Chapter Text
The Choice That Learned Mercy
Elowen Ashryn learned early that the world did not mean to be cruel.
It simply was.
She learned it in the way rain drowned ants without noticing. In the way frost killed flowers without apology. In the way people walked past grief because they had learned how to survive with it instead of living.
But Elowen noticed.
She noticed everything.She always did and sometimes that’s all she did.
When summer storms flooded the ants hills, she crouched barefoot in the mud, hands trembling as she tried to move them to higher ground. When she failed, she cried—snot and tears mixing until you couldn’t tell them apart, with broken sound of someone who felt responsible for a universe that did not listen and gods that have abandoned it since.
Her grandfather never stopped her.Even when her mother stood next to him worrying over her daughter, he never even said a word of comfort.
Rowan Ashryn was a gruff man who would sit on the porch steps with his tea cooling untouched, watching her small shoulders shake, watching the way she pressed her palms together afterward as if praying for the poor souls who suffered, souls normal people would stop to think about.
“She feels too much,” her mother whispered.Looking over to Rowan, her brows furrowing in worry, “I’m afraid one day, it would cause her downfall.”
Her eyes clouding over trying to see the threads of fate tying around her daughter, but knots were all she could see, knots always and so many of them. Her frown deepening while her eyes moved rapidly under her lids trying discern her fate.
Rowan thought: No. She feels honestly. “Don’t worry she’s not weak just because she feels everything. It’s her strength.” He hummed reaching over for his now cold tea.
“She’s too emotional, too weak.” Her mother frowned harder eyes shut and face scrunched by struggles she couldn’t name, emotions she could not explain.
”Too kind-“
”Kindness is not a weakness Ellie, just like how softness is not, soft things they bend, they stretch, they adapt and more importantly, they survive. Don’t worry she will thrive.” Rowan simply took another sip of his cold tea the bitter taste a relieving distraction.
But he never voiced his fears, that one day her, maybe, just maybe her ability to feel too much might just drown her in them.
Before the night Eve was born, Rowan believed mercy was something people practiced.
He was wrong.
Mercy was something the world demanded payment for. Only the strong could afford it.
The storm came without warning.
Not a natural one.
The sky cracked open with light that did not belong to lightning, air pressure shifting so violently it rattled glass and split tree bark. The earth itself seemed to recoil.
Rowan felt it immediately — the pull.
That familiar, terrible gravity in his chest that meant a threshold had been crossed. The void was here, greedy in it’s own way to devour, trying to fill something that had no end.
“Inside,” he told Elowen, voice calm despite the dread threading his spine. “Stay with the lantern. Don’t move.”
She obeyed, eyes wide, clutching the brass handle as if it could anchor the world. She looked too small. She was too small.
Rowan felt her heart clench as if someone was wrapping a hand and trying to hit it out. Still he had responsibilities. Ones that didn’t lot disappear just because he would almost imagine the dreadful after effects this storm would most certainly bring.
So Rowan stepped outside.
And felt the truth descend like a verdict.
Ellis! Shes still out!
Elowen’s parents — his daughter and her husband — were too far.
They were caught beyond the perimeter of safety, where the surge of uncontrolled resonance had already begun to tear reality apart. The kind of surge that did not kill instantly.
The kind that unmade.
Rowan ran. “Ellis!, Ellis!!”
he could feel the dread choking his throat as his muscles burnt and protested as he ran and ran and ran.
His knees screamed. His lungs burned. But he ran anyway, the pull in his chest growing stronger with every step, as if something inside him was waking against his will.
He saw them through the rain.
Saw the way the air bent around their bodies, skin already fracturing with light, voices lost to the roar of collapsing power.
“DAD!!!” his daughter screamed when she saw him.
He reached for her. Tried to but he knew deep down it was too late. He was too late.
please not her. Oh god, just not her!
Choose.
The word echoed in his mind even though he knew no one has said it aloud
Choose. It echoed again and the flash of Elowen’s innocent little face with fear and tears in her eyes as he left her in the house flashed with the image of his daughter and he knew he had to choose or he would loose them both. The timed seemed to has stooped, slowed to a crawling phase, he tried reaching to his daughter, decision not yet made.
And the world stopped him. The void swirling like a vortex sucking them in. He knew deep deep in his chest. He would have to choose.
The choice came then — not as a thought, not as a debate — but as knowing.
He could reach them.
Or he could turn back.
Not both.
Because the power answering him was not limitless.
It was conditional.
The emotion that broke him open was not fear.
It was acceptance.
The crushing certainty that some losses could not be undone — and that pretending otherwise would only multiply the dead.
Rowan dropped to his knees in the mud, sobbing as the truth carved itself into him:
If he tried to save them, he would fail.
If he failed, Elowen and her brother would be alone.
And if they were alone in a world like this —
Thet would not survive. Especially not Elowen.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice dissolving into the storm. “I’m so sorry.”
He turned away.
And in that turning, something inside him shattered cleanly enough for something else to take its place.
The card did not appear immediately.
Eve never rushed.
The power gathered slowly, gently, like hands cupping something fragile. Gold light bled through the rain, warming the cold, steadying Rowan’s breath as his grief condensed into something unbearable but purposeful.
This was not healing born of hope.
This was healing born of choosing who lives when the world demands a sacrifice.
Eve formed in his hands as Rowan collapsed in the garden, soaked and shaking, clutching the card to his chest as if it could hold together what he had broken. His throat choked from his grief, tears streaming down. His daughter, his beautiful sweet daughter. His shoulders shoke from the effort trying to contain his emotion,” Ellis.”
The figure on the card was not human.
It was a presence — faceless, luminous, surrounded by roots and light, one hand extended, the other withdrawn.
Mercy that does not save everyone.
Mercy that survives knowing it failed.
Rowan screamed until his voice gave out. He had made his choose and he will learn to live with it.
By the time he returned to the house, dawn was bleeding pale across the horizon.
Elowen was still where he left her.
Lantern burning low.
Eyes red.
She looked up when he entered, hope flickering instinctively before she saw his face.
“Where’s Mama?” she whispered, trying to look behind him, trying to see if her mother might be following behind him.
Rowan felt his break all over again as he knelt in front of her and took her hands — hands still sticky with sap and dirt from where she’d been moving insects all night, waiting.
“They’re gone,” he said softly.
“Gone? Where? Did mama go to the next town to bring me the medicine again?”
Elowen didn’t understand, her face scrunching up.
“We have to bring mama back gran, it’s dan-get-ous. We have to!” Anxiety brimming her small body as she tried to break his hold.
Rowan just held her hands tighter, trying to stop her, trying to break the news as gently as possible.
”No El, mama went to live with dad, she’s not coming back.” He’s own voice quivering,still trying to keep steady yet failing.
Elowen stilled and then Just a small, broken sound, like something folding inward.
Rowan pulled her into his arms as the realisation slowly set in.
She has always been sharp.The damn finally broke as the seconds ticked by, her grief sharp and immediate, unfiltered by understanding or protection. Her brother who had arrived as he broke the news to her ,stood close by, silent, too shocked trying to come term to the reality , feeling but numb as he looked at his sister but somehow looking past her, as if he could see through the door outside faraway where they disappeared.
Rowan held Elowen and Caelan and felt Eve pulse against his chest.
And understood then — fully — what the card had cost him.
Eve would never let him forget.
Eve did not erase pain.
She taught one to carry it without letting it rot.
Years later, Rowan would give the card to Elowen with shaking hands.
He would tell her it was meant to protect her.
What he would never say aloud was the truth:
Eve was born the night he chose her life over the world’s fairness.
And one day —
The world would demand that choice from Elowen too