I Will Find You

Part I

"There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance."
― Oscar Wilde

P A R T I

"fall for"

PHRASAL VERB

(fall for someone) to be very attracted to someone and to start to love them

If you fall for someone, you are strongly attracted to them and start loving them.

"She was fantastically beautiful – I just fell for her right away."

Song: I'm With You - Trent Reznor

⏳

Azriel had known that Gwyneth Berdara was particularly nimble and flexible, but he had rarely seen that strength exemplified outside of the training ring. It appeared that she applied it everywhere, even here in the bowels of the library.

With her left toe pointed and her right arm stretched towards one of the top shelves, her speckled finger teased at the spine of a heavy tome as she tried to tug it out and presumably into her grasp. Azriel winced at the size of the text, imagining it falling from such a height and tumbling into Gwyn's lithe arms.

He strode down the aisle, dwarfing the priestess by just a foot as he came to stand beside her ( less than how he towered over most people ). He extended an arm, plucking the book off the shelf with ease. "Berdara, you know you don't have to get these off the shelf by hand? You have magic fully at your disposal."

He offered her the text and she slumped, fixing him with what he imagined she thought was a fierce look. "Well, you called off training tonight, so I was trying to get some exercise in by doing everything manually today." Lifting her chin, she pulled the book out of his hands, not sparing a single glance at his scars, and hugged it to her chest. Her eyes rounded. "Oh, is that why you're here? Is training back on for tonight?"

Something in Azriel's chest warmed at the hopefulness in her voice.. Sometimes he worried she was only humoring him, that she did not care to spar into the wee hours of the night when she had work with a demanding silver-haired priestess the very next morning. But then she would reference their training like that – with eagerness and excitement. It was a pleasant reminder of just how very easy it was to be Gwyneth Berdara's friend. The midnight training sessions between just the two of them had been something he'd grown to love.

That was part of why it was so difficult to let her down. Azriel frowned, "I'm afraid not. I'm actually here on behalf of Rhysand and Feyre."

Gwyn angled her head, narrow brows drawing together in confusion. "Oh? Everything alright?"

How could he begin to explain that a distressed female who spoke in the Old Language had fallen from the sky onto his High Lord's lawn asking for aid to another realm?

He rubbed the back of his neck. "There was a distressed female who fell from the sky onto Rhysand's lawn asking for aid to another realm, in the Old Language." Gwyn blinked owlishly and Azriel's frown deepened. "It's exactly what it sounds like."

Those teal eyes narrowed in something like suspicion as she inclined her head to smell the air around him. "Did you get drunk with Emerie again? Did she give you some more of that lotus leaf–"

Azriel braced a hand on her shoulder and chuckled-keeping her at arm's length and halting her now borderline theatrical sniffing. "You're never going to let me forget that night with the lotus leaf."

She grinned, eyes glinting with humor. "You burned the whole pipe on your first go. I'll see that you don't live that down for centuries." Turning on her heel, Gwyn started towards the other end of the aisle, "I have to get this text to Merrill, if you could just..."