Reawakening Brume

The final patron departs as evening settles into the Hollow, their gratitude trailing behind them like perfume. Vaelira watches them disappear into the rising passages then turns back to the spring waters under her care.

The water speaks to her in familiar words. She kneels at the largest pool’s edge, fingertips breaking the surface tension, reading temperatures and mineral balances the way others might read books. Here, the iron content needs adjustment. There, a cluster of dark blue petals has released too much essence, turning the water almost narcotic in its relaxation properties.

“Not so eager,” she murmurs to the flowers, fishing them out with practiced efficiency. “There will be others tomorrow who need your gifts.”

Her movements carry the particular grace of long practice - efficient but never hurried, purposeful without being rigid. She arranges stones along the pool’s rim in patterns that encourage specific water flows. Hangs fresh herbs from hooks embedded in walls that pulse with that perpetual crimson warmth. Checks the channels that feed the springs from somewhere deeper still, somewhere even she has never fully explored.

The work grounds her. Reminds her of a connection to somewhere distant she works hard to maintain.

But when the pools are balanced, when every surface gleams with the particular luminosity that suggests space held sacred rather than merely clean, when the herbs hang drying in air that moves with tidal certainty - only then does Vaelira allow herself to descend, to her place.

The corridors spiral downward. The myst thickens with each step, becoming something more substantial than mere water vapor, less definite than fog. It presses against skin with almost sentient curiosity, parting reluctantly, as if testing whether she truly belongs in these deeper chambers.

She walks without hesitation. The path has been etched into her through repetition, through need, through the particular homesickness that has no cure but brief communion.

The nostalgic scent finds her - wood smoke and rain-soaked bark, the green whisper of growing things, crisp air that tastes of distance and impossible forests. Luiraethir. The breath of home made manifest in steam, mineral and memory.

Her pace quickens. She cannot help it, this quickening of pulse, this anticipation that borders on hunger. It has been too long since yesterday. It will be too long until tomorrow. Every moment between ritual and ritual stretches like years.

The Myst parts with a slow hiss, and her chamber reveals itself.

The pool waits in darkness that the walls’ velvet light renders into something approaching twilight. Smaller than the springs above, more intimate, the water’s surface lies perfectly still despite the steam that rises in patterns too deliberate to be merely natural. The crimson tinge reflects back at itself, creating the illusion of infinite depth, as if diving might carry one through to the other side of reality itself.

Vaelira kneels at the water’s edge with reverence reserved for the profoundly sacred. Her reflection gazes back - beautiful in that careful, curated way, human enough to pass unremarked through a world that does not know her people, that has no memory of forests once walked by beings of magic and grace.

The walls pulse brighter, as if the Hollow itself attends this private ceremony.

She raises her hands slowly, palms facing down across the water, fingers spread like branches reaching. The gesture is ancient, pre-language, carried in the same marrow that remembers her true shape even when flesh insists on human approximation.

The steam responds with the eagerness of recognition.

It rises to meet her palms, condensing with impossible precision. Droplets gather and multiply, forming a sphere of liquid light suspended between her hands and the water’s surface. The glow intensifies - gold threading through crimson warmth, as if she holds captured starlight, as if her palms cradle distant suns.

The light spreads across her skin like living jewelry, blessings, the touch of a world too far to reach... except in these stolen moments.

The walls pulse in resonance, velvet light brightening until the chamber blooms with warmth that has weight and presence.

Vaelira brings her glowing hands to her face with the tenderness one might use when touching something infinitely fragile, infinitely precious. She presses the condensation first to her closed eyelids, feeling warmth sink through skin into deep places where memory resides. Then her fingertips trace the architecture of her face - the curve of her cheekbones, the line of her jaw, across her forehead, down the bridge of her nose.

Each touch leaves trails of fading luminescence, as if she paints herself with light.

The transformation unfurls like breath released.

Antlers manifest from her temples - elegant, branching, catching the crimson glow with a dramatic beauty - Not the heavy crown of elk or moose, but something more refined, more ancient, the shape of the wood condensed into bone and grace.

