Where the Road Goes.

[Kalphoenix]

Delayne leans down and takes a handful of ash from the former site of the House of Chance and deposits it in a small bag without really paying attention to what she is doing. After doing so, she stops for a moment to tie the top firmly shut.

She then takes stock of her meager possessions as she packs them in a way most efficient for travel, most of which are nothing more than tokens of her memories. Others may take the gate, but her druid-heart remains and she will go overland to see what still lies between Far Reach and Haven. She has so little that there is little to take.

She hasn't been in Far Reach long enough for her to have anything but a passing remembrance for how it sheltered those who came to it. She considers the wastes for the winter, to seek the place where she slept for one whole year after the weeks she spent unsuccessfully pursuing a thief.

She is older, surely, not quite as much the young, naive woman (this one that they once called "fire chicken" in playful meaning) she was when she came out of the desert seeking her An'Drae'Dar. Then out of the blighted wilds to the lands of Haven with a small band of Phoenix Guard, to intertwine her fate with theirs.

She has long ago accepted her own fate: When your eyes are focused on something so far away from you and yet so close to your heart, it is likely you will miss the forest for the trees even if they are laid before you. And so she has, so many times. Her Love and Dedication to something others do not understand (And she would not ask them, nor force them to, for that was not her way), ever kept her apart from those around her. Her regrets on such things are few; in dreams of the heart, she spares only a small feeling for the lost prospects of more earthly love.

But still, she has changed. Her eyes and her face betray new hardness, gained from the long years and seasons spent pursuing a need to set right a wrong committed so many years ago, pursuing one who, perhaps, she would never find. He would have found mercy with her, for she desired no more than the return of what belonged to that of which she loved. Her heart did not cry for his death or his blood, as she knew others did. In that much, at least, the world and it's trials had not changed her.

But now his days were numbered, They would come to him when They were ready (Or Their long patience wore thin), if she failed to see things set right in her lifetime. So long as he held a piece of Their sleeping sister captive, she suspects Their attempts at finding him and marking vengeance will not be difficult. She knows there are reasons for delay (largely on her behalf), and hopes it will not come down to Their solution.

She suspects she will never truly feel at home anywhere. Even the place from which she believes she came from holds a hazy insignificance for her now, as if it was simply a mirage to begin with. The potter's home, where she stayed for so long with Brooke comes close, but the closest she has come to a sense of home and rightness was in the dreaming where...where...

Such a vision...laid out so that even now the cold and tired parts of her weary heart find warmth and strength. Even if she accomplishes nothing else, she has set in motion the events that will eventually set all other things right, as least so far as she is concerned.

If she has nothing else, she BELIEVES, and even this small thing is enough.