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Rook is nothing like Mythal.
She is reed-slender and soft-fleshed and moon-haired, her mouth curved to smile and her hands unscarred and uncalloused. She laughs easily, scowls fiercely, and wears every expression in between as if it is a strand of gemstones that she’d like to show off.
She is not Elvhen. She is barely an elf - their language sits like marbles in her mouth, consonants clacking together rather than singing. In some ways, Elgar’nan finds it endearing: like watching a halla take its first steps, still wet from the womb.
It is also sad. Look, he says to Ghilan’nain, who could not be less interested: look what the Dread Wolf, in all his wisdom, has taken from our People. Look how far they have fallen.
She does not reply to him in these moments, when frustration overcomes him and there is nothing for him to do but rail against a man who cannot hear him and would not care if he could. Ghilan’nain considers herself apart from these new elves, and does not care for their plight.
In the privacy of his mind, where it cannot hurt her, Elgar’nan, too, considers her apart. His strange jewel of a daughter, terrible in her brilliance - his sister, whom he loves and will never say he fears.
She is too young to understand the folly of her impatience, though he tells her that it will be the end of her. She does not see, even now, the timeline on which they can work, which mortals can never match.
They are as insects, he tells her, but again she does not listen so he must fold space to save her from the mortals that she has so derided. Now he is watching Rook, who is nothing like Mythal except in her stubbornness, fight against frozen time for one more chance - though what she thinks she will do, Elgar’nan does not know.
He is sun-tamer, earth-shaker, first of the firstborn and last of his kind. Rook’s hands move by degrees - reaching for him, for her weapon, for her power. Of course she would fight tooth and nail against him, but only because any animal will struggle against what they do not understand. Would a snared rabbit not break its spine avoiding the hands that would set it free?
Her companions look at her, held frozen in time as she is not. Even here, the Dread Wolf’s power lingers around her like cobwebs; perhaps it feels like a boon to her, to be able to strain against reality, but to Elgar’nan it looks like cruelty. What chance has she to fight him, truly? What is the use of false hope?
Rook bares her teeth. She looks nothing like Mythal, but for a moment Mythal is all he can see.
Perhaps later he will justify it: he will think that by taking her, he has taken their hope, their leadership, their strategy. He has taken their flimsy connection to the Dread Wolf and to the magic that would protect them. He will think later that perhaps he could change her mind, to make her see and understand how far she has fallen and how easily she could have it back.
But he does not think that in the moment. As he steps down from the cliff face, walking on stairs that he conjures of trapped sunbeams, all he is thinking is that he wants her.
☀
Rook takes to captivity as well as can be expected.
“This is for your own good,” Elgar’nan tells her gently, her forearm trapped between his thighs as he coaxes glittering shards of broken glass from her palm with delicate twists of magic. She had smashed a window - to escape, he imagines, though he does not know what she thinks she would have done with the wards - and shredded the skin on her knuckles against it. She had put her palm in the glass trying to scramble outside.
Too slow, of course. She’d yowled like a wildcat when Elgar’nan had sent someone up to fetch her from the roof, and spat at his feet when she’d been hauled in front of him. She wears the ivory silk pajamas Elgar’nan had provided for her, presumably only because her options had been limited. The set had been charming when it was new, but now the hems of the overlong sleeves are speckled with blood.
She is so fragile. So frail. Her blood comes easily to the surface when Elgar’nan eases free little splinters of glass from her tender flesh. Her breathing stutters when he sets his thumb across the veins in her wrists to feel the birdwing hum of her pulse.
She strangles a whimper in her throat when he pulls the last shard free. Elgar’nan sighs. Still she has not said a word to him: a part of him wonders if she even knows how to speak. Perhaps this is her small defiance - and let her have it, he thinks, if it would satisfy her need to rebel.
“We cannot have you hurting yourself,” he murmurs, less to her than himself, and smooths his thumb along the line of her palm where glass had split it like an overripe peach. It knits itself together with barely a whisper of power and no hint of a scar.
Rook flexes her fingers and does not thank him. He watches her tongue dart out to wet her bottom lip, as if she is preparing to speak, but in the end she says nothing.
Elgar’nan holds her there for one moment longer, his fingers around her elbow and her forearm between his thighs. She looks up at him through her eyelashes - less, Elgar’nan thinks with some amusement, out of some desire to be coquettish and more because she is trapped by their position.
He lets her go. She snatches her arm back and clutches it to her chest, stumbling back from the dais on which he has enthroned himself. Again, she looks as if she has something to say - her face is so furious, her dark eyes even darker with her anger - but in the end, she swallows it back.
“Go on,” he says softly, and nods towards the stairs. “Wouldn’t you like to change your clothes?”
She bares her teeth at him, but goes.
☀
It takes another broken window, two doors shattered into kindling, and one ugly curtain set lost to an uncontrollable fire before she breaks.
“Why are you keeping me here?” Rook demands, halfway to screaming and still sounding as if she is about to burst into tears. “Solas said you might torture me for information about our plans, but you don’t even ask me anything.”
“Do you have plans?” Elgar’nan asks, raising an eyebrow without looking away from his book. She has found him in the back garden, which is thick with roses and strikingly blue delphiniums.
She fumes in silence for a moment, perhaps less effectively than someone who weren’t wearing a linen sundress and no shoes might. Elgar’nan gives her the time - he is, after all, immortal. A handful of wasted seconds means very little to him in the grand scheme.
“I’m not telling you,” Rook says at last. Her tone is such that Elgar’nan imagines she would stomp her foot if she did not know he would find it amusing.
“Well,” he says, and licks his finger to turn the page. Her eyes drop to his mouth, which he knows only because the book itself is modern drivel and he is barely reading it.
Well, well, he thinks to himself, and closes the book to give Rook his full attention.
“There are no secrets between us, da’len,” Elgar’nan says. “If you have questions, you need only ask. I want you to be comfortable.” Surely he does not need to remind her that she is the one who has gone for weeks without speaking.
Rook clenches her fists like she’s thinking of hitting him. Elgar’nan watches her curiously, wondering if she has the courage to try it. Certainly he recalls sparring with Mythal, blades and hands and bare flesh and mouths when they had fallen to temptation, as they so often had, when even the air between them had been too much distance to bear.
But Rook is nothing like Mythal. Her magic is like fireflies before a bonfire, her body prettily formed but easily broken. The bruises on her knuckles are only just beginning to fade. In the end, she does not hit him, and Elgar’nan is not surprised.
