Twilight, just beyond the campfire’s glow – Wilderness fringe
It was just the two of us.
No scouts, no merchants, no curious followers of Seren or Saradomin trailing behind. Only the hush of the wild around us—brambles whispering in the wind, stars blinking into the bruised sky, and the distant, pulsing heartbeat of the Wilderness.
I was tending to my arrows, tuning their balance with careful touches. Wolfthora lounged nearby on a slab of broken stone, one boot kicked off, fingers laced behind her head like the sky was hers to cradle.
She doesn’t sit like someone on guard. She sprawls. Like a flame that doesn’t care what it catches.
And then, in the middle of something ridiculous—something about a Zamorakian she’d decked for eating the last bit of smoked hare—she said it.
“Right, Nyss, you’d have shot him in the leg just to make a point.”
It was so quick, like a flick of flint. Nyss.
Not Nyssarra. Not “you.”
Just Nyss.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
My hand stilled on the arrow shaft I’d been adjusting. I didn’t even look up. Just let the sound sink in, like cold river water slipping under armor.
No one has called me that since... before. Since Tirannwn. Since before I learned what my name needed to mean in two tongues.
“Nyss” wasn’t a title. It wasn’t even a nickname. It was... bare. Easy. And in her mouth, it didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded familiar. A moment of knowing.
She didn’t look at me after she said it. Just kept talking, staring up at the sky like nothing had shifted. But something had. I felt it in my bones. In the way the firelight didn’t quite reach the silence between us.
I don’t know if she’ll say it again.
I don’t know if I want her to stop.
—Nyssarra
no
- Nyss
