for just an instant. His yellow eyes narrowed and peeled off from Taellyn’s silver orbs and fell on the embroidered stars even as his fingertips fell away.

“She said that she’s known you for a bit longer than a week, Steppe Son,” Taellyn whispered softly, setting the embroidered work aside and, for the first time in more than thirty years, reached out to take the mith’ganni’s hand in one of hers and used the other to turn his eyes to hers, again, “how long have you known her?”

“Ten years,” he said after a moment, “perhaps… longer…”

“Why has she only known you for just over a week, then?”

“We never worked together before that,” he shrugged.

“You watched her all that time and waited until, by some twist of fate, you ended up working together before you spoke to her?”

“I did not have to watch her long to know that she would want nothing to do with me,” Nyx scowled, slipping his hand from hers and backing away from the touch of her fingers on his cheek, “she despises elves to the point that she hewed away the points of her own ears…”

“And even knowing that, you continued to watch?”

Nyx’s answering nod was faint enough that only a subtle bobbing of his mane betrayed the action.

“Why?”

“Amin n’sinta…”

“Psssh! Yes you do, Nyx! You just won’t let yourself say it outside the confines of your own thick skull!”

Nyx’s eyes flashed a deadly warning as Taellyn’s voice rose, his jaw tightening as he glowered at her… The woman’s firm visage didn’t change in the least, though, and she continued to stare back at him… “What does any of this has to do with my dream,” he rumbled after a moment.

“Everything,” she said, “She is the dream, don’t you see that? She is what you came here to find…”

His mouth opened to protest but she silenced him with the raising of a finger.

“…You can continue to tell yourself, Steppe Son, that you were drawn here to visit your wrath on the round-ears where they breed… you can continue to tell yourself that you do what you do out of retribution for what they did to your clan and out of reverence to that horrid god you follow… and, Nyx Shyndyn, you can continue to tell yourself that the love you sought to find when you first turned your hate-filled gaze west was supposed to be Lyssa, but you and I both know that you don’t actually believe that to be true any longer, don’t we?”

She waited for a moment, giving him an opportunity to answer but the only reply the mith’ganni offered was a single, slow blink of his shimmering eyes.

“Lyssa died before she left the plains, Nyx. She was not the type that would allow a slave brand or any sort of ‘training’ to change who and what she saw to it that she wouldn’t have to… You didn’t come here for Lyssa…The love you came here to find, the love to whom the stars have been guiding you all this time, is your ‘constellation’. The stars in the skies, Nyx, and the stars in your dreams are guideposts of the fates. Your finding this ‘constellation’ was fated and where it will lead, you, too, is fated to be…”

The mith’ganni’s features had lost any hardness that his flaring anger had carved into them and he nodded in silent confirmation as Taellyn’s words, now, along with the myriad questions she had asked him while he recounted the dream to her, started to congeal into a final acceptance of the Dreamweaver’s interpretation… and of the fact that he had known the answer to it all along as well…

“Without one another, the both of you are alone, Steppe Son,” the ancient wood-elf said softly, “both of you without people or place… both of you with nothing to care for save for that dark anger and hatred that you each profess gives you purpose…”

Nyx rose to his feet, his eyes finally tracking away from Taellyn and falling, once more, on the threadworked constellation that sat atop the small table next to her and lingered there for a while before he offered the woman a nod and padded silently across the room to retrieve his cloak.

“…There is more purpose for the both of you than that,” Taellyn’s voice followed him into the shadows even as her hands took up the midnight cloth and began to free it from the confines of the embroidery hoop, “and, that, dear boy, is what your dream means. You belong to those stars. They guide you, give you purpose beyond the illusion that you have created for yourself, and, the fates have shown them to you because, that same constellation called you here and, as you may have guessed, will also guide you home…”

“How much do I owe you,” the mith’ganni’s voice whispered from the darkness, now beyond her sight.

“For the dream-reading? A silver and two coppers,” the wood-elf smiled, not bothering to watch the shadows where he lingered, her attentions instead fixed back on the blue-violet fabric she held in her hands, “But, if you bring me thirty gold before you leave Drasnia in the next days, I shall include it in the price, of this new coat I am making you… You’ll never get all of the blood out of that one, you know? And I think the needlework on this one has become more appropriate to what you are becoming, now, than the skull you paid me to work into that one.”

“Very well,” Nyx’s voice answered from somewhere down the staircase, “I shall return in two days or less, then. Namaarie, Dreamweaver.”

“Tenna’ ento lye omenta, Steppe Son. Go to your constellation, now, and see what the fates have spun for her, hm?”

~*~*~*~

The morning sun had yet to begin it’s climb into the sky when Nyx found himself nearing the tumble-down structure on the wharf called Vergal Sea Port and the clinging dark of the night and the storm it had borne made it all too easy for him to slip past the Hellkite shadow that huddled, cold, sleepy, and miserably stiff beneath the rickety stair that stretched up to the building’s third storey. He passed like a wraith through the canvas that hung from the door at the top of that stair, the bells that hemmed it not making the faintest of peals as he entered the apartment. His yellow eyes skimmed the murk of the tiny apartment and fell upon the loom and the new work upon it… See what the fates have spun for her? See what her dreams say?… lingered on the rose and moon that embraced each other in a star-laden night sky long enough for a smile to be worked onto his lips by the translation that his mind and Taellyn’s words gave to the imagery, and then, sought out the tapestry of the tree and the softly snoring bundle of blankets that lay beneath it.

He shrugged out of his still damp cloak, let it fall where he stood, and padded softly towards the pallet. “Quel amrun, elen en cormamin,” he whispered, sinking to sit on the edge of her bed as one hand reached out to feather fingers softly across a cheek of the sleeping face that peeked from the tangle of blankets, “Oio naa elealla alasse’.”