Estella had been having, overall, a very good day indeed.
She'd managed to get a bit of work done in the morning, enough to clear her schedule for an afternoon of sledding with Cy, Ves, and Astraia. A side of Cy that hadn't really made many appearances in a very long time had surfaced over the course, which lifted her own mood as well. It was hardly a cure to what ailed him; she knew that tomorrow had every bit of the potential to be a bad day as it would have otherwise. But she also understood that he had to do that: take things a day at a time and hope that slowly, the balance of bad days and good days could shift around a little. Having friends, she'd found, was the best way to up the odds. Needless to say, she was relieved to see him getting along so well with Ves, Astraia, Zee, Leon, and even Khari, when they trained together.
That alone would have made the diversion of an afternoon's time well worth it, but that Astraia had also been met with good news was even better still. Such were her thoughts as she climbed the stairs to the roof of Cy's tower. They'd broken for the opportunity to find dry clothes, and Estella had bundled herself in a thicker cloak while she was at it. Apparently, dinner had made its way up in the meantime, as had her uncle, strange as that thought still was to her.
"Hello again, Harellan."
He was dressed for the weather as well, though on the whole, cold didn't appear to bother him much. The now-familiar golden tree decorated the front of his tunic, which today was deep purple. He turned as she arrived, offering a gentle smile. "Estella. You're looking particularly happy today, I must say." It seemed to come as good news to him; then again, there was hardly a reason it wouldn't.
Of course, someone calling attention to it made her immediately self-conscious, and she smiled a bit sheepishly. "I suppose I am. Strange way to feel in the middle of all this, I know, but... I guess I'm trying to compartmentalize, and leave all the rest of that for tomorrow." There were already thick wool blankets on the ground along with the food—simple, easily-portable fare that wouldn't make a mess eaten like this. She took a seat against the crenelations, putting her back to them and turning her eyes out to the west, where the sun sank slowly behind the mountains.
"How about you?" She asked, shifting her eyes back to him. "I know it's not... well, it's not much, is it?" A job as a stablehand, a place to sleep in the barracks. There was nothing shameful about occupying such a place as that, but it did seem very... small, for someone like him.
Insofar as she really knew him, she supposed.
His smile widened slightly; Harellan sat down across from her, his back to the sun and his legs crossed beneath him. "I see you've already forgotten I spent your childhood doing exactly the same job." He leaned forward a little, setting his elbows on his knees and letting his hands drape forward. "You need not trouble yourself. I am happy here. With you and Cyrus." He exhaled a soft breath, sitting back a little and tipping his head up to take in the yellow sky.
"You can't imagine how long I've wanted that. To be able to tell you who I am. To tell you a little more about who you are. Someday, perhaps—" He cut himself off then, and shook his head. "Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Everyone says it's youth that rushes, but I don't think I've ever felt such haste as I do now. When I'm terribly-positioned for it, no less." His expression took on a melancholy tinge, almost like a shadow passed behind his eyes.
Before she could form any particular response to that, the trapdoor to their left opened again. Cy was the first out of it, setting a glass bottle down on the ground before pulling himself up and moving aside so the others could do the same. He handed her the bottle—the last of yesterday's brandy, apparently—then settled down to her right.
“Harellan." His greeting was perceptibly cooler than her own had been, as they usually were.
Harellan, however, answered with the same warmth. "Good to see you Cyrus. And Vesryn and Astraia as well, of course." He offered a smile to the others, using the time everyone took to settle to start removing the covers or wrappings from what was on offer. Bread, jams, nuts, cheese, and chilled meats, mostly.
"Hello again," Ves greeted, taking a seat against the crenelations next to Estella. Astraia chose a spot on the blanket on the other side of him, immediately plucking a few of the nuts from a bowl. "Quite a lovely day, I think. Enough to wash away the stain of my crushing defeat at Wicked Grace." Astraia snickered a little at that.
