Twelve Centuries since the Crystal War, the 1,287th year of the reign of King Cydan

Advisor Mathon studies the treatesies before him, idly listening to the sound of the freezing rain harrying the walls of Amythn.

The storms have been more frequent of late, and although Mathon is no longer High King, he worries for his people all the same. With the destruction of Tirnoch, the Cycle is mending slowly, and many Fae have returned, or gone into self-imposed exile, too ashamed to face their former comrades.

And there are those that none have heard from at all, Mathon muses, wondering not for the first time if some Fae were just lost to them completely.

No one has seen or heard from Gadflow, and perhaps they never would. Tirnoch may have well devoured the Fae usurper and consumed his very soul.

Mathon shakes his head sadly as another rumble of thunder sounds above. These storms have never in all their history been so violent and destructive; it bodes ill.

"You seem worried, Mathon," the voice of High King Cydan murmurs from the doorway of the library.

"It is only the storm, your Majesty," Mathon replies. "I've never seen such weather before. Their frequency is worrying."

"Do you think the mortals might have something to do with it?" High King Cydan asks, and Mathon looks up to see his King leaning against the doorway, watching him with sharp eyes.

Mathon thinks for a moment, then shakes his head. "No, your Majesty. They have not the magic or technology to shape the winds as they see fit."

"Not yet, anyway," Cydan says lowly, arms crossed.

Mathon is well aware of Cydan's dislike of mortal meddling with the seasons. There have been plenty of skirmishes with mortalkind over the past twenty centuries that illustrate that point perfectly.

And yet, Mathon knows that in the depths of Amythn, in a crystal chamber, the Godslayer of the Crystal War still sleeps. The only mortal that High King Cydan had ever loved, or so it was said.

"Is there anything I can do for you, your Majesty," Mathon asks.

"The Summer delegation is visiting next week," Cydan says, "I trust that preparations are well underway?"

"Yes, your Majesty," Mathon says, reaching for the stack of papers that all detail the upcoming delegation's schedule. "Very nearly finished save a few minor details."

"Good," Cydan says, his gaze somewhat distant.

He's tracing the sigil of the crystal tree etched into his bracers again, Mathon notes. The sigil of the Lady Godslayer, one she herself had apparently designed upon the ending of the Crystal War.

The bracers had been a gift, Cydan had said, when Mathon had finally asked about them a few centuries back. "A name-day gift," Cydan had said, looking amused, "though we Fae do not count name-days as mortals do. So, Liriel decided that my name day was in Midwinter, and gave me the bracers. The prisimere was only just growing white again, and she chose the crystal from beneath the Hallowed Tree."

"Is there anything else, your Majesty?" Mathon asks now as the silence seems to drag on, "you seem distracted of late."

"Twelve centuries, Mathon, and we've yet to find any hint of a way to break her curse," Cydan says quietly, looking at Mathon with dark eyes.

There is a deep anguish there, and looking at his King now, Mathon wonders at Cydan's strength. The very embodiment of the House of Sorrows, and the one of the few who had survived the House's destruction under the leadership of Bisarane.

Cydan has ruled for over a thousand years, but he bears the weight of those centuries easily. The longest reign of a Fae monarch, Mathon knows, is over ten thousand years, the reign of High Queen Aoife, who together with her wife, the Queen Eadgyð, had sealed away Tirnoch in the Age of Emergence.

The Queens had succeeded and their victory had brought the Faelands peace for many millennia after. At least, Mathon thinks, until Gadflow had broken the Cycle asunder.

"My King," Mathon begins, and pauses because what can he say? His King is in love with a mortal, and such an entanglement that can only lead to sorrow and despair.

Cydan waves a hand at him, halting anything else Mathon might have said. His jaw is clenched tight, eyes hard and cold as the very heart of Winter. He half-turns away, to gaze out at the sheeting rain.

"Come find me before court is due to open," is all he says before he stalks away.

Mathon sighs as Cydan vanishes around the corner. His King, he fears, is withdrawing, slowly consumed by his grief for his lost love. Mathon has never heard of any Fae returning to the Great Cycle through heartbreak, but he worries that High King Cydan might be the first.

It's a few hours later, when Mathon descends into the heart of Amythn, where the Godslayer sleeps. He's searched everywhere else for the King, and a few of the guards had said that they'd seen His Majesty enter the heart of Amythn, nearly an hour prior.

Cydan leans against the edge of the Godslayer's tomb, staring down at the Godslayer's peaceful face.

"Your Majesty," Mathon says quietly, barely above a whisper. It seems wrong to speak loudly here, where a Hero rested in eternal sleep, guarded by an immortal Fae.

Cydan doesn't look up, his fingers idly tracing the outline of the Godslayer's face through the crystal. "What is it, Mathon?" his own voice is whisper-quiet as well.

"The court merely awaits your presence, your Majesty," Mathon reports.

Cydan is silent for a long moment, an unmoving statue.

"Your Majesty?" Mathon asks as the minutes wear on.

"I heard you," Cydan says softly, but there is winter ice in his voice. It's a tone that Mathon knows well enough to know that saying anything else will get him frozen to the wall in a heartbeat if Cydan is angry or possibly stabbed.

Mathon has seen Cydan in a rage before. The Fae is deadly cold, and absolutely brutal, the very personification of the heart of Winter.

So Mathon stays quiet.

Cydan closes his eyes, head bowed, hands tracing a sigil upon the crystal that glows with silvery light. A light that is echoed by something within the tomb.

Mathon blinks; he'd heard rumor that the Godslayer had carried with her a totem of Faekind, but to bury it with her…

"You seem puzzled, Mathon," Cydan says, and Mathon realizes that the King has stepped back from the tomb to study him.

"I did not think the rumors true, your Majesty," Mathon says, "that the Godslayer carried a totem of the Fae with her."

Cydan offers him a bitter smile. "You did not think I would ever gift something so precious to me to a mortal woman? Nor leave it with her in her tomb?"

Mathon nods.

"I burned my totem with her body when she fell the first time," Cydan says, and there is an old grief in his eyes. "She returned with it, and told me that she awoke with it upon her breast, singing to her as our crystals now sing to us. That it was her guide out of the darkness into which she had been reborn. How could I not leave it with her?"

He strides past Mathon, "Come, we've still court to open."

Mathon follows, while behind them, the totem of the Winter King shines, resting upon the heart of the Godslayer.