Tired bones prompted a pillow for her knees. Youth was relative. Calmly, Asha Ave Enai lit a candle at her bedside, and her room began to fill with the fragrance of anise. As her head bowed, a troubled mind found solace in the constance of her prayers.

"My Lord Barbades, give me courage and guide my path. Bless and watch over Your humble servant, for daily she seeks to live by Your will. Bless and watch over those who walk in Light, so that they may bring Light to others. Bless and watch over those who walk in Darkness, so that they may see their transgressions and come to Light. Bless and watch over those who stand Neutral, so that they may be granted compassion and come to Light. Bless and watch over those who wage war, so that they may find peaceful solutions to their quarrels. Bless and watch over those who bring peace, so that they might ease the suffering of others. Bless and watch over all who suffer, so that they may be peaceful and that they may be well."

Different words, fervent and without hesitance, fell at the end of her nightly exchange with her God. "Grant me peace, Lord Barbades, and grant clarity to my mind. Stay foolish thoughts that seek to cloud my judgment. Give me the strength to continue to walk these mortal realms... alone... and continue your work..."

Only now did she pause, a moment of resounding silence. "Let Ellis be well and peaceful at your side." She became intimately aware of the gold band on her finger. "Let him know that I have not forgotten him.

"Amin harmuva onalle e' cormamin."

Tears left their stain on the front of her dress, and the anise stung her reddened eyes. She looked up at the shadowed ceiling as if it would hold some answer. Long put-away grief was like a half-healed wound wrent anew. "Almost six years now, Ellis..." she whispered. "And still you haunt my heart." Was she seeking release or reaffirming her love for him?

As she blew out the candle and climbed into bed, her God answered at least one of her prayers. Asha's sleep was without dreams.

The sun was setting, and cast a lurid glow across the land that was meekly rivaled by the bonfire that roared in the wilderness. It had been constructed with care, circled with many stones and far away from anything that might catch flame. The dancing blaze contrasted with the stillness of the elf who stood before it, painted in orange and glittering gold. Her cloak had been discarded on a rock, and she stood bare to the cold.

A dagger was ceremoniously held aloft in her hand, high above her head and pointing to the gold and purple above.

"Cleanse me."

The wind sent sparks up into the air before they died like falling stars. She besought the sky, not the fire before her; her back was arched, her head tilted back to gaze upward. Golden curls fell partway down her back like a banner. "Cleanse me!" she demanded again, her voice echoing around her. "Cleanse my heart of grief! Grant my spirit rest!"

The smoke, in concert with the spiral of emotions she felt, made the fire blur in her sight, but she blinked the tears away and let them fall, ignored, down her face. Without hesitation, she grabbed a fistful of her lovely hair and sliced it clean from her head. The locks were tossed upon the fire, sending sulfurous smoke into the air. She tried not to breathe the smell of burning hair as she repeated the process, cutting and slicing until all that remained of her hair was a choppy mess. For a moment again, she was still, shivering in newfound cold. Her head felt so strange without the weight of her hair.

Asha took the time to even out her close-cropped hair, throwing all that she cut into the flames. When she was at last satisfied, the knife dropped to the hard earth. She had one final sacrifice to make. For a time, she stared down at her wedding band, running her fingers over the gold... Then she slipped the ring from her finger and threw it too into the fire. "I release you to Barbades, Ellis," she spoke softly. Finally... after almost six years, she accepted that her husband was dead.

She felt lighter, and it was not just because of her shorn head. Grief had weighed her soul down for so long. It wasn't yet gone and might never be, but she felt... reborn... and alive. "I may walk the mortal lands alone, but I still yet walk in them. We will meet again on the other side."

Asha Ave Enai stood vigil by the fire until the last rays of the sun died. Then she smothered it with snow and took up her cloak, wrapping herself in it eagerly. In darkness, she departed, the closing to her every prayer on her lips.

"Amin harmuva onalle e' cormamin."

It was not until the wee hours before dawn that she at last returned to her tiny room in the church. She was tired, and she would have liked nothing more to fall into bed and be whisked away by sleep, but there was something she had to do first. After several attempts trying to place the crystal of flame, a gift from a new acquaintance, atop her nightstand, only to have it try to roll off each time, she contented herself with setting the thing on her bed. Perhaps the crystal would warm it through, and Asha certainly would not complain of a warm bed tonight.

The air in her room was cold. It had become stale and stuffy while she had been sick in bed, and she had aired it out yesterday. The chill had not yet left, but it smelled of freshness and cleanliness. As she did every night, she lit a candle on her bedside table. The anise had burned down and been replaced by one that lent the scent of lavender and honey. As she went about the nightly ritual, her mind played over something Connar had said.

"... as if there is somewhere else she'd rather be. Or there be somewhere else she needs to be."

Pausing over the flame, she wondered how true that was, or if it was just a shadow of the past. For a time, she had longed to join Ellis at Barbades' side, but death had cruelly avoided her. Now? She had made her peace with that, and another snippet of conversation, this time with Paladin, entered her thoughts.

"So, what land did you once call home?"