That had been—well. That had been a lot of things, none of which Estella wanted to be remembering right now. Mostly for the sake of her dignity, little of it though there was. She cleared her throat slightly. "Yes, well, no cards tonight, I think. Perhaps for the best—I'm quite convinced that Harellan could beat all of us, should bluffing be involved." One didn't accept a moniker like his without some inclination to deception, she knew that much.
He seemed rather amused by the assertion, if his lopsided smile was anything to go by. It almost told the truth all by itself—tilted and sly, as though to let anything too direct or straightforward slide right away. "Perhaps we'll have to find out, some other day." He picked at the various plates of food, assembling himself a sandwich and skimming a few nuts from the top of the bowl. The first crunched shortly after, as he cracked it between his back teeth, chewing slowly.
Cyrus filled the temporary silence. “How's Saraya been, Vesryn? Still no changes?"
"Nothing, really," he answered. It was hard to tell if he was surprised by that or not, but he was definitely pleased to say it. "She sleeps more often than not when I do, and never while I'm awake. Dreamless still, and peacefully. She's still as aloof as ever, refusing to lend a hand in our game of capture the flag. Though I think she would've scrounged up the effort if I'd needed to bring Khari down." The two had a bit of a rivalry apparently, or at least, Saraya had some vested interest in not being beaten by the Dalish elf while she was working in tandem with Ves. "I think whatever the Loneliness demon did, it didn't affect me like Nightmare, or... Zeth, did."
"I'm glad I missed that," Astraia murmured, bringing her knees to her chest and shuddering slightly, not just from the cold. "The demon. The whole thing sounded awful."
“They usually are." Cyrus said it in a muted sort of tone.
Harellan frowned slightly. "Loneliness? Those are..." He trailed off, then shook his head, sending a ripple down the long black hair on the right side of his head. "Quite rare. I've only ever encountered a few."
A few? That was... still a lot more than she was sure most people had ever run into. Most mages, even. "That many?" She asked, brows furrowing. "I hadn't even heard of them before we found the one in that house." Of course, her arcane education had conspicuous gaps in it where it had ended prematurely, so maybe the knowledge was more common than she thought.
Harellan met her eyes and tilted his head. "Perhaps I have simply spent too much time alone. It begins to wear, even on those of us who are quite used to it, I think." He paused momentarily to eat again, then elaborated. "For quite some time, it was just your father and I, you know. We were very young, and... very stupid, admittedly." His expression softened, eyes going almost out of focus, as though he looked beyond her.
"But Mahvir was bound and determined that we would see the outside world, and I'd have followed him anywhere."
"What was he—" Estella's voice hitched. She could ask, she knew, and she had no doubt that Harellan would tell her. But there was another lingering question there. Was she ready to hear this? To know two people who had been nothing but figments of her imagination her whole life? Was she ready for them to be real and solid and possibly different from what she'd tried not to let herself conjure?
She swallowed. "...what was he like? My—my father?"
"A dragon in an elf's body." Harellan seemed to understand the difficulty in asking the question, because his answer was soft. "Larger than life, with the kind of personality that made him impossible to ignore. Passionate, and ambitious, and more than anything invested. In everything and everyone around him." He reached for the bottle of brandy, still where Cyrus had put it. "May I?" He tilted the bottle in her direction.
"Oh, um. Of course." She was still trying to absorb the information he'd just set in front of her.
Pouring himself a few fingers of the liquor, Harellan sat back slightly, leaning his free hand on the blanket behind him and holding the glass at his knee with the other. "Our people, our... clan, I suppose, live deep within Arlathan, where the trees still stand that stood when our civilization first took root. It has kept us closer to history than most, but..." He ran the pad of his thumb over the rim of the glass. "The cost is isolation. Before Mahvir and I, none of us had ventured beyond the boundaries of the forest in generations. We knew, know little of what happens beyond us, save what we glean through very careful inspection of the eluvian network."
Harellan took a sip from the glass, apparently pleased with the flavor. "Mahvir thought that was a foolish way to live. He was determined to reconnect us with the world beyond the trees."
Both Ves and Astraia listened intently, though it was Astraia that spoke up first. "That sounds... amazing. Maybe a little sad." Immediately she held up a hand as if to retract the statement. "The isolation, I mean. But..." She had a look of wonder at the thought, almost reaching the way she'd looked upon first being on this tower, and observing the stars.