He nods at the seat across from himself. She sits because she is beginning to understand her place in the world. If not at his feet - easily imagined, but crass in the execution - then certainly at his whim.
There is no tea, so Elgar’nan offers her the book, which Rook snatches and leafs through greedily. As if she’s never seen a book before, though - no, surely she has.
“You do know how to read, don’t you?” Elgar’nan watches her idly.
“Of course I know how to read,” Rook snaps, clutching the book to her breast as if she thinks he may take it from her. As if he’d care to retrieve something of so little cultural merit.
Perhaps, Elgar’nan will later reflect, this is the true turning point. Rather than anger that she - peasant-low, unnamed and without lineage - would snap at him, all he feels is a warm, vague sort of amusement.
Likely she is simply out of sorts, with only the Dread Wolf for company for so long. Elgar’nan certainly would be.
“There are other books,” he tells her, as if it matters that she is entertained as well as fed and clothed. Rook looks at him, her lips softly parted with surprise before her entire expression shutters with suspicion.
“You’ve nothing to gain by being kind to me,” Rook says, which is entirely true.
“You would be shocked by the limits of my generosity if this is what you would call a kindness,” Elgar’nan replies. “What is a library to a god?”
She bites her lip. Elgar’nan can acknowledge that the picture she paints is a pretty one. She really is a remarkable looking creature, considering her lineage.
“Thank you,” she says after a long moment, the words belying the begrudging tone.
“Of course,” Elgar’nan says. He waves a hand to give her leave to go, but she lingers for a moment longer, her narrow fingers fiddling with the corner of the page.
☀
“You smell of your little pet,” Ghilan'nain says. There is an echo in her voice that Elgar’nan knows but does not want to acknowledge as the Blight. He looks towards her, raising an eyebrow.
“Everyone needs a hobby,” he replies, which is neither agreement nor disagreement. He does not say that it could be worse - that Rook, at least, is bathed and oiled and perfumed daily by servants, and that genlocks and hurlocks have no such attendants.
Ghilan’nain makes a derisive noise. Elgar’nan could tear her apart for her insolence - and with so many limbs, there are so many places to grip - but will not, because he loves her in spite of and perhaps because of it.
Still: she does not truly challenge him, regardless of her true thoughts. He wonders if she is afraid of him.
They walk arm in arm together through the carcass of what had once been a titan, Ghilan’nain’s fingertips resting on Elgar’nan’s wrist. Her other arm - long and spindly and jointed thrice - extends to trail her free fingers against the cavern wall. They are deep enough that they have passed the art that once painted the walls. Now it is bare stone and the humming black.
The downward slope gives way to stone-carved stairs above an abyss that would feel endless were it not for the yellow glow far below. Ever-so-faintly, Elgar’nan can hear the slosh of liquid lyrium.
“Still in working order,” Ghilan’nain congratulates herself, and slips her arm from Elgar’nan’s to take the rest of the stairs somewhat more quickly. She drifts out of the circle of sunlight that Elgar’nan has conjured and disappears into the inky dark.
Elgar’nan is in no hurry to see the blighting pool. He does not fear the Blight - it is a tool, and his will is more powerful than that of any tool - but neither does he like the way it feels in his mind or against his skin. Its unhindered presence is a buzzing annoyance in his ears, an echoed reminder of Titansong that should have died out with them.
The hum is louder on the shore of the pool, which is ten arm spans across and limitlessly deep. Ghilan’nain trails her fingers through the yellow lyrium without stooping, her head turning unnaturally so she can look at Elgar’nan over her shoulder with her flat, luminous eyes. Deep beneath the surface, something made of many segments twists against itself.
“Shall we?” Elgar’nan asks. When she beams at him, he smiles in return, and the thing in the pool stirs.
☀
Rook is reading when Elgar’nan returns. She is sprawled on the sweet-smelling grass in the garden, her skirt rucked up around her thighs and her chin resting on her hand. She looks up when Elgar’nan opens the door, but does not acknowledge him before returning her eyes to the page.
So easily, he thinks, she has become comfortable. The wards are barely twenty paces from her and she does not even press herself against them. Elgar’nan had imagined her as a moth beating itself to death against glass it could not conceive of when he had been away, but instead she is indolent and easy in the sunshine.
He steps from the doorway and comes around to her side. Her eyes are molten in the light, dark irises catching sunbeams and turning to honey gold. They are warmer than Mythal’s - her golden eyes had been dragon-scale sharp. Pretty, though, all the same.
“Where did you go?” Rook asks, closing the book on her index finger to keep her place.
Elgar’nan wonders if this is some attempt at espionage, or simple curiosity.
“What answer to this would be a happy one? Perhaps I was out killing your friends.”
Her pretty eyes narrow. “You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?” he asks, unable to hide the amusement in his tone. “Would you hesitate before swatting an irritating fly?”
“If they’re so insignificant, then they wouldn’t irritate you.”
This makes Elgar’nan laugh. “Yes, alright,” he agrees. “Your little friends survive another day because they are so beneath my notice. Does this soothe you?”
She looks like she is considering it, which for some reason is even more funny than a simple answer. Elgar’nan lowers himself into the grass beside her. It’s warmed by the sun and sweetly perfumed by the flowers that grow with carefully-curated abandon.
“Tell me what you’ve learned from your reading,” he orders, and lays an arm across his eyes so he does not have to watch the way her face brightens.
How much of her day does the Dread Wolf see, Elgar’nan wonders. How frustrating is it for him to watch his only connection to reality babble about the charmingly naive treatise on magical theory that she’s borrowed from Elgar’nan’s library?
Hm, he thinks.
☀
Elgar’nan finds himself elbow-deep in the creation of an aurum hair comb before he realises what he’s doing and it is too late - the work too exquisite - to dispose of.
He had made little gifts like this for Mythal once - of silverite and quartz and diamond and things that reminded him of her and her moon-sliver smile. She had been beautiful when she had run the jeweled comb through her long hair, and more beautiful still when she had pulled the combs out and let it all tumble down her spine - bare by then, always, her hair had always come down last - in a night-dark spill.
The comb doesn’t remind him of Rook, which perhaps he should take some measure of solace in: aurum is his element, buttery-warm as the sun and forged only by impossible pressure. The precision of the magic required to work it at such a scale is immense. Should he call it a waste if it is of no moment to him?
