(fragment, penned in Illidan's hand)
I met Jace Tisserand today.
I had imagined him differently. Older, perhaps. More distant. Instead, he carried himself with courtesy and restraint, the way a man does when he is holding his grief together by its thinnest thread. When he spoke of the accident at the Well—Darkrune and Aydris lost in an instant—I saw the cost of each word in the set of his jaw.
Lytavis rose to him without thinking. She moved the way she always moves toward suffering—directly, unguarded, as if her instinct is to meet pain with her hands already open. Her voice was soft, the kind of soft that steadies the dying.
It should have comforted me. In a way, it did.
And yet something in me went still when I saw him hold her a moment longer than grief required.
It is not jealousy, or if it is, it is an old, weary shape of it. I have spent years standing in the shadow of another's brilliance, another's favor. I know too well the sting of being second. Of being almost. And for a heartbeat, the sight of her in his arms opened that wound.
She saw it—of course she did.
She always does.
On the walk home, she said the thing I could not bring myself to ask for:
"You're not in his past. You're in my present."
I believe her. Truly.
But the truth beneath that belief is harder to hold:
I want to be in her future.
If there is envy in me, it is not of Jace. It is of the effortless kindness she offers the world, the way her heart opens without hesitation, and the grace she grants even the broken. I do not know how to be worthy of that. But I want to be.
I am learning—slowly, stubbornly—that love is not possession.
It is the courage to stand beside something radiant without flinching from its light.
Tonight, I am still learning.
But her hand was in mine as we walked home.
And tonight… that is enough.