"How many of you are there?" Ves asked. He looked to be thinking about something. Knowing him, he was likely trying to make an appraisal of what he was feeling in his own head. Saraya's reaction. "You must be few, to be able to remain where you are."
"Very few." Harellan sighed, shaking his head slightly. "And dying, though few would ever admit it. There is only so much to be done to keep up a population that grows more related with each generation. But the solution anyone else would use—bringing in outsiders—is anathema, and so we keep very careful record of our family lines, and the pairs optimal to produce children are calculated from that information." His mouth pulled to the side. "It's effective enough, but hardly what you want out of life when you're young and strong and feel like the world is yours for the taking."
"I'd like to think I know a thing or two about that," Ves said, an upwards quirk to his lips. "So where did you go, beyond the trees?"
"Right into the middle of the Imperium. Not really many other options, considering." Harellan rolled his eyes. "It initially went about as well as you'd expect. Here we were, armed and armored to the teeth, elves with strange accents and little knowledge of either the Imperial tongue or even the trade language." He snorted softly.
"The people in the outlying villages we ran into first left us alone out of fear I think, never mind Mahvir's attempts to make friends. Language barriers can be very difficult to circumvent. But we learned, slowly. Usually by trying to talk to traders or caravans. The kinds of people used to the odd and the strange." Harellan's smile turned wistful. "We circled the rim of the ocean, hearing tales of Minrathous. He wanted to go there, of course, to the beating heart of that place that had once been an enemy to us all."
Cyrus scoffed, under his breath, but loud enough for Estella to hear. “I'm sure that went well for you."
Harellan shrugged. "It wasn't so bad at first. We didn't look like slaves, and we didn't act like them. Most people were willing enough to accept that we weren't, even if they didn't know what we were instead." It was hard to imagine that they'd resembled the technically-free city elves, either.
"At first?" Estella was almost afraid to break the flow of his telling. She had so many more questions, but considering how much every detail fascinated her, she supposed it was probably best to allow Harellan to give them in the order he deemed appropriate.
"Well... yes. News travels fast, when it is such strange news as we were. We knew enough not to mention where we were from, but we didn't hesitate as much as we should have before giving out other rather conspicuous pieces of information. We'd have either been summarily detained or wanted for the deaths of those who'd tried to detain us had Genny not intervened. Iphigenia, that is."
Harellan, who had been speaking at relatively normal tone and volume, grew quiet upon her mention, something indecipherable coloring the edges of the words. It sounded almost like... reverence, or something of a similar kind. "She saved us both, though I must admit Mahvir nearly didn't play along fast enough." He shook his head. "His pride didn't let him accept the role of wayward slave easily, but he saw the sense eventually."
Estella could only imagine how much it must have stung, for someone so steeped in the oldest traditions of a very proud people to be forced to play a role like that. Imagining that such a person was her own father was... not as easy. Then again, imagining someone like that as Cyrus's father tracked just about exactly right. "I can think of more auspicious meetings," she admitted. "But also worse ones." She cracked a tiny smile.
"It was certainly memorable for all involved." Harellan returned her smile, but his only made it halfway to his eyes. "She was a formidable woman, your mother. Bright, vibrant, dynamic, brilliant. And more compassionate than anyone either of us had ever met. It didn't take long before Mahvir was entirely enchanted." He closed his eyes briefly, pulling in a breath as if to collect himself. When he blinked them open again, he met Estella's steadily.
"I'm sure you've heard this too many times. But you look so much like her. Except—"
"The color of my hair," Estella finished dryly. "It... might have come up once or twice." Something uncomfortable tightened in her chest, but she did her best to quash it before it got any worse.
Something about the way Harellan spoke made her wonder about something, but she couldn't think of a way to phrase the question that wasn't too... something. Perhaps she'd find the words at some later point, but for now, she let the thought settle somewhere at the back of her mind instead. "I... Tiberius never told us about him. Did he... did he know?" She couldn't imagine him approving. Quite the opposite.
