It wasn’t the same when you weren’t here.

Timeline/World: Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Indrah Laruwien
Race: Dragon
Age: 94, physically about 28
Final Word Count: 627 words

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After the death of our daughter and our granddaughter both, things changed at home. We both knew that if it had indeed happened, perhaps it was meant to be but it still hurt. Elva had been terrified that there would be something between Arianne and Milo but I don’t know that there ever was a chance. I did understand her fear and for a while, I almost believed that the curse was still at play, I had seen it happen by ways of her memories between her and brother but I knew better, she knew better, but it still shattered something between us, something fragile and delicate.

We did talk things through and over together, like responsible adults, we decided that for a little while—it lasted a year—we would live apart. We’d gone a month together after the death, trying to act like everything was perfectly okay but it just wasn’t. She blamed herself, I blamed her, I blamed myself, and I blamed the whole world. I’d been able to tell early on that Arianne was going to be a problem, as much as Guinevere would be. I wanted to believe that she could have been ‘fixed,’ though not so much fixed as we could have worked out some way of changing her habits but the world took her away and while I hate to admit it, I’ve come to accept that just barely maybe it was for the best. Some souls are broken at birth and there is no fixing it. I had a cousin who was like that and he’d been forced to leave our dwellings.

So we talked this over with Milo who had been handling the loss well enough, we talked it over with his two older brothers and we decided on separate living for a year, see how it would go.

It went well at first. That first month was like a breath of fresh air, it was pure and soothing, and there was no strain, no stress, nothing. The second month was similar. After the third month, I started noticing things. How certain habits I had only made sense with Elva around, how I missed the scent of her hair as I fell asleep at night, the feel of her skin against mine in the mornings. The fourth month only made that more noticeable and by the sixth month I was beginning to feel like things were trying to fall apart, what had we been thinking? We did still talk, daily. Milo spent a week with her, a week with me and seemed to not be suffering for it.

When I told her that I was beginning to feel like I was growing crazy without her, she told me she felt the same. We almost decided that it was better that we cut our time apart short but we didn’t. Instead, we sort of started over. We went out on dates the way we had at the beginning, we went to the movies, picnics, shared a warm meal together, went dancing. It rekindled something that I think we both might have lost with Arianne’s death, or maybe we’d lost it trying to handle her nature, it’s hard to know. I wish I knew how Rellik and Amadeus managed together, never straying, even with the death of Guinevere but I suppose that they are different and handle things differently.

At the end of the year, Elva came back to help me pack up my things from where I’d been staying, we walked back home together and while it hasn’t been perfect every single day since, most days have been an absolute bliss and I don’t want to be apart from her ever again, not in this way. It hurts far too much.

You should rescue him first.

Timeline/World: Mixed Races
Characters: Cornellius Stratford
Race: Human
Age: 28
Final Word Count: 529 words

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Let there never be a time in your life where you have to make this decision. Being forced to decide on who lives or who dies first is something that will tear your heart out of your chest, rip it to itty-bitty pieces and then shove it back in there like it doesn’t matter that you need the thing to live. It is one of the most unpleasant things ever and let me tell you that I never want to be in this situation again. I was there once, it broke something in me and I’ve never really been the same since.

I’ve also been living on my own since, just completely unable to face sharing my life with someone else and chance being put in the same situation. I’ve never been able to understand if I was the cause of this situation or if this was just a case of bad luck, being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I guess, in a way, it doesn’t really matter. It happened, I told them to take my life because I didn’t want them to harm a single hair on Challis’s head, but I guess that to them, it was the wrong answer.

Why give someone a choice between their lives and that of the one they love, only to go against their decision to save their loved one? That is hardly a choice. I had lost so much when he’d been taken away from me the first time, the second time was a permanent removal of his presence from my life and I still have yet to find comfort from that. It has been ten years, ten. I still ache at the thought of him and no amount of thinking about the situation makes it any better. What could I have done to change things?

The markings are gone now. I don’t know how, since they’d been inked deeply into my skin but they’re gone. With Challis out of my life, I feel empty. I feel as though I’ve been completely left behind and forgotten and maybe it’s best that way. I just barely manage to keep myself alive on a daily basis; I don’t know that I would manage anything more if there were someone out there interested in being at my side. Not that I could let them, not after Challis, not after them. I would rather die than face that kind of loss again but I don’t get a choice, do I? That’s just how that’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? I just barely trust myself to have someone at my side and some higher power of sort decides that I don’t deserve them, that I’m a sinner and that they should die so I might suffer more?

I think being alone is the better option. It is not ideal but it is the best. Living as I do, barely making it day in and out, I don’t want anyone else to suffer for me, suffer because of me, suffer because I’m a foolish soul. I’ve learned my lesson, best I stay alone and barely surviving. It’s all there is to my life.