Cold air, full of the damp of sea and the tang of wet cobblestones, tickled Sylvia's cheeks and plucked at long strands of black hair. She walked the streets of Rhydin in the late hours of night. The guard a doppleganger of her shadow. She sought familiarity and clarity, and only the cold streets provided it.

Too often gone, too long away, and kept too far apart from those she held dear. They had changed. A wince of memory, flash of fist against a face she had known -- features the same, but the soul was not. Creeping hands of sorrow choked at her throat and constricted her lungs.

Tears stung the corners of her eyes. She looked to the sky and tried to bid them go away, but instead they fell out of those corners drawing reflective tracks to her hair. Fingertips, cold and trembling, rubbed at those eyes, forcing the tears to stop with the pain. They wiped away evidence that any had fallen. The tears still stung, but inside now.

What if she let him go? Maybe....maybe she had to. She had clung to the surety of a kinship that was spoken not blood made. Neither were certain. Nothing was certain.

"My lady." The guard's soft prompt broke her out of her thoughts.

Sylvia looked around her. She had made her way to the docks. There she stood on the end of the pier. The waves laughed and danced below her. They beckoned her to join in their salty reverie. The space between pier and water, the solitude, she felt herself there uncertain whether to cling to the pier or make for the sea. She wanted to cling to the pier, to struggle to claim her place there, but it felt as if it tilted urging her to slid away.

"My lady," he said again.

"Yes, I know."