WOLVES WITHOUT TEETH ( geralt of rivia.. )

004. tomorrow's gravestones..

"I wish I could have taken you with me..."

Her whispers were the gentle touch of a halo. It rolled off the pained sweat beads, the nothingness and the ghosts of what he had and will never again feel. The memory of that feeling was distant, from another world that now, could not be glanced upon past the frozen horizon of Arcapan.

Sylvain had wished the ghost of his sister to have spared him the mercy of turning that senseless recovery into a more permanent deathbed. What wouldn't he give to have joined her and how much he envied his father for going away so soon, even if by the pains of a disease as disgusting as the one he earned and saw.

The whole kingdom felt like a plague, a gravestone for all tomorrows to come, all which now weighed down a legless head, a stone cold stature that would never stand, but only rise to expectations which no longer mattered to the people it once did.

Ever since the monster attack, fear cracked the skulls once wisely keeping the balance of Arcapan. Their resources ran out in under a year and after that, diseases crept into their secluded lives. One of them brought the Lord down seven feet beflow the wheels of his son.

Sylvain has changed, far beyond the invention of a chair on smaller carriage wheels that his mother could count as her most expensive accessory procured in times of crisis. Arcapan needed food, medicine, a new mage for the Keep perhaps too, but the mad Lady bought instead a chair from the nearest big kingdom who either way, despised them enough now not to bother giving aid.

They were going to let them die out.

He knew all those things because he sat on the reminder that he now had a duty, not to the letters in a stone that spelled the name of his father, but the name next to him: Azaras. He never should have lived and she should have been the iron gripped ruler of the city, or at least that was how Sylvain pinched himself with enough color to not die of broken heart.

"You should have taken me with you, to death," Sylvain mumbled.

Between him and the graves, one fresh and one covered in two years of moss and neglect, blew a chill. It had travelled from the white peaks of the mountains to check on the state of the kingdom living at its feet, only to find everything has remained frozen, if not just moving incredibly slow.

He gritted his teeth for two years, staring down at his sister's grave, imagining a funeral he has battled inhumane pain through, away, and could have never attended. It was absence which forced him to stay behind after the ceremony of his father's death, the final piece in an ironic puzzle which ended him in the one situation he did not wish to be.

Never too strong and swift to begin with, Sylvain has been made weak, alone and Lord of a dying keep, trapped to the lands to which he was born, lands which waited to claim him like he did half his family.

"Everyone would understand," Geoffrey dared, as much as his shivering voice could, to speak over Sylvain's terrifyingly numb ritual, "if you did not show up today for the council's meeting."

He had been ascended to a full fledged guard and personal carrier of Lord Sylvain, because while his secret lover laid in pain, he, not allowed to see him without raising suspicious eyes, fought harder in trainings than all the other few lads. Each shed of sorrow and aches he'd let go to waste by the blink of an eye and waste away his talent pushing a wheeled chair, if only it meant he'd be closer to the one he loved.

Only Sylvain was worrying him lately. The paths to the river were too danger for these thin wheels he was on, but every day down to the graveyard, he'd still demand going out. Same words, same gestures, and now they added a new family member of his.