Azura took to silence like a swan to water. Long ago, in moments that will no longer exist, she craved a shred of peace amidst a crumbling world. She remembers little of her childhood in Nohr and doesn’t lose sleep over it. From the mouths of the elder siblings, she was lucky to forget. But even then, when the shadows are long and her heart jumps at the slightest sound, she believes she’s recalling something. Hasty footsteps, a sliding lock, practiced but nervous hands shaking around the hilt of a short blade. She’s never been sure who the purple hair from her memories belongs to. It’s for the best she’ll never know for sure.
Feeling finally abandons her legs and leaves her breathless in the dirt. It was a struggle escaping Krakenberg but she knows the passages well. The halls have many ekes and dips to crawl through for the use of spies passing on secret information or bundling important bounty through. She was introduced to them as a child by the Kouga ninja, whom even now she wishes she spoke up for. At least a part of him endeavors through her, as strange as it is to consider, learning and traversing the passages he once warned her not to become too familiar with. “S’no place for something like you.” He had gruffly mumbled before dusting off her knees and hurrying her down another dark alleyway.
She heaves something heavy in her lungs. It can’t be air. Air isn’t this heavy or laborious. It doesn’t stick to the walls of her throat like the mud staining her white robes is. It fills her with song, not distress. This thing clutches around her throat and tightens around as hard as it can grip. And something else, some other pain that’s almost forgotten, saps her strength into nothingness. As if little by little she’s returning to where she came.
In this moment of pain and absence, just a hair’s breadth away from the lake, she remembers: Nyx. She would have said it if she could. If only the sound would spark from the back of her tongue once more. Instead her attempt dies in the disappearance of her body. As her right hand glimmers down to her wrist, Azura feels a bitterness inside her. Even if Nyx was here, what good would it do? Nyx would have to watch her waste away with as much explanation as what would remain of Azura herself. To call Nyx to her would be nothing more than selfishness on her part. To disappear as if she had never been, like her homeland. At least she tried to heal the wound.
"To gift someone like me a long life and leave you to disappear like seafoam... fate must think itself a funny thing."
Nyx’s words from the start of their campaign echo in Azura’s mind, summoned by something untouchable.
As a phantom movement stirs her knee, Azura feels her height being weighed down. She had always wondered what Nyx had truly meant. Rumors found their way into camp like cats lie in the sun. As the source of some of those rumors Azura had found it hypocritical to put stock into the ones she heard about Nyx. While the whispers between soldiers about Azura banked on her being a spy for the enemy, the hushed tones about Nyx suggested the casting of a curse, not gossip about a fellow man-in-arms. The dread child, orphan by her own making and the maker of more, stealing souls to feed her own youth.
Azura never asked and Nyx never offered. Such was their companionship as the cast-offs of the army. But while Azura had Kamui and Elise, Nyx seemed to have nobody. For a short time it seemed young Mozume had attached herself to the soothsayer’s hip but that bond ebbed away after Nyx rebuked the young Hoshidan’s efforts.
Now that she thought about it, as her blue tresses are cut short, Azura was the only person she knew whom Nyx sought the company of. She would find her in twilight hours, wherever Azura had hidden herself away. She had reminded Azura of a cat with the way she kept company. While Kamui would invite Azura to a session of cuddles and skinship, Nyx was content with existing in the same space as her. It was in those quiet moments, side by side on a riverbank, or watching over the army camp under the guise of a watch patrol, that Azura had felt the most at peace.
Because of this, Azura knew that Nyx didn’t need to leave her letters to read (for when they knew they wouldn’t have a chance to see each other in between battles and the preparations for them) for Azura to know Nyx cared for her. She didn’t need to inscribe her most recent letters with shaky, colloquial Hoshidan characters, as if learned from a farmer. Nyx didn’t need to hold Azura’s hand while they walked or brush her lips against Azura’s ear as she cast an enchantment upon her.
With all those unspoken occasions, those expressions without words, Azura hopes that her letter to Nyx touches her heart as Nyx has touched hers. She hopes that Nyx heals from her affliction, that she finds peace in her life, that she has friends, family, a life. All the things she couldn’t find with Azura.
Her tears flutter and glitter upwards like bubbles in water. Bubbles... She wrote about them in the letter. That she'd dreamt of her and Nyx sinking under the waves in each other's arms and breaching the surface clean and free, their curses washed away with everything else.
She had dreamt...
—
There are no official records of Nyx from after the war, however bards tell of an eternally young fortune teller of eerie skill. It is said the tradition of mourning favors- letters addressed to a deceased lover- originated with her, though to whom she wrote is a mystery lost to time.