6/3/2026, 9:13 PM
She had been...not quite absent. But close to it. After a year of the weight of the world building to a suffocating crescendo, Solulfur had yet to learn how to breathe without its vice grip. Every third thought no longer devoted to the plague or the cold or the runes. Every other dream plagued by the ominous presence she'd despised for so long, yet come to know so personally. Spring washed the land clean of the marks of its tragedies, fissures and rune-lines disappearing, the Isle halting its pacing. But Solulfur remembered. Could not forget.
And with the return to spring and the world setting itself right, Solvi. Solvi and Shiloh, both! Fitting back into their places in Dawnbreak's tapestry, yet there was something unmistakably changed about their return, too. For all her grief at Solvi's disappearance, Solulfur found it difficult to return to things as they had been. There was a part of her waiting, waiting for some haunting admission or another disappearance, like her father had pulled.
Solulfur kept to herself, haunted the peaks of the Vale like some golden-eyed, speechless spectre. After a year of her strings being yanked on by forces far outside her control, it felt exhausting to even glimpse the strings hidden within every conversation, every glance or glower, and so Solulfur avoided them entirely for a time. The only detail she kept her ear to the ground on was her brother's approaching wedding. That was a detail she could not let slip through her teeth.
Solulfur was doing...better, at least. Enough that when her brother's call rang out through the pines, she felt fond instead of hunted. She met him on the trail, falling into step with a bob of her chin as greeting. Friendly enough, although notably subdued for Solulfur. He looked nervous, she thought, but it was hard to tell. He'd grown into a fine sense of composure. A man worthy of the best of their weighty, complicated legacies.
She could not tell him, alas. Afi forbid any sibling of hers have a bigger ego than Solulfur herself, no, no.
