# The Winter's Rest Inn
The chamber had fallen into one of those silences that was not silence at all, but the stillness before a storm breaks across the moors. Shadows danced in the flickering light of the great firepit, making the carved stone walls seem alive, listening, waiting like ancient sentries. The air tasted heavy—metallic and sharp, like the moment before steel was drawn in anger, or before lightning split the sky above a heaving sea.
Hadrian froze mid-gesture, his wine cup halfway to his lips, emerald eyes suddenly narrowing with predatory focus. The shift was subtle but unmistakable—that distant look, that sharp intake of breath, the way every muscle in his powerful frame seemed to coil without moving an inch. It was the look of a hunter who had just scented something that might be prey, or might be death stalking toward them through the darkness.
Fleur saw it instantly. She had fought beside him through too many battles, shared too many dangerous nights not to recognize that particular stillness. Her hand slid toward the hidden knives beneath her wildling leathers without conscious thought, fingers finding familiar steel with practiced ease.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est?" she asked, voice pitched low and sharp with sudden urgency. The question carried the kind of edge that turned casual inquiry into battlefield command. "What is it, mon amour? What do you sense?"
Hadrian blinked once, slow and deliberate, like a great cat considering its options. When he spoke, his voice was calm, measured—too calm. The sort of dangerous quiet that set experienced warriors on edge and made wise men reach for weapons.
"Magical signature," he said, each word carefully chosen, placed like stones in a wall he was building around his thoughts. "Approaching from the south. Strong. Familiar." He paused, those green eyes narrowing further as though rifling through a thousand half-remembered faces, battles, and betrayals. "But not hostile. At least, not deliberately so."
The tension in the chamber ratcheted up like a crossbow being drawn. Tormund Giantsbane shifted his massive frame, uncoiling from his relaxed sprawl like a great bear rising from winter slumber. His hand moved to the hilt of his sword with deceptive casualness—for all his size and apparent crudeness, the motion was practiced, efficient, faster than men half his age and twice as deadly.
"Friend of yours then?" Tormund rumbled, his voice like distant thunder, beard bristling as his mouth tugged into something between anticipatory grin and threatening grimace. "Because I'll tell you plain, southern lord—I've yet to see a mysterious magical stranger knock politely before bringing good tidings. And if this one ruins my mead or interrupts my drinking, I'll gut him myself and feed his entrails to the ravens."
"Always such a romantic, our Tormund," Hadrian murmured, but his attention remained fixed on the approaching presence only he could sense.
Ygritte, quicker than either man, already had an arrow nocked to her bowstring, the weapon drawn taut with fluid precision. Her grey eyes flicked across the chamber's various approaches—doorway, windows, even the shadows near the ceiling—with that cold, methodical calculation that had made her name legendary among the Free Folk. In the firelight, the steel arrowhead gleamed like a fallen star, deadly and beautiful.
"'Familiar,' you say?" she asked, voice low and sharp as the shaft she held ready. "Familiar could mean you once shared a warm bed and sweet words, or it could mean some clever bastard has learned to mimic your magical scent before sticking a poisoned blade between your ribs. Which is it, crow?"
Hadrian's lips curved into that insufferable smirk—the expression that promised he'd survived too many apocalypses to be truly impressed by one more. His voice took on that dangerous, sardonic lilt, the cultured British accent he wielded as skillfully as any blade.
"Oh, Ygritte darling," he drawled, setting down his cup with elegant precision, "if I had shared a bed with this particular magical signature, I assure you, I would remember. I do tend to leave rather lasting impressions on my bedmates. It's the eyes, you see—quite memorable in candlelight."
Tormund barked out a laugh that shook dust from the rafters. "That's true enough, you beautiful bastard. Man like you—built like a bloody mountain and sharp as a bear trap—how could any woman forget your bedroll? Hell, I'd remember, and I prefer my partners with more beard and less pretty face."
"Flattery will get you everywhere, Tormund," Hadrian replied lightly, though his gaze never stopped scanning the chamber, every supernatural sense tuned to frequencies no one else could hear. "Keep sweet-talking me like that, and I might just start thinking you're developing feelings. Should I be flattered or concerned?"
"Sweet on you?" Tormund's grin widened, showing teeth through his magnificent red beard. "Aye, and next you'll be telling me you shit gold dragons and piss the finest Dornish wine. Though I'll admit, if you did, I'd follow you to the ends of the earth just for the convenience."
