lay down your burdens

vi

The night is crisp and cold and endlessly quiet, as if even the wildlife in the Greenwing has grown silent in respect for the being that crosses beneath its canopies. Above, through the trees, the sky is alive with bands of opalescent splendour, an aurora to rival anything of Safrin's creation. It is this that occupies Vi's gaze as he arrives at the Olson Hunting Lodge. Standing on the porch, the air around him tight and vibrating, as if something ethereal and other has been contained in a shape far too mundane to hold it for long, he waits, leaning against the solid wood.

"Noah Olson." His name is spoken softly, a summoning in the form of a gentle, outstretched hand, and wherever the Forsaken might be - awake, asleep, at home or elsewhere, he will know where to go. And though the hour is late, time will not march onwards no matter how long it takes for Noah to arrive. Only when he is present will the stars begin to glimmer again, will the trees breathe and the earth sigh its relief.

Table base by Sky!

He was asleep, but even the deepest o slumbers was easily disturbed by the sound of his god calling his name, of the tug on his soul between him and the deity. Glacier eyes snapped open, and the Forsaken sucked in a breath before he disappeared from his bed.

His magic did not need to take him far, but he trusted it to take him to where he was called, wherever that happened to be. His feet touched his porch, covered only in ursur wool socks, and he looked up to the god of life.

He let out a breath. Vi’s presence wasn’t overwhelming, not in the way of storms or fire. It was gentler. Stranger. But no less terrifying. He shivered from reverence washing through him so fiercely it almost hurt—but almost. There was something soft in the way his name echoed again in his mind, from how he had been called.

”Vi,” he uttered, voice shaking slightly at the edges, frayed with anticipation.

noah

let it rain until it floods
let the sun breathe life once more
reborn

vi

Vi does not look over his shoulder at Noah's arrival, merely gesturing with a hand for him to step up and stand with him at the porch. Already the chill of the night is returning in earnest, both due to the change in season and the way the god of life no longer clenches his fist around reality. A blanket of darkness beneath a sea of dazzling stars, he merely watches it for a moment before speaking once again. "Life is not easy," he says softly - not as its patron and not as one who marches through it towards Mort's embrace.

"It has not been easy for you, these past seasons. But I think," and he slows here, glancing sidelong at Noah with a gaze no less dark than the night, but somehow aglow from within, "that we may now have peace, for a time." A long time, if luck should hold. "And I think the state of affairs ought to reflect that. Noah Olson - I will be releasing you from your burden of duty to me. You need be weighed down by my banners no longer. You are Forsaken no more."

Gazing back up at the heavens, he links his hands gently behind his back. "The only thing I want you to do from here is to live."

Table base by Sky!

Noah stepped forward as bidden, slow and quiet, the snow crunching softly beneath his wool covered, stocking feet. The night air bit at his skin, but the cold didn’t bother him. It was the god beside him that made his heart pound—a presence that felt like the world exhaling, like roots shifting deep beneath the frost. Warmth and biting cold all at once.

He stood shoulder to shoulder with Vi and listened.

And though the words were gentle, they struck him like thunder. You are Forsaken no more. His heart raced.

Noah didn’t answer right away. He looked up. The stars above were the same ones he’d hunted under, prayed under, bled beneath and even as he stood here now, with Vi, quiet had never felt like a gift before. But it did now. Something in him stilled. Something he hadn’t known was still fighting. Still bracing. He felt his heart still its erratic beating, the breath fill his lungs again.

He steadied. As he steadied, Vi’dore stepped from the shadows around the lodge and lowered his head. The unicorn knickered a low, rumbling sound that sounded like a good-bye. 

“…Peace,” he said, at last. The word didn’t sit easily on his tongue, foreign and fragile. He looked down at his hands, as if expecting to see the burden still there, etched into his palms. ”I don’t know what I look like without the weight.”

A breath left him, half a laugh, half a prayer. As he looked back to Vi he saw Cordelia for a moment in his vast eyes. Then, after a long pause, he said, voice low. “And if ever you call again—I’ll come.” For Vi would still hold his allegiance. The gos would still be the patron over his life. His prayers would still go to him, the one powerful enough to breathe life into lungs.

noah

let it rain until it floods
let the sun breathe life once more
reborn

vi

As Vi'dore appears, Vi bows his head towards the unicorn as if in greeting and reunion, the same way he would to any living creature intelligent enough to acknowledge his passing. "I think it is time you found out, don't you?" He glances back to Noah, and though there is no smile on his lips (there very rarely is), the space between them now is charged with warmth rather than anything like conflict. And rather than a stripping, of a sensation of something being torn away and removed, Noah - the Sentinel - will feel a sense of release.

Of homecoming.

"Of that I have no doubt, Noah Olson. Now go - live. For your children and your region, but most of all for yourself." Brushing past the newly minted Attuned, Vi descends the steps off the porch and begins to walk back into the Greenwing, a hand reaching out to pat Vi'dore on the neck; an invitation for the unicorn to follow.

---

Noah has become an Attuned once again!

Table base by Sky!

Noah didn’t move.

The cold curled around his ankles, snow dampening the wool of his socks, but he barely noticed. All he could feel was release—not a cutting or breaking, but an undoing. A gentle unfastening of something so tightly bound around his soul, around his spine, through bones and blood and sinew and muscle. And in its place, lightness.

Not joy, not yet, but a quiet, aching kind of freedom.

A return.

His eyes burned, tears threatening to spill forth in the wake of it all. He blinked hard, exhaling through it, steady even now. Watching as Vi turned, as Vi’dore stepped forward, as god and unicorn disappeared into the hush of the woods, Noah listened to the beat of his own heart and felt a familiarity swell within him.

And still, Noah stood. Familiarity trembled at the edge of his thoughts, but it wasn’t what he clung to. It wasn’t what rooted him there on the porch.

It was the last thing Vi had said. That was the part he didn’t know how to do—But he would learn.

Drawing in a breath, Noah let his gaze lift to the stars once more. No oaths. No vows. No banners. Just the quiet, and the cold, and the first sense of stillness he’d known in years.

And then—finally—he turned.

Not toward battle. Not toward burden.

But toward his children, his home, his future.

He stepped across the small porch, in through the door, and into the lodge.

FIN

noah

let it rain until it floods
let the sun breathe life once more
reborn