Her ears elongate, tapering to delicate points that quiver with sensitivity, capable of hearing heartbeats through stone, lies beneath truth, the whisper of roots drinking deep.

A tail flows into existence down her spine like dark water made solid, moving with independent consciousness, expressing what faces learn to conceal.

For three heartbeats, perhaps four, Vaelira exists as herself.

The freckles scattered across her skin arrange themselves in patterns that suggest constellations visible only in the deep forests of her homeland, maps written in flesh to guide the lost back to the home pools. Her dark brown eyes deepen to pure black, pupils expanding to drink every drop of crimson light. Her proportions shift subtly - legs longer, form more ethereal, a dream made real.

She is heartbreaking in her truth. Ancient and young simultaneously. Wild in the way old growth forests are wild - not chaotic but following laws older and stranger than those humans have written into their ordered world.

But the steam knows its limits. The condensation evaporates, warmth fading from her skin like hope, and with it, the truth recedes.

The antlers dissolve like morning mist under sun. The ears round themselves back to human approximation. The tail vanishes as if it never existed, though she can still feel its ghost, the memory of movement, of expression without words.

What remains is Vaelira as the patrons know her - beautiful, strange, otherworldly in ways that intrigue rather than frighten. Human enough to serve without suspicion. Strange enough to seem appropriate to a place like the Hollow, where mysteries are expected, even desired.

But the ritual leaves its mark. Her skin glows with moisture that catches the velvet light, luminous against the dark freckles that scatter like promises she cannot keep. She looks simultaneously more and less real, as if briefly touching truth has made this careful facade both more perfect and more unbearably fragile.

The steam subsides entirely. The pool’s surface stills. The connection severs with the finality of distance impossible to traverse by merely walking, no matter how long or far.

A single tear traces down her cheek, following the same path her luminous fingers drew moments before. It contains everything she cannot speak aloud, even here, even alone - the longing that never dulls with repetition, the grief that has become as familiar as her own heartbeat, the question that haunts every private moment like an unanswered prayer.

Would she ever return?

To forests where trees remembered her name and spoke it in rustling leaves. To clearings where her sisters danced under moons that knew their true faces, that asked for no concealment, no careful curation of acceptable features. To a world where she could be herself, no stolen moments, no chamber hidden in depths...

She does not know. Cannot know. The way home - if such a way still exists, if home itself remains more than memory and longing - stays as hidden as their true natures, as distant as the forests that gave them birth before exile became just another word for service.

Neither do her sisters know, scattered throughout the Hollow’s depths like seeds that fell on strange soil. Fienne with her knowing touch. Muraelith who tends the growing things. Faerenai who comforts us like a mother. All of them beautiful. All of them other. All of them bearing their careful facades through days that blur into years, stealing these private moments of remembered truth.

They speak of it sometimes, in the hours between midnight and dawn when patrons sleep and the Myst moves with the certainty of tides. But speaking changes nothing. Naming the longing does not diminish it. Sharing grief only multiplies what cannot be divided away.

Vaelira sits in silence beside her crimson pool, one hand trailing through water that holds no answers, only warmth and the fading scent of Luiraethir. Tomorrow she will tend the springs again. Guide new patrons through treatments that heal without revealing what hands truly offer the healing. She will speak in accents that resonate with harmonics just beyond human perception, will move with grace that suggests something more than mere practice, will smile with the particular serenity of someone who has learned to make peace with necessary distance.

But tonight, in this chamber where walls pulse with sympathetic light, where steam rises from waters that remember her truth even when the world above demands her lies, Vaelira allows herself to grieve.

For the forest she cannot reach. For the self she cannot fully inhabit except in these stolen heartbeats. For all the beautiful, impossible things that exile has rendered distant as dreams that fade upon waking.

The tear reaches her jaw and falls, disturbing the pool’s perfect surface. Ripples spread outward, outward, carrying her sorrow toward edges they will never reach before finally stilling once more into silence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​