A week had passed since the Festival of Blossoms, but the city still wore the remnants of celebration. Petals clung to gutters and drifted across the canals, faded now to pale ghosts of their former colors. Music had long since fallen silent, leaving behind only the faint hum of ordinary life trying to resume its rhythm.
The brothers sat at the same café they had watched the festival from, more out of habit than plan. Malfurion cradled a cup of tea, its steam rising in thin, uncertain threads. Illidan hadn't touched his. His gaze kept straying toward the Temple district, though he said nothing about why.
"You've stared into that cup long enough to frighten the tea," Malfurion said at last—light on the surface, careful underneath. "If you mean to scry with it, you'll need mint and a better bowl."
Illidan's mouth curved. "You mock, but tell me—didn't you feel it? The shift in the air this morning?"
Malfurion did not ask what. The morning was still raw on the edges.
They let the canal speak for a short while—the chuff of an oar, the murmur of distant vendors, a burst of laughter from a nearby balcony that faded quickly, embarrassed by its own brightness.
"It was not your sorrow to carry," Malfurion said gently.
Illidan's eyes shifted; the light caught in them like a thought. "Whose, then?"
"Theirs," Malfurion answered. "The family's. The priestesses'. The garden will hold it—and time." He looked toward the Temple's pale curve far down the canal. "Everything returns. That is not cruelty. It is the world's pattern."
Illidan's fingers flattened on the table, a slow, quiet refusal. "Patterns are for cloth," he said. "This was…" He stopped, searching. "She held it as if the world were still supposed to make sense."
Malfurion knew whom he meant—the healer with silver hair who had passed them, carrying weight like a second heartbeat. "Compassion is not defiance, brother."
"Isn't it?" Illidan considered the drifting petals that gathered in the eddy near the steps. "She took what would have broken them and set it in herself instead. If that isn't resisting the shape of things, I don't know what is."
A breeze came up the canal, pushing the petals briefly backward against the flow. Malfurion watched them spin and settle. "There is resistance in acceptance, too. To stay, to listen, to say 'this hurts and I will not turn away'—that is a kind of bravery."
"It is," Illidan said. "But it is not enough."
Malfurion smiled faintly. "And there we are."
"We never left," Illidan replied—but the edges of the words were not unkind.
They fell quiet again. A child in a doorway counted flowers, lost track, and started over with fierce dedication. Someone called for oranges; someone else haggled for a ribbon as if the coin mattered more than color. Life resumed its small, stubborn chores.
"When the child fell at the fountain," Malfurion said, thinking aloud, "you watched the healer as if you already knew her."
"I watched how she moved," Illidan said. "How she made a space where panic wasn't allowed. People expect miracles to be loud. They're not. They are a line held steady when everything pulls at it."
Malfurion's mouth warmed. "You're describing driftwood."
"I'm describing a spine," Illidan said—and that was that.
A hawker passed with a tray of sugared citrus. He offered; Malfurion shook his head. Illidan did not look up. The hawker moved on, trailing a thin thread of sweetness that seemed suddenly out of place.
"What would you have done?" Malfurion asked—not as challenge, but sincerely. "This morning, I mean. If it were your task."
"I would have done what she did," Illidan said. "And then I would have done what she could not."
Malfurion turned, patient. "Which is?"
"Taken the hurt out of the air," Illidan said simply. "So it could not settle again. So when they slept, it would not crawl into their dreams." He glanced at his brother at last. "You tell me that is not possible. I tell you that is what power is for."
Malfurion considered him a moment, the way one studies a branch to see which way it means to grow. "If you remove sorrow, you remove shape," he said softly. "Grief carves us into who we must be."
"I don't see why the knife must be that sharp," Illidan returned.
"Because we are not finished being made," Malfurion said—and there was no triumph in it.
Illidan watched the far shimmer where the canal turned. "I don't like how easily we return to laughter," he said.
Malfurion did not disagree. "It isn't forgetting," he said. "It's breath."
"Breath can be a kind of forgetting," Illidan said, but without heat. "I don't know. Perhaps I'm simply tired of the city deciding which parts of itself to see."
"You are tired of not deciding," Malfurion said—and Illidan's mouth twitched because it was true.
They let the light slide a degree lower. A boat nosed past with garlands drooping over its prow like spent comets. Somewhere, a chime marked an hour no one needed to know.
"Do you think she has anyone?" Illidan asked, almost idly, almost not.
"The healer?"
He nodded.
"She has her order," Malfurion said. "And faith."
"Faith is a blanket," Illidan said. "Warm. Thin." He traced a nail along the table's scarred edge. "No one should have to carry the world alone."
Malfurion tilted his head, hearing what lay beneath the words. "You don't even know her name."
"No." Illidan's gaze was on the far sunlit water, as if a line strung from here to there might vibrate just enough to be heard. "Not yet."
They rose when the shade reached their feet. Malfurion gathered the cups and set them on the tray for the keeper—a small kindness he performed as ritual. "I'm going to the gardens," he said. "Cenarius will be there at dusk. He says the moonlilies open faster if you don't watch them."
"Do they?"
"I don't know," Malfurion said, smiling. "But it's a pleasant way to waste an hour finding out."
"Go, then. Waste an hour." Illidan brushed petals from his sleeve as if clearing a board. "I'll follow later."
Malfurion took a step, then paused, looking back with a brother's half-grin. "You can come now, you know. The trees won't mind your impatience."
"They mind more than you think," Illidan said. "And I've never been good at being where I'm not wanted."
Malfurion's eyes softened. "You are wanted," he said. "Just not always by the same things."
Illidan huffed a laugh. "Go, Mal. Before the lilies catch you watching."
Malfurion left, his shadow folding and unfolding along the railings as he crossed the bridge. Illidan remained, hands empty, the table suddenly too small for what would not fit inside him.
He stood at last and followed the canal toward the Temple—not close, not far—walking because there was nothing else to do with his feet. The city, tireless, offered him its indifferent beauties: shadows netted under archways, a curl of incense from a shrine, a child's chalk stars already half-scuffed by passing heels.
At a corner he stopped. The afternoon had the particular stillness of breath held between one word and the next. Illidan looked toward the pale curve of the Temple district where the morning had been heavy and exacting, and—without meaning to—inclined his head as he had earlier, to no one in particular.
"Not alone," he said under his breath, testing the promise for shape. It sounded like nothing at all—and everything that mattered.
A vendor called; a bell answered. The breeze turned, briefly against the current, teasing a little flotilla of petals back the way they had come. Illidan watched them resist, falter, and then slip forward again—carried by a strength they couldn't see but trusted all the same.
He walked on. The day, for better or worse, remembered.
And he, who could not bear forgetting, began—quietly, stubbornly—to choose.