"The mental image alone is worth its weight in gold," Hadrian said dryly. "Remind me to include that in my memoirs. 'Chapter Seventeen: Why Tormund Giantsbane Wanted to Follow Me to the Privy.'"
Fleur did not laugh at their banter. Her expression had shifted, color draining from her face like water from a broken pitcher. Her breath caught—just slightly, barely perceptible, but enough. She had gone pale, those brilliant blue eyes wide with something that was not fear, but recognition. Something older, deeper, infinitely more dangerous than simple fear.
"Mon Dieu," she breathed, the words torn from her throat like confession under torture. Her accent thickened dramatically, betraying the emotional storm she rarely allowed to surface. "That... that signature. It feels like—" She stopped abruptly, voice strangled, unable or unwilling to finish the thought.
Hadrian's head snapped toward her with supernatural speed, concern flooding his features. His voice cut through the charged air like drawn steel. "Fleur. What is it? What do you sense?" When she didn't immediately respond, he took a step closer, voice gentling but losing none of its intensity. "Love, talk to me. What's wrong?"
Before she could answer, the knock came.
Three soft but deliberate raps echoed through the chamber like a judge's gavel, measured and precise. Not the desperate hammering of someone fleeing danger, nor the stealthy scratch of an assassin's approach—but the calculated rhythm of someone who wished to be heard, who demanded recognition and respect.
Every instinct in the room tightened like a drawn bowstring. Fleur's hand closed fully around her knife hilt, knuckles white with tension. Ygritte's bow creaked ominously as she drew it tighter, grey eyes narrowing at the heavy wooden door as if her stare alone might pierce through oak and iron to identify the visitor. Tormund shifted forward, his bulk blotting out half the firelight, beard bristling with suspicion and something dangerously close to excitement.
"Well," Hadrian murmured, straightening to his full impressive height, "how wonderfully dramatic. Three knocks—very proper, very polite. Either we're about to receive a formal invitation to tea, or someone with exquisite manners is here to kill us all."
Hadrian moved across the chamber like liquid shadow given muscle and deadly purpose, his black cloak whispering against stone with each fluid step. Ignis's hilt rested beneath his palm, though he kept the gesture casual, conversational—like a lord discussing the weather rather than a man half a heartbeat from drawing fire-forged steel. His eyes began to glow with that faint emerald luminescence that marked the full engagement of his supernatural senses, every magical faculty stretching beyond the merely mortal to taste the approaching presence.
"Hadrian," came the voice beyond the door.
The single word stopped him cold. Low, urgent, pitched specifically for his ears alone. Feminine, cultured, unmistakably highborn—but more than that. It carried hope strangled by terror, desperation wrapped in careful control, the sound of someone who had gambled everything on one fragile, impossible moment.
The magical resonance that accompanied the voice struck him like a physical blow. Familiar, achingly so—woven into seventeen years of grief and guilt and impossible longing. It was a frequency he had thought silenced forever, burned away in the flames of a war that had cost him everything he held dear.
"Susan," he breathed, the name escaping his lips like a ghost dragged unwillingly from the ashes of memory. For all his power, all his mastery of fire and steel and venom, that single name undid him completely. His hand trembled on the door latch, the legendary composure cracking like ice in spring.
Behind him, Fleur inhaled sharply, the sound cutting through the chamber's tense atmosphere. Her voice emerged as a whisper, half-choked with disbelief and something approaching wonder. "C'est... ce n'est pas possible..." Her knives hung forgotten in her hands, blue eyes wide and burning with the terrible recognition of something that could not exist yet somehow, impossibly, did.
"Who the bloody fuck is Susan?" Ygritte hissed, arrowhead glinting like concentrated winter in the firelight. Her grey eyes flicked rapidly between Hadrian's suddenly vulnerable expression and the door that contained mysteries, sharp suspicion written in every line of her face. "Old lover? Old enemy? Or just another corpse that refuses to stay properly dead? Because in my experience, dead things that come knocking rarely bring good news."
Tormund rumbled a laugh that didn't quite mask the sudden tension in his grip on his sword hilt. "If she's an old bedmate, girl, I hope she learns to knock louder next time. Three little raps? That's a lady's knock, proper and polite. A real lover pounds the bloody door down, announces herself like she owns the place. Shows proper enthusiasm."
