Shadowguard

Half-elves, contrary to popular belief, slept.

Wil was no exception to that rule, but the sleepiness that lodged itself into his bones was not the normal languor of waking. It reached deep into his core, burying him beneath a haze so thick that it took several moments for him to pry his eyes open, and several more before he realized he'd succeeded. The snowy streets of Pendel lay before him, bathed in the splendor of early dawn.

He blinked, slowly, as his eyes nearly refused to open the second time, and, with far too much effort, hauled himself into a sitting position. He stayed there for some time, swaying. His thoughts were mere threads of coherency — fragmented and distorted. He saw the festival; Everna staggering about in a drunken stupor and the coill and his partner. There was a significance to it, but he couldn’t say what.

Dark boots obscured his vision then, followed by a face. A flicker of recognition thinned the fog, if only just enough to draw the connection between the face and the name floating about his mind. Everna's mother — Evelina — crouched before him, her face set with barely restrained fury.

He then realized how similar Everna looked to her mother. The resemblance was uncanny, though the difference lay not in their hair or eye color, but in the finer details of their dispositions. Where Everna had a certain softness to her, Evelina was all harsh lines and sharp edges. There was a thinly veiled promise of violence in Evelina's gaze — the look of a hardened killer — that Everna failed to emulate, even when she took the head off of a Shroud agent.

"Where's my daughter?" Evelina demanded.

"I don't... know?"

As far as he could remember, which was not far at all, she was right beside him. Yet as he turned to look about the street, she wasn't anywhere to be seen. While that alone should be enough to shock him into wakefulness, his body simply refused to respond. She wasn't there, and that was a problem, but he couldn't shake off enough of the daze to fully grasp why.

Evelina seized him by the throat, her nails biting into his skin. "What do you mean you don't know?!"

"Easy, Evelina.” Leah placed a hand over Evelina's and pulled it from his throat. "There's potent magic lingering in the area. He's dazed, if not coming out of a hefty sleep spell. You can't expect him to know anything."

That would explain why he felt so put under. Half-elves slept, but not like elves, who merely rested their eyes, nor like humans, who fell into the deep oblivion of unconsciousness for eight hours at a time. He never slept for longer than three to four hours a night, or day — whenever he had the chance, really.

Accounting for the shift of the day's length, if dawn touched the sky, then he slept for over six hours.

"That's not—"

"The level of magic here is comparable to the traces at the town hall," Leah reasoned, her voice soft yet carrying sharp undercurrent. It was as close to annoyed as Wil had seen her. "I understand you're worried — we all are — but flying off in a fit of rage and taking your anger out on the first person you see won't help anyone. It certainly won't help Everna."

Evelina scowled. "You expect me to believe he was conveniently asleep this whole time? Shroud would've killed him. They're not that careless."

Osain who spoke next, standing somewhere off to Wil’s right. Leah must have contacted him when she realized neither of them had made it back to the tavern. "You're right; they're not that careless. That's why they left him alive. Everna ripped the head off the last Enforcer that tried killing him. They probably didn't want to risk it happening again, or they couldn't get back to him without getting caught."

"Everna? Killing an Enforcer?" Evelina asked, her voice laced with sardonic amusement. "You were a lot of things, Osain, but a good liar wasn't one of them. My daughter could never."

Wil almost laughed. Even half-awake, he knew better than to believe that. Everna was a living testimony to the belief that looks could be deceiving. She was far more capable than most gave her credit for — and perhaps far more than she herself believed. It wasn't every day an unassuming barmaid survived an encounter with one of Shroud's more dangerous agents.

She’d known what she was doing. There was too much clarity beneath the burning fury in her eyes to think otherwise. At that moment, she'd done everything right, short of obeying orders.

Osain raised a brow. "You don't know your daughter as well as you think. Or, like always, you're denying the obvious because you don't like it. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and you know damn well with Everna that the apple may as well have clocked you on the head."

Evelina released a sharp huff through her nose. "She's nothing like me."

"She's exactly like you before Shroud got to you. The sooner you recognize that and stop smothering her for your own comfort, the better off she'll be."

"That is not your decision to make! She's my daughter."

"She's my niece and I'm the one who's been busting my ass to keep her alive these past two months while you ran around and made matters worse, like you always do.”

Wil glanced between them, confusion slowly morphing into a startling realization. It wasn't apparent until they were next to each other, but the longer he looked at them, the more he noticed the similarities. They had the same hair, pin straight and black as night, though strands of gray peppered Osain's. Even their faces were the same, though Evelina's bore the hallmarks of femininity that weren't present in Osain's.

Leah's reaction was far more appropriate. Her head snapped up as she looked between the two of them. "You're... siblings?"

Evelina scowled. "Twins, unfortunately."

Osain snorted. "If you think that's a shock, wait until you find out who our half-brother is." He turned back to Evelina, a sardonic smile on his lips. "Speaking of, I am thoroughly looking forward to watching you try to explain everything to your daughter, since you've been lying to her all this time."

"It was for her benefit! What was I supposed to do? Sit her down with a cup of tea and tell her half her family are murderers and assassins?!"

"Yeah, well, it's really benefiting her now. You better pray like hell she really is like you, otherwise she won't survive long enough for us to find her."

"Check the gallows," Leah said, with no small amount of sarcasm. "That's what they wanted this whole time."

"Wanted, yes," Osain said. "But the plans have changed, according to the few sources I have. They don't know exactly what, a feeling it's the usual response to a particularly troublesome individual."

"Which is?" Leah asked. Wil relaxed as her hand came to rest on his head, a rush of refreshing cold washing over him as the last lingering threads of bewilderment fled from his mind.

"Shroud has several methods of dealing with their problems," Evelina said. "When killing doesn't work, some of their Taskmasters resort to... induction."

"The agent in Windhollow said they wanted her alive," Wil said, the details now much clearer. "Even if he threatened to kill her right after. I thought maybe they wanted to hang her, but—"

"Shroud's been having issues with agents acting on their own lately,” Osain said. “Allegedly, Windmore wasn't supposed to correct the error; I suspect that when you thwarted their hanging attempt, he panicked because he realized it put him on the chopping block."

Evelina shook her head, her hands fisted in the folds of her dress, which was wrinkled and stained with various liquors. She must've woken up and realized her daughter hadn't come home after the festival. "Unless there's another plan we're not aware of, they're going to convert her."

Wil’s stomach turned at the thought. Shroud had finally gotten ahold of her, and if Evelina and Osain were correct, she'd wish they'd just killed her. It would be a much kinder fate.

You fucked up, he thought.

He should've never let her convince him to have the first drink — it only spiraled from there. He should've cut her off before she'd drunk too much, but for the first time in weeks, she looked as if she wasn't crumbling beneath the weight of the Nine Realms. Gods, Osain was going to strangle him once this was over.

He should've listened to Osain and the Courts the first time and stayed out of it, but no, he just had to let that pitiful look in her eyes sway him.

"Why, though?" Evelina demanded. "Why the hell is Shroud so hellbent on getting their hands on my daughter? What could she have possibly done—"

"She's a threat to the entirety of Shroud."