And then it is done, and he is holding it in his hand. Tiny, pretty thing, with rabbits gamboling in a field of flowers backed by the golden sun.
A mark of ownership, he thinks, not a gift. He pretends the thought is not tinged with guilt - and because he is pretending, he need not decide whether it is the memory of Mythal that causes it.
☀
They share more meals than not. At first, Elgar’nan had pressed Rook into it for the sake of making Solas miserable - a worthwhile venture, regardless of the quality of the company - but as time has passed he’s found that he likes the uncomplicated nature of Rook’s personality. She is, he has found, incredibly forthright, easily flustered, and not particularly clever.
She flushes pink when he gives her the comb over dinner. It looks bigger in her hands, soft and uncalloused as they have become - or perhaps have always been. Elgar’nan can easily confess that he does not recall what she’d looked like before. She rubs the pad of her thumb over the relief of the sun and looks down into her glass of wine.
“It would have been a piece of a set in Arlathan,” Elgar’nan tells her, reclining in his chair until he’s more lounging than sitting. “Necklace, earrings, combs.”
“What did it mean?” Rook asks, and peeks at him from beneath her eyelashes. “In Arlathan?”
Elgar’nan is tempted to say nothing, because it’s true - he had made combs for Mythal because he had loved her, but the gift of a comb had never been terribly meaningful outside of the fact that they were pretty.
“To signify regard,” Elgar’nan says. It is not strictly a lie, but neither is it the truth in any way that matters.
“Oh,” she says softly, and turns the comb over again in her fingers.
If she were a different woman in a different place and a different time, she would flutter her lashes and ask Elgar’nan to help her put it in her hair. If this were another place - if this were Arlathan, and if Mythal were still alive, and if things were still unbroken - Elgar’nan would take her up on the unspoken invitation that is written in every curve of her body and the fragile arch of her neck.
None of those things are true. Elgar’nan is in the present and Mythal is gone. They are in a manor home that had belonged to a magister before Elgar’nan had killed him, and now belongs to no one.
Rook looks pensively at the comb in her hand, running her fingers back and forth along the relief of rabbits.
“Will you tell me about it?” she asks, and slips out of her chair to creep closer to Elgar’nan’s seat. “Arlathan?”
“Of course, da’len,” Elgar’nan says. She looks like a prey animal with her cautious movement. He can imagine her with her belly to the ground. “Imagine first a city of crystal, lit by the rising sun.”
☀
Elgar’nan feels the wards fall in the night and, in the hazy moments between dreaming and wakefulness, thinks that he is back in Arlathan and someone has come to kill him.
Reality settling in is both a relief and a disappointment: a relief, because in truth there is nothing alive now that can harm him. A disappointment, because there is no Mythal to try.
He wanders the halls bare-chested with a dressing gown draped over his shoulders, hunting for the intruder more out of curiosity than any particular concern for the safety and security of the staff or himself. Elgar’nan has nothing against the servants that occupy the lower levels of the manor, but he very rarely thinks of them and certainly would not weep if they were murdered in the night.
He finds no one in all of those long hallways. But still, he can feel the broken wards like an itch at his nape. Something, he knows, has happened. But what?
The truth of it is revealed when he steps into the cool night air of the garden, where the damp chill settles itself like a mantle on his shoulders.
A lantern bobs just past the flower maze, a single guttering candle holding back the dark. The breeze carries frantic whispers and the patter of bare feet on grass. Just faintly, Elgar’nan can hear the swish of fabric against skin.
How, he wonders, had he forgotten about Rook? Surely it can be none but she - though, in truth, Elgar’nan had not anticipated her ability to break the wards. A part of him is begrudgingly impressed.
Elgar’nan reaches and plucks the strands that make up reality, strumming time to a stop with a soft cascade of magic. There is no real need - Rook is not moving quickly, and Elgar’nan’s legs are long - but the result, he thinks, will be much more satisfying this way.
When he is closer to the lantern, he realizes that it is not just Rook but another woman as well, who he does not recognize at all. Perhaps, he thinks with some cynicism, this is the ward-breaker. Perhaps he had not underestimated Rook after all.
They are frozen nearly to stillness - the woman entirely, but Rook’s eyes ever-so-slowly track Elgar’nan’s leisurely pace around her. She’s wearing a nightgown made of something sheer and filmy that ruffles in the faint breeze.
She can hear his footsteps, he knows. He sees the way she strains against the magic - against reality. He watches her pupils widen moment after moment, like hunted prey.
“Da’len,” he sighs, brushing his fingertips across her shoulder blades and down the line of her arm, which tenses but does not tremble. “What have you gotten yourself into now.”
He looses his grip on time and lets it pour once more between his fingers. Rook’s eyes are so wide and so dark they may as well be black. The other woman - a servant, perhaps? - gives a little scream when she realizes just whom she has stumbled upon.
If Elgar’nan had expected them to explain themselves, he would be disappointed. The woman flees immediately, heading for the road. Elgar’nan watches her go dispassionately, allowing her the brief fantasy of flight before he flicks a hand and freezes her back into stillness.
Rook has no such instinct. She is as still as she had been when Elgar’nan had stopped time, her fingers fisted in the gauzy material of her nightgown.
“Well?” Elgar’nan prompts.
Rook’s knuckles go white as her dress. “It was me,” she says, her shoulders hitched up around her ears. “I planned it. Don’t hurt her.”
And perhaps it is uncharitable, but he knows, then, that she is lying: there is no chance she had orchestrated this. She had been dragged along, as she always seems to be dragged along. Of course she had not broken the wards. Of course she had not unlocked her window from the outside.
“Who is she?” Elgar’nan asks, smoothing his tone into one of idle curiosity.
Rook’s eyes flick to the woman, who is caught in time. Elgar’nan watches the way I don’t know springs to her tongue and is swallowed back.
“A friend,” Rook says after a moment, stilted. “Just a friend of mine.”
“Ah,” says Elgar’nan delicately.
“Please,” Rook says. “Don’t do anything to her. She was just trying to help. I promise, I won’t - I won’t try to leave again.”
“Of course, da’len,” Elgar’nan says, bumping a knuckle beneath Rook’s chin so she will look him in the eyes. “Of course. Run along back to bed now, hm?”
“You won’t hurt her, will you?” Rook asks, her eyes roaming Elgar’nan’s face.
“You have my word,” Elgar’nan says. “I will not hurt her.”