Hadrian shot him a look over his shoulder, dry as desert sand and twice as cutting. "Forgive me if my past lovers don't arrive with the same unbridled enthusiasm you bring to a mead barrel, Tormund. Some of us inspire rather more... subtle devotions. Quality over quantity, as they say."
That earned him a bark of genuine laughter from the giant, though Ygritte only muttered, "Aye, subtle. Like poison in your wine cup—quiet right up until it kills you."
"Your confidence in my judgment is truly heartwarming, love," Hadrian replied, then turned back to the door. His hand found the latch, hesitated for one crystalline moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, then pulled it open with deliberate, controlled motion.
And there she was.
A young woman stood in the corridor's lamplight, auburn hair catching fire-colored highlights that seemed to burn with inner luminescence. Her eyes were the deep, striking blue of the Tullys—sharp, assessing, intelligent. She wore practical traveling leathers and well-made wool, the garb of someone who had journeyed far and fast, who expected danger around every corner and intended to meet it head-on with steel and determination. Despite her youth, she carried herself with a bearing that spoke of command, of decisions made in desperate circumstances, of authority earned through blood and loss.
It was unmistakably Sansa Stark of Winterfell. He had spoken with her only hours past, had seen her among her siblings and the other lords of the North. And yet—her magical signature burned into his enhanced senses as Susan Bones, loyal Susan, brave Susan, who had fought beside him in that other world, that other war. Who, along with a precious few others, had loved him from afar while his heart was breaking over Fleur's supposed death.
The contradiction slammed into his consciousness like a war hammer against an anvil.
"Hello, Harry," she said, her voice carefully measured and controlled, but hope trembled beneath the surface like a barely contained wildfire. "I realize this is... rather a significant amount to process. But we desperately need to talk."
For a heartbeat that felt like an age, the chamber held stillness as absolute and profound as the grave.
"Susan," Hadrian whispered again, reverence wrapped in disbelief, the beloved name leaving his lips like a prayer offered to gods he'd thought long dead. His voice dropped low, rough with emotion he couldn't quite conceal. "Merlin's saggy left bollock... how are you here? How are you real? After the battle, after everything we lost, everyone we buried—I thought you were gone. I thought you were all gone."
The auburn-haired woman—Susan wearing Sansa's face, or perhaps the reverse—did not flinch beneath the weight of his stare. She stood straight and steady, spine rigid with determination, as though she had rehearsed this exact moment in every dream for seventeen long years of separation and grief.
"We walked through the Veil of Death," she said simply, as though she were discussing crossing a river or changing traveling cloaks. Her tone carried no apology, no hesitation, no acknowledgment of impossibility. "All of us who could not bear the thought of existence without you. All of us who refused to accept that love could be ended by something as trivial as dying."
Ygritte snorted, a sound like winter wind through dead leaves. Her grey eyes narrowed to slits of suspicion. "You walked through death?" The bowstring creaked ominously as she adjusted her grip. "That's madness. Worse than madness—that's the sort of fool's talk desperate people whisper before jumping off cliffs to see if the wind will catch them. Death isn't a door you walk through, girl. It's the end of the path."
Hadrian's lips curved into that dangerous, knowing smirk—the expression that had gotten him into and out of more trouble than he cared to count. "To be entirely fair, Ygritte darling, we've all done considerably worse things after consuming a few too many pints of ale. At least Susan had the basic courtesy to make a properly dramatic entrance instead of falling arse-first into a snowbank. Style points matter in these situations."
Tormund slapped his massive thigh hard enough to rattle the furniture. "Ha! Now that's a woman worth drinking to! Walks through bloody death itself just to chase down one stubborn man. You should be careful, Hadrian—devotion like that will either get you crowned as a king or murdered in your sleep. Possibly both, if she's particularly creative about it."
Susan's blue eyes flickered at that comment—Tully blue, unmistakable, sharp enough to pierce armor and twice as penetrating. "Luna saw you," she continued, ignoring the interruptions with practiced ease, her voice growing gentler, more intimate. "Across the barriers between life and death, across the walls between worlds. She saw you were alive, that you were building something here. Something real, something good, something worthy. She told us you needed us still, that your work wasn't finished."
Hadrian's jaw tightened visibly, firelight catching on the pale scar that cut across his left cheek—a memento from battles long past. His voice emerged hoarse, scraped raw by emotion. "All of you?" The words seemed to pain him. "Not just you, Susan... all of you came through? All of you risked everything?"
