Chasing Shadows

But she is crying. She knows she is. Her eyes are burning rather than stinging and the tears are stubbornly pushing free from beneath her fingers. Slipping down her cheeks freely and seeping their salty tang between her lips. It hurt to hear the half-truths of her actions so freely scorned. Hurt to understand that it was so very simple for others to twist her nobleness and her sacrifices and losses into selfishness and stupidity. And it hurt to learn that her heart and her morals could be so easily yet so wrongly picked apart and openly traded as gossip - simply because she’d accepted that the cycle of hate and vengeance between all of the races needed to end.Because she and Ezran and Callum had been bold enough to begin undoing the old narrative of history.It hurts to finally understand that her hardships and her punishments mark her more than her triumphs. That they mark her an outcast, not just by her own people, but by all of the beings of Xadia.That they always will.