Rook gives him one last lingering look, her bottom lip caught between her teeth and her expression caught between agony and what is clearly an aching desire to trust his word, and leaves.
Poor, sweet, foolish creature. She is so desperate for a guiding hand that she will take anything she is offered.
“Now what should I do with you,” he asks the frozen woman rhetorically. He could just kill her, he supposes. It would be easy. It would, frankly, not be particularly sporting.
He steps in front of her and releases time again, allowing her momentum to carry her directly into his arms. They spin together as if they are dancing, until she has run out of breath and all she can do is shake. When he lets her go, she does not run again. Perhaps she realizes the futility.
“Elgar’nan,” she says, showing him the flats of her hands. “All-Father, Sun-Tamer, I beg your mercy. My mother wore your marks until she died.”
So she must be an elf. She does not look like one.
“Lethallan,” Elgar’nan names her. “Child beloved by your mother, who has been taught the old songs: what do they say of Elgar’nan?”
“They say you spilled the blood of the sun to make the stars,” the woman says. “And you made the world for us. Please - please. They paid me to fetch her. I didn’t know.”
“Hush, child,” Elgar’nan says gently. “What do they say of my mercy?”
She looks, for a moment, confused - and then Elgar’nan turns her to ash, and she does not look like anything anymore.
There are no stories about his mercy.
☀
Rook is quiet in the morning, drawn and listless with sleepless bruises beneath her eyes. Elgar’nan, by contrast, feels tremendously well-rested: to use his magic for the sake of it had been a pleasing change of pace.
She finds him later in the garden, where the sun is only just beginning to burn off the morning mist. She drops herself at the table across from Elgar’nan and waits in silence while he pours her a cup of tea from the pot that he’d been steeping.
Elgar’nan waits for her to say something while watching birds hop and peck their way across the flowerbeds.
At last, she speaks. “Did you kill that maid last night?”
“I said I would not,” Elgar’nan says. It is not a lie, so he doesn’t need to try to sound convincing.
“Where is she?” Rook asks.
“Surely you knew she could not remain here,” Elgar’nan replies.
At that, Rook looks down into her teacup. Her fingers circle the gilt rim. After a long moment, she says, “Are you upset with me?”
Her voice is so small, like a little bird. Elgar’nan feels a frisson of excitement up his spine.
“No, da’len,” he says gently.
She looks no more comfortable or confident.
“Here,” says Elgar’nan, and opens an arm to her. She looks at him with wide eyes, gold in the morning light. “It’s alright. Come here.”
He thinks that perhaps he will have to pat his lap, like coaxing a reluctant cat, but in the end it isn’t necessary; Rook steps between his thighs and hides her face in his shoulder. Tension that Elgar’nan had not noticed bleeds out of her by degrees, until he is supporting all of her weight and she is trembling - relief? Sadness? He does not know. It doesn’t matter.
“There, there, da’len,” he says, stroking his fingers through her hair. “Darling girl. I know it’s hard. You’re safest here with me. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
☀
Rook, over dessert that evening, says, “Solas says that you’re using me.”
Elgar’nan, knee-jerk, nearly replies of what use are you meant to be? but successfully holds his tongue. He raises his eyebrows at her instead.
“You would take the warning of a man who would end your world?”
“If that’s you warning me, you have a strong sense of irony.”
Elgar’nan barks a laugh that he can’t hold back. “No,” he says. “To what end would I warn you? The Dread Wolf is as ineffectual as he has always been, and you are his unwitting mouthpiece. Would he like to know my plans? I welcome you to tell him what you’ve gleaned.”
There’s a strawberry on her plate that she pushes back and forth with her fork. It tracks syrup across the white porcelain.
“I don’t understand,” she says at last, sounding frustrated - though with herself or the conversation, who is to say? “I can’t - I want to understand. I want to know why you’re keeping me here.”
Elgar’nan steeples his fingers in front of his mouth, watching her roll that berry forward and back and forward.
“You are thinking too small, da’len,” he says after a moment of thought on how to put this in a way she will understand. “You think that all things that affect you are about you. You believe that because something makes you sad, it is designed to hurt you. Imagine, instead, that you are a grain of sand that was once a part of a palace - a palace so beautiful, so perfectly crafted, that it would make you weep to look upon it. Can you imagine for me?”
Rook looks up at him, the sun catching in her eyes. “Yes,” she says. “I can imagine.”
“When a grain of sand tumbles out of place, do we weep at its displacement? When we scoop it up to lay the groundwork of a new palace, as beautiful as before in spite of the wreckage, do we mourn the loss?”
“No,” she says. “But -”
Elgar’nan holds up a hand to hush her. “But you are not sand,” he says. “You are alive. Yes?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m - we’re all alive.”
“You are. And have you not earned your place in this world? Though you have been worn to sand by time, you once were a part of something exquisite. What a waste it would be to throw away something with so much history. So much potential.”
The berry slips away from her. The fork hits the porcelain with a jarring squeak. “How is blighting everything not a waste? How is that building a new palace? You’re making a kingdom of the dead!”
Elgar’nan smiles at her faintly, raising his hand to the dust motes that dance in the sunbeam that slants through the window. “Do I look dead to you, Rook?”
He stands from the table and spreads his arms, inviting her to look. He can feel her eyes on him like something physical, and she does not look away even as she shakes her head.
“I - I don’t know.” she says. “It’s magic. You’re just using magic.”
“Oh, da’len,” Elgar’nan sighs. “You still fail to understand. Everything is magic. From the finest grains of sand to the mountains to the very heart that beats in your chest, there is only power, and there has only ever been power. You think of magic as something separate from this world, something that can be wielded or locked away in towers and hidden beneath beds, but it is the fabric that makes up reality.”
She shakes her head again. “I don’t -”
“I know you don’t,” Elgar’nan says sympathetically. “I know. But you could, and that is why I’m keeping you here. You are such a clever girl, Rook. I know potential when I see it.”
She looks away, but not quickly enough to hide the way heat climbs into her cheeks. Elgar’nan turns his gaze to the darkness outside as she leaves and thinks about the empire that once was.
☀
The Venatori are individually foolish toadies and as a monolith entirely incompetent, good largely only for being killed in increasingly predictable ways by both the lingering agents of Fen’harel and by the straggling survivors of a shattered slave rebellion that haven’t realized that they’ve already lost.