Susan drew herself up even straighter, as though bracing for physical impact. Her chin lifted with unconscious nobility. "Hermione. Daphne. Padma. Luna. And myself. Scattered across this world like seeds on the wind, but alive. Changed, perhaps, wearing different faces, carrying different names, but fundamentally alive and fundamentally ourselves." Her expression softened, vulnerability flickering through carefully maintained composure. "Each of us carrying complete memories of our old lives. Each of us waiting, planning, searching for you across years and continents."
The chamber went silent save for the pop and hiss of burning wood. Fleur's knives glinted at her sides, her grip white-knuckled with tension. When she spoke, her voice carried the edge of finely honed steel drawn across a whetstone.
"Alive? You expect us to believe this tale? That women who died in your world now walk breathing in ours? That you—" her piercing gaze cut to Hadrian like a blade seeking its target, "—you suspected this might be possible?"
Hadrian turned his head, eyes flashing with that familiar green fire, a smile tugging at his lips that was equal parts devastating charm and lethal weapon. "Oh, my darling Fleur, if I had possessed even the slightest inkling that half the women I'd spent years mourning had been busy planning an elaborate resurrection party, I assure you I would have baked a bloody cake. Complete with candles and a cheerful 'Welcome Back From The Dead' inscription." His smile deepened into something truly wicked. "Though knowing Hermione, it would have needed to be gluten-free, sugar-free, and annotated in triplicate with proper bibliographic citations."
Tormund roared with delighted laughter that seemed to shake the very foundations. "Ha! I like this Hermione already! Any woman who can organize death itself sounds like my kind of drinking companion!"
Ygritte rolled her eyes so hard it was genuinely surprising they didn't simply fall from her skull and clatter across the floor. "Seven bloody hells, you're surrounded by devoted women in every single world, aren't you? What is it—some sort of curse? Divine punishment? And here I thought you were just unusually fortunate with Val and the occasional tavern wench."
"It's the eyes," Hadrian said solemnly, gesturing to his admittedly striking green gaze. "Quite hypnotic, apparently. That, and my legendary modesty."
"Your modesty," Fleur said dryly, "is indeed the stuff of legend. Legendary for its complete and total absence."
"You wound me, love. I'm incredibly modest. I simply have so much to be modest about that it becomes challenging."
Susan's lips curved slightly, faint amusement breaking through her carefully maintained composure like sunlight through storm clouds. "Some things truly never change, do they?"
Hadrian's expression grew more serious as he studied her face—searching, testing, as if he could read truth and falsehood in the elegant planes of her features. "You realize what you're telling me breaks every law of magic, death, and basic common sense I've ever encountered in any world. The Veil isn't a gateway—it's an ending. Final, absolute, irreversible."
Susan's reply came quiet but steady, implacable as mountain stone. "And yet, Harry... here I stand. Here we all exist, scattered but real, changed but essentially ourselves. Some laws, it seems, were made to be broken by those with sufficient motivation."
Fleur let out a sound that might have been laughter, though it carried bitter edges sharp enough to cut. Her eyes blazed with complex emotion—part storm, part fire, part something that might have been wonder. "Of course. Naturally. The dead return for you, mon amour. Even the gods themselves refuse to let go once you have them firmly in your grasp. Why should I be surprised?"
Hadrian's smile this time was slow, dangerous, altogether too full of shared history and intimate knowledge for anyone's comfort. He met Fleur's blazing eyes, then Susan's steady gaze, then let his attention drift across the room to encompass Ygritte's suspicious glare and Tormund's interested expression.
"What can I possibly say to that?" he asked, spreading his hands with theatrical helplessness. "Some men collect debts, others hoard gold or political favors. I, apparently, have developed a talent for collecting extraordinary women. And it seems that even death itself has proven insufficient to discourage them from tracking me down. I'm not entirely certain whether I should be flattered or deeply concerned about the implications."
"Both," Ygritte muttered. "Definitely both. And probably terrified as well, if you had any sense."
"Sense," Hadrian mused, "has never been among my more prominent virtues. I prefer to think of it as fearless optimism in the face of overwhelming feminine devotion."
"Overwhelming feminine devotion," Tormund repeated thoughtfully. "That's what we're calling it? I had other words in mind, but yours sound much more polite."
