The ride seemed to take an age or more. Xanderian did not pause even to breathe until the swamps of Gladden were a distant memory and the domain of the Bearmen raced passed. She was terrified that if she paused even for a heartbeat the voice would be gone and her moment, her one chance would have passed unheeded.
The sons of Beorn neither trusted her nor denied her succor through those long weeks she hunted warg in their lands, reluctantly opening their gates to this strange wraith of an Elf who would throw bloody tokens at their feet in exchange for a night's haven and honeycakes. She spared no words to them and they offered none, though one of their women, the mate of their chieftain asked her one night when the moon was full what demon she fought. When told Xan fought wargs and the evils of Orckind, she shook her head sadly and said "No...what OTHER demon?" The Huntress had no answer for that...she still didn't as she road past their halls. Perhaps she never would.
It was not until she reached battered, tragic Skarhald where the misguided Zhelruka called her Rimeshadow the Huntress that she realized she did not even know where she rode. She thought she was following the voice that sang in Cyndwin's tones and called her by a tender name, Rian. The name of a sister, of a lover, that few even knew yet dared speak. However, there was no clear direction...when she sought a goal her heart simply told her "elsewhere".
Sitting atop a shattered battlements of purple stone, looking towards the sunset she thought back to that day more then a year past or perhaps longer, a lifetime. To the day that Cyndwin and herself stood beside the Silken Witch in Carn Dum and bartered against the Brazen Scales for Hildawyn's foolish soul (in the final chapter of Balances, yet to be set down by myself, Xanderian's tardy chronicler). As they left the dark halls of Carn Dum following that bittersweet conclusion all seemed well until Cyndwin grew silent, which was not her way. For some reason that silence turned Xanderian's blood icy cold. Turning to ask what had happened, the Elleth found golden-haired Cyndwin gone as if she had never been, and indeed nowhere to be found though she searched high and low in that accursed fortress, leaving a trail of skulls to mark her path. Xan knew in her heart that the Shieldmaiden still lived, but beyond that there was nothing. That nothing rent her soul in two.
The Huntress searched and sought a mere fragment of hope for weeks, months....until she saw that she was to be denied even a flickering possibility. Cyndwin, her Aza and companion, simply no longer existed in the waking world. Faced with the prospect of carrying on without her, Xanderian opted to join her in nothingness, far beyond the reach of her once bright dreams. She became a revenant, embodying again the blood hunter that lurked within her darkest soul, and lived on little more then gore and fear for longer then she will ever allow herself to know. She was simply a force of vengeance now seeking revenge against anything and anyone. As she had been when Gem died before her grief (see Nightwind) so was she again, a reaper of the night, and she never expected nor desired to see another dawn.
Until the voice reached her in the marsh of Gladden.
Cyndwin was somewhere, she knew that now and looking out over Skarhald she felt a burning shame for all she had done since last hearing the woman's laughter. She was somewhere...but where? Simply racing from one sea to another was of no purpose.
Perhaps she would be in Belfalas? No, for she would find things there unlike what she remembered. Perhaps Dol Amroth, or Edoras? No, neither seemed likely.
Bree...she would return to Bree. Where they had passed their happiest days, where first they met and she and Xanderian and Fille once walked hand in hand through green fields and spoke of slaying goblins and destroying all evil.
So did Xanderian ride through countless days and nights until finally she arrived at the Prancing Pony once again. However now she was a black cloaked shadow of the adventurer who once presumed to save the entire world from Barliman's common room with her young, spirited comrades.
As she stalked into the crowded Inn, seeing the cheery fire nearly broke her anew, remembering all that had passed before it. So many friends and lovers gone, or destroyed by the specter of war. So much beyond restoration. Even now she closed her eyes and could hear the halting, uncertain melodies she had come to love playing in her memories.
Or were they in her memory....she opened her eyes and the melodies were still there...but like the voice, here but distant. Moving silently through the halls of the inn she finally pushed a door open to a small sitting room and there stood the musician before the fire, carefully picking out the lay which she remembered. The man turned, distracted, and Xanderian let out the breath she had forgotten she was holding.
"Hawke? My Urchin?"
His surprised smile was all the answer Xandarian needed, and so was yet more hope restored...