Elgar’nan allows them to live less because he thinks they are effective as a fighting force - they are not - and more because he finds their delusions of grandeur entertaining. By whom else can he be worshiped and feared and sneered at in turns within the same crowd? How like Arlathan it is, except that everyone is much stupider and much shorter.
Ghilan’nain has retreated to the cold dark below ground, where she will twist the blight into great and terrible shapes. Elgar’nan has no interest in watching that process. He loves her as much as he can love anyone, and yet seeing the way her fingers bend disconcerts him.
He is, instead, hosting a party, watching the Venatori consort with one another as if they have anything of value to add to any conversation. One by one, the bravest of them creep up to the dais on which he’s lounging to kiss his rings, which is about the extent of their usefulness in Elgar’nan’s eyes.
Because he is hosting at the manor, he vaguely recognizes the servants that scurry about with drinks and entremets. They are more background noise than anything - seen, not heard - until there is some sort of commotion down the hall from the ballroom. Suddenly the entire crowd is less interested in dancing and rubbing elbows and more interested in watching someone harass a slave.
It would not, frankly, be any of Elgar’nan’s concern - and he is not concerned, until he realizes that it is neither a servant nor a slave that the Venatori are harassing but Rook, who has dropped the drinks that she was for some reason carrying and now is standing barefoot amidst the remains of shattered glasses.
Stupid girl. She shoves the Venatori closest to her and he stumbles a step back. Perhaps she has forgotten her magic. Perhaps she simply wants to hit something. There is nowhere for her to go, though, without cutting her feet. The Venatori slaps her hard enough to leave a livid handprint.
Elgar’nan stands from his throne and Venatori scuttle away from him like insects, the crowd parting like a school of bait fish before a shark.
Stupid girl, he thinks again, but amends - his. His stupid girl. His pathetic creature.
“Rook,” he says, and holds a hand out to keep her still. She, of course, pays no attention to the silent order, and takes a stumbling step closer.
The Venatori beside her catches her hair by the roots. He is drunk, Elgar’nan sees, but there have been wiser drunker men. Rook gasps and staggers. It’s more surprise than pain, but it makes her step again into the glass. Her blood smears across the floor and the Venatori opens his mouth to say something, a smirk on his mouth.
Elgar’nan puts a hand on the man’s face and crushes his head like a grape.
The crowd goes very quiet. The musicians continue to play - something modern with strings, not particularly to Elgar’nan’s taste - and the man’s body crumples to the floor and begins to pool.
Elgar’nan turns to Rook, who looks pale and shaken, and flicks viscera and little shards of bone from his fingertips to the marble floor.
“Anyone else?” he asks her gently. With his clean hand, he tucks her disarrayed hair back behind her ear.
She shakes her head quickly, but he sees the way her eyes dart to another of the Venatori, who are now all backing away.
“If you’re certain,” Elgar’nan says, and tips his head towards the end of the hall. “Go wash up.”
She skitters away, and this time no one thinks to stop her. She leaves a path of bloody little footprints. Elgar’nan steps over the cooling body and returns to the dais. The rest of the evening is somewhat subdued.
☀
Elgar’nan returns upstairs in a celebratory mood.
He plies Rook with cherries in dark syrup and gives her sips from a flute of ice wine until she is rosy-cheeked and wavering on her freshly bandaged feet.
“Why don’t you just kill me?” she asks, her words slurring together and so soft that Elgar’nan must lean closer to hear her. “What do you want from me?”
Elgar’nan puts his hand on her waist to steady her and draws her to perch on his knee. She sways until her shoulder blades meet his chest and her head tips onto his shoulder.
“Little beast,” he says to her in elven, round with fondness. “Little pet, little dove.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she says, turning her head so she can say it against his jaw. He can feel the smile that she presses against his skin.
“I know,” Elgar’nan says, and runs his knuckles along the length of one of her finely pointed ears. “It would be more efficient to list the things you do know than the things you don’t.”
She trembles in his arms, her mouth wet and red with syrup. Elgar’nan thinks of kissing her, and wonders whether it would be closer to kissing a frightened animal than a lover.
He knows that her question is not truly about why he does not kill her - rather, he knows that it is a question of why he has chosen her in particular, of all the number of creatures and elves that walk the modern world.
There is no answer that will satisfy her: she wants, he knows, to hear that she is special. That she is unique among her kind, that there is something in her that is different. Perhaps true, but it is nothing that she has done and everything to do with Solas’ magic wreathing her like silk.
Beneath it, she would be bare, as everyone is bare - but there is something in the way the Dread Wolf’s magic lingers.
Perhaps, in truth, this is how Rook reminds him of Mythal: in the ghost of a man who had gotten too close.
She is still leaning against him, so close he can feel the brush of her eyelashes against his cheek. He puts a hand, featherlight, on her knee. The fabric of her dress is smooth and cool but her skin beneath is blood-hot.
“Perhaps it is time to sleep, da’len,” Elgar’nan says, his voice low.
Rook says nothing in return; Elgar’nan briefly entertains himself by imagining that she has anticipated the order, rather than simply being too tipsy to stay awake. Her soft breaths ghost against his jaw.
She is unwieldy in Elgar’nan’s arms for all her fragility, her limbs coltish and draping as he carries her. She sighs and curls into her pillows when he sets her in her bed.
It is his turn to linger, watching her when there is no chance for her to watch him back. He evaluates her in her entirety - the length of her legs and the moonlight spill of her hair and the flutter of her pale eyelashes against her cheekbones, nearly invisible in the dim light.
Pretty thing. Helpless thing. He wonders what it would take for her to wear his vallaslin. He wonders at himself for even thinking of it. Will he make a priestess of her, then?
No. That is not how he wants her.
She murmurs when he draws the quilt up to her shoulders, reaching for something - for someone - that is not there. Elgar’nan takes the light with him when he leaves.
☀
Time passes. Ghilan’nain makes new monsters to love and Elgar’nan finds ways to command them against any who would oppose them. The mortals, he finds, have the tendency to fold like wet parchment when they are confronted by an unending horde of screeching, slithering things wearing the faces of people they had once known.
It requires disappointingly little strategy as their army amasses more numbers: in truth, the darkspawn are as numerous as insects and have an equally fierce will to live.
The trouble, Elgar’nan finds, is in that lack of strategy. Perhaps if it required more of his mind to command them, he would not so keenly feel the blight trickling into his thoughts. Perhaps he would be able to distract himself from it more thoroughly - but instead, he feels it creeping like a rot up the back of his brain, twining through flesh and spirit both.
