Autumn Winds
Everything is happening strangely, but so much.
It is not lost on her that the catalyst is the intrusion of outsiders on their equilibrium, and the necessity to guard against their perfidy.
Her endless life — her endless duty — is one she not just chose, but fiercely worked for, qualified by relentless competition against her peers in arms, by excellence and temperament. She know that her chosen and absolute certitude is not the princess's, who was born to this; she does not know how the Fool came to it, but the jester's demeanour does not suggest they have a commonality in this.
The princess — always elevated, aloof — has nonetheless always been constant, like the sun. She ebbs, now, in her warmth. The Fool, in contrast — forever proximate, sometimes uncomfortably — has always been at best a blustery weather, and shines now like a warm afternoon. Ser Glorie feels caught in some strange autumn season, world around her pivoting simultaneously, bafflingly, from summer warmth to winter chill and also from winter to summer, while she luxuriates between, caught at the axis.
It is, she thinks in longing terror, temporary: their visitors will overreach, reveal their treachery, and be dealt with. Glorie's permission to act out of turn, in order to best be readied against them, will be ended. This unfamiliar season will close. The Fool will return to acid and salt.
The princess, she hopes, will turn her distant unearned warmth back upon her. And if not, Glorie's duty continues nonetheless.
To hope to enjoy these unaccustomed airs for so much as an extra hour, even a minute, would be treason. And yet, for now, Glorie has both her duty and a stolen sweet facsimile of intimacy toward herself, and Glorie breathes.