Harellan shook his head. "Not for quite some time. Not until the two of you, actually. At least in a manner of speaking. It was a rather impossible thing to hide, when Genny conceived. She kept the truth from him as long as possible, for fear of what would become of you if she didn't." His jaw tightened, as though he gritted his teeth with considerable force. "But they wouldn't let themselves be separated for too long. One of the servants sold them out."
He sighed. "I won't tell you that story tonight, unless you truly want it now. It's not hard to guess, in any case." He paused, his eyes fixed on his knee for a long moment. "They were the ones who named you, though. Your parents. Their sun and star." Harellan huffed slightly. "And Mahvir gave you elven names, too. Names from our family."
Estella found herself very much wanting to know, but without the voice to properly ask. So she held his eyes, and hoped he'd understand.
"Eliana." He certainly seemed to comprehend the tacit request. His eyes flicked to Cyrus. "And Syrillion. We are the Saeris." He shook his head. "I'm sorry. That this part of you was kept from you for so long."
Eliana.
And Syrillion. She supposed they had to have meant for the names to sound similar in both languages, though the meanings were quite different. Still... there was a sense of harmony to them, maybe. It felt like an insight. Into her parents, into the kinds of people they were, and into what her life would have been like, if only things had been a little different.
It was sobering, in a way, but also a relief. To know. To have names, personalities. Their names, and hers as well. As for faces, well... she probably had more than most orphans ever would. A face like the one in a mirror, and a face like the one in front of her, belonging to her father's twin. It was more than she'd ever dared hope for.
Her hand dropped to her side, seeking Ves's in an automatic way that she didn't think twice about.
"It's not your fault," she breathed. "Thank you, for sharing it with us now. I'm... I'm grateful." The word felt wholly inadequate to her feelings, but she wasn't sure what else she could possibly say, either.
Harellan didn't seem to be without considerable emotion himself, but he appeared to swallow the feelings, whatever they were, before they could break fully over his face.
"You are... quite welcome, Estella."
She'd managed to get a bit of work done in the morning, enough to clear her schedule for an afternoon of sledding with Cy, Ves, and Astraia. A side of Cy that hadn't really made many appearances in a very long time had surfaced over the course, which lifted her own mood as well. It was hardly a cure to what ailed him; she knew that tomorrow had every bit of the potential to be a bad day as it would have otherwise. But she also understood that he had to do that: take things a day at a time and hope that slowly, the balance of bad days and good days could shift around a little. Having friends, she'd found, was the best way to up the odds. Needless to say, she was relieved to see him getting along so well with Ves, Astraia, Zee, Leon, and even Khari, when they trained together.
That alone would have made the diversion of an afternoon's time well worth it, but that Astraia had also been met with good news was even better still. Such were her thoughts as she climbed the stairs to the roof of Cy's tower. They'd broken for the opportunity to find dry clothes, and Estella had bundled herself in a thicker cloak while she was at it. Apparently, dinner had made its way up in the meantime, as had her uncle, strange as that thought still was to her.
"Hello again, Harellan."
He was dressed for the weather as well, though on the whole, cold didn't appear to bother him much. The now-familiar golden tree decorated the front of his tunic, which today was deep purple. He turned as she arrived, offering a gentle smile. "Estella. You're looking particularly happy today, I must say." It seemed to come as good news to him; then again, there was hardly a reason it wouldn't.
Of course, someone calling attention to it made her immediately self-conscious, and she smiled a bit sheepishly. "I suppose I am. Strange way to feel in the middle of all this, I know, but... I guess I'm trying to compartmentalize, and leave all the rest of that for tomorrow." There were already thick wool blankets on the ground along with the food—simple, easily-portable fare that wouldn't make a mess eaten like this. She took a seat against the crenelations, putting her back to them and turning her eyes out to the west, where the sun sank slowly behind the mountains.
"How about you?" She asked, shifting her eyes back to him. "I know it's not... well, it's not much, is it?" A job as a stablehand, a place to sleep in the barracks. There was nothing shameful about occupying such a place as that, but it did seem very... small, for someone like him.
