Chapter 664: Bottomless Grave (Part Two)
How long she sat in the forest, staring into the bottomless pit, Ashlynn couldn’t say. The sun had been slipping toward the horizon when she wandered into the woods in search of this spot, and the darkness of a moonless night had enveloped the forest for quite so ti before the soft crunch of foot falls on fallen branches and the soft golden light of a lantern disturbed her spiralling thoughts.
"My Lady?" Ollie called as he navigated his way through the forest to find Ashlynn sitting at the base of a cedar tree. Ever since becoming the Cypress Witch, he could feel her presence and her proximity even if they were leagues apart so it hadn’t been difficult to find her, but when he did, he montarily wondered if he should have... or if he should have just waited for her to return to the hastily established camp.
"What is it Ollie?" Ashlynn asked in a tone that was much lighter and clearer than her heart felt. "Has Marcel already arrived?"
"Not yet, my Lady," Ollie said, dropping down to one knee in the soft earth of the forest and bowing his head deeply. "My, lady," he said stiffly. "One of the n I brought from the village has gone missing. Darragh, one of the hunters you captured when you defeated Sir Broll," he explained. "I, I think he’s trying to escape from the Vale."
"Oh? And why would he be doing that?" Ashlynn said, looking up at Ollie with puffy red eyes and tearstained cheeks. "I thought that he was living well with everyone in the village."
"I thought he was too," Ollie confessed, as he tried and failed to suppress the look of shock and concern that flickered across his face when he saw Ashlynn’s distraught visage. "My lady, are you well? This place," he said, glancing at the shallow pit that seed just large enough to hold a person’s body.
"I’ll be fine," Ashlynn insisted as she brought a silk handkerchief to her eyes and rubbed the tears away. "You don’t need to be so formal with
when it’s just the two of us Ollie," she added as she tapped the ground next to her, gesturing for Ollie to take a seat. "All of the courtly manners, the ceremonies, those things are performances for the audience witnessing formal events and sotis the people in the middle of them."
"Between a knight and his liege lady, there’s no need for all of this," she said, giving him a gentle smile as he joined her sitting at the base of the cedar tree. "Besides, you’re not just my knight. You’re part of my coven and that makes us family. So please," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder and slumping against his strong torso as she continued to stare at the shallow grave. "Please, don’t be too formal with
when it’s just the two of us," she said softly.
"All right, Ashlynn," Ollie replied, stumbling only slightly at using her na without a formal title, though he still wasn’t sure what else he should say. After yesterday’s festival, followed by his formal knighting and the bestowal of his surna, his mind was still grappling with all of the different nuances to their relationship. He felt closer to her now than he had before she returned to the Vale, but that closeness kept getting tangled up in his desire to be a ’proper’ knight and he din’t want to fall short of her expectations of him after last night’s ceremony.
"So, you picked this place for our eting because this is where..." he started after several minutes of awkward silence, only for his voice to trail off as he realized he couldn’t speak the words to describe what had happened to Ashlynn here. He’d heard the story, more than once, but sitting her in front of the grave that she’d been forced to crawl out of on her wedding night sohow made the whole thing more horrifically real to him than it had been before.
The first ti he’d heard the story, it had been shocking and he’d been furious to hear about how she’d been treated but it was all a bit abstract. Now, looking at the pit in the earth, it wasn’t hard to imagine her battered body lying motionless at the bottom of the grave at all, and the thought filled him with a mixture of fury and dread that felt so heavy that it was suffocating.
It wasn’t until his heart began to race in his chest that Ollie realized why the feelings that poured over him were so intense. They seeped into him from the seed of witchcraft in his chest, carrying an echo of what Ashlynn was feeling right now through the ties that bound them together.
But whatever he felt from her through their tenuous bond was so much less intense than the emotions that engulfed her own heart. Sitting there next to her, he suddenly felt like he was standing knee deep in the water of a raging river, but Ashlynn herself was completely caught by the current.
"I’m here with you," he said softly as he slipped a protective arm around her. Slowly, he opened his heart to the cypress seed within his chest, imagining himself as one of the mighty trees in the Briar that could withstand any flood or storm while providing a place for Ashlynn to take shelter. "I’m here for you to lean on," he added gently. "Whenever you need . You don’t have to be here alone."
"Mmm," she said softly as she soaked up the aura of safety and security that Ollie had begun to radiate even before becoming the Cypress Witch. Now that he had, the feeling was only stronger, allowing her to relax, secure in the feeling that soone could help to carry the burdens weighing her down in this place.
"I dream of this place often," Ashlynn said in a soft voice that was little more than a whisper. "The feeling of having piles of earth shoveled over , of lying in wait and struggling to breathe until I was certain that Sir Broll and Sir Tommin had left
behind... It haunts
still. I thought, if I confronted this place," she said slowly. "If I confronted this place, I thought it would help to put it behind ."
"And?" Ollie asked gently. "Is it helping?"
"No," Ashlynn said, shaking her head. "If anything, it only weighs on
more. Like I’ve poked a wound that wasn’t healed yet and now it’s bleeding again. It’s such a shallow grave, only a few feet deep, but I feel like it’s swallowed
whole," Ashlynn said as the darkness and gloom of the forest at night seed to cling to her body.
"It won’t let go of
until I bury the last of the people responsible for putting
in that hole in the first place," Ashlynn said fiercely as her eyes began to glow with a faint erald light, pushing back against the darkness with the strength of her determination and her bone deep need to claim her vengeance against the people who had shattered her world along with her body before dumping her into a grave that still trapped a portion of her soul, long after her body had struggled free.
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