Starblade Triptych

I Cannot Leave

_{"A TOAST TO THEE!" my host did shout}

_{Tonight at dinner in this house}

_{Yet now designs to murder me}

_{And since I'm home}

_{I cannot leave.}

_{—from Terry Moore's "Echoes of Home"}

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If asked, Starblade could not have explained what he felt when he heard of Dawnfire's fate.  Yes, he grieved with and for his son's loss.  Yes, he felt guilt over his inability to warn them what had happened to her sooner.  Yes, there was sorrow she could not have been restored.  But it was the jealousy he found difficult to come to terms with.

It was an ugly thing that gnawed on his heart and mind.  And Starblade had no way to tell if it was his own, or another of those bits of himself broken off and perverted by Mornlithe's "training".  He wanted to believe it wasn't his.  Dawnfire had been missing for three... four days?  In His "care" as long as Starblade had been, yet she came home with her own mind intact.  He tried to remind himself that it was not Dawnfire that He had cared to break.  It had not fit His plans.  But that did not stem the bitter emotion filling his thoughts.

And now she was free.  That was even more bitter than the first.  As a chosen avatar of the Goddess, she would not have the pain from that experience linger.  There'd be no nightmares of green-gold cat eyes looming over her.  No memories of a voice purring in ecstasy as pain came crashing down on her senses.  No lingering sensations like a phantom pain crawling in her flesh--pain, pleasure, heat of shame, cold of fear.  She wouldn't find herself paralysed in the middle of the night, unable to remember if freedom had only been a dream and he was really back there with that fiend laughing, laughing, always laughing at his reactions--the fear, the hate, the shame, the desire, and she didn't have to live with it!

Starblade could be free of the compulsions left in his mind, but it seemed he's never escape Falconsbane.  Even now, safe in the Vale and the augmented shields and that damned crow dead--Starblade felt Him there still.  The magical markers His power left on His victims might be gone.  But Starblade felt His hand on him, all the same.