Insofar as she really knew him, she supposed.
His smile widened slightly; Harellan sat down across from her, his back to the sun and his legs crossed beneath him. "I see you've already forgotten I spent your childhood doing exactly the same job." He leaned forward a little, setting his elbows on his knees and letting his hands drape forward. "You need not trouble yourself. I am happy here. With you and Cyrus." He exhaled a soft breath, sitting back a little and tipping his head up to take in the yellow sky.
"You can't imagine how long I've wanted that. To be able to tell you who I am. To tell you a little more about who you are. Someday, perhaps—" He cut himself off then, and shook his head. "Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Everyone says it's youth that rushes, but I don't think I've ever felt such haste as I do now. When I'm terribly-positioned for it, no less." His expression took on a melancholy tinge, almost like a shadow passed behind his eyes.
Before she could form any particular response to that, the trapdoor to their left opened again. Cy was the first out of it, setting a glass bottle down on the ground before pulling himself up and moving aside so the others could do the same. He handed her the bottle—the last of yesterday's brandy, apparently—then settled down to her right.
“Harellan." His greeting was perceptibly cooler than her own had been, as they usually were.
Harellan, however, answered with the same warmth. "Good to see you Cyrus. And Vesryn and Astraia as well, of course." He offered a smile to the others, using the time everyone took to settle to start removing the covers or wrappings from what was on offer. Bread, jams, nuts, cheese, and chilled meats, mostly.
"Hello again," Ves greeted, taking a seat against the crenelations next to Estella. Astraia chose a spot on the blanket on the other side of him, immediately plucking a few of the nuts from a bowl. "Quite a lovely day, I think. Enough to wash away the stain of my crushing defeat at Wicked Grace." Astraia snickered a little at that.
That had been—well. That had been a lot of things, none of which Estella wanted to be remembering right now. Mostly for the sake of her dignity, little of it though there was. She cleared her throat slightly. "Yes, well, no cards tonight, I think. Perhaps for the best—I'm quite convinced that Harellan could beat all of us, should bluffing be involved." One didn't accept a moniker like his without some inclination to deception, she knew that much.
He seemed rather amused by the assertion, if his lopsided smile was anything to go by. It almost told the truth all by itself—tilted and sly, as though to let anything too direct or straightforward slide right away. "Perhaps we'll have to find out, some other day." He picked at the various plates of food, assembling himself a sandwich and skimming a few nuts from the top of the bowl. The first crunched shortly after, as he cracked it between his back teeth, chewing slowly.
Cyrus filled the temporary silence. “How's Saraya been, Vesryn? Still no changes?"
"Nothing, really," he answered. It was hard to tell if he was surprised by that or not, but he was definitely pleased to say it. "She sleeps more often than not when I do, and never while I'm awake. Dreamless still, and peacefully. She's still as aloof as ever, refusing to lend a hand in our game of capture the flag. Though I think she would've scrounged up the effort if I'd needed to bring Khari down." The two had a bit of a rivalry apparently, or at least, Saraya had some vested interest in not being beaten by the Dalish elf while she was working in tandem with Ves. "I think whatever the Loneliness demon did, it didn't affect me like Nightmare, or... Zeth, did."
"I'm glad I missed that," Astraia murmured, bringing her knees to her chest and shuddering slightly, not just from the cold. "The demon. The whole thing sounded awful."
“They usually are." Cyrus said it in a muted sort of tone.
Harellan frowned slightly. "Loneliness? Those are..." He trailed off, then shook his head, sending a ripple down the long black hair on the right side of his head. "Quite rare. I've only ever encountered a few."
A few? That was... still a lot more than she was sure most people had ever run into. Most mages, even. "That many?" She asked, brows furrowing. "I hadn't even heard of them before we found the one in that house." Of course, her arcane education had conspicuous gaps in it where it had ended prematurely, so maybe the knowledge was more common than she thought.