It is this sensation - the inexorable dread that he will not admit - that drives him from his bed in the small hours of the morning. The moon is barely a sliver in the sky, but still it is a relief to look up at it and to feel closer -
Closer to whom, he thinks with no small measure of self-recrimination, which he only allows because the night is dark and he is alone.
He wonders what Mythal would make of it. He thinks she would not fall to the blight - she would leash it, as she had brought everything else to heel before she’d died. She would not fear it, either: she had not feared anything.
The door opens and Elgar’nan tips his head to look, though he knows already that he will see Rook there, silhouetted by dim candlelight. She slips out to stand beside him, her head barely at his shoulder.
She is so small and slender. Even in the dark, it is impossible to pretend that she is someone else.
“Are you alright?” Rook asks.
Elgar’nan looks down at her, at the way that sparse moonbeams catch in her eyelashes and limn her entirely in silver. She looks like a spirit.
He kisses her in lieu of answering. Her mouth is soft and wet and she gasps her surprise, her hands fluttering at his nape before they settle on his shoulders. He catches her waist in one hand and her jaw in the other, tipping her face to suit him.
He does not want her to talk. There are a number of things that he wants that he cannot have, but this is something that he can - she is something that he can.
Rook is on her toes and that is still not close enough for her. Elgar’nan can feel the way that she strains for nearness, but he has all the time in the world - he amuses himself by disentangling them and watching how she chases after his mouth.
She opens her eyes to narrow slits.
“Yes?” he asks archly. “Was there something you needed?”
For a moment, she looks startled, as if she’s been woken from a dream. She abruptly clutches her robe more closely around herself.
“No,” she says, but then she touches her mouth with her fingertips and ruins the illusion of nonchalance. It is too dark to see, but Elgar’nan can imagine her lips bruised pink.
“No?” Elgar’nan asks, his voice low and intimate. “Are you certain, Rook? There’s nothing you need?”
Her breathing stutters and speeds. He wonders if she is blushing - he wonders how that flush would feel beneath his hands.
In truth, he does not have to wonder: he could touch her and she could do nothing. But he wants her to beg. He wants the giving to be a mercy to her.
“No,” she says, touching her mouth again. “Nothing.”
☀
Elgar’nan finds the second Venatori from the party and gives him to Ghilan’nain. It’s not much of a gift, but he can only ruin so many robes before it starts feeling wasteful.
She’s easily entertained regardless. Elgar’nan deigns to watch her work, which means largely that he tunes out the screaming until she plunges the man into the pool, at which point he need only tune out the sound of thrashing and frothing lyrium.
“I thought to mix him with a rabbit,” Ghilan’nain says conversationally. She holds the man beneath the surface with one segmented arm while her head swivels to look at Elgar’nan behind her.
“Poetically ironic,” he agrees, watching the bubbles come up to the surface. The lyrium is viscous enough that they are slow to rise. “But not particularly useful as a darkspawn, one would imagine.”
“No,” Ghilan’nain says thoughtfully. “What eats rabbits? Wolves?”
“It will tear itself apart,” Elgar’nan points out. The bubbles are starting to slow.
“Oh no,” Ghilan’nain says, dry. She withdraws the lyrium-bloated corpse and wrings it between two hands as if trying to dry a towel. It crunches terribly. “What a shame that would be.”
☀
They enter a war of attrition, in which Rook engages with an earnestness that Elgar’nan finds charming. Perhaps she does not know that his patience is eternal - or perhaps she does not realize that she bites her lip and lowers her eyes every time she sees him.
She sees him often. When he is working on correspondence or otherwise occupied, she will linger around the door and watch him with her wide, dark eyes.
Would that he could say the same. In what’s probably an unintentionally cunning bit of spycraft, she is gone any time he looks up to ask what she needs. He sees glimpses of her from the corners of his eyes and from over the edges of letters, but in any moment where she might be pinned by conversation, she may as well be mist for how skillfully she disappears.
That, he thinks, is the charming part. He rolls his sleeves up for her benefit and listens for her fluttering little sighs.
It is, then, unsurprising that her patience runs out first; she is not, after all, immortal, and has been alive for a fraction of a percentage of the years that Elgar’nan has lived. Frankly, it’s surprising that she lasts as long as she does.
“Did you mean it?” she asks the day that she gives up on subtlety.
They are in the library, perhaps ten feet apart. The sun filters through stained glass windows and paints the floor in puddles of orange and teal. Rook is at the edge of the shelving, just outside the pool of sunshine that Elgar’nan is lounging in, looking unsure of her welcome.
He wonders if she’s ever had to ask before. Pretty, obedient thing that she is - Elgar’nan can imagine that she has fallen into relationships and relations and never had to chase them.
Or. There is another option, he thinks.
He crooks a finger to beckon her and Rook nearly trips in her haste. As soon as she is within reach, he catches her wrist and tugs her down. The letter that he had been half-heartedly reading is crushed beneath her knee and immediately forgotten.
She is still and startled perched on his thigh, frozen with some emotion Elgar’nan doesn’t care to name. Fear or anticipation or something between - either way, she does not leave.
“Did I mean what, da’len?” he asks, sotto voce, and stops her from shifting with a hand resting lightly on her hip.
Rook’s hands flutter. “You know what,” she says, and that is true - Elgar’nan does. But he smiles at her faintly, because he wants her to ask. He likes watching the frustration purse her lips.
She makes an angry little noise - she has never sounded more kittenish - and kisses him, biting and off-center. He laughs against her mouth, which only makes her angrier, and draws his palms up and down her ribs. Her dress is thin enough that he can feel the heat of her skin through it.
“Is that your question?” he asks, fitting his thumbs into the dips beside her hip bones. She is soft there. If he squeezed, he would leave bruises that would last.
“Please,” she says. “Please.” She cants her head to look at him from beneath her eyelashes, which Elgar’nan is certain is devastatingly effective to people for whom seduction is not a daily occurrence. How reminiscent of the more interesting Arlathan parties.
She is, he realizes, wearing the comb in her hair. He wonders if she’d dressed this morning with intent. He wonders what she is wearing beneath her clothes.
“You still haven’t asked a question, da’len,” he prompts, and smiles when she whines. “Am I meant to assume what you’d like?”