"I was born in Eahaasae, and that was home for about half of my life... I was thrown into Tharel, and that became home for the other half. And now I am here. Perhaps this will become a third home." She drank cold tea.

"Perhaps." He mulled that over thoughtfully. "Which do you think you prefer?"

"Here," she answered quite simply. "Even though those places were home in the past, they... hold nothing for me now." Asha smiled, but it held no light. "When I was whisked out of Eahaasae, it had just been destroyed in the Trollic Wars. When I was drawn from Tharel, I had outlived most of my peers by about twenty years, and my husband was five years dead. I would not revisit either if given the chance. What would be left?"

He nodded. "A very good point, although I'm sorry each of your leavetakings were accompanied by such scorched earth."

"I appreciate the sentiment, but perhaps it is better this way. A new place to make new beginnings."

As she remembered the words, she agreed with them anew. Rhy'Din, for all its frightening wonder, held its allure. She was certain that she was brought here for a reason, and she held no regrets at leaving past homes behind. One would only meet her with charred, gray, mangled corpses of trees and tainted, ashen earth. The other offered faces of people she did not know and a war-torn land, chaos and destruction and hate. Really, that was not so different from what Rhy'Din held, and she found that she rather preferred being a stranger in a strange land. Each time she had left a realm, she had desperately needed a new beginning, a new life. And each time, the whim of fate had graciously accommodated her.

Why, then, did Connar see in her a desire, or need, to be elsewhere?

Lavender was lulling her to sleep, and she broke from her thoughts long enough to kneel on the floor. Her fingertips touched, and she bowed her head over them. "My Lord Barbades, give me courage and guide my path..." she began as she always did, her nightly prayers softly fervent in the candlelit darkness. Though she always spoke the same thing, word for word, every night, her prayers never became mindless or merely by rote. It is said that one converted to a faith or way of thinking, a true convert, takes to it with more enthusiasm and zeal than one who has lived under it his entire life. "Bless and watch over all who suffer," came the closing, "so that they may be peaceful and that they may be well."

And as she sometimes did, she added new words to the end of her prayers. "Bless and watch over Paladin. Guide his travels through Darkness and grant him strength and peace. May his sleep be tranquil and untroubled. Please grant him kind dreams tonight so that his soul might find rest." She remembered her promise, and she spoke of no other.

"Amin harmuva onalle e' cormamin."

Sleepily, she rose, blowing out the candle on the way. Turning back the covers, she climbed into an invitingly warm bed and immediately stole into sleep. The crystal of flame, softly glowing, rolled to the foot of the bed before it was stopped by her toes.

((Events between now and the next post unfold in A Fragment of Evil (Part One)))

It had been months since Asha had last set foot in the Red Dragon Inn. The weather was a proper excuse for staying indoors. Her homeland had been forested and humid year-round, and, while a near ninety-year stay in Tharel had acclimated her to cooler temperatures, snow was still quite foreign to the elf. When she first saw it, she had been enchanted with the way snowflakes softly floated to the ground, gently and almost hushed, not at all the way the rain fell. The way the bed of white sparkled in the light had charmed her. But its allure fled all too quickly in the face of the unbearable cold that went along with it. She had managed to get herself a warm, fur-lined cloak to better suit the weather, but her boots weren't made for slogging around in snow and slush, and she often came out of such treks with her stockings soaking wet and freezing, not to mention the hem of her dress and cloak.

But the weather was not the only thing that kept her inside. Rhy'Din was a fearsome place, and her god had seemed to forsake her. His silence was more unsettling than thoughts of her own fleeting mortality. The pacifist elf had never been formally trained in the art of combat, even when she had been a bastion against the forces of evil. She had relied on arcane gifts as her blade and shield. Now, Asha relied on the divine; her blessings had not left her. She healed the sick when she could, and granted blessings when asked (or when not, at times). But Barbades' silence wore on her. His presence had always been a constant comfort, and now she was lacking. She had spent a year now in Rhy'Din, and yet she had made little in the way of friends. In a way, it was her own fault. It wasn't that she was not kind or friendly to those who spoke with her, but the cleric was at once open and guarded. To one whose entire life had been left behind, ninety years of love and friendship and history now lost to her, forging new bonds seemed only another way to be hurt. Those she cared about would inevitably be taken from her. Barbades' voice had helped to ease the pang of self-inflicted loneliness, but for the past several months she had had nothing.

During the day, she lost herself in her chores, but at night she had only the company of her own somber thoughts.

Her mind often strayed to those who had welcomed her and showed her kindness. Lately, Glenn was in the forefront of her thoughts, as she had spoken with him more recently than any of the others. Connar was not far behind. He had become the closest thing to a friend she had in Rhy'Din, but it had been many months since she had last saw him. Nor had Elessaria begrudged her kindness. Her life had been dappled with kind faces and friendly conversation, but nothing was ever lasting. A little owl carved of bone often perched on the rim of her teacup, a reminder of one such fleeting encounter. Another trinket, a ball of flame, was not often gone from her pack. Fleeting kindness. It made her heart ache for the past.

None of those who had so touched her were oft absent from her prayers.