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..."And what price did you pay to use it?"...

Nyrielle’s words pierced through the veil of gloom that clung to Ashlynn like a shroud, startling her out of the dark world she’d glimpsed and bringing her fully back to the present.

Slowly, she drew a deep, shuddering breath, followed by another as she fought to get her disordered heart back under control and restore the natural flow of energy through her body.

"I, I’m fine," Ashlynn said as she slumped into Nyrielle’s embrace, allowing herself to rely completely on her lover for support. "This, this will pass," she said a moment later as fatigue washed over her. "I just need a few minutes to recollect myself."

"Should I carry you away?" Nyrielle whispered softly. "The air here isn’t fresh and nothing grows here. Dawn is hours away. I could carry you out into the forest if it would be better, or just to your terrace if that’s enough for you," she said as she turned Ashlynn around so she could gaze into her lover’s tired, haunted eyes.

"Just tell me what you need," Nyrielle said gently as she pulled a handkerchief from her dress and began to gently dab away the beads of cold sweat on Ashlynn’s brow. "You know how I hate to see you like this."

"Fresh air," Ashlynn said softly, burying her face in the soft fabric of Nyrielle’s dress and taking a deep breath of her lavender and jasmine scent. She didn’t want to admit how far she’d pushed herself and she was certain that once she recovered, Nyrielle would be cross with her, but at the moment, the thought of fresh, cool air in her lungs and the soft loam of dirt between her toes appealed far too much to reject for a moment of stubborn pride.

"And growing things. But we don’t need to go far. The gardens will be fine."

Gently, moving as though Ashlynn was a delicate piece of porcelain, Nyrielle scooped her lover into her arms before shrouding them both in darkness.

She swept silently through the corridors of the ancient fortress at a speed too quick for most people to observe, leaving behind only the slightest breeze to mark their passage until they arrived in a dark, quiet rooftop garden.

Of all the gardens scattered around the grounds of the ancient fortress, this one was the most private, belonging originally to Nyrielle’s mother and filled with the lavender, lilac, wisteria and primroses that had been among her mother’s favorites when she was alive.

It was also the garden where Nyrielle and Ashlynn had taken their meals together, sharing fleeting tender moments until Ashlynn trusted Nyrielle enough to invite the vampire into her bed chambers and dinner moved onto Ashlynn’s terrace.

"Thank you," Ashlynn said as Nyrielle set her down next to the wooden trellis that supported a climbing wisteria. The feeling of the cool, damp night air did more good for her than she’d imagined as she took one long, steadying breath after another while running her fingers ever so lightly over the rough surface of the wisteria’s gnarled branches.

For several minutes, neither woman spoke as Ashlynn allowed her senses to envelop the garden, feeling a supportive, nurturing offer from many of the trees that dotted the garden.

Though she didn’t need the energy of the trees in the garden in order to recover, the fact that they offered so readily told her a great deal about how close she’d come to touching the source Nyrielle’s dark, deadly power and how dangerous it was to use so carelessly.

"I’m sorry," Ashlynn finally said when she felt she’d recovered enough to stand on her own, without leaning on the wisteria’s trellis for support.

"I overdid it tonight. It, it wasn’t intentional, but once I stepped forward I felt.

.. caught up in a dark wind," she explained awkwardly.

"Once my sails were filled, it was all I could do to steer around the rocks and shoals.

I, I think I avoided the hazards but I had to go forward. "

"And where did this dark wind carry you?" Nyrielle asked gently, running her slender fingers through Ashlynn’s soft blond hair and caressing her cheeks that had turned rosey in the cool autumn night air. "What is it you were trying to do by blending our power tonight?"

"You told me once," Ashlynn began as she tried to put words to something that had been more feeling than deliberate intention. "You told me that you caused the death of the soul. That your power could destroy part of what made a person who they were."

"That’s true," Nyrielle said slowly. "The Kiss of the Void will cause anything it touches to wither. Sometimes, whatever part of a person I’ve touched withers away completely and dies. Sometimes, so little is left that it can never recover to what it was," she explained.

"If a person is strong, or if I try to envelop too much of their soul, then it lasts for moments at most, though those moments can prove lethal," she said, thinking of the moment of utter helplessness she’d bestowed on Hamdi to allow Ignatious to claim his vengeance against the powerful High Lord.

"I’ve seen your power up close, when you used it on the Frost Walker’s ancestors," Ashlynn said. "Ever since then, I wondered if Aspakos had touched something similar. He’s lost his ability to touch tools and it seemed like such a strange thing, but it’s also bound up in the aura of darkness and violence that clings to him, like a layer of oil paint. "

"When you pushed back against his power, for a moment, I felt like the aura clinging to him loosened," Ashlynn said. "Like I could see a glimpse of the man beneath the miasma. And I wondered... I wondered if I could reach out to the man he’d been, to help him regrow what had been lost."

There was more to it than that, of course.

What she’d seen in Aspakos had been a pain that reached so deeply into his heart that she couldn’t help but sympathize with the broken-beaked sorcerer.

After all, her own heart and spirit had suffered wounds so grievous that they still felt raw and tender, even after all these months.

Worse, the pain she felt only seemed to grow greater with the passage of time, as if someone had left a twisted barb in her wounds when they heaped shovelfuls of damp earth into her shallow grave.

In that brief, fleeting glimpse of the man beneath the aura that clung to him, she’d seen something so painful in Aspakos that she wondered... if it could be healed, if she could find even a sliver of relief for him... could she find relief for herself as well?