“Yes,” Rook says desperately. “Don’t make me beg.”
He traps his laugh behind his teeth and threads his fingers through her hair, tugging until she must show him her throat. He kisses her there, where her pulse flutters beneath her fragile skin.
The library is by no means private. There are groundskeepers outside the window and maids just beyond the doorway, but either Rook has forgotten or she does not care: when Elgar’nan tells her to take off her dress, she begins unlacing it with trembling fingers.
She cannot take it off without climbing out of Elgar’nan’s lap, which he will no longer allow. The bodice falls open and away but traps her arms. She wears nothing beneath it - it can be nothing but calculated. So certain of her welcome.
Pretty thing, he thinks. Like porcelain, like alabaster. He can see the blood that pools beneath her translucent skin.
She’s bitten her lip pink to match her nipples, the flush that climbs up her throat and down her belly. There is a nearly irrepressible urge for Elgar’nan to sink his teeth into her, as if she is a ripe peach.
“Here,” he says, taking her hips in his hands and moving her so she can grind against his thigh. “There you are. Take what you need.”
She flushes more deeply - embarrassed, he supposes - but moves as he’d intended her to, rolling her hips against him. There are enough layers between them that he can only barely feel the heat of her, but he knows - he can smell - that she is wet, that she wants it. If she will not beg, then her body will speak for her.
Elgar’nan does nothing but watch her, but still she gasps his name. Elgar’nan, she says high in her throat, and oh, oh, oh.
Who does she pray to, he wonders. Is she Elven enough for that? His name sounds like worship in her mouth.
He kisses her when she comes, prying her mouth open and licking the taste of his name from her tongue.
Elgar’nan could let her catch her breath, but he does not. Instead he kisses her until she is shuddering and choking on a breath she cannot take quickly enough when he finally pulls away, until her pupils are dilated and her eyes are glossy with unshed tears.
“Lovely,” he names her, his voice so low it is very nearly a growl. Rook flushes prettily, even through her ragged breaths. She would thank him for anything he did, he thinks. “Beautiful girl.”
He helps her up so she can remove her dress, letting it fall into a pool around her feet that she can step out of. The stained glass window splashes her skin in vivid red and deep blue. She looks like a painting, long bare lines and sleek muscle. Her inner thighs are wet.
Elgar’nan does not kneel for anyone who is alive to recall it, so instead he lays Rook out on the chaise, her hands above her head and her entire body available to him. Her head is thrown back so she can hide her face in her arm. Her breath catches when Elgar’nan leans over her and kisses her throat, the valley between her breasts, the vulnerable plane of her stomach. Lower.
“Oh,” she says with perfect, aching softness when he kisses her clit, and then she keens when he uses his tongue.
She is wet and blood-hot and tastes like salt. She babbles above him, begging in spite of what she’d said - his name, the Maker’s, please please pleases that squeak high in the back of her throat. She reaches for his hair and then thinks better of it, twisting her fingers into the upholstery instead. When Elgar’nan pushes his fingers inside her - hot, so tight around his knuckles that it very nearly aches, of all the places for a mortal to be so strong - she whimpers and arches against his mouth. So sensitive.
He does not let Rook peak like that. He draws her up to the very edge, until she is shifting restlessly against him and she tightens around his fingers, and then he pulls away and leaves her gasping.
“What,” she asks, dazed, and Elgar’nan smiles down at her.
“Patience, da’len,” he tells her, and then begins all over again.
She is not particularly patient, but Elgar’nan gives her no room for disobedience. Her whimper catches in her throat when he bites her thigh - not a nip but a bite, high and hard enough to bruise. That makes her moan. She is too tight to fit another of his fingers.
He can teach her, he thinks. He can teach Rook to beg properly, to ask for what she wants, to take what she is given - to take what he gives her.
Her body is begging now, wet enough to slide down the bone of Elgar’nan’s wrist, but she is biting her forearm to muffle the sound of her whining. He touches the point of his tongue to her clit and her thighs clench around his ears, as if she cannot bear to let him leave.
He is much stronger than she is. He leans back regardless, and smiles beatifically through the ragged protesting noise that she makes.
He brings her up to that edge twice more, until she has forgotten herself and clutches at his hair with a flattering desperation. Her hands are not firm enough to hurt, and her arms are not strong enough to still him, but she makes a valiant effort.
“Please,” she sobs at last, going limp against the chaise when he pulls away again. “Please, please, I can’t.”
“Greedy creature,” Elgar’nan says, but he cannot sound anything but approving. His mouth tastes of her. “Darling thing. Was there something that you wanted?”
She is flushed everywhere, from the tips of her ears and the tops of her cheekbones all the way down to her cunt and her pretty thighs, but she has lost some of her shame in the breathless, intervening time between the beginning and the end.
“Please,” she says, rolling her hips against him as if she cannot help herself. “Please make me come, please.”
“There you are, da’len,” Elgar’nan murmurs against her thigh. “Was that so hard?”
Rook shudders and arches so she is closer to him, to his mouth and his fingers. She smooths her hands over his hair shakily.
“Please,” she breathes.
Perhaps, if Elgar’nan were more cruel, he would make her wait again - let her ride his fingers nearly but not-quite-there, until she is so sensitive that he could bring her over with nothing but his breath. If he were more cruel, he would not let her come again at all; she has once already, after all.
But he finds her greed both appealing and amusing. He likes that she has begged for him. He puts his mouth back on her and bullies another finger inside her.
Rook yelps when she comes, like it has surprised her, and bucks so Elgar’nan’s fingers are hilted fully inside her. He curls them to draw out her orgasm, his tongue on her clit and her shuddering little whines in his ears.
“Oh,” she squeaks when he does not stop, even when she squeezes around his knuckles in sensitivity rather than pleasure. “Oh, oh - wait, I can’t -”
She attempts to jerk away from Elgar’nan’s mouth when he does not let her up, but he pins her hips to the chaise with an arm banded across her belly. He can feel the way that she twists beneath him, but he is a god: she will get no further here than she ever has.
“Is this not what you asked for?” he asks with a tone of idle curiosity, moving his fingers so she trembles. “Should you not be grateful?”
She is too sensitive, he knows - he can feel the way that she clutches around his fingers and yanks him by his hair, the way she throbs beneath his tongue, hot and vital and slick with him and with herself.
She whines her sweet little waits and I can’ts until she comes again, and then she runs out of words and gasps raggedly instead.