Susan's gaze lingered thoughtfully on the blonde woman at Hadrian's side—taking in Fleur's otherworldly beauty, her unmistakable warrior's bearing, the absolute loyalty radiating from every graceful line of her body. This was a woman who had chosen Harry completely and stood with him through fire and frost, through battles and quiet moments alike. The romantic complications practically crackled in the air between them like lightning before a devastating storm.
When Susan spoke again, her voice was precisely measured, each word chosen with the delicate care of a diplomat navigating treacherous political waters. "Fleur," she said, dipping her head in a gesture of respect that managed to convey acknowledgment without submission, "I want you to understand that our arrival—mine and the others—was never intended to create complications you couldn't have prepared for, or to disrupt what you and Harry have built together. We came not as rivals or threats, but as allies. As friends who wish only to support him, and by extension, to support his happiness. His joy has always been what we fought for, what we would die for again if necessary."
The chamber held its collective breath, tension ratcheting higher than a siege engine preparing to loose its payload.
For a moment that stretched like eternity, Fleur studied Susan's face with the intensity of a master strategist analyzing potential threats and opportunities. Then, to everyone's surprise, her knives slipped smoothly back into their hidden sheaths with the soft whisper of steel finding familiar home.
She crossed the space between them with the fluid grace of a born huntress, golden hair catching firelight like spun silk, her traveling cloak whispering behind her. When she reached Susan, her arms opened in a gesture of welcome that somehow managed to be both gentle and fierce.
"Ma chère Susan," she said, her English warmly accented with musical French, each word chosen with careful thought, "if Harry's friends loved him deeply enough to follow him across the Veil itself, across death and the spaces between worlds, then you are my friends as well. Love that strong, that pure, that devoted—it does not divide or compete or diminish. It multiplies. It makes us family."
The embrace that followed was sudden and intense, two warriors clutching each other as if to anchor themselves against the impossible tide of circumstances. Seventeen years of grief, loneliness, desperate searching, and carefully maintained hope broke like ice barriers in spring. Tears caught in both women's lashes, though neither would ever admit to such vulnerability aloud.
Hadrian watched this display with that maddening, devastatingly charming smirk, arms folded across his impressive chest, dark head cocked to one side in apparent amusement. "Well, that's genuinely heartening. For a brief moment there, I thought I might need to referee some sort of territorial dispute. And I am absolutely terrible at refereeing anything more complex than a drinking contest. Far too handsome and distracting, you understand. The contestants tend to lose focus entirely."
Susan's laugh was watery, half-choked with emotion, but it was real and warm. Fleur's answering smile was sharp as a blade and twice as luminous.
Fleur stepped back but kept her hands on Susan's shoulders, her expression turning practical and determined. "Besides," she continued briskly, "if we are to prevent the end of all worlds—and knowing Harry as I do, that is almost certainly the task that lies before us—then we will need every friend and ally whose courage has been tested in the fires of impossible battles. If five brilliant, devoted women followed him willingly through death itself and beyond..." Her eyes softened as they flicked toward Hadrian, affection and exasperation mingling in her gaze. "...then clearly his worth extends far beyond what even I had fully grasped."
Hadrian arched one dark eyebrow, green eyes gleaming with inner fire and barely contained amusement. "Careful, love. Continue down that path of reasoning and people will start building temples in my honor. Altars, devoted priests, daily sacrifices—the whole elaborate religious experience. And while I do enjoy being worshipped in appropriate circumstances, I draw the line at incense. Gives me the most dreadful headaches."
"Do you really?" Fleur asked with deceptive sweetness. "Draw the line at incense?"
"Well," Hadrian admitted with theatrical reluctance, "mostly. I suppose I could make exceptions for particularly high-quality frankincense. And perhaps myrrh, if the devotees were sufficiently attractive and genuinely enthusiastic about their worship."
"Your vanity," Susan observed with fond exasperation, "remains as boundless as ever."
"It's not vanity when it's justified by objective reality," Hadrian replied smoothly. "I prefer to think of it as accurate self-assessment combined with healthy confidence."
Tormund let out another booming laugh that seemed to rattle the very stones of the ancient walls. He slapped his knee with enough force to fell a smaller man, his magnificent beard bristling with delighted energy. "By all the old gods and the new, if this is what southern lords bring with them when they travel—dead women returning from beyond the Veil, living women embracing like long-lost sisters, casual talk of building temples—I'll drink to it gladly! Hell, I'll drink for it! We'll need more wine though. Barrels and barrels of the stuff. Otherwise none of us will survive this night with our wits intact."
