BORDER
Written on October 30, 2024 (♏︎)
Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2024 for prompt No. 30: Recovery (Holding Back Tears).
They were riding out of Ivalice, and Alma, having grown up immured in a convent, had little head for what it meant to pass a boundary one could not see. What could it mean to step out of one nation and into another when there was no gate or waymarker? The open sky and fields before them had no distinctions.
As they pushed their bird forward, as the dohms between them and Igros grew greater, Alma’s thoughts slid back to the walls of Orbonne, and to the friend of her youth no longer bound by them. She had heard–in bits and snatches–that Ovelia was queen, that Ovelia had married, and she supposed that it was whatever unseen walls encircled a kingdom that bound her now.
There was a little swell of one valley where she felt something in her shift, and on the ascent she realized that a tear was balanced on the edge of her eyelashes.
She did her best not to let it fall.
Alma could not have known if they were in another country then, but she felt a strange thrill of finality, a sudden moment of pain–as though an unseen and ghostly dagger had pierced her.
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