Her breasts move prettily with her panting. Her eyes are glossy and her hair sticks to her temples. She looks more beautiful now than she had when they’d begun, with her mouth and eyes wet.
“Give me one more,” Elgar’nan tells her, and only smiles when she shakes her head. He hooks his fingers inside her and presses his thumb to her clit, where she is so sensitive now that it must ache.
She sobs into his mouth when he leans up and kisses her. She is shaking so hard her teeth are nearly chattering, but still she whimpers his name in bitten off half-syllables.
Pretty girl. Pretty thing. She is tight around his fingers and he wonders how she will feel around his cock. Blood-hot and trembling.
“I can’t,” she says, sounding like she truly believes it. “I can’t, I can’t, please, it hurts.”
“I know,” Elgar’nan coos, stroking his thumb feather-light against her clit. She jolts as if she’s been shocked. “Be good, darling. I ask for so little.”
Rook’s last orgasm is silent. She freezes and then trembles all at once, her body clenching so hard around Elgar’nan’s fingers that a lesser man would be forced out of her.
“Stop,” she mumbles, tipping her face away so she can gasp for air and try to mouth messily across his jaw. “Please, I can’t, please.”
He pets through her hair with the hand that is not soaked with her, tucking it back behind her ear.
“Do not think to tell me what I can and cannot do,” he says gently, withdrawing his fingers from her and trailing them across her clit. She spasms and nods tearfully.
“I won’t,” she says. “I won’t.”
He pats her fondly, leaving a wet handprint low on her belly. “Sweet girl,” he says. “What do you say when someone gives you a gift?”
“Thank you,” Rook says, sounding blurry. “Thank you, Elgar’nan.”
He kisses her again as a reward for good behavior.
☀
Rook rides three of his fingers and Elgar’nan watches her through half-lidded eyes, wondering whether Solas knows what she’s doing or not. Is he aware that he has lost the last of his pawns? Or does he cling to that glimmer of hope still, tenacious as a dog and half as clever?
Rook’s breasts bounce when she moves. She is whimpering for him, Elgar’nan, Elgar’nan, and then, please, want you.
“You have me, da’len,” Elgar’nan says, flexing his fingers inside her, and she shakes her head breathlessly.
“I want you,” she says, and drops her hand - comically small in proportion, when he considers it - to his lap.
He is hard. Of course he is. He has been: she is beautiful and young and squeezing around his knuckles.
“Is that so?” Elgar’nan murmurs. He twists his fingers inside her and she shudders.
“Yes, please,” she says.
Well. So politely she asks - how can he refuse?
He tips her onto her back and fucks her on three fingers until she is gasping wordlessly, a breath away from her orgasm, and then tucks a fourth finger into her. She is still so tight - it feels impossible for a moment, but there is nothing that is impossible for Elgar’nan. She whines, but it fits.
“Hush,” Elgar’nan says gently. He spreads his fingers to make room for himself and she makes a helpless, shuddering noise. “There, da’len. You take it so well.”
He does not let her come like that, though she asks for it so sweetly. She has gotten so good at begging.
Her fingernails dig furrows into his shoulders when he notches himself against her. He can feel the way that she flutters for him.
She is wet and tight and willing. She is small and makes a noise of discomfort when he presses inside her.
He hits the back of her cunt before he hilts in her and she winces. He strokes his thumb over her clit and makes a shushing noise.
“Does it hurt?” he asks. She shudders.
“Yes,” she says.
“Will you bear it?” he asks.
“Yes,” she breathes, and tilts her hips up.
He fucks her slowly, watching the way she chews her bottom lip and a flush rises to her cheeks and runs down her throat.
She is beautiful. Her hair is spread across the pillows and her pale eyelashes are sticking together with unshed tears. Her breath hitches with every thrust in, and it does not matter how slowly he goes - she shudders at the end.
Elgar’nan wants to feel her come around him. He wants to feel how tight and how wet she can be, wants to hear her whimper for it: he likes, already, that she has asked for this.
Rook covers her mouth with her hand when he speeds up, stifling her punched-out little ah ah ahs until Elgar’nan gathers both of her wrists in a hand and pins them up above her head. She clenches around him insistently, as if her body cannot bear to let him go, and keens.
“Papae,” she gasps, and Elgar’nan almost laughs but does not. He curls his fingers more tightly around her wrists and thinks - his pretty, stupid, pathetic mortal girl, who has had to be so brave for so long with no one to take care of her.
“That’s it,” he tells her. “You only need to be taken care of, da’len, pretty child.”
She says oh, oh, oh in progressively higher pitches until she goes shudderingly still and silent and still tighter, her nails clawing into her palms for lack of anything else to grip. Elgar’nan fucks her through it until she is half-sobbing with overstimulation, her eyes bright and glossy and golden when the sun slants through the window - they are most beautiful in the sun.
“Look at me,” Elgar’nan murmurs whenever her eyes flutter closed, and she gasps and nods and tries her best - sweet girl, she does try.
She runs out of air for words when Elgar’nan tilts her hips and fucks her at the pace he prefers, her mouth red and open and gasping. A tear tracks from the corner of her eye into her hair - but she is whimpering and clenching around him, so how can it be anything but pleasure?
He nudges more deeply inside her and she jerks, twisting beneath him. He murmurs soothing nothings that she does not understand.
“You need me to come inside you,” Elgar’nan says, smoothing his thumbs over her hip bones. “You want to see an empire rebuilt.”
She nods, though she certainly has no idea what she’s agreeing to, and says please, papae, in the voice of a kitten, and that is enough: Elgar’nan spills inside her and she makes a shocked little noise at the the suddenness of it, her hands bracing against his belly between her spread thighs.
“It’s so hot,” she says, her breath hitching. Her thighs shake where they are spread by Elgar’nan’s hips.
“Can you feel it here?” he asks, moving a thumb to tap just over her womb, separated only by a layer of muscle and fat and creamy skin.
She can’t, of course, though she nods and looks up at him with starry eyes, lying little creature - but she will. He leans down to kiss the corner of her mouth and starts to move inside her again, changing the angle so nothing spills out.
☀
“What does the Dread Wolf think of your studies?” Elgar’nan asks idly, flicking little pieces of an over-baked scone to a handful of watchful songbirds.
Rook, nose-deep in a book with her feet tucked beneath her, shrugs.
“I don’t know,” she says. “He never talks to me anymore.”