"Assuming we had wits to begin with," Ygritte muttered, though her arrow had finally lowered, the bowstring easing slightly. She didn't unstring the weapon entirely—old habits and ingrained caution died hard—but the immediate threat assessment had clearly shifted. "Mark my words," she continued, grey eyes flicking meaningfully toward Hadrian, "this isn't going to be the last of his devoted followers to appear. Dead or alive, lost loves or loyal friends, they'll keep coming. Like ravens to a fresh corpse, or flies to spilled honey."
Her gaze sharpened as it settled on Hadrian's carefully neutral expression. "The question is whether you're the honey drawing them in, or the corpse they're all circling."
Hadrian's smile was slow, dangerous, and entirely too confident for anyone's peace of mind. "That depends entirely on the day, darling Ygritte. Today? I'm feeling remarkably honey-like. Sweet, golden, irresistibly attractive, and beneficial to everyone's health."
"And tomorrow?" she pressed.
"Tomorrow," he said with theatrical solemnity, "I may well be a devastatingly handsome corpse. But even then, I'll be the most attractive corpse anyone's ever seen, so the general principle remains sound."
The fire popped enthusiastically, sending sparks dancing upward toward the shadowed ceiling as though even the flames found genuine amusement in their increasingly ridiculous banter.
Susan stepped fully into the chamber then, Fleur's hand still resting supportively on her arm, the heavy door closing behind her with a resonant thunk that seemed to shut out the entire world beyond these stone walls. The sound created a sense of intimacy, of secrets about to be shared among trusted companions, of councils convened in firelight and shadow.
"Now then," Hadrian said, straightening to his full impressive height and clasping his hands behind his back in a gesture unconsciously reminiscent of a commanding officer addressing his troops, "before we continue this delightfully chaotic reunion, perhaps we should establish some basic parameters. Susan, my dear, you mentioned that you and the others—Hermione, Daphne, Padma, and Luna—are scattered across this world. Do you know where? Are they safe? And more importantly..." His expression grew serious, the playful mask slipping to reveal the strategic mind beneath. "Why now? What has happened to bring you here tonight, to this specific place and moment?"
Susan's composure shifted, revealing the urgency she had been carefully concealing beneath courtesy and emotional reunion. "Luna found me three days ago. She said the barriers between worlds are weakening, that something vast and dark is stirring across multiple realities. She said you would need all of us—that the battle coming will make the war against Voldemort look like a children's game."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees.
"Luna always did have a gift for cheerful prophecy," Hadrian muttered. "And here I was hoping for a quiet month or two of simple political intrigue and manageable assassins."
"When," Tormund asked seriously, his joviality fading into the grim focus of an experienced warrior, "have you ever been that fortunate?"
"Point taken," Hadrian conceded. "So. Weakening barriers, stirring darkness, apocalyptic battle approaching. Tuesday, then?"
"Probably Wednesday," Susan said with a trace of her old humor. "Luna was never terribly specific about timing."
"Well," Hadrian said, glancing around at the assembled faces—Fleur's determined beauty, Ygritte's wary competence, Tormund's eager readiness, and Susan's desperate hope, "I suppose we'd better start planning. Ygritte, love, you can lower that bow now. If Susan intended to murder me, she'd have done it by now. Much more efficient than standing around chatting about the end of the world."
"Maybe," Ygritte said, but she did finally unstring the weapon. "But I'm keeping the arrows handy. Just in case your reunion gets more complicated."
The inn's common walls had hosted many a night of laughter, plotting, drinking, and heated argument, but tonight felt different. Tonight the ancient stones seemed to lean inward, listening with the attention of old gods to mortal concerns. For what was unfolding within this circle of firelight and shadow was not merely reunion, nor simply strategy session.
It was the beginning of something vast and complex, tangled in love and loyalty, devotion and death-defiance, power and sacrifice. And somewhere in the delicate balance of it all hung the fate of more than one world, more than one reality, more than any of them could yet imagine.
The fire burned lower as conversations continued deep into the night, but none noticed the chill. They were too busy planning for war, and celebrating the impossible gift of love that refused to accept endings.
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