Aursra had been spending a good deal of their time in Mycha’s room when she was not busy trying to restore what she could to rights. It was pretty much the only room that had been left relatively unscathed. Aursra had swept away glass and disposed of the deer carcass. She’d carried out other debris too, trying to at least clear paths for Mycha so that she could get around the place without falling into craters where floorboards once had been or tripping over various and sundry items that had been chucked into the place. (Mychalyna had been spending a good amount of her time next door, following around Ita, though she and her mother ‘checked in’ with one another often.)

As was often the case with the poetess, she had worked herself to exhaustion… focused so intensely on that single task. She had collapsed in Mycha’s bed, too tired to even untuck the covers to snuggle beneath the blankets. The place was a mess now, but Verial should have seen it just a couple of days ago.

It had not been pleasant surveying the situation once the morning had dawned. Others might have sat down and wept over the loss, and gods knew a part of her had wanted to, but she was made of tougher stuff than she gave herself credit for. They had gotten through it. They had lived. It could have been so much worse. So, there’d been nothing left to do but to start picking up the pieces.

She was pretty good at that by now.

She wanted Verial and Kyrian to have Home to come back to. She’d wanted to get it presentable, but it would seem she’d not had time enough after all despite no small amount of effort.

Anyway, while she had been overtaken by exhaustion, her magical alarms were still in place. The barriers were designed to ‘recognize’ Verial, but her magic seemed to think that she’d still want to know about someone newly arrived in the cottage. It took some time, but she was eventually prodded awake with a sensation that was very much like an amplified version of the pins and needles feeling that one gets when lying in an awkward position for too long.

She sat up with a start, rubbing at her arms… frowning.

And then she heard it.

Footsteps?

Her name?

The pins and needle feeling was quickly dissipating now that her inner magic was convinced she was awake enough, and she stood to her feet with a bit of a groan. Every muscle ached. Leaving the bedroom, she stepped into the kitchen, grabbing the closest thing to a weapon that was readily available: a cast iron skillet.

Then, she was moving cautiously up the stairs, not daring to trust her own ears… the familiarity of that voice. The Illusionist knew better than most that things were not always as they seemed. She was, quite honestly, a mess. Her mahogany hair was hidden beneath a kerchief that she’d tied over her head to keep the curls out of her face. She was in the old tattered dress that she’d been wearing when she had rediscovered Verial at the Siren’s Corner because that had seemed the thing best suited for the tasks she’d needed to deal with. There were smudges of dirt on her face; a cut above one eyebrow where she’d taken a rock to the head during the fray. Her hands were red from scrubbing the kitchen counters and floor, since she’d needed to prepare meals.

Needless to say, this was not any of the many possible homecoming scenarios she had imagined since Verial’s hasty departure…