Harellan met her eyes and tilted his head. "Perhaps I have simply spent too much time alone. It begins to wear, even on those of us who are quite used to it, I think." He paused momentarily to eat again, then elaborated. "For quite some time, it was just your father and I, you know. We were very young, and... very stupid, admittedly." His expression softened, eyes going almost out of focus, as though he looked beyond her.
"But Mahvir was bound and determined that we would see the outside world, and I'd have followed him anywhere."
"What was he—" Estella's voice hitched. She could ask, she knew, and she had no doubt that Harellan would tell her. But there was another lingering question there. Was she ready to hear this? To know two people who had been nothing but figments of her imagination her whole life? Was she ready for them to be real and solid and possibly different from what she'd tried not to let herself conjure?
She swallowed. "...what was he like? My—my father?"
"A dragon in an elf's body." Harellan seemed to understand the difficulty in asking the question, because his answer was soft. "Larger than life, with the kind of personality that made him impossible to ignore. Passionate, and ambitious, and more than anything invested. In everything and everyone around him." He reached for the bottle of brandy, still where Cyrus had put it. "May I?" He tilted the bottle in her direction.
"Oh, um. Of course." She was still trying to absorb the information he'd just set in front of her.
Pouring himself a few fingers of the liquor, Harellan sat back slightly, leaning his free hand on the blanket behind him and holding the glass at his knee with the other. "Our people, our... clan, I suppose, live deep within Arlathan, where the trees still stand that stood when our civilization first took root. It has kept us closer to history than most, but..." He ran the pad of his thumb over the rim of the glass. "The cost is isolation. Before Mahvir and I, none of us had ventured beyond the boundaries of the forest in generations. We knew, know little of what happens beyond us, save what we glean through very careful inspection of the eluvian network."
Harellan took a sip from the glass, apparently pleased with the flavor. "Mahvir thought that was a foolish way to live. He was determined to reconnect us with the world beyond the trees."
Both Ves and Astraia listened intently, though it was Astraia that spoke up first. "That sounds... amazing. Maybe a little sad." Immediately she held up a hand as if to retract the statement. "The isolation, I mean. But..." She had a look of wonder at the thought, almost reaching the way she'd looked upon first being on this tower, and observing the stars.
"How many of you are there?" Ves asked. He looked to be thinking about something. Knowing him, he was likely trying to make an appraisal of what he was feeling in his own head. Saraya's reaction. "You must be few, to be able to remain where you are."
"Very few." Harellan sighed, shaking his head slightly. "And dying, though few would ever admit it. There is only so much to be done to keep up a population that grows more related with each generation. But the solution anyone else would use—bringing in outsiders—is anathema, and so we keep very careful record of our family lines, and the pairs optimal to produce children are calculated from that information." His mouth pulled to the side. "It's effective enough, but hardly what you want out of life when you're young and strong and feel like the world is yours for the taking."
"I'd like to think I know a thing or two about that," Ves said, an upwards quirk to his lips. "So where did you go, beyond the trees?"
"Right into the middle of the Imperium. Not really many other options, considering." Harellan rolled his eyes. "It initially went about as well as you'd expect. Here we were, armed and armored to the teeth, elves with strange accents and little knowledge of either the Imperial tongue or even the trade language." He snorted softly.
"The people in the outlying villages we ran into first left us alone out of fear I think, never mind Mahvir's attempts to make friends. Language barriers can be very difficult to circumvent. But we learned, slowly. Usually by trying to talk to traders or caravans. The kinds of people used to the odd and the strange." Harellan's smile turned wistful. "We circled the rim of the ocean, hearing tales of Minrathous. He wanted to go there, of course, to the beating heart of that place that had once been an enemy to us all."
Cyrus scoffed, under his breath, but loud enough for Estella to hear. “I'm sure that went well for you."
Harellan shrugged. "It wasn't so bad at first. We didn't look like slaves, and we didn't act like them. Most people were willing enough to accept that we weren't, even if they didn't know what we were instead." It was hard to imagine that they'd resembled the technically-free city elves, either.
