Twenty-three – 06

[This post is from Phelan’s point of view.]

Phelan grinned even as Kellin shook her head.

“Out with it, Phelan.”

“You first,” he countered, crooked smile still firmly in place. He was borrowing trouble and was fully aware of it, but at the same time doing that felt a hell of a lot better than letting his own worries gnaw away at his mind. Worrying about things he couldn’t readily fix wasn’t going to help him or anyone else. “The monsters still living inside of your head, Kellin.”

For a few seconds, she paused. They’d reached the corner of the ward-lines, the spot down the hill from the forge where the ravine curled in two directions around their growing village. Emotion flickered through the young woman’s eyes as she stared out over the trees and brush, one of the wards she’d set into a bare patch of ground at her feet, the stones still neatly piled on top of each other inside a circle cut into the ground with the tip of a hand trowel.

“Sometimes I wonder if it will be enough,” she said at last. “Everything we’re doing—everything I’ve done. Sometimes I wonder if I’m too much. It’s always been easier for some of them to talk to Marin about things. I find myself wondering if my place is really here anymore, or if it’s time I move on, find another spot, find other people who desperately need someone to help them, to guide them—but then I wonder if there’s anyone left out there that’s survived this long without that sort of help. Finally, in the end, I realize this is my home and this is where I belong, that there’s nowhere else that I would rather be. My friends—hell, they’re my family—are here. Everything that really matters to me is here, now. But there’s still this tug, this tether I can feel without seeing. It’s…I don’t want to say it’s disconcerting, because that’s not quite the right word for it, but it’s there and I can feel it. Sometimes it’s stronger, sometimes it’s fainter, but it’s always there.”

“The lines?” Phelan suggested. “Another nexus, something else?”

“It feels different,” Kellin said as she sat down in the grass in front of the small warding cairn. She ran a fingertip along the deepest part of the circular groove, smoothing the base of it from a point into something deeper but more rounded, a tiny moat around the miniature stone mountain. “It’s something beyond the lines, something—older, I guess, even though I know it’s not. The lines are as old as the world itself. Forgotten is probably the better word. Something old and forgotten and it’s tugging at me. Sometimes it feels close but most of the time it feels very, very far away.”

The once-druid stared at her for a very long time, silent. He watched as she took a few herbs from the bag she carried, bundles carefully braided together, and tucked them into the small pile of stones at the center of the anchor. The power that she infused it with was familiar enough to cause a faint ache.

Kellin glanced up toward him, her brow arching slightly. “What?”

“I know what it is,” he said quietly, his throat tightening. “What’s tugging you.”

Her brows knit. “What?”

“Something lost a long time ago,” Phelan whispered, his throat tight. “But never truly died.”

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