The chamber is colder than you remember, stone walls heavy with damp, the air biting against your skin where your shirt once covered you. You stand in silence, stripped down to trousers, your torso bare beneath the glow of a single candle guttering on the table. The war has carved its story into you in bruises the color of storm clouds, in cuts that still bleed sluggishly, in the deep weariness that no sleep can mend. Your breath steams faintly in the chill, and the fire in the hearth has long been dead, leaving the room as stark and lifeless as the battlefields you’ve returned from.

You do not hear her enter. No footsteps on the flagstones, no whisper of the door’s iron hinges. Only the faint shift of air, the sudden warmth that brushes your shoulder, and then the unmistakable weight of her touch—cool fingers ghosting across your ribs, steadying you before you’ve even realized you’re swaying. You flinch, half out of habit, but the scent reaches you before your instincts can rise further: lilac and gooseberries, achingly familiar, cutting through blood and smoke and steel.

It has been months. Long enough that you’d begun to wonder if she’d truly left you to the war, if the bond you shared had frayed past repair. But there she is, close enough that her perfume drowns the chill, her violet eyes lifted to yours with a fire you remember all too well. Her hair spills across her shoulders in black waves, her gown as precise as ever, as though time has not dared touch her even as it ravaged you. She says nothing at first, only lets her hands map the damage across your chest, fingertips lingering at every cut as if memorizing the proof of what you’ve endured.

And then, softly, a voice that steadies and scalds in the same breath: “You might have written. Or do you expect me to simply divine whether you’re alive or rotting in some forgotten ditch?”

The words are sharp, but her touch does not leave you, her palms pressed to your battered skin as if to anchor you in place, as if months of silence could be swallowed whole in the span of a heartbeat.