"At first?" Estella was almost afraid to break the flow of his telling. She had so many more questions, but considering how much every detail fascinated her, she supposed it was probably best to allow Harellan to give them in the order he deemed appropriate.
"Well... yes. News travels fast, when it is such strange news as we were. We knew enough not to mention where we were from, but we didn't hesitate as much as we should have before giving out other rather conspicuous pieces of information. We'd have either been summarily detained or wanted for the deaths of those who'd tried to detain us had Genny not intervened. Iphigenia, that is."
Harellan, who had been speaking at relatively normal tone and volume, grew quiet upon her mention, something indecipherable coloring the edges of the words. It sounded almost like... reverence, or something of a similar kind. "She saved us both, though I must admit Mahvir nearly didn't play along fast enough." He shook his head. "His pride didn't let him accept the role of wayward slave easily, but he saw the sense eventually."
Estella could only imagine how much it must have stung, for someone so steeped in the oldest traditions of a very proud people to be forced to play a role like that. Imagining that such a person was her own father was... not as easy. Then again, imagining someone like that as Cyrus's father tracked just about exactly right. "I can think of more auspicious meetings," she admitted. "But also worse ones." She cracked a tiny smile.
"It was certainly memorable for all involved." Harellan returned her smile, but his only made it halfway to his eyes. "She was a formidable woman, your mother. Bright, vibrant, dynamic, brilliant. And more compassionate than anyone either of us had ever met. It didn't take long before Mahvir was entirely enchanted." He closed his eyes briefly, pulling in a breath as if to collect himself. When he blinked them open again, he met Estella's steadily.
"I'm sure you've heard this too many times. But you look so much like her. Except—"
"The color of my hair," Estella finished dryly. "It... might have come up once or twice." Something uncomfortable tightened in her chest, but she did her best to quash it before it got any worse.
Something about the way Harellan spoke made her wonder about something, but she couldn't think of a way to phrase the question that wasn't too... something. Perhaps she'd find the words at some later point, but for now, she let the thought settle somewhere at the back of her mind instead. "I... Tiberius never told us about him. Did he... did he know?" She couldn't imagine him approving. Quite the opposite.
Harellan shook his head. "Not for quite some time. Not until the two of you, actually. At least in a manner of speaking. It was a rather impossible thing to hide, when Genny conceived. She kept the truth from him as long as possible, for fear of what would become of you if she didn't." His jaw tightened, as though he gritted his teeth with considerable force. "But they wouldn't let themselves be separated for too long. One of the servants sold them out."
He sighed. "I won't tell you that story tonight, unless you truly want it now. It's not hard to guess, in any case." He paused, his eyes fixed on his knee for a long moment. "They were the ones who named you, though. Your parents. Their sun and star." Harellan huffed slightly. "And Mahvir gave you elven names, too. Names from our family."
Estella found herself very much wanting to know, but without the voice to properly ask. So she held his eyes, and hoped he'd understand.
"Eliana." He certainly seemed to comprehend the tacit request. His eyes flicked to Cyrus. "And Syrillion. We are the Saeris." He shook his head. "I'm sorry. That this part of you was kept from you for so long."
Eliana.
And Syrillion. She supposed they had to have meant for the names to sound similar in both languages, though the meanings were quite different. Still... there was a sense of harmony to them, maybe. It felt like an insight. Into her parents, into the kinds of people they were, and into what her life would have been like, if only things had been a little different.
It was sobering, in a way, but also a relief. To know. To have names, personalities. Their names, and hers as well. As for faces, well... she probably had more than most orphans ever would. A face like the one in a mirror, and a face like the one in front of her, belonging to her father's twin. It was more than she'd ever dared hope for.
Her hand dropped to her side, seeking Ves's in an automatic way that she didn't think twice about.
"It's not your fault," she breathed. "Thank you, for sharing it with us now. I'm... I'm grateful." The word felt wholly inadequate to her feelings, but she wasn't sure what else she could possibly say, either.
Harellan didn't seem to be without considerable emotion himself, but he appeared to swallow the feelings, whatever they were, before they could break fully over his face.
"You are